"Worship as Counter-Culture"
Rev. Everett L. Miller
Those challenging words of the Apostle Paul to the Christians in Rome, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds,” have echoed throughout the past 20 centuries and still confront us everyday of our lives. There is to be something fundamentally different about a Christian after he or she has been transformed by the renewing of their mind by God. Life just isn’t the same as it was before. Everything, from the words we speak and the way we treat people, to the forgiveness we offer to others and the way we use our talents and our resources have to be looked at through transformed lenses, through the eyes of Christ.
In our modern lives time might be the biggest commodity of all and the most difficult to manage because there is always a fixed amount of it. No matter how hard you try you cannot stretch a day any longer than 24 hours. A pastoral counselor I knew in Austin used to tell the group of students that met with her, “You cannot add anything on to your schedule unless you are willing to take something away. There are only 24 hours in a day. You will never have time unless you make time.” She told us that in regard to Scripture reading, prayer, and meditation. So often our culture sends the message that we are not doing enough. Make sure your kids are in sports, music, tutoring, community service clubs, youth group, etc. Even a lot of retired people are so busy they can’t find time to actually retire. I’m as bad as anyone. Yes I’ll do that and that and that and that. But we can only go on that way for so long, until we are burned out or until we realize that that is not what life is all about. Then we come to realize that Paul’s words, “do not be conformed to this world,” has a great deal to say about viewing our time in a way that is counter to our culture, viewing our time through Christ’s eyes. And at no time is this more important, perhaps, than in Christian worship.
As we have discussed at length as of late, it is the Holy Spirit, which draws us into this life of Christian faith and service even though this life is counter to our culture. At least for my age group, for the people born around the time that I was, and even for my family, it is quite counter-cultural just to be willing to have faith in Jesus Christ and to attempt to live out the Christian life. But it isn’t just this way for today’s young people. It is that way for everyone. To be Christian and to really care about what that means is a counter-cultural act. Sometimes it is even counter to the culture of the church itself. Although there have been times in history when it seemed that everyone in America was a Christian and everyone went to worship on Sundays, I would imagine that even when almost everyone went to church, it was still just as rare to find real Christians. For those who do believe in something it is counter-cultural these days to be willing to say what you believe in. If it cannot be proven, if it cannot be seen, if it cannot be measured, and if we cannot show exclusive video of it on the nightly news, then it is not worth believing in it. It is counter to our culture to put yourself after God and even after others. It is counter to our culture to say, “God what do you want me to be? What do you want me to do?,” instead of saying, “Here is what I am going to be and do and here are the seven steps that will get me there.” It is counter to our culture to be still, to be silent when there is so much to do.
The early Christians were disliked by the Romans for the most part because they were counter to Roman culture. The early Christians didn’t have temples, they wouldn’t offer sacrifices to the gods, they very often refused to serve in the military, and they refused to declare that Caesar is Lord. The early Christians were derided as atheists because they did not believe in the Roman gods and they would not pledge their allegiance to the Roman state. They would not participate in the culture as it was offered to them. They were counter-cultural, but in a very specific way that isn’t concerned about appearances but with the kingdom of God.
At the top of the list of counter-cultural activities by Christians (and really all religious people) is worship. Worship is one of the most counter-cultural acts in which we participate in our lives. This may come as a surprise to many of you who have barely missed a Sunday in sixty or seventy years. Worship is just a part of your lives and maybe it always has been, but if you were to skip church one Sunday and go to restaurants, or the golf courses, or knock on people’s doors during our worship hour, you would begin to believe me when I say that worship is counter to our culture. Our culture does not know what to do with worship.
Two aspects of life that are given a great amount of value in our society are production and individuality. Worship does not produce anything. Worship does not allow us to do whatever we want to as individuals. In fact, worship calls us away from production and away from individuality.
For our Jewish friends from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday is the Sabbath. For religious Jews the Sabbath is not just another day. It’s not even just a day when you go to synagogue worship then do whatever else you want to. It is a day of worship and rest. It is a divinely commanded day of being anti-productive and anti-individualistic. That’s the point for Jews. The Sabbath is counter-cultural. The Sabbath is different. It is a time that is outside of time. The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel asks the following questions in response to God’s command to keep the Sabbath holy: Is it possible for a human being to do all his work in six days? Does not our work always remain incomplete? What the verse means to convey is: Rest on the Sabbath as if all your work were done.” Now that is a counter-cultural statement about worship and the keeping of holy time.
