Spirituality and Worship teaching

Spirituality and Worship I. Spiritual but not religious. How many of you have heard someone ever say, “I am spiritual but not religious.” What do you think is meant by that? (I usually assume that means that they do not participate in organized religion, nor do they regularly attend worship or church). II. What is worship? How do you define the word “worship”? a. Worship—means to pay someone their due; the response of the creation to the creator b. Dennis Maynard’s chapter on worship—p. 37-38 “Additional definition of worship as it might apply to the Anglican Communion: ‘worship is the attempt to create an atmosphere in which we can know God’s love and make God’s love known.’ In the Episcopal church, ‘worship is the attempt to create an atmosphere in which we can know God’s love, and we can make God’s love known.’” c. How many of you have stories of how your parent’s became engaged or how you became engaged? What are key parts of these stories? That’s what we are doing when we are gathering together to worship God. III. Three characteristics of Episcopal worship A. Worship is a universal instinct. To worship is to be human and to be human is to worship. Worship is the consequence of not taking life and living for granted. It includes a sense of awe, amazement, and thanksgiving. B. In the Episcopal church, worship is not a spectator sport. It is an aerobic activity. The liturgy is what we all do together. (Anybody know what the word liturgy means—from its Greek roots? “the work of the people). The Holy Eucharist, the Liturgy, is a great drama. It’s a pageant. It’s a play in which we are all participants. There’s direction, movement, and purpose. These are all designed to inspire and uplift us. But we are not the audience. God is the audience. C. Through worship we are to lose ourselves in adoration and praise of God. We come to worship to empty ourselves so that God might make us full. If we have to concentrate on the very elements of worship, then we aren’t worshipping. I heard it once described this way: “if you have to count the steps, then you aren’t dancing.” IV. Book of Common Prayer: what binds us together in both prayer and belief. A. If you go to an Episcopal church, anywhere around the world, chances are that our worship will be very recognizable. B. Lex orandi lex credendi—we pray what we believe and we believe what we pray. We are not a dogmatic church where you have to believe a certain number of things to be Episcopalian. Our belief is all tied up in how and what we pray (and our prayer is all tied up in how and what we believe). V. Practices to make common worship more prayerful/spiritual. A. To worship God with greater ease, we must practice loving God every day of our lives. To see God in worship we need to see God in the everyday, and if we see God in the everyday then we can see God better on Sunday. B. We have certain responsibilities in worship. One of my pet peeves is when someone comes to me and says, “I’m just not being fed.” It makes me want to say to them, “Well, open your mouth because here comes the choo choo!” C. First responsibility is for those who are leading the worship. We have a responsibility to be well-prepared, and to understand that our purpose is not to entertain but to point away from ourselves and toward God. To lead others in worship, we leaders need to worship ourselves. (Presiding Bishop Frank Giswold used to tell clergy that we needed to be more than “technicians of the sacred.”) D. The people have a responsibility to one another. Worshipers must be tolerant of one another’s preferences. There is a tendency for all of us to value things according to our own subjective experience. If it was meaningful to me then it was a good thing. If it wasn’t meaningful to me, then it’s not a good thing. What is called for is worship tolerance. What is meaningful to one may not be so to another. We also have a responsibility to one another to participate in the worship. Say the responses, sing the hymns. (Talk about change in location of 8:00 service…) E. Finally, we have a responsibility to ourselves. We need to come to worship with a thirst for God. We need to come before God with anticipation and expectancy. When you come to worship, expect God to touch you, change you, be present with you at some point in that worship. And God will.