Six weeks ago we started talking about a longing many of us have to know God better, to go deeper in faith. And we began to talk about things we call “spiritual disciplines,” practices that we can engage in NOT because we have to or “should,” but because we want to deepen our relationship with God. We’ve now talked about: prayer. reading scripture. confession. sabbath. This morning we want to talk about “Worship.”

I believe we have a longing deep inside of us to connect with SomeThing or SomeOne bigger than selves. It’s why sights like the Grand Canyon, or a towering waterfall, or rugged mountains are so fascinating, leave us with mouths hanging open and feeling a bit small. It’s why so many people have perceived that human beings are hardwired to worship, people as diverse as Bob Dylan who sang “Gotta Serve Somebody” and G.K. Chesterton who wrote “When we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing. We worship anything.” The question is not will we worship, but who and what that even means.

Worship is a discipline that can be very broad. We can engage in it as individual people. We can practice worship in the very way we live our lives. We can worship as a gathered community. This morning I mainly want us to consider the last one. Our worship as a community, or “corporate” worship, together like we are doing right now. In fact, What ARE we doing here?

Our sermon text comes from the last book in the Bible, the book of Revelation, the mysterious, symbol-laden vision of John. We’re jumping into the middle of a picture from chapter 4, where John has been taken up into heaven and we’re privileged to see a worship scene taking place there that he describes. I’ll begin reading at the new paragraph that comes in the middle of verse 6 of Revelation chapter 4.

Reading: Revelation 4:6b-11

What ARE we doing? Let me give you three pictures.

The first is just a little commentary on this amazing picture from Revelation. John is pitched through a heavenly doorway, touches down in a place filled with the colors of rainbows and jewels and crystal, flashes of lightning, peals of thunder, burning torches that represent the Spirit of God…amazing! There is so much symbolism, we couldn’t begin to sort it all out. And in the middle of it all, this throne, the throne of God Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth. And around the throne, four living creatures who look like: a lion, an ox, a human, an eagle. From the very early days of the Christian faith, these creatures represented the gospels, and the gospel writers: Matthew a lion, Luke an ox, Mark a human, John an eagle. So hovering in the middle of this worship scene around the throne are the gospels, the story and testimony of how God met and provided for his people in Jesus Christ. Amazing.

And day and night, non-stop singing:

“Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God Almighty,
who was and is and is to come.”

The chanting, the singing, the acknowledging that God is unique, set apart, totally Different, timeless. AMAZING. And as the 4 personified representations of the gospels give glory and honor and thanks to God, there are also 24 elders clothed in white, seated on thrones with golden crowns, great personages who might well represent the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 apostles of Jesus. These elders throw off their own crowns and fall down to the ground in front of God and start their own chorus:

“You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.”

And if we had time to look just a little further in scripture, we would find that the next episode has along with all of these images, another: the Son of God, Jesus the Lamb of God. Amazing.

Worship. What are we doing?

The second picture comes from Daytona Beach Florida. On a sunny Sunday morning like Florida is famous for, cars slowly pull into a large grassy parking area. It used to be a drive-in movie theater. Now it’s a drive-in church. They park their cars…and remain inside them. They reach down and turn their radios to 88.5 FM so they can hear the service. They listen to their radios, perhaps glancing at the far end of the parking lot where a tiny robed pastor preaches from an elevated balcony and a small choir sings a song.

At one point in the service, they grab the little instant communion kit they were handed on their way in. In fact, it looks just like this one I received in the mail- it’s amazing what pastors get in the mail! You peel back the top seal and find a tiny wafer. Then peel back the second to get the juice. So they serve themselves communion. At the end of the time, they start their engines and drive out of the parking lot, rolling down their windows long enough to greet the pastor who stands near the exit.

Worship (?) What are we doing?

Third picture. Bethany Presbyterian, (9, 10:45, 5pm) on a Sunday. Perhaps six hundred people file into a church building built in 1929. The congregation has met since 1888, for better or for worse. We sit on straight-backed pews (unless you’re lucky enough to get one of these cool chairs with extra padding!), we spend an hour fifteen or twenty or twenty-five together. We come from many backgrounds, with a host of expectations. Some are excited, others are bored, or tired from a late night or a long week. What are we doing?