We, as Gentile Christians, do not tend to keep the Jewish Sabbath. Instead, we worship on Sunday, the first day of the week, which we call the Lord’s Day. We gather on this day to worship because it was on the first day of the week that God raised the Lord Jesus from the dead, inaugurating the new creation. We step out of our extremely important lives of productivity—being farmers and bankers and teachers and mothers—to do something which is in its very essence non-productive. We stop to turn to God’s Word, to sing songs of praise, to pray as a group, to share our joys and concerns with one another, to pray for the world and our neighbors, and to catch up and hug one another in Christ’s name. We set aside our individualities to become a group. It is a weekly re-membering of the body of Christ. Although we are to live every minute of our lives in gratitude for God’s grace and to do every single task we have, no matter how menial it may seem, as though we were doing it for Christ, there is something special about this hour to hour and a half on Sunday mornings. It is a time that we have set aside and dedicated to God.
I remember once in the room with the choir before worship at the Guthrie church. One of the choir members said, “We need to get out there. It’s time for worship to start.” Another one of the choir members who was kind of a cantankerous guy said, “They can wait. They won’t start without us.” Then one of the elders of the church spoke up. “No. It’s not just that we promised them we’d start at 10:45. We set an appointment with God at 10:45.” It is important to set aside time dedicated to God, a time when we have said, “We will not go by the rules of the culture during this hour. We will not worry about productivity. We will not put ourselves first. This is not a time to do, but a time to be with God and one another.” That is why worship is so important. It is a weekly glimpse of what we can be with God’s help. It is a glimpse of what it is like to be dedicated to God and to be a member of God’s community. Then we take the experience we have in worship into our daily lives.
People come to worship for many different reasons. The same is true for people who do not take time to worship. One of the reasons people don’t worship is that they are so busy Monday through Saturday that Sunday is the only day they have to sleep in and to spend time at home. Some people don’t come to worship at traditional churches like ours because there isn’t enough going on. There isn’t anything to keep them interested and engaged. And I can understand both of those. I have to admit to you that although I am your pastor and love being your pastor, I, like you, sometimes have a Sunday when I would rather sleep in or go sit at Starbuck’s and sip on a coffee while reading a good book. Some Sundays I just want to be by myself or be with my family. But that’s why worship is so important. Because it reminds me that my life is not my own, my time is not my own, and that I must be drawn out of myself and into God and the gathered body of Christ.
Some of the older folks at one of the Native American congregations I served that one summer when I was in seminary used to tell me about how when they were little if you didn’t show up for worship you would get a knock on your door while worship was going on. You would open the door to find a couple of the church elders standing there with a tall wooden staff that they’d used to knock on the door. They would firmly remind you that this is worship time and nothing else. Then you would guiltily put your church clothes on and head up to the church building. The elders of that congregation didn’t care whether or not you wanted to worship or felt that you needed to worship because the rest of the congregation needed you there at worship and because if you think you don’t need to worship you are wrong. Can you imagine waking up on a Sunday morning to see Jim Crossland and Dorothy Leaming standing on your front porch carrying staffs asking you what it is that you think you are doing during the worship hour?
In the 2nd Helvetic confession from 16th century Switzerland, which is in our Book of Confessions, it reads: “Meetings for Worship not to be Neglected: As many as spurn such meetings and stay away from them, despise true religion, and are to be urged by the pastors and godly magistrates to abstain from stubbornly absenting themselves from sacred assemblies.” Can you imagine getting a nice greeting card with the pretty picture of the church building on the outside only to open it up and to see a nice note from me urging you “to abstain from stubbornly absenting yourself from sacred assemblies”?
While both of those examples come from different times and different cultures than our own and you don’t have to worry about Jim and Dorothy interrupting your Sunday morning coffee when you decide to play hooky from church and you don’t have to worry every time you open a card from me that you will be called stubborn, they illustrate how important worship is not just for the life of the individual Christian but even more so for the life of the faith community as a whole. You may not feel the need to be here, but the rest of us need you here. As I’ve said, worship is counter to our culture and counter even to what we want to do sometimes. Worship is not about me. That’s hard for all of us to stomach.
