What to do with worship?

Is Christians worship supposed to be entertaining or thought provoking?  In worship, are your experiences limited to sitting in a darkened auditorium watching a smoke enhanced spotlighted preacher?

 

Or, are you surrounded by a throng of jumping enthusiasts who could just as well be at a rock concert?  Who taught you what worship is suppose to look like and how you are supposed to act in order to fit in? 

 

 

Since I - like so many who are 50 and over - was initially raised in a mainline tradition church, I learned that first of all, worship was boring and basically irrelevant to my limited experience in the world.  The general lesson was this: worship was a place to be quiet, be still, behave or be exposed! 

Modeling this out very well was the pastor, who always looked like he had either just eaten liver, or was having gastric cramping.  With smiles limited to greetings at the door, we were left with little but an hour of stoic resignation. 

Now having worshiped in a variety of churches and denominations with a wide range of
worshiping styles, it raises questions.  Some of these worshiping communities look a bit scary to someone raised in the 50’s.  Maybe it’s the juice at the fellowship time – is it spiked or what? 


Back in the late 90’s we sang a song in the “emerging” contemporary worship movement call “Undignified.”  It was based on the II Samuel 6:22 passage where King David -- so overjoyed that the Ark containing the covenantal laws was finally coming into a proper house -- danced “naked” through the streets of Jerusalem.  When he was confronted about this "indignity" he said, (v 22) “if you think this is something (my indecent dancing) just wait, I’ll become even more undignified than this!”

What are we meant to experience and express in Christian worship?  Are we to be the more serious stoic-worshipers of Almighty God; or are we to raise our arms and dance in the aisle because the Spirit of Christ is upon us and we just can’t contain ourselves.  Should we all don loin cloths and taunt those who would criticize by saying, “You haven’t seen nothing yet, we can become way more undignified that this!” 

 

If you want the rest of the “loin cloth” story (a real one) we will continue our series this Sunday “Where did  we learn that?  Misguided lessons we’ve learned about the Christian faith.” 

  

 

 

 

Where Did You Learn That?

How much do you remember from what you’ve been taught, be it school or life in general?   Would you like to test your knowledge?  Okay, here goes.  Write down your answers to the following questions.  When you get to the end, you can see if you get a passing grade.

 

 

1.     What are diamonds made from? 
2.     What percentage of our brains do we use?
3.     Who invented the light bulb? 
4.     Cleopatra’s famous heritage?
5.     Who invented the printing press?

Now for your grade:  1. If you wrote Diamonds are made from compressed coal, you are 100% wrong.  The carbon that makes diamonds comes from melting of rocks from the Earths upper mantle; coal is produced from plant material.  2.  If you answered that we only use ten percent of our brain, you are also wrong. Over the course of a day, most people use all parts of their brain.  3.  Edison did not invent the light bulb! Actually, historians list up to 22 invntors of the incandescent lamp before Thomas Edison, starting with Sir Humphry Davy in the early 19th Century.  4.  Cleopatra was the beautiful, charismatic queen of Egypt and the wife of Julius Caesar, but she was not Egyptian!  She was actually of macedonian Greek Heritage, daughter of Ptolemy XII.  5.  If you’re doing poorly, certainly you’ll get this last one correct.   If you answered Gutenberg, you are not alone in being wrong.  So you will base your knowledge on the truth, print technology originated in China in 593 AD, and the Chinese were printing from movable type in 1040 AD.

If you answered based on what you had been taught, or felt were commonly held facts, and still failed, please don’t fret.  What I am really interested in is this: Where did we learn these “truths?”  

 

Wherever or from whomever we learned them, we learned them well.  And once learned, these “truths” become incorporated into our life operating system (our philosophy, both socially and culturally) by which we live and act. 

 

Most of us realize that what we learn has consequences both beneficial and harmful.  This is because what we learn guides us; and like a tram on a rail, it’s hard to make a u-turn!

 

Practice perfect, right?  Wrong! Practice makes not perfect but permanent.  If you an idea reinforced over and over again it doesn’t get perfected, it becomes permanent.  But, what happens if what we learned, no matter how seemingly authentic and commonly believed, was wrong in the first place.  What if we’ve placed into our psyche misguided lesson we’ve learned?

 

Some misguided lessons are innocent and have little effect on life; there are others which do. What about the misguided lessons we’ve learned about the Christian faith?  What if there are lessons about faith and practice we’ve learn very well that are actually wrong.  Then, like other such “learnings” we’ve incorporated them into our Christian operating system (theology) which guide us like a tram on a rail too!


We all bring “lessons” and “learning’s” into our faith.  However, some of what we’ve learned has no basis in Judeo-Christian biblical faith.  This Sunday, we will begin a sermon series, “Where did we learn that?”  In the coming weeks, we will examine some commonly misguiding lessons we’ve learned about the Christian faith.  The goal behind our exploration is to become more authentic and more fulfilled through our faith.   This week we will look at our worship of God in community.