Psalm 100
“Why Worship?”
18 June 2017 St.
Andrew’s Military Chapel
When you hear the word worship, what comes into your mind?
What words or images or events in you life?
I thought of songs, Scripture,
prayer, sermons (some good, some bad and hopefully mine are more on the good
and memorable scale than the bad), a church building, people, etc.
So, let’s start with a simple question: Why are we here? And
I don’t mean the large metaphysical why but rather why are we here to worship?
For many, that is a simple because mom or dad made me come. But why do our
parents drag us to church (hopefully we’ll be a community where we don’t feel
drug to worship)? And even that has a fairly simple answer, because in passage
such as the one I just read God tells us to worship. And we always do what God
says, right? So maybe the right question isn’t why do we worship, but what
exactly is worship?
Psalm 100 provides a good example
of what worship should look like as well as explaining why we come together as
a community to praise God. We make a joyful noise of gladness through our singing
and laughing together, especially when we are passing the peace. We spend time realizing
we are all God’s people equal under God’s sight and all receiving an abundance
of God’s ever flowing love and we have a chance as a community to give thanks
for that love. We also experience the feeling and realization that God is God
and we are not. For some of us that is the hardest part of worship.
Let’s look a little closer at Psalm
100 to help understand what all we are doing here today and why the church
worships in the way it does. When we look at the Hebrew structure of Psalm 100 we
see the use of 6 different imperatives (commands) describing worship: Shout,
Come, Worship/Serve, Know, Praise/Give Thanks, and Bless. It’s nice to see at
least one part of the Bible provide clear and easy to understand guidance on
how to worship. Let’s look at each of these as to why we worship.
Shout! Worship excites us about our
faith. We are to shout our faith from the mountaintops. We tell people when
they ask, but use our lives as the reason they ask.
Come! We are called to worship as a
group. We can have worshipful moments alone, but we need others to truly
experience the power of worship. Matt. 18:20 “Wherever two are three are
gathered in my name, I am there among them.” Coming together in Christ’s name
draws him into the worship making the worship perfect. Community gives
encouragement, prayer, support, role models and teachers. Coming together shows
us we aren’t in this alone. God knows we can’t succeed in this new way of life
alone. Plus, I bore myself after a while so I need others to keep worship from
being boring.
Worship/Serve! Sitting at God’s
feet in a room of other believers we learn we are God’s. God is God and we are
not. By serving God we acknowledge there is a higher purpose to our being
alive. If we focus on ourselves as the center of all things, we’ll never find
that purpose.
Know! We worship in order to learn,
and not just from the minister. Ministers don’t have all the answers. The Word
of God is our teacher as it is read and interpreted through others. Again, a
community is needed to learn and know of God. We ask quesions of each other,
challenge each other and thus dig deeper into our faith and know more. Worship
allows us to know a new story that the world won’t tell you. Knowing this story
opens a new pattern of life that will seem at odd to the world because we know
that we aren’t the focus of life.
Praise/Give Thanks! In worship we
express our thanksgiving for leading a different and renewed life through the
grace of God. Our prayers allow us to directly thank God in words. We learn to
respond to God’s Word in more than words but through actions. Sometimes we are
inspired to give financial resources as a means of praise for God’s impact on
our life.
Bless! We are called to leave this
place and bless the world as part of our worship. This command tells us to take
our worship beyond the walls and that worship continues all week long. These
services are a recharge so we can go and live into our original call given
through Abraham. In Genesis 12 God says: “I will make of you a great nation and
I will bless you and make your name great so that you will be a blessing.” We
are blessed to go and be a blessing to the world. This means we have to take
the worship into the world and worship everywhere.
When I first arrived I mentioned
how we need to take inspiration from the New York based improvisational troupe,
Improve Everywhere and look for ways to worship everywhere and that still holds
true two years later. We have done a great job in extending our worship beyond
these walls, for this small time each week is but a training ground for the
real work and worship of the church. Our true worship happens the other 167
hours of the week. What we are called to do is to live our lives in a way that
we are always a source of worship.
Shout may look like one who is
excited about life, living in such a way that people see the joy in everything
you do. Come could be that you are always looking for new ways to be a
community or that you are exploring ways to deepen your commitment to a
particular community such as this wonderful group of people, or even your
office mates. We are relational and need others to fully thrive, so we should
go out and embrace that facet of our lives.
Serving takes on many forms. We
could seek out opportunities where we can give to Singapore in partnership with
other churches as well as through how we spend our contributions towards
mission locally in Singapore as well as around the globe.
Knowing plays itself out in reading
the Word outside of worship or group Bible study. Those are important, but we
need to study on our own as well as read a variety of things where we see God
at work. Even fiction has God in there as the Bible has inspired and is a part
of so many works of fiction throughout the ages.
Praising and giving thanks can be
exemplified though just trying to find the best in others. The time we spend in
voicing our prayer requests and thanksgiving in the life of this community is a
model for us to follow as we give thanks and praise in our lives outside these
walls. Let us always live a life full of prayer and thanksgiving in the fact
that we serve an awesome God.
Through all of the imperatives we
hear in Psalm 100, we are given a model of how to be a blessing to the world.
We can operate in a way that the tribulations of the world, while significant
and burdensome don’t win. Christ has already won and we are the instruments to
spread that blessing to the world.
This is how we become members of
the gospel troupe Worship Everywhere. Let us take the lessons of Psalm 100 out
into the world so that everyone sees our worship not in our words but in our
actions, in our demeanor, in our being.
When we do this and take worship
into the world, there is a good chance that something amazing will happen. We
will become people who see God’s blessing all around us, we’ll see God’s hand
at work in all of creation. Because we are worshipping everywhere we’ll see God
everywhere.
Let’s not confine our worship to
this chapel. Worship is more than music, or prayers, or silence, or reading the
Bible. Worship should be the core of our living. So, as you go about the week
and see something that you find sacred and worshipful, take a photo and send it
to someone in the congregation.
Let’s again try to use #worshipeverywhere
and we’ll incorporate those into our worship experiences.
If comedy can work everywhere, we
can take our liturgy, our basic structure for telling the greatest story ever
and apply it anytime and anywhere we gather together for worship. When we let
the liturgy of worship guide the entirety of our lives, then we truly are a
community that worships everywhere, because God is everywhere.
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