Love in Our Worship

A meditation for August 2003

The 3rd of the Great Ends of the Church is "The maintenance of divine worship."

There is little doubt that what we once considered appropriate in the worship of God’s people has undergone radical change in our lifetime. New forms and liturgies, new hymns and music, offer us a great variety of choices as we seek to be sensitive to people’s needs in the context of common worship and at the same time faithful to the God who calls us to offer our praise.

The important thing for us to remember, as a community of faith, is that we are invited to worship God in spirit and in truth . If we take the invitation seriously we will open our lives to a living presence and to an encounter with the Holy One who seeks us in our humanity, even as we seek a vision of the divine.

What we must do, if we are to be a part of the reformation of worship, is to be open to the work of the Holy Spirit. The tried and true along with the fresh and innovative will all be a source of inspiration and renewal if we trust ourselves to the Spirit’s leading.

I have been helped by thinking of worship as an offering we make to God. God is the audience before whom we play our roles in the divine-human drama. God is also the Director who has called us to center stage and whose worth is celebrated. Here we offer praise, as we are assured of God’s forgiveness, as we hear the Word proclaimed, and as we present ourselves in response to God’s love and grace.

Places, everyone!

Love in Our Worship

Look with me at the gifts of the Spirit and I will show you one of the great ends of the Church:
"The maintenance of divine worship."

If I speak of God’s worth in the language of the psalmist and the reformers, or with the songs of cherubim and seraphim, but do not come to worship with love for God, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I bring to worship insight into God's nature, and if I gain knowledge and understanding, in company with those who gather; and if we, as a faithful people, are in awe before the mystery of divine grace, but we worship without love for God’s service and God’s servants, we are nothing.

If our offerings of self and substance, of time and talents, are sacrificial, but we offer them apart from love, we gain nothing.

Love in our worship means to wait on the Lord; to approach God with humble hearts, without demands or complaints. God’s lovers look for ways to honor God's ways and to celebrate God’s presence.

Love, open to hearing God's Word in Jesus Christ, seeks forgiveness and welcomes words of peace given.

Love, in sacramental acts, makes visible God’s grace. Love responds in praise and thanksgiving, rejoicing in the truth revealed.

Love, kneeling before the Holy One, believes all things are possible, bears the burden of trust, hopes for an epiphany, endures dry seasons of inspiration.

God's love and ours, at the center of our worship, offers endless possibilities.

But as for visions of the Lord, high and lifted up; as for sentimental journeys, they will end; as for high church liturgies, they shall cease; as for low church rituals and rites, they will play out. For we have made beginnings without end, but the journeys of the mind and heart have not yet brought us to completion.

When I sat in worship as a child, I spoke to God as a child, I thought God to be a great Chief in the sky. I reasoned that I would outgrow this Sunday morning routine. When I matured in my understanding, I abandoned these adolescent notions and came to treasure worship in the life of God’s people. Once I experienced worship as a mirror held up to God’s grace, seen dimly, then I came face to face with the fullness God intends for those whom God loves.

And now abiding in the secret place of the most high are these three things:

faith in the renewal of the Body of Christ in our worship;
hope for the maintenance work of the Holy Spirit among us;
and love that celebrates the grace, mercy, and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ, world without end.

Amen.

Let divine worship bind us together in love

From Love's Letters: A Poetic Book of Confessions by George Gunn
(Library Lane Press / Copyright 2001)