What we say we’re doing is coming to a worship service. Now those two words, “worship” and “service” actually say a lot. But I think we’ve pretty much forgotten what the meaning of the phrase is, because it’s so common. It’s generic, like saying “Kleenex.” “Worshipservice” means a group of people, some music, some scripture, a message. “I’m going to Worshipservice.”

What are we doing when we worship? Here’s 4 thoughts:

1. One simple definition is that Worship means “to ascribe worth to.” Acknowledging, verbalizing, praising, giving glory, proclaiming the character, and the characteristics, of God. We have a longing to connect with something bigger than ourselves, something worth everything, and we’ve found that this is not a but a person: God, revealed in Jesus Christ, present in Holy Spirit, and to worship means to honor that God. So we tell God. We name Him. We remind him (as though he needs reminding) or rather we remind ourselves who he is, and what he had done.

2. To worship is to respond. We come into the presence of a mysterious and powerful God, we are encountered by Him, and we respond. We think about God creating the world in all its beauty and complexity. We ponder God making human beings, and desiring to be with them. We wonder over God’s decision to come to earth in Jesus Christ, in apparent weakness more powerful than any army. We marvel that he has called us to himself for all time in the Resurrection. We remember times we have been touched by God’s Spirit, have felt close, have discovered that God actually loves not just the whole world, but us. We enjoy, right here, right now, the Presence of the God of the universe. And we respond. We can’t help ourselves.

3. Worship literally means to bow down before. When I took Hebrew and Greek in seminary, I vowed to avoid ever saying in a sermon “Now, in the Hebrew, or in the Greek…” (sounds sort of arrogant), but I’ve broken that vow two times and I want to again this morning. The word in Hebrew (OT) for worship, and the word in Greek (NT) for worship really both mean “to bow down before.” To prostrate oneself before or kneel in front of, worship, do reverence to. The New Testament word is “PROSKUVEW,” and it’s used quite a bit. The wisemen “proskuneOed” before the child Jesus, they knelt on the ground in front of Him, they worshiped Him. Or after the adult Jesus calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee, the disciples “proskuneOed” him in the boat, they knelt before, threw themselves at the feet of, worshiped him.

It’s a posture we don’t use much in our culture anymore. Many cultures still do. You bow before someone to pay them honor. You kneel in the presence of greatness or position. You physically lower yourself to remember or pay testimony to a Person clearly greater than yourself. You get low. In our Revelation text, the very hosts of heaven bowed down at the throne of God. It’s as though they are saying “You are God. I am not. I understand. I recognize. I proclaim it.”

4. Worship is dangerous. In what way? Mark Labberton is the pastor at First Presbyterian down in Berkeley. This year he wrote a book, a good book, called “The Dangerous Act of Worship.” In it he says “worship is dangerous because every dimension of self-centered living is endangered.” Because worship is about God, to God, for God, because it is a vertical action not a horizontal one, because it is totally and thoroughly God-centered, it is not self-centered as most of our lives are…and so it is dangerous to life as we now know it. If we worship well, our lives will change. Worship is dangerous to our status quo. One of my prayers each week before we worship together is that we might leave as different people than we came in as. Convicted, filled, healed, joyful. Changed.

So what is worship? Ascribing worth, responding, bowing down, dangerous.

But we said we sometimes engage in a worship Service. Service? Servant. Serving. Service to whom? God. We serve God. It’s a whole different way of thinking about worship. When we worship, we serve God. It’s not what we get out of it, it’s what GOD gets out of it. We serve by offering ourselves. When we offer our listening selves, we serve God. When we offer our praises, we serve God. When we declare His name, we serve Him. When we sing, dance, read scripture, listen to poetry, pray in silence, are moved by music, we serve God. When we go out and live different lives because of being with God, we serve God. What are we doing? Worship. Service.

Soren Kierkegaard, the 19 th century Danish philosopher developed a famous analogy to help us think about worship. He said to imagine worship as a theater performance. Our tendency is to think that the stage is up here at the front of the church, that the actors are the people engaged in leading worship (I hate that!), and the audience is you, the congregation. But Kierkegaard said “No! you’ve got it all wrong! The sanctuary is the stage, and the entire congregation (including worship leaders) are the actors, and the audience (recipient) is God!” The goal is bringing God delight, serving God. Worship is about God.

