In your mind’s eye, take a tour with me. In your imagination, let’s go into some very special rooms.
First, we go to a spacious room, dark, slightly musty, with nooks and crannies in which you could hide if you wanted to. And, indeed, in this room, there are a number of people who appear to be lost in thought, even asleep, sitting with their eyes closed and their bodies relaxed. Others are on their knees, their lips mumbling something. At the front someone is speaking, but his speech is quiet and almost inaudible, and his focus does not appear to be on the people scattered in the room, but on the items on a large table just in front of where he is standing. Off to the side, in the shadows, we see flickering candles in front of a statue of a woman holding an infant in her arms. What is this place and what is this activity? This is Christian worship, Roman Catholic style.
Journey with me now to another room, one quite different from the room we have just left. This is not a spacious room; this is a small space, harshly lit by a couple of dangling light bulbs. The folding chairs on which some of the people are sitting are battered and bent, as if they had been given away several times before they got to this place. This room has not always been a gathering space; on the walls there are fragments of old posters advertising soft drinks and cigarettes. This has been a storefront, but now, cramped and crowded with only thirty people in it, something very passionate is happening. Over in the corner is an elderly woman who raises her voice in an awkward half-melody, and everyone else chimes in. Over in the other corner a young man on an electronic keyboard finds her key and hammers away, and soon the sound overwhelms you. Bodies sway and head fly back, hands clap and feet stomp. What is this? This is Christian worship, Pentecostal style.
Again, come with me to yet another room. This room is unlike either of the others we have visited. This room is large without being immense; it is light without being garish; it is comfortable but unadorned, without very much special to look at, other than a cross at the front and a Bible on a table. Here the people sit as if at attention. They say nothing, they do not walk around, they are hushed. And at the front there is someone who reads from that Bible, who talks about various activities, who greets people in a jovial way, and who, finally, launches into a speech of some sort. An awful lot of talk from that one person, and not a whole lot of response from those who have gathered. What is this activity, what is this all about? This too is Christian worship, Takoma Park Baptist style.
If I were to continue our little mind’s eye tour, I could regale you all morning with the ways in which Christians worship. The variety is infinite and bewildering. Almost anything you can imagine, someone has used to offer to God in worship. From monks chanting behind an icon screen in a richly adorned Orthodox church, to the honky-tonk sound of a tinkly piano in a white frame country chapel; from the stirring sound of a great pipe organ echoing through the vast chambers of a cathedral to the sheer silence of a Friends meeting, broken only when someone feels the movement of the Spirit; from a half-dozen bleary-eyed teenagers clustered around a campfire softly singing, “Kum ba yah” to the rousing rhetoric of an impassioned preacher who has learned the magic of the spoken word .. in all these things the people of called Christian have expressed worship. In all these things and a whole lot more, the church of the Lord Jesus Christ offers its worship.
Can all of this really be Christian worship? Can all of this truly voice what needs to be expressed before God? By what standards can I judge anything that somebody calls worship?
In the 149th Psalm I find four affirmations. Four distinctives that need to be honored if the “how” of worship is to be genuine.
First, worship must be fresh, not just form. Second, worship must be in community, not simply individual. Next, third, worship must have joy at its bottom line, not mere instruction. And finally, worship must spill out into the streets and not be confined to the sanctuary. Let’s explore each of these with the help of the Psalmist.
I
First, would you agree that worship be must be fresh, and not just a form? Worship must have in it a spontaneity, an immediacy, something now, human, fresh.
The Psalmist puts it very crisply. His word is,
“Sing unto the Lord a new song .. let them praise His name with dancing, making melody to Him with tambourine and lyre.”
Sing a new song. A fresh song. I don’t think the Psalmist is telling us we cannot sing the old favorites. I don’t think he is urging us to pick our worship music out of the Top Forty. No, he is telling us that we need to be fresh. We need to be personal, spontaneous, immediate, now. Not routine, but fresh. Not hackneyed and cliched, but in real time. For our needs. In our language. Fresh.
Did you know that our spiritual ancestors were very definite on this point? When Baptists began in the 17th Century they were disgusted by the dead ritual of the churches of their time. They were so certain that everything associated with the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of England was so ritualistic and so cut and dried, that they threw out everything they could throw out. Did those people wear robes? So get rid of the robes. I never saw a Baptist preacher in a pulpit robe until I came to Washington, and I never used one myself with any degree of consistency until I came to Takoma and you all told me it was the thing to do. Our spiritual ancestors threw out ministerial robes because they looked like dead ritual.
They threw out other things too. They threw out the prayer book. Some churches use written prayers and take words written hundreds of years ago to express their longings. Our Baptist forebears threw out the prayer book and said, if you are going to pray, do it spontaneously, freshly, from the heart. My father, who was a Lutheran, and who therefore was accustomed to a prayer book, sort of dreaded going to Baptist services for fear the preacher would look him in the eye and ask him to lead in prayer. He just didn’t think he could do it without the book! And, frankly, I remember that when I started out I felt a twinge of guilt every time I would jot down a few notes and prepare to lead prayer. It seemed ritualistic and unspiritual to prepare to pray! We threw out the tradition of written prayers. We tried to get rid of the rituals and the forms.
But, you know, the very thing we were trying to avoid happened to us too! We threw out their rituals, but we brought in our own rituals. We threw out their robes, but somebody decreed that every good Baptist preacher would get himself a black suit; the flamboyant ones could wear a white suit in the summer. That’s a ritual.
We threw out the prayer-book, but we didn’t throw out ritual prayers. We built up a certain pattern of our own. You were just expected to say, “Lord, I thank you that you got me up this morning; that you protected me from hurt, harm, and danger; I thank you that I woke up clothed in my right mind and that my bed was not a cooling board.” You remember? We built up our own rituals. I never will forget the old deacon in my home church whose prayers were so incredibly predictable. Every time, every single time, his prayer went the same way. They had three points: “Lord, we thank you for this beautiful Sabbath Day; we beg you to forgive us of any sins we may have committed; and then, Lord, bring us back here safely next week.” And you wanted to ask why come back next week if we are going to go through the same motions as this week! Ritual, form, routine!
But worship must be fresh. “Sing to the Lord a new song.” A fresh song. Something that really reaches down and expresses your heart today. If you can use what someone else has written, fine, but it needs to be your heart. It must be fresh, spontaneous, and immediate.
You see, it’s not whether the songs are a hundred years old or hot off the press; it’s not whether they are stately and classical or whether they are spirited and down-home. It is whether we bring a fresh expectation to worship; it is whether we are going to open up and let passion fill our souls. It is not whether the musical instrument is a majestic pipe organ or a pair of tambourines; it is whether the experience is heart-felt, personal, immediate, spontaneous. It is not whether the prayers are off the top of the head or off the top of the page; it is whether the one doing the praying makes them his own and leads others to pray. Worship must be fresh.
“Sing to the Lord a new song ... let them praise His name with dancing, making melody to Him with tambourine and lyre.”
II
Second, worship must be in community, not simply individual. Worship must take place in a gathered fellowship. It is not just individual performance, it is not just personal feelings, it is not simply private experience. Worship is corporate, social, in community.
Catch the drift of the Psalmist as he says,
“[Sing] his praise in the assembly of the faithful. Let Israel be glad in its maker; let the children of Zion rejoice in their King.”
In the assembly of the faithful, in the gathered community, their King. You see, we is more than a bunch of I’s. Did you get that? We is more than a whole bunch of little I’s. When we come together to worship, and souls gather around us, we find that God’s spirit does something in the whole of us that is greater than what He does in each one of us personally. God has a way of working through a gathered people. Worship requires our presence, before God and before one another. Worship requires that we belong to one another.
I saw a cartoon the other day that both amused me and horrified me. It showed a church sanctuary, fully adorned with crosses and candles, pulpit and pews, everything ready for worship. But up at the pulpit there was no preacher, there was only a video screen and a VCR, ready to be started at the right moment. That’s bad enough; but then you look out over the shoulder of that TV set, and what do you see? About 200 tape recorders, all plugged in and ready to record! (I don’t know, by the way, who was going to turn on all that stuff!) What’s wrong with that picture? Who worships in that setting? Who brings honor and praise to God in that scene? Nobody! Nobody, because although information might be communicated, and it might be good stuff, but it wouldn’t be worship. Hey, you know, I shouldn’t tell you this, but it would be a lot cheaper to put me out to pasture and just play tapes of Billy Graham or James Forbes or whoever you want each week. And it would be good stuff, but it wouldn’t be worship, because community would be lost. Or you could just buy one of our tapes and have it sent to you, and some of that is not bad stuff, but it still wouldn’t be worship. Worship is not just private enjoyment. The shared experience would be compromised. That terrible, wonderful, exciting, frightening expectation that God Himself might be in our midst, that would be lost. Worship has to be in community, it must be in fellowship.
It’s good that at the end of our worship we “reach out and touch.” It’s a little thing, but it gets at this great truth: how do we worship? In community.
“[Sing] his praise in the assembly of the faithful. Let Israel be glad in its maker; let the children of Zion rejoice in their King.”
III
Next, third, worship must have joy at its bottom line, not mere instruction. Worship is more than passing out information; it is celebrating release, it is finding hope and strength and freedom. Worship is joy. I can feel the intensity building as the Psalmist cries out,
“For the Lord takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with victory. Let the faithful exult in glory; let then sing for joy on their couches.”
Joy is the bottom line for worship. Joy. Oh, there are going to be times when the mood of worship is somber and subdued; there is a time to mourn, a time for quiet. Even so, the bottom line is joy. There is one non-negotiable, one truth never to be sacrificed, and that is that God loves us. That God cares for us. Here it is, “The Lord takes pleasure in his people”. And therefore, however we say it, the bottom line is joy because God is in the business of lifting us up out of the miry clay and setting our feet upon a rock, and for that there is no substitute. “He adorns the humble with victory.” Victory! With joy! How do we worship? I do not care whether you say it with a full-throated shout or with a tiny whisper, but at least say this: “ “Joy”. I do not care whether you sing it with the majesty of Bach or the exuberance of Andrae Crouch, but sing “Glory”, sing “Salvation”. Tell it out, “God loves us.”
Joy. And I don’t mean something that is cooked up, pumped up by artificial respiration. I wish you could stand where I stand and see and know what I see and know. When I look out and see somebody who used to be in the streets, but now is at home, I say “Thank God”. When I can touch hands with somebody who a year ago was sick unto death, but now is well and happy, I say, “Praise the Lord.” Our joy that is not inflated by wailing warblers in the choir loft or whooping cranes in the pulpit. Ours is the sheer awesome joy that comes when I see somebody who three months ago didn’t even speak to his parents, but now is embraced completely. That’s joy. That’s the bottom line. Worship has this joy at its bottom line, not mere instruction.
“For the Lord takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with victory. Let the faithful exult in glory; let then sing for joy on their couches.”
IV
And finally, don’t miss this one. Don’t tune out just yet. How do we worship? We worship with a fresh approach, we worship in community, the bottom line of our worship is joy; and, finally, when “church” is over, then our worship spills out into the streets and is not confined to the sanctuary. Our worship continues once we leave this room. It spills into the streets. Because here we have been empowered by His spirit, we are able to do bold things, big things, justice and righteousness things. That too is the “how” of worship.
The Psalmist arrives at this conclusion beautifully,
“Let the high praises of God be in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands, to execute vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, to bind their kings with fetters and their nobles with chains or iron, to execute on them the judgment decreed. This is glory for all his faithful ones.”
“The high praises of God in their throats and two-edged swords in their hands to execute [justice]”. I am sure that what happens in here sometimes seems very far from what happens in the streets. In here there is harmony and safety. Out there on the streets there is conflict and danger. In here there is the language of Zion, with its lofty “thees” and “thous”. Out there there is the language of hatred, pejorative prejudice, filth and froth. It seems there is no connection.
But I tell you, this is the most significant “how” of all. How do we worship? With mission in mind. With a militant heart and a desire to do God’s will, out there where it counts. How do we worship? With a song on our lips, a prayer in our hearts, of course, but with out there on our minds. With a willing spirit, to be empowered for justice and a witness. With a consciousness turned toward the power of Christ, so that the fight against evil becomes bearable and the struggle against oppression becomes winnable. The most significant “how” in our worship has nothing to do with what music we use, with how loud things are, with how long the service lasts. It has everything to do with how we go to the streets, how we go to the world out there, and what our worship empowers us to do. For worship calls us, empowers us to claim the kingdoms of this world for our Lord and His Christ.
I know that there are men and women in this very room who find strength here and only here to do what they have to do. Some worship God here and find power to keep up the civil rights struggle. Some worship God here and find strength to teach hostile children. Some worship here and gain the courage to enforce the law, practice medicine, tug of war with bureaucracies. Some worship here and just go home to tackle one more time an impossible family situation. And in their worship they find glory! Strength and honor and power and glory! Just as the Psalm says, “This is glory for all his faithful ones.”
Thirty years ago in a southern city a man stood before a large crowd and led them in worship. They did all the usual things. They prayed, they sang, they heard the Scripture. And then he preached. In his message he said.
“I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter to me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop, I won’t mind. Like anyone else, I would like to live a long life. ... But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord “
And when a few hours later gunshots rang out at the Lorraine Motel, Martin Luther King, Jr., died, but he died knowing that his worship had gone to the streets. And the Psalmist says, “This is glory for all his faithful ones.”