I have heard people say that they go to worship to be fed spiritually. While that does make sense in regard to the words of the Psalmist, “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” and in Jesus’ saying that he is the bread of heaven, I am always bothered by it because I think it is incomplete. For some people, and probably for all of us at one time or another, worship is like going to a restaurant where they provide the food and we eat it. We want it to be like the wonderful old Native American ladies in Seminole who would invite me over to eat and absolutely refuse my help in any way. They provided the food. I provided the appetite. Worship is not like that, at least not in the Reformed tradition. The pastor and liturgist are not spiritual restaurateurs and this is not a spiritual super-buffet. Communal worship is more like a pot-luck dinner where everyone brings something to the table and we all enjoy it together, even if the pastor and the liturgist act as waiters. It doesn’t matter what songs we sing, what prayers we pray, or what the sermon says, if everyone in the room is not prepared for worship and is not willing to offer something in the worship of God. If you have a spiritual appetite, remember that everyone else does too, so bring food to share. So I would rather than hear someone say, “I was fed,” say, “We all cooked and we all were fed.”
I saw a story on the news not too long ago about a school program that is teaching kids how to cook healthy meals. The parents weren’t taking the initiative on the diet of their kids so the school did. They tried all kinds of educational programs—speakers, videos, and workbooks. But it wasn’t sinking in. So they recruited local chefs to teach the kids how to pick out the ingredients, how to prepare them, and how to serve them. Then the parents of all the kids in the class came to the school cafeteria for a fancy multi-course dinner all prepared by the kids with the help of their parents. Then after cooking together they all sat down and ate. It was amazing the effect it had on the families. They hadn’t just been fed, they offered themselves and enabled others to be fed as well. So it is with worship. The worst Sundays that I have had as a worship leader have had very little to do with how things went during the worship service. Those Sundays were bad not because there wasn’t enough for me to eat, so to speak, but because I showed up without my dish to share.
Just before Paul writes the words, “Do not be conformed to this world,” he writes, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Paul is talking about offering your whole life as a worshipful sacrifice to God, as opposed to worship in the Jewish temple, which offered an animal’s death as a worshipful sacrifice to God. This is about a total transformation in your life, Paul is saying. Give everything you have to God, especially yourself. He knows this is a counter-cultural thing to say. But it is necessary, he claims, so that “you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Be who God wants you to be, not who the world wants you to be. Do what God wants you to do, not what the world wants you to do.
I’ve heard it said that we have forgotten that we are human beings and we have become human doings. That is one of the reasons that worship is so important. Because in worship we do not produce anything and we are drawn out of individuality and into community. We catch a glimpse of who we can be with God. It is a scheduled, dedicated, sacred time of being who God wants us to be and doing what God wants us to do, so that we can carry that out into our everyday lives. We praise, we confess, we forgive, we sing, we pray, we listen, we speak, we are generous in giving, we fellowship, and nothing that can be measured or sold comes out of it. We don’t come just to be fed but to share with others. Our culture does not know what to do with worship, and that’s okay as long as we do.
In our modern lives time might be the biggest commodity of all and the most difficult to manage because there is always a fixed amount of it. No matter how hard you try you cannot stretch a day any longer than 24 hours. A pastoral counselor I knew in Austin used to tell the group of students that met with her, “You cannot add anything on to your schedule unless you are willing to take something away. There are only 24 hours in a day. You will never have time unless you make time.” She told us that in regard to Scripture reading, prayer, and meditation. So often our culture sends the message that we are not doing enough. Make sure your kids are in sports, music, tutoring, community service clubs, youth group, etc. Even a lot of retired people are so busy they can’t find time to actually retire. I’m as bad as anyone. Yes I’ll do that and that and that and that. But we can only go on that way for so long, until we are burned out or until we realize that that is not what life is all about. Then we come to realize that Paul’s words, “do not be conformed to this world,” has a great deal to say about viewing our time in a way that is counter to our culture, viewing our time through Christ’s eyes. And at no time is this more important, perhaps, than in Christian worship.
