Worship Everywhere

Here is the sermon from yesterday at the chapel. Sorry it didn't go up last night, I was busy watching Singapore celebrate their 50th birthday. What a party!

Psalm 100

 “Worship Everywhere”

09 August 2015 St. Andrew’s Chapel Singapore

For the next few weeks, my sermons will provide glimpses into my theology and where I see us heading over the next few years. At times these may seem idealistic and unreachable goals. That’s ok. If anything I ever say touches a theological nerve in you let me know and we can chat over a cup of coffee (or glass of soda for those weirdoes like me who don’t drink ground beans).

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 is a great example of what it means to worship. We find there are six imperatives within the Hebrew that tell us how to worship. For those of you looking around wondering what in the world an imperative is, it is a command. And don’t feel bad because this engineer had to relearn all of that stuff they taught me in English when I learned Hebrew in seminary.

The Psalm gives us six one word commands regarding what it means to worship. Shout, Come, Worship/Serve, Know, Praise/Give Thanks, and Bless. For once, God breaks this whole following him thing down Barney style. Can it really be that simple? Let’s take a look at each of these and see.

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, we need each other to make worship work because each of us bring a bounty of gifts that enhance each other’s worship experience.

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 pastor. Pastors 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 ?’s 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. Worship allows us to know our part in the larger story of God both individually and collectively. 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 through our 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. We are commanded to take worship into the world. We are tasked to worship everywhere. (Play video clip).

What if we took not just improv comedy into the world in creative ways, but what would it look like to worship everywhere?

Over the next few years, let us do our best to worship everywhere. That doesn’t mean that we have to go out and be street preachers. In fact, that could get us in a whole heap of trouble here in Singapore. 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.

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.

We’ll talk more about our call to serve in a few weeks, but that is more than just helping others. It revolves around our knowledge that we are serving the goals and plan of something greater than ourselves, something greater than the military. Praise and give thanks is something we’ll dig deeper into next week as we explore prayer, but we are called to find the best in others. Let us always live a life full of prayer and thanksgiving in the fact that we serve an awesome God.

Because of all of the above commands, we are allowed 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. (Show Instagram photo). We’ll even see God at play in a opening door. This photo is from the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation during Lent with #rethinkchurch. The caption reads, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Let’s not confine our worship to this beautiful 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 me through one of the ways on the screen. And yes, your chaplain is on Twitter and Instagram.

Use #worshipeverywhere and we’ll incorporate those into our worship experiences. Live tweet our services. I’m working on getting WiFi in here to facilitate that, but give me some time.

For many Christians the idea of having a “liturgical chaplain” is a bit scary. Many people are skeptical of liturgy for fear that it makes church feel like a stuffy service from the frozen chosen of the Presbyterians (and yes, I can pick on them because they are my people). But, I want you to provide me a bit of grace and space to briefly explain the structure of this new worship format and hopefully make liturgy a word that you love.

Liturgy provides a form to our worship time. How we follow that form is meant to be fluid, allowing space for the Spirit to move in our worship and in our lives. By providing a repetitive structure each week, we provide ourselves with space to practice out our faith so that we can take a strengthened faith out into the world and, like our comedic friends we met today, truly worship everywhere.

If we look at the order or worship, there are four movements to our worship, and all of the elements under each movement relate. When we arrive, we gather as a community offering praise and thanks to God through prayer, song, and greeting each other in the name of Christ. Soon we’ll add a prayer of confession into our gathering movement. This sets our frame of mind for what comes next, our proclamation of God’s Word where we can hear, or maybe see, Scripture and then meditate on how we can apply that word to our lives.

After hearing God’s word, we are called to respond to that word in a variety of ways. We’ll sing, offer our time, talent, and treasure, proclaim our faith, pray for God’s help in living out our calling, and participate in sacraments. Finally, we will take the world into the world so we can #worshipeverywhere. We do this by singing together and receiving a blessing on our way.

If comedy can work everywhere, we can take this liturgy, this basic structure for telling the greatest story ever and apply it to anytime we gather together for worship and study and let it soak into our lives so that it structures how we live every day. Gathering together as brothers and sisters in Christ, opening ourselves to hearing God’s word and seeing the worshipful moments all around us, then discerning how to apply that word, or object lesson into our lives, and finally, blessing the rest of the world with that worshipful moment. 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.