Now. If we are even partly right about this, then it follows that there are a few things that worship is clearly not:

1. Worship is not entertainment. This is a very difficult thing for our culture to understand. We are constantly being entertained. We go to concerts, to movies, to ballgames, to shows. We go to be entertained, to be engaged. We applaud what we like and boo what we don’t, that’s our right. We paid for it. We chose to go to an event that will have a particular outcome that benefits us. And if we aren’t entertained, or we get tired of it, we quit going or more likely we find something else that will provide fresh entertainment.

Worship is not entertainment. But in the age of church shopping and church hopping and comparing preachers and rating musicians and big screens and buildings, it’s easy for us to confuse worship with entertainment. Now, that’s not to say that worship should be boring or sloppy or poorly led. Not at all. But it has an awful lot to do with our motives for coming in the first place. Are we coming for entertainment that will benefit us, or to serve and acknowledge God?

2. Worship is not necessarily supposed to be comfortable . But we often operate on that premise. Am I comfortable here? Can I depend on what’s going to happen? Well, unfortunately, sure! It’s mostly printed in the bulletin. There’s a semi-regular pattern to what will go on in any given worship time. In many church services there’s no room for anything that makes people anxious or is outside a comfort zone or that’s new. Sometimes that means there’s no room for God. We’ve domesticated God into looking like our bulletin.

I think the Pentecostal churches might be far ahead of others in this regard. Their openness to the gifts of the Spirit, or to waiting on God and seeing what God will do makes many of us uncomfortable.

In Mark Labberton’s book that I mentioned he tells a great story of the day a pigeon got loose in the First Pres sanctuary. It was just before the service, and the ushers and pastors were trying to shoose it out, but to no avail. Then it struck Mark that the pigeon was God’s gift that morning. In fact, that it was the best Call to Worship they’d had for a long time! The pigeon made people uncomfortable- where would it land, what would it do? Where would it do it?! Everyone was on edge. There was a discomfort, a watchfulness he hadn’t seen before that seemed right, actually. Mark’s comment: “If we were holier God might have sent a dove. But since we’re only Presbyterians, all we got was a pigeon!”

Are we looking for worship that is comfortable? Things happen. Babies cry, phones go off, a word of prophecy is shared, we find ourselves captivated by a single word, we can’t get a scripture out of our mind, we find ourselves emotional, we’re around new people. None of those things are necessarily comfortable.

3. Worship is not about having my needs met. Sometimes we approach a time of worship like it was a lunch menu. “Let’s see. Today I need a message on grace (not things to change), I need some loud music (it was too quiet last week)…and I need no one to bother me (I don’t really like people).”

The first thing is that we often don’t know what our needs really are. But God does. And the second thing is thing is that what we really need is God. That’s the longing. And as we are met by the living God, we find that we receive what we need. What are we doing?

Worship is not: entertainment, or comfort or having my needs met. Worship is not about us. It’s about God.

Now, you’ll notice that in all of this conversation about worship, I have said almost nothing about “style.” High church-low church, bands-choirs, guitars-organs, formal-informal, open prayer-scripted prayers, noisy-contemplative. I don’t mean to communicate that there aren’t important questions there. Just not the most important question. The important question is: are we serving God?

How will we know if we’ve succeeded in our worship? We will be changed people. Comforted, healed, renewed in Spirit, ready to embrace the needs of our world, ready to invest in the things of the Kingdom.

Let me leave you with one last story that sums this up, a story that Ben Patterson tells. Arturo Toscanini was an Italian music conductor in first half of the 20 th century, a man some feel was the greatest conductor ever (I don’t know enough about classical music to say).

Once, after Toscanini finished conducting a brilliant performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the audience rose to it’s feet as though one, shouting and applauding with great enthusiasm. But Toscanini started to wave his arms, stopping all of the applause. He turned to the orchestra which had just finished an outstanding performance and shouted “You are nothing!” You could have heard a pin drop. Then he pointed to himself and shouted “I am nothing!” Then he shouted “Beethoven is everything. Everything.”

Our worship is not about ourselves. The God of the universe, revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, present in the Holy Spirit here and now…HE is everything. Everything.

Let us pray.