As we have discussed at length as of late, it is the Holy Spirit, which draws us into this life of Christian faith and service even though this life is counter to our culture. At least for my age group, for the people born around the time that I was, and even for my family, it is quite counter-cultural just to be willing to have faith in Jesus Christ and to attempt to live out the Christian life. But it isn’t just this way for today’s young people. It is that way for everyone. To be Christian and to really care about what that means is a counter-cultural act. Sometimes it is even counter to the culture of the church itself. Although there have been times in history when it seemed that everyone in America was a Christian and everyone went to worship on Sundays, I would imagine that even when almost everyone went to church, it was still just as rare to find real Christians. For those who do believe in something it is counter-cultural these days to be willing to say what you believe in. If it cannot be proven, if it cannot be seen, if it cannot be measured, and if we cannot show exclusive video of it on the nightly news, then it is not worth believing in it. It is counter to our culture to put yourself after God and even after others. It is counter to our culture to say, “God what do you want me to be? What do you want me to do?,” instead of saying, “Here is what I am going to be and do and here are the seven steps that will get me there.” It is counter to our culture to be still, to be silent when there is so much to do.
The early Christians were disliked by the Romans for the most part because they were counter to Roman culture. The early Christians didn’t have temples, they wouldn’t offer sacrifices to the gods, they very often refused to serve in the military, and they refused to declare that Caesar is Lord. The early Christians were derided as atheists because they did not believe in the Roman gods and they would not pledge their allegiance to the Roman state. They would not participate in the culture as it was offered to them. They were counter-cultural, but in a very specific way that isn’t concerned about appearances but with the kingdom of God.
At the top of the list of counter-cultural activities by Christians (and really all religious people) is worship. Worship is one of the most counter-cultural acts in which we participate in our lives. This may come as a surprise to many of you who have barely missed a Sunday in sixty or seventy years. Worship is just a part of your lives and maybe it always has been, but if you were to skip church one Sunday and go to restaurants, or the golf courses, or knock on people’s doors during our worship hour, you would begin to believe me when I say that worship is counter to our culture. Our culture does not know what to do with worship.
Two aspects of life that are given a great amount of value in our society are production and individuality. Worship does not produce anything. Worship does not allow us to do whatever we want to as individuals. In fact, worship calls us away from production and away from individuality.
For our Jewish friends from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday is the Sabbath. For religious Jews the Sabbath is not just another day. It’s not even just a day when you go to synagogue worship then do whatever else you want to. It is a day of worship and rest. It is a divinely commanded day of being anti-productive and anti-individualistic. That’s the point for Jews. The Sabbath is counter-cultural. The Sabbath is different. It is a time that is outside of time. The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel asks the following questions in response to God’s command to keep the Sabbath holy: Is it possible for a human being to do all his work in six days? Does not our work always remain incomplete? What the verse means to convey is: Rest on the Sabbath as if all your work were done.” Now that is a counter-cultural statement about worship and the keeping of holy time.
We, as Gentile Christians, do not tend to keep the Jewish Sabbath. Instead, we worship on Sunday, the first day of the week, which we call the Lord’s Day. We gather on this day to worship because it was on the first day of the week that God raised the Lord Jesus from the dead, inaugurating the new creation. We step out of our extremely important lives of productivity—being farmers and bankers and teachers and mothers—to do something which is in its very essence non-productive. We stop to turn to God’s Word, to sing songs of praise, to pray as a group, to share our joys and concerns with one another, to pray for the world and our neighbors, and to catch up and hug one another in Christ’s name. We set aside our individualities to become a group. It is a weekly re-membering of the body of Christ. Although we are to live every minute of our lives in gratitude for God’s grace and to do every single task we have, no matter how menial it may seem, as though we were doing it for Christ, there is something special about this hour to hour and a half on Sunday mornings. It is a time that we have set aside and dedicated to God.
I remember once in the room with the choir before worship at the Guthrie church. One of the choir members said, “We need to get out there. It’s time for worship to start.” Another one of the choir members who was kind of a cantankerous guy said, “They can wait. They won’t start without us.” Then one of the elders of the church spoke up. “No. It’s not just that we promised them we’d start at 10:45. We set an appointment with God at 10:45.” It is important to set aside time dedicated to God, a time when we have said, “We will not go by the rules of the culture during this hour. We will not worry about productivity. We will not put ourselves first. This is not a time to do, but a time to be with God and one another.” That is why worship is so important. It is a weekly glimpse of what we can be with God’s help. It is a glimpse of what it is like to be dedicated to God and to be a member of God’s community. Then we take the experience we have in worship into our daily lives.
People come to worship for many different reasons. The same is true for people who do not take time to worship. One of the reasons people don’t worship is that they are so busy Monday through Saturday that Sunday is the only day they have to sleep in and to spend time at home. Some people don’t come to worship at traditional churches like ours because there isn’t enough going on. There isn’t anything to keep them interested and engaged. And I can understand both of those. I have to admit to you that although I am your pastor and love being your pastor, I, like you, sometimes have a Sunday when I would rather sleep in or go sit at Starbuck’s and sip on a coffee while reading a good book. Some Sundays I just want to be by myself or be with my family. But that’s why worship is so important. Because it reminds me that my life is not my own, my time is not my own, and that I must be drawn out of myself and into God and the gathered body of Christ.
Some of the older folks at one of the Native American congregations I served that one summer when I was in seminary used to tell me about how when they were little if you didn’t show up for worship you would get a knock on your door while worship was going on. You would open the door to find a couple of the church elders standing there with a tall wooden staff that they’d used to knock on the door. They would firmly remind you that this is worship time and nothing else. Then you would guiltily put your church clothes on and head up to the church building. The elders of that congregation didn’t care whether or not you wanted to worship or felt that you needed to worship because the rest of the congregation needed you there at worship and because if you think you don’t need to worship you are wrong. Can you imagine waking up on a Sunday morning to see Jim Crossland and Dorothy Leaming standing on your front porch carrying staffs asking you what it is that you think you are doing during the worship hour?
In the 2nd Helvetic confession from 16th century Switzerland, which is in our Book of Confessions, it reads: “Meetings for Worship not to be Neglected: As many as spurn such meetings and stay away from them, despise true religion, and are to be urged by the pastors and godly magistrates to abstain from stubbornly absenting themselves from sacred assemblies.” Can you imagine getting a nice greeting card with the pretty picture of the church building on the outside only to open it up and to see a nice note from me urging you “to abstain from stubbornly absenting yourself from sacred assemblies”?
While both of those examples come from different times and different cultures than our own and you don’t have to worry about Jim and Dorothy interrupting your Sunday morning coffee when you decide to play hooky from church and you don’t have to worry every time you open a card from me that you will be called stubborn, they illustrate how important worship is not just for the life of the individual Christian but even more so for the life of the faith community as a whole. You may not feel the need to be here, but the rest of us need you here. As I’ve said, worship is counter to our culture and counter even to what we want to do sometimes. Worship is not about me. That’s hard for all of us to stomach.
I have heard people say that they go to worship to be fed spiritually. While that does make sense in regard to the words of the Psalmist, “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” and in Jesus’ saying that he is the bread of heaven, I am always bothered by it because I think it is incomplete. For some people, and probably for all of us at one time or another, worship is like going to a restaurant where they provide the food and we eat it. We want it to be like the wonderful old Native American ladies in Seminole who would invite me over to eat and absolutely refuse my help in any way. They provided the food. I provided the appetite. Worship is not like that, at least not in the Reformed tradition. The pastor and liturgist are not spiritual restaurateurs and this is not a spiritual super-buffet. Communal worship is more like a pot-luck dinner where everyone brings something to the table and we all enjoy it together, even if the pastor and the liturgist act as waiters. It doesn’t matter what songs we sing, what prayers we pray, or what the sermon says, if everyone in the room is not prepared for worship and is not willing to offer something in the worship of God. If you have a spiritual appetite, remember that everyone else does too, so bring food to share. So I would rather than hear someone say, “I was fed,” say, “We all cooked and we all were fed.”
I saw a story on the news not too long ago about a school program that is teaching kids how to cook healthy meals. The parents weren’t taking the initiative on the diet of their kids so the school did. They tried all kinds of educational programs—speakers, videos, and workbooks. But it wasn’t sinking in. So they recruited local chefs to teach the kids how to pick out the ingredients, how to prepare them, and how to serve them. Then the parents of all the kids in the class came to the school cafeteria for a fancy multi-course dinner all prepared by the kids with the help of their parents. Then after cooking together they all sat down and ate. It was amazing the effect it had on the families. They hadn’t just been fed, they offered themselves and enabled others to be fed as well. So it is with worship. The worst Sundays that I have had as a worship leader have had very little to do with how things went during the worship service. Those Sundays were bad not because there wasn’t enough for me to eat, so to speak, but because I showed up without my dish to share.
Just before Paul writes the words, “Do not be conformed to this world,” he writes, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” Paul is talking about offering your whole life as a worshipful sