Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 12:1-2
We begin a new series on worship this week. I think it’s interesting because, in the main, most of us who come to worship never actually learned how to worship, or even why we worship. When I was a kid growing up I kind of learned to worship by osmosis—you know, just kind of figuring it out as I went along. Like most kids I found most of it pretty boring—mostly just sitting and listening (or not listening). If you look at my Bible from my teenage years, for example, you can see that I drew battleships in the Mediterranean Sea on the maps in the back during worship. For years I saw worship as a Christian obligation—something you had to do before you got to the good stuff.
But one of the things that I’ve learned over the years is that worship isn’t just a Sunday morning ritual—it’s actually the most important thing that we do as Christians. In fact, if we do it well it tends to permeate everything else in our lives and in the church. Our discipleship, our service, our love for God and neighbor, eminates from the practice of worship. It’s worship that begins to form us as the people of God.
I saw this when I started really diving into the Scriptures instead of drawing in them. The passage we just read from Isaiah, for example, is extremely powerful. Isaiah has a vision of being in the temple (do you ever dream of being in worship?) and suddenly he sees God—God actually shows up! The angels praise him. Isaiah realizes that compared to the holiness he sees around him he is “a man of unclean lips.” An angel takes a coal from the altar and touches his lips, cleansing him from sin. And then Isaiah hears the voice of God—“Whom shall we send and who will go for us?” And all he can say is, “Here am I. Send me!”
Wow. That’s what worship does. When we come to the place of worship, when we get a glimpse of God, when we have our sins forgiven, when we hear the call, that’s when we can go as the sent people of God. Worship formed Isaiah into a prophet, and if we’re really anticipating worship when we show up each week, we can hear God send us, too. First, however, we need to understand how worship works.
During my doctoral work I read a fascinating book by James K.A. Smith, who teaches philosophy at Calvin College, where our daughter Hannah now attends. Smith’s book Desiring the Kingdom has a lot of people in both the church and the academy thinking afresh about what actually forms people into who they are and his answer was surprising. Indeed it actually runs against the conventional wisdom of Western culture.
For example, Smith begins, most of us have been brought up with the idea that knowledge is the key to a person’s formation. Our educational system is based on that premise—that the more we can learn how to think, the better off we will be. From the time we’re small, we put the bulk of our time and energy into learning—lecture, drill, test. It’s a common view that believes that humans are primarily thinking things and if we can just get their thinking right then people will achieve a better life. Reason, then, is the key to a fully orbed worldview.
This is a basic fundamental philosophy of the Western world. It’s as old as the Greek philosopher Plato but cultivated throughout Western history and made most famous by the 17th century philsopher Rene Descartes, who spent several days locked in his room alone trying to think his way through the problem of whether anything in the world can be known with certainty. Descartes, who was wracked with doubt about everything, decided that in order for him to even be thinking this way he first must exist. That’s where his famous dictum emerges: “Cogito, ero sum—I think, therefore I am.” Descartes saw humans primarily as thinking beings, and the Enlightenment ran with that idea—claiming reason as the solution to most human dysfunction. Smith wonders how things would be different the Western world if Descartes had only gotten a date!
It’s interesting to see how much Christianity has been influenced by this primary orientation toward thinking. From the middle ages onward, Christians began to set up schools and universities to educate people in right thinking. The Sunday School movement in the 19th century moved the dominant paradigm of the church toward educating people’s minds about the faith with the thought that if they just knew more, they would exist better. I learn, therefore I am. Christian faith and worldview is all about right thinking, with its emphasis on doctrine and theology.
Close akin to thinking is believing. This is actually the tack that the Protestant Reformers took (In fact, it was 498 years ago on Friday that Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg Door). Rather than thinking and reason, it’s faith that matters in this worldview. It’s not so much what we think—the ideas that we assent to—that matter, rather it’s the commitments and truths that we adhere to that order our way in the world. The Protestant emphasis on “faith alone” swung the pendulum away from the emerging rationalism of the Enlightenment and toward a shared set of beliefs and commitments that mark the Christian community. In other words, I believe therefore I am.
Now, let me be clear here. Thinking and believing are key parts of forming a Christian worldview. Without thinking we’d be subject to manipulation and abuse and without believing we’d be scattered in our understanding and commitment to God. God gave us our brains for a reason, and faith as well. But if we rely on thinking and believing alone to form us as followers of Christ, we might tend to become what Smith calls “bobblehead” Christians—all head and no body. It leaves a potential gap between what we believe cognitively and what we do physically—a dysfunction we call “hypocrisy.” Jesus pointed this out all the time. “Listen to what they tell you,” said Jesus about the Pharisees, “but don’t do what they do.” Their heads are disconnected from their bodies. Their thoughts and beliefs don’t match their actions.
So if we’re not designed primarily as thinking or believing persons, then what are we? Smith borrows from St. Augustine here, who believed that the primary orientation of humans isn’t what they think or what they believe—rather, it’s what they love. Augustine saw the center of gravity of human identity not in the head but in the heart—and not the “heart” as we think of it—merely the center of emotion—but actually deeper than that. It’s closer to what we mean when we say “guts.” We make our way through the world each day not primarily by thinking our way through it or by adhering to a set of proposed beliefs, but by feeling our way through it with gut and all of our senses. Before we are thinking and believing creatures, we are desiring creatures whose hearts are aimed at the world. And what we aim at is, first and foremost, what we love. As Smith puts it, “To be human is to love, and it is what we love that defines who we are.”
And we’re not talking about trivial loves here—like saying that we love the Broncos or love pizza; or even more substantial loves like the way we love our spouse or our children. What we’re talking about here is our ultimate love—that desire which governs our vision of the good life—our vision of what would make our lives flourish. It’s the target toward which we aim our lives, consciously or unconsciously. It’s the thing that animates our passion, dominates our thoughts, and alters our beliefs. It’s a picture of what we think it looks like to live well—a picture of that governs, shapes, and motivates our decisions and actions. To put it another way, our ultimate love is what we worship. Whatever it is that we worship ultimately orders our thoughts, our beliefs, and our actions.
As one of Augustine’s disciples summed it up: Lex orandi, lex credendi lex vivendi—“As we worship, so we believe and so we live.” Actually, we tend to get that backwards—as we believe, so we worship and so we live. That, however, is a bobblehead faith. It’s worship, our ultimate love, that drives where our minds and bodies tend to follow
We might think of that ultimate vision of what we desire as “the kingdom,” that like King Arthur of old every person is on some quest for the Holy Grail—that hoped for, longed for vision of the good life that we pursue without ceasing. There a lot of kingdoms we can quest for—the kingdom of wealth, the kingdom of pleasure, the kingdom of sex, the kingdom of power and prestige—there are as many kingdoms as there are people who desire them. Of course, there’s even a kingdom of God, too, which we’ll get to in a minute. Whatever it is that we desire most is what we worship and we’ll orient our whole lives around it.
Indeed, that’s what habits are—they are the automatic ways in which we live day to day that we don’t even think about, but that orient our lives toward the thing we desire. If my ultimate kingdom is wealth, for example, then my habit might be to check the stock report first thing in the morning and several times a day. If my kingdom is recognition and fame, I might habitually Google myself every morning to see what the world is saying about me. Whatever it is that we worship orders our habits in ways we don’t even realize. Our hearts and tethered to our bodies, thus what the heart desires the body tends to do almost automatically.
I mean, think about how your mind and body work without your conscious thought. For example, who can tell me what letter is directly to left of the letter “F” on a computer keyboard? Ah, you had to think about it, didn’t you? Did you try to finger it out? Why? Because your body knows where “F” is even if your mind is somewhere else. You’ve trained your body constant repetition until it became muscle memory. The body and the mind work together for the larger goal. Whatever it is that we worship, the body is formed by habits and practices to get it.
Indeed, there’s a word for those habits and practices—we call it “liturgy.” In Greek that word means “work of the people”—these are the habits, rituals, and practices that work toward an ultimate goal. Humans instinctively gravitate toward liturgy, which is why we see it everywhere if we’re paying attention. The football game is a liturgy—the same rituals and practices take place at every game (pregame, anthem, coin flip, halftime, songs, celebrations—the only difference is the outcome. Going to the mall is a liturgy; Eating at a restaurant is a liturgy; Going to work or school is a liturgy. All of life is, in some sense, a liturgy.
Of course, the only place we normally hear that word liturgy is in church. Whether you’re at the traditional or contemporary services we have a liturgy, don’t we? We have rituals and practices that we do every week, over and over again. Of course, if you’re here this morning you’ve also engaged in rituals and practices before you even got here. There are a lot of reasons we might come to worship on a Sunday morning. For some it’s an old habit—their bodies automatically get in the car and come here no matter what their minds are thinking. For some it’s about a cognitive teaching moment—a chance to think. For others it’s a believing moment—time to reaffirm one’s faith.
But why are we really here? We’re here to imagine and desire a different kingdom. We’re here to use our minds and our bodies, our beliefs and our practices, as a way of being formed and prepared for the kingdom of God. This is where disciples get formed. As Paul puts it in Romans 12, “I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship;” and then, “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” Worship is about our minds and our bodies!
Worship is where we lay aside our other loves and desires, the things our bodies and minds crave, and desire only God. This is where we use our bodies to train our minds in habits and practices of the kingdom—the same practices used by Christians ever since that first gathering in the Book of Acts. We break bread, we praise God, we hear the Word, we share our resources, we pray. It’s a liturgy that transcends time and space, and one that turns our desire toward the kingdom. It’s where we learn to love God and neighbor not merely through our minds but through actions with our bodies—we stand and sing, we touch others when we pass the peace or hold hands at the end of the service, we touch and taste the bread and the cup. These are rituals, but they are kingdom rituals. Worship is habit-forming and life-altering.
That’s why it’s the number one thing we do here. Yes, we still very much value Bible studies and classes, we still teach the basics of the faith, we still do mission together. But if we are to do those things well, they will always emerge from a deep desire for the kingdom—a desire that is infused in us through worship.
As we begin this series on worship, it’s a chance for us to evaluate what we feel in our gut. What is it that you desire more than anything else? What do your daily and weekly habits say about what you desire? What kingdom are you trying to build? How you answer those questions will tell you about what you worship. Our faith and our thoughts can only be fully turned to God when we turn our desire toward him and his kingdom.
That’s why we worship. Our life is a liturgy—our desire is for God and his kingdom.
As we worship, so we believe and so we live. Let us learn to worship well. Amen.
Source:
Smith, James K.A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Baker Academic: 2009.
