Second Sunday Before Advent, 16 November 2014
Queen Camel, Corton Denham, Weston Bampfylde
Perhaps my first memory of Christian worship is of the day when, at the age of three or four, in a Baptist Church in suburban Liverpool, I spent the whole of one particular service in the pew alongside my grandmother, rather than out in the creche as I usually did.
When it came to the congregation starting to recite together the Lord’s Prayer, my eyes opened, lit up, and I turned to my grandma and said excitably, 'I know this prayer! We say it every day at nursery school!'
Now besides my grandmother who was mortified by my loud interjection, and shusshed me up quickly, this must have amused the rest of the adults around me, as it amuses me (and a little bit embarrasses me) now, but it was a revelation at the time.
In that moment of recognition I learned something significant about Christian worship - that in different places at different times there was a common prayer which connected people as they said it; a prayer that had been passed on to us by others before us.
I was later to learn, of course, that the Lord’s Prayer went all the way back to first-century Palestine and formed part of the teaching of Jesus to his followers in what we now call The Sermon on the Mount. [1]
I was later to learn that in some churches it was said differently than in ours: some churches used contemporary language instead of thines and thys, and some churches cut the prayer short, missing out the ending ‘for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever’, which I also later learned was called the doxology. I came to learn that what we in our nonconformist church called The Lord’s Prayer others called the Our Father or the Pater Noster.
In time I came to learn that The Lord’s Prayer prayer appeared twice in scripture and that Luke’s gospel misses out the lines, ‘your will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven’, and later also omits to say ‘deliver us from evil’. I came to learn that where I was used to praying, ‘lead us not into temptation’, others said, ‘save us from the time of trial’, and that where I usually said, ‘forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us’, others said ‘forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors’.
Each of these little lessons learned was another revelation about God and how we Christians speak of him, about Jesus and how we Christians relate to him. About how Christian churches differ in the way they go about following Jesus, and can learn from each other’s ways. About how our worship has been formed by our various histories and cultures, and how it continues to evolve.
We are going to spend the next few weeks in our churches thinking about our worship and what it means to us. It’s an opportunity for us to look more closely at the liturgies which we take part in week by week, to renew our understanding of them, to refresh our interest in them, to deepen our involvement in them.
Now, the word liturgy comes from a Greek term meaning 'public service' and is formed by two words: 'laos' (people) and 'ergon' (work), so liturgy literally means ‘the work of the people'. That’s an interesting revelation: suggesting that as we join together in our individual churches in our prayers and our songs and our responses to the word, in our communions and confessions and intercessions, we are at work - paying due honour and homage to God. [2]
Another ancient expression which has always held great importance when it comes to Christian worship is the Latin phrase lex orandi, lex credendi - ‘the rule of prayer is the rule of belief’. That is, the way your community worships - expresses, teaches, and governs what your community believes. Worship comes before belief. Your worship forms your belief.
So if in worship we are at work giving honour and homage to God, we are at the same time being shaped and formed into the kinds of Christians our worship invites us to be. Consider what is happening to us when we join in these responses:
Lift up your hearts: We lift them to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God: It is right to give thanks and praise.
- we are being shaped and formed into people whose hearts are directed towards God, whose authority is our Lord, to whom we are thankful.
And when the minister goes on to say,
It is indeed right, it is our duty and our joy, at all times and in all places
to give you thanks and praise, holy Father, heavenly King, almighty and eternal God
- then the church affirms this, our heartfelt belief.
Now God’s people have been working together at worship, and being formed and shaped by it, for many many centuries. Christian worship has pre-Christian origins, of course, in the Temple worship of ancient Israel, with its blood and grain sacrifices, its formal offerings at festival times; in the household prayers of most of the people most of the rest of the time; in the reading of the law and the corporate worship of the local synagogues, whose importance rose as the Temple fell.
The first Christians were rooted in these ways of worshipping and so it was natural that they would deeply influence the developing forms of what eventually became known as Christian worship. The reading and exposition of scripture, the singing of the psalms and other hymns, developed early too. Jesus’ institution of a meal in his memory ensured that communion played a key part from the start, in gatherings of Christian believers. [4]
And whilst the church over centuries divided between East and West, and later again between Reformed and Roman traditions, virtually all Christian churches everywhere, today,
- meet on a Sunday;
- listen to Bible readings;
- share in Communion or the Eucharist;
- listen to music, and join in with hymns and songs;
- join in prayer;
- receive teaching in the form of a sermon or homily; and
- take a collection or an offering. [5]
- and in these ways we continue our work of praising God, and being formed and shaped by our worship.
That’s not to say that our work is always easy. Some people stop coming to church when they’ve been hit by a crisis or involved in a disaster, because the liturgies don’t say what’s in their hearts: the confusion, the lamenting, the anger aren’t allowed a voice.
Others fall out with worship when its language seems to reduce them to something less than they feel they are: many struggle over this line, for instance: ’But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders’. Others struggle with the relatively recent innovation, the Sharing of the Peace, whilst others embrace it as a positive expression of brother- and sister-hood.
Believing that worship forms us, some people fall out with forms of worship which they feel are shaping them in unGodly ways. For instance, some gratefully fall into the silence of Quakerism, escaping the bombardment of words, words, words, on which so much Western Christian worship is based.
But others, well aware of the in-fighting and the exclusiveness which sadly marks church life, note the contradiction in the creed, of everyone saying together, ‘I believe in the holy catholic church’, but keep saying it, in the firm hope that this will sink in and the ecumenical spirit will rise.
Returning, in conclusion, to The Lord’s Prayer. You recall how it came about when his disciples asked Jesus ‘Teach us how to pray’.
You might think, but surely they already had all the prayers of their tradition, they were well versed in the psalms and the household prayers and the synagogue liturgies. So why did they need Jesus to teach them how to pray?
Perhaps because they clearly saw that Jesus was doing a new thing with them. Jesus was introducing to them a whole new way of relating to God, which challenged the old ways of relating. No longer the Temple and the need for blood or grain sacrifices. No longer the formalities of the law alone. But now a relationship - now the people’s prayers were to be directed to God as a father.
Our worship is in constant development. Look at the history of the church and you see that all our services - even the beloved old BCP - have hardly stood still, they’ve constantly evolved as the people of God have evolved in their understanding of his ways in the world, requiring fresh expressions of prayer and praise.
And so new forms have worship emerge, like new growth each springtime. Most of them still consisting of Bible reading, music, and prayer, many of them around the sharing of a common meal.
So in our benefice CafeXtra, for instance, or Sacred Space, a service of prayers for healing, have come about in recent years and are meeting needs. As time goes on, other forms will come too, to complement and at times enrich the more established styles of worship. It has ever been so.
So over the next few weeks in our services we will be taking a closer look at the way we worship, and your questions, your comments, will be very welcome. This week you may like to give some thought to your own personal worship journey:
The traditions which you have been brought up in;
Moments of illumination in which certain aspects of worship have come alive for new in a new way;
The best things about the traditional forms of worship, which you most value;
And the good things about new or informal ways of worshipping which you have experienced or seen.
Our aim in this series is to enrich our life of worship together. We have been given much; we have an abundance of wonderful worship at our disposal. Let us take what God has given us and make even more of it, for our sake and for the sake of drawing others in.
Notes
[1] Matthew 6.5–13
[2] Wikipedia: Christian worship.
[3] Wikipedia: lex orandi, lex credendi.
[4] Paul F. Bradshaw, A Companion to Common Worship: v. 1 (Alcuin Club Collections 78), p.1-9
[5] Wikipedia: Christian worship.
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