The Revd Dr Victoria Johnson, Priest-in-Charge of St Michael's Church in Flixton, Manchester, was trained as a research scientist and is an accomplished liturgist and musician. This past Sunday, she continued the term's Evensong series Gospel and Culture with her thoughtful and often humorous sermon 'Hard-wired for worship'.
*****
A lot of people from my parish attend worship.
They don’t come to my church, but they do attend worship!
St Michael’s Church, is just a few miles away from two of the biggest ‘worship venues’ in Europe. Their facilities are cutting edge and I’m green with envy as I struggle with worn-out hymn books, a photocopier rescued from the ark, and a sound system which often picks up Steve Wright’s Sunday Morning ‘Love Songs’.
The first worship venue, with whom we ‘compete’, has seating for over 50,000 people, big screens, music,
Full-on community spirit. Worship lasts almost exactly ninety minutes and the congregation is full of people I never see at the parish eucharist. Men, are in the majority, and the worshippers are devout, traveling hundreds of miles, through snow, wind and rain, to stand on that hallowed ground.
The second ‘worship’ venue attracts millions of visitors each year and caters for every type of personality and pocket. There is something for everyone here, and they have no trouble with fundraising. There are refreshing water fountains (for ritual purification perhaps?), golden cherubs guarding the entrances and the architectural style is eclectic with minarets, domes and glass arches, all in cathedralesque-proportions.
Attendance at worship in Church, across all denominations, has been in a steady decline for the past 50 years or so. More people ‘worship’ Manchester United, than come to church; there are more people on a Sunday morning buying the latest must-have gadget in the Trafford Centre (one of europes biggest shopping malls) than there are opening their hearts to God or affirming their faith in the words of the creed. If worship is defined as our innate capacity for adoration, then there are plenty of cultural delicacies and delights to distract us from the worship of God.
Worship could also be defined as the longing of the human heart to look beyond itself towards a greater narrative of which it may be part. But today, it seems there are so many narratives to choose from, so many different ways of trying to put our lives into context. Too much choice.
Tom Wright, describes worship as ‘love on its knees before the beloved’. He implies that Christian worship calls us to humility, obedience and love. It’s an activity of the human heart. In Biblical terms, The love and worship of God, has always been the first and most important commandment. Martin Luther, in his discussion around the first commandment, ‘you shall have no other God’s before me,’ suggested that ‘whatever your heart clings to and relies upon, that is your God.’
By that measure, you could easily think that we live in a secular age, and many people do argue that case. It’s pretty clear, they say, that no-one really relies on God anymore. God’s love isn’t declared either steadfastly in the morning or faithfully at night. Hardly anyone goes to Church therefore no one believes in God. So where does today’s culture find ultimate security and meaning? To what, or to whom, do our hearts cling? To the worship of celebrities? The cult of Cheryl Cole? The bible of wikipedia? The security of intellect and knowledge? The community of Facebook?
Have our once faithful hearts turned to stone by worshipping the wrong God’s? Has Neitzches premonition of the ‘Death of God’ now come to pass and is the worshipping church of today, rather like a requiem being sung in an empty sepulcher, a remnant of a remnant of something long forgotten?
The anthem we have heard this evening, Haydn’s ‘Insanae et vanae curae’, touches on this theme of confusion and abandonment in culture. We hear the violent turmoil in Haydn’s music, reflecting the turmoil of the human heart beset by the distractions of the world. But then, from the turmoil, like sunshine from behind the clouds, comes the hope and peace which is found in God alone.
Haydn set his stirring music to these words:
Vain and raging cares invade our minds,
Madness often fills the heart,
robbed of hope,
O mortal man,
what does it profit to endeavour at worldly things,
if you should neglect the heavens?
If God is for you, all things are favorable to you.
Despite these ever present ‘vain and raging cares’, and ‘madness of the heart’, very surprisingly, in the last census, about 72% of people in Britain labeled themselves ‘Christian’. Culturally Christian, but not ‘Church attending Christian’, we might want to argue. Nominally Christian, maybe, but perhaps not ‘worshipping Christian.’ Nevertheless, something is stirring in the heart of Mondeo man and Middle England Woman. It seems the death of God was a lie, God’s funeral never happened. And far from being a requiem, the church rallies a trumpet call of joy and gladness, a song of promise and hope. Ring out the bells, sing out the song, make your processions, and live a new kind of life! God is not dead! The tomb may be empty, but Christ is risen!
Our culture may not be able to express this hope fully, but in our heart of hearts, we know there is more to life than hum-drum, work-a-day rationalism. A candle is lit- flowers are laid at the side of the road; the Lord’s name is taken in vain to disguise the fact it’s actually the beginning of a prayer, a baby is born and baptized because it’s the ‘thing’ to do, a couple get married in church, because it ‘feels right’. A man requests that a priest officiates at his funeral, because he wants a ‘good’ send off. More people than we might expect, call themselves Christian. More people than we might expect still hope in God, still believe in God. Human beings are very reluctant to neglect the heavens completely.
Hearts may be ‘restless’ and perhaps a little cool, but not yet turned to stone, and deep down, these hearts, even now, in this supposedly Godless age, are still looking for their security and meaning in God. If we believe we are made in God’s image, then there is always hope, for the church and for culture.
The Westminster confessional ascribes meaning to our lives with these words: The purpose of man is to worship God and enjoy him forever.....If we believe that theological statement to be true, that the purpose of humanity is to worship God, then deprogramming a human being to forget God or deleting our innate capacity to look beyond ourselves, is a pretty difficult thing to do. We would be undoing creation itself. Even an over exposure to the grand narratives of atheism, capitalism, scientism, reductionism and any other ‘ism’ you care to mention, cannot alter the fact that we are hard-wired for worship.
Sometimes that desire to worship is blown off track. Amos the prophet, who we have heard speaking this evening, condemned a culture in which the worship of God had been sidelined, and forgotten. They had replaced God with the worship of idols and self-made deities. They began to sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals. Their hard heartedness spread; their worship and their love became introverted and cruel.
Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, argues that when we become alienated from God, to use the words of the prophetess Lilly Allen, we don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore. We focus on our own man-made objects of worship and our hearts do turn to stone. We create our own idols- and then we risk becoming callous and uncaring towards one another. Our lives are no longer a gift, but a self-fulfilling prophecy of vain and raging cares, robbed of hope.
When we worship God in Christ, we are given a new kind of life. A life in which we become the embodiment of Christ, in the here and now. We become remade in his image and can then go out into the world as his feet, his hands, his heart. True worship, is not self-fulfilling but all embracing, tender-hearted. And if we are Christ’s body in the world, are we not also Christ’s body for the world? Can worship be something the Church does on behalf of, and for, everyone? Are we not called to be the vicarious, worshipping body of Christ? Are we not called to be a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving on the altar of the Lord? What if we are the sacred heart of culture, and our calling is to make worship an offering, a sacrifice of praise, a gift, for all those who cannot, or choose not to be present? If we do that, if we remain a visible presence, an active presence, a living presence in the world- then all those nominal Christians, may yet join us and become worshipping Christians.
So, perhaps we, the Church, should no longer be drawn to compete with or capitulate to culture. I shouldn’t be worried by cultural mega-churches on my doorstep! What the church of God offers is very different, and maybe it has to be different. No longer Christ ‘and’, ‘in’, ‘above’, or ‘against’ culture, but Christ serving Culture, Christ as a gift, to culture, and by that measure a Church which is, in its very being, a servant and a gift to culture too.
On a Sunday morning when I see a happy band of pilgrims kneeling in prayer, and approaching the communion rail with such awe and reverence, when I see what they bring into worship, the places they have come from, the problems they are facing...the joys they celebrate, when I see all this, I remember why we are there and I remember that this is, truly, a priceless gift, a sacrifice of praise.
Oscar Romero said ‘let us not measure the church by the number of its members or by its material buildings. That doesn’t matter, what matters is you the people, your hearts. God’s grace, giving you God’s truth and life. Don’t measure yourself by your numbers. Measure yourselves by the sincerity of heart with which you follow the truth and light of our divine redeemer.’
When people realize that the worship of modern day idols can only take them so far, the Church may just be able to show them the depths which can be found in the worship of God. We can be, for the world, the body of Christ, sometimes bruised and bleeding, sometimes ignored and ridiculed, but always shot through with glimmers of glory and promise.
When I consider my small suburban parish and the thousands of similar places like it scattered throughout this land, One could ask what difference we can really make, whether worship has any impact whatsoever on the world outside. But if we doubt this, then we doubt the power of Christ and the mission of God. If we doubt that worship can make a difference, then we doubt the reality of the resurrection and the rightness of what it stands for. The important thing is that worship goes on, prayers are still said. So though the football clubs, and shopping centres, and all the other distractions of this life may be the places where we find nominal Christians ‘worshipping’, we have to be there for them when their hearts bring them back to worship God.
So may we hold the fort-keep the fire burning, like a night watch looking for the morning, and in these changing and challenging times, when both the world and the church seem to be in turmoil, may we live out what we have learned in Christ. I pray, that one day the world will want to worship God again on his holy mountain. I pray that one day, the holy spirit will lead people back to worship in its fullest sense, that God’s church will be full, but until that day? Perhaps we worshipping Christians are called to carry on, counter to the culture we are in but servants of it, a gift for it, until that day of restoration and renewal. We are called to keep the rumour of faith alive, to keep on praying and never lose heart. We are to let the worship of God illuminate our lives beyond the church doors and we are to witness to world, about what we have learnt. We perfect our lives, we live a new kind of life, through the Christ, who gave us, through himself, life in all it’s fullness, without the need for distraction. In him alone, do we find our hearts content.
I’m always amazed by the utter devotion of people who really do make worship the centre of their life.
Those who keep the faith. Those who keep turning up to church week by week. They live worship, they breathe it. And yet, their determination is only a fraction of that shown by Christians over thousands and thousands of years. Those who have worshipped God in the face of torture and death, who have worshipped God in secret, those who have passed on the faith to us and held on to worship and prayer and praise when the world around them looked like it was spiraling into oblivion.
Perhaps the miracle is, that despite the apparent decline in Church attendance and apathy towards religion in today’s world, the Church is still here. Perhaps the miracle is, that people are still drawn to the church; still drawn to God, still worshipping God. Despite everything, the human heart still has a capacity for worship, and thank God, the human heart has not yet turned to stone. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment