If one danger threatening our sense of what worship is for is turning
worship into something we do to teach or inspire or increase membership, another danger threatening worship (and the whole
being of the Church) today is the breakdown of the church into party politics and factionalism. Professor Margaret Miles puts
her finger on why this is so dangerous: "Christian worship is not primarily a gathering of the like-minded. It is a gathering
of human bodies to be with one another in the acknowledgment that human existence originates in and is drawn toward love.
"
You see, the God we worship is not a god. The language of supernaturalism
has confused us and led many to the fatal error that God is a god. Anthropomorphic thinking is probably necessary and it is
okay so long as you remember what it is that we are doing, but God is not an entity. We must never be so foolish as to suppose
that our thinking about God can ever encompass God.
In worship, I let go of any morphology and yield to God as the source
of my life. Christians, starting with Jesus and Paul, have believed that the best way to understand this is in terms of the
human capacity for this strange thing called love. Jesus, in fact, incarnates (embodies) this love so powerfully that we have
come to call him Son of God. We follow Jesus because he leads us to this shalom, this fullness, this vitality. Even
in death, death on a cross, vitality breaks forth. And we are struck dumb and get weak in the knees: therefore we kneel and
worship. And at that moment our new lives begin.
The hardness of the floor is good, the smell of incense, the taste
of bread and wine, the music hitting our eardrums. They all remind us that our worship is about love. It is not platonic—it
is not the chaste and austere worship of abstract ideals and eternal forms—it is sacramental, the immersion in God's
reality as love, as us at our truest and deepest, at the possibility of a life. So that worship becomes a place where we come
together in the face of our most serious disagreements and disputes. Republicans and Democrats, Lutherans and Calvinists,
Christians and Jews, young and old, rich and poor, gay and straight, male and female, ornery and nice. We do not leave these
differences outside. They have not suddenly become irrelevant; we bring them in. We do not love each other in spite of our
differences, we love each other in all our rich difference. We argue with each other, even get mad at each other. But, because
of Jesus, we still love each other, treasure each other, support each other. God makes us one, not uniform. We are one, not
the way political parties are one, or clubs; we are one the way families are one. It is a oneness that begins when we sit
together in pews to worship the God who so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son. Everything else rests on this
foundation.
Yours in Christ,
— Pastor Bastien
