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Reverend Dr. Stephen K. Nash

Is there a right and a wrong way to worship God?

You may have noticed that there is a fair bit of conversation in the churches these days about how we should worship.

Some believe that there are those–young adults, people with little or no experience in the Christian faith and Christian community, who will be attracted to the church only if the church’s style is contemporary, familiar, slick and choreographed like an Oscar Awards broadcast–not too “churchy.”  Gone are the hymnals, the liturgy, the pipe organs.  In their place—words of praise choruses flashed on big screens Power Point style, guitars, drums, singing groups with hand-held microphones, multi-media presentations, drama skits.  It’s said by advocates of this approach that people should not feel like they are coming into an alien sub-culture when they come to worship—that that creates artificial an unnecessary barriers to faith.

Tex Sample, the theologian-sociologist, kind of spiritual raconteur (I don’t really know how to describe him), talks about a shopping plaza in a large Midwestern city that became a popular gathering place for high school age young people, particularly those with skateboards and roller blades.  The merchants quickly became distressed because the paying customers were beginning to stay away in droves, fearful of getting run over or accosted or something.  They couldn’t force the kids to leave.  After all, these are public streets, public sidewalks.  And so the merchants’ association came up with a plan.  They bought a huge sound system, installed speakers on every corner and started to play nothing but classical music.  The kids left.  Tex Sample says we do the same thing in the church.

Is that true?  Must worship be contemporary—whatever “contemporary” is?  No one’s interested in tradition—that’s what some say.  The preachers in these “seeker-friendly” churches are more likely to be dressed in a polo shirt than in a coat and tie or in a robe.  No pulpit.  Sometimes no Table.

Fred Craddock, the dean of American preachers,  tells of visiting a large, booming megachurch.  He discovered that this congregation has discontinued its practice of celebrating the Lord’s Supper.  Fred asked “why?”  One of the ministers told him.  “Because it’s dead time.”  “Dead time?”  “Dead time—on the television broadcast.  No one’s interested in watching people pass plates of bread and wine up and down the pews.”  “I’m interested,” said Fred.  The minister told him,  “We have a table with bread and wine set up over in the Sunday School Annex, so that if someone wants to take communion they can go after church and partake.”

How should we worship God?  Is there a right way?  Is there a wrong way to worship?  Some say that if it is God who is being worshiped, the living God, the Creator and Sustainer of the heavens and the earth—not false gods who would claim our allegiance, who latch onto us and take the very life out of us—if it is God who is being worshipped then that worship must be, by very definition, must be contemporary, for God is our eternal contemporary.

There are also many people, many of them young people who say, on the other hand:  “I don’t want the music that I sing in church to sound like the music I listen to on the radio.  I don’t want the preacher to look like the people I see in the grocery line.  I don’t want the room in which I worship to double as a gymnasium.  When I worship God I want to be reminded there is something extraordinary happening.  Something sacred.  That there is something different about this time, at this moment, in this place, in this community with whom I gather.  That there is something that is beneath and beyond ordinary life itself.  And I’m being called into the presence of something that’s important and different.  I don’t need another concert to entertain me.  I don’t need another motivational meeting.”  That’s what some say.

Is there a right way to worship God?  There are some churches on the family tree of the denomination out of which I came that don’t believe that singing in worship should be accompanied by instrumental music.  A rather odd, peculiar belief to me, but it is sincerely held by some, going back to the austere Zwinglian tradition of Protestantism.

There are churches who believe that every time the church gathers around the Table to observe communion that there must be someone present who has been ordained, a clergy person, who will preside over that moment.   Others disagree.

There are churches who do not welcome women into their pulpit, while others, including myself—quite strongly believe in the absolute gender-inclusivity of Christian ministry and that one’s sex has absolutely nothing to do with one’s giftedness and calling by the Spirit of God to minister the gospel in Christ’s name.

Is there a right way and a wrong way to worship God?

I think most of us would want to say—I certainly would say–that there’s a great deal of latitude in how faithful people worship God.  The silence of a Quaker meeting—that’s worship.  The dark mystery of an Armenian Orthodox church liturgy—that’s worship.  The exuberant and unfettered spiritual enthusiasm of Pentecostal services, or the lively singing and preaching of African-American churches—that’s worship.

There are indeed many ways to worship.  Worship in the great stone National Cathedral, or my brother’s little wooden pieced-together country meetin’ house.

But is there a right way and a wrong way to worship?

There is more to that question than matters of style, matters of setting.  There is even more to that question than important theological distinctions and affirmations.  I am, frankly, profoundly disturbed that so much of the conversation about worship that I hear about in churches these days are really matters of secondary importance and personal tastes.

Traditional hymns or praise choruses?  Robes or casual dress?  Bands or pipe organs?  Different people are comfortable in different settings, worshiping God in different ways, and people on both sides of these issues can either admit that their preferences are just that—preferences and respect the sincere perspective of people on the other side of the issue,   or they can be condescending in their belief that they possess true worship and others are simply misguided.  And that is true on both sides of every worship debate.

But there is one thing that must undergird every act of worship.  There is one thing that must be present in the congregation that gathers in a great cathedral, one thing that must be a part of a little band of Christians who come together on Sunday morning in a little country church, one thing that those of us who gather in this beautiful East Tennessee sanctuary, one thing we must do if we are to worship God in the right way.  It is the sina qua non of worship.  That is, that without which there is no worship.

Seven hundred years before Jesus of Nazareth, God called a prophet named Isaiah and asked him to go speak to the people of Israel.  The first thing—the very first thing—that Isaiah needed to say to those people had to do with how they worshiped.

“There is,” he says, “something very wrong with your worship of God.”  He speaks in strong language, words of outrage, words of disgust. “God has lost patience with you.  ‘What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?  I have had enough of your burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts.  Bring me no more vain offerings . . . incense is an abomination to me . . .’”  All of the things that God has required of Israel, all of the worship carefully described and defined in the Torah—the Law of Moses—the assemblies, the feasts, the fasts, the sacrifices—God is offended by them, Isaiah claims.

Please don’t misunderstand.  I don’t think that Isaiah is saying that God is disturbed with the way they worshiped—the style or setting of their worship, the prayers that they prayed or the acts they performed.  It’s not that God [I have heard it interpreted this way, but it is not the case.] It’s not that God was asking them to worship like North American, Reformed Tradition Protestants.  The people of Israel were doing exactly what they understood God has told them to do.

Some evening, just for the fun of it, sit down and read the Book of Leviticus.  Feasts, fasts, sacrificds – okay, it won’t be fun.  It’ll be the dullest reading you’ve ever done in your life frankly.  But its’ helpful to know that this is what the people understood to be required of them by God.   They were doing just as they were required, and yet Isaiah says,  “God is weary of your prayers.  God is offended by your sacrifices.  God hates your feasts and your festivals.”  What was the problem?  They were worshiping God in the right way, but they weren’t worshiping God in the right way.

And Isaiah said,  “This is the word of the Lord . . . ‘I cannot endure iniquity in solemn assembly.  Cease to do evil.  Learn to do what is good. Seek justice.  Correct oppression.  Defend the fatherless.  Plead for the widow.”  Iniquity. Evil. Good. Justice. Oppression.  In the midst of this conversation about worship, Isaiah begins to use the language of ethics.  What is right.  What is wrong.  What is good.  What is evil.  Is there a right way to worship God?  Yes.  And it has to do with a word used often in the Old Testament.  Sedaqah.  (Not Neil Sedaqah) The Hebrew word for justice.  True worship has to do with the ethic of  justice – sedaqah.

Seek justice.  Correct oppression. Seek out the weak.  When we think of justice what usually comes to mind is the image of courtrooms and lawyers and defendants and judges in black robe, and the great symbol of the American notion of justice, the blindfolded woman balancing the scales.  Justice is blind—it is balanced.   We talk about justice as retribution.  That young man murdered his friend and he will spend the rest of his life in jail—that’s justice.  A society ruled by law and order—that’s justice.  No less a philosopher than Plato gave shape to that western understanding of justice.  He says that a just society is one in which wise people have authority and their authority is respected and obeyed.

But the Bible—the Mosaic movement, the classical prophetic movement, and the Jesus movement as recorded in the pages of Scripture have something very different in mind when the word justice is used.  So put out of your head western notions—American notions—of justice.  When the Bible talks about justice, the kind of justice that God wills and loves for all creation—when the prophets of Israel talk about justice, when Jesus talks about justice, they immediately begin to talk about the widows, the orphans, the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the aliens, the refugees, the strangers.  Isaiah does that in the text read earlier.  “Seek justice, not oppression, defend the fatherless, plead for the widow.”

Now are those different things or are they the same thing?  They are the same thing.  Defending the fatherless is seeking justice—seeking sedaqah.  Pleading for the widow is correcting oppression.   Isaiah is not alone in his understanding that there is an essential relationship between the worship of the community of faith and the justice, or absence of it, in the society in which that community lives.

Amos, who probably preceded Isaiah a decade or two—and even prophets need mentors—said,  “I hate . . . I despise your feasts.  I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.  Take away form me the noise of your songs, the melody of your hearts.  I will not listen.  But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Nicholas Westerhoff is right when he says that when Amos says that, when he says, “Let justice roll down like a mighty river” the meaning is not “may your prisons multiply and your police forces expand.”  The  meaning is not “make criminals writhe as they receive their just desserts.”  Amos says justice is a matter of what happens to the poor and needy, the widows and the orphans, the homeless and the refugee.  Justice has to do with caring for the weak and not being content to live within a system that seems to implicitly live by the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—where the pluckier or the luckier have the necessities of life and a thousand times more—while others, because they are weaker, or less intelligent, or less fortunate—suffer and are in need.

There is an insidious individualism afoot today that is convinced that poverty is a personal achievement.  The poor wreak poverty upon themselves.  That’s a remarkable position since the largest group of the poor in the world are children who have neither the desire for poverty nor the power to bring it about.

Justice—biblical justice—God’s justice–sedaqah has to do with advocating for the weak who are abused by the strong, directly or indirectly.  When the prophets talk about justice—the kind of justice that God loves—the kind of justice that God wills for all creation—they had in mind a society that cares for those who have no claim—no claim.

Justice, Abraham Heschel says, is nothing less than God’s stake in history.  If life is clay, justice is the mold in which God wants history to be shaped.  Martin Buber said that “justice constitutes the completion of creation by human activity.  And it was Martin Luther King, Jr. who affirmed, “the universe bends toward justice.”

There is a right and a wrong way to worship God, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of music that is played, or what the preacher wears.  It has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not people shout and stomp or whether they sit decently and in good order.  It has nothing to do with whether the Lord’s Prayer is recited or not.

The right way and the wrong way to worship has to do with justice or the lack of it.  Whether a particular group of worshipping people oppress the weak or defend the weak.  Whether they are proud of their status in the world or whether they seek the well-being of those who have no status.

Now, we are not naïve.  The world is a complicated place.  We cannot solve every social ill.  We cannot meet every human need.  But we must know, we must know, with whom we stand.  And it best be with the people with whom Jesus stands.  If we ignore the fragile who live on the very edge of life then the songs we sing, whether they are contemporary or traditional—Rock of Ages or rock ‘n roll – will be just so much noise to God.

But if we in Micah’s words do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God, if we care for one another, if we resolve not to hurt one another, if we welcome the stranger and treat everyone—everyone—with dignity, if we make life a little more bearable for some of God’s children and call on our community to defend those who cannot defend themselves—then I think God will delight in the prayers that we pray, and the songs that we sing,  because our worship will reveal that we know the very character and heart of God.

Is there a right way and a wrong way to worship?  Indeed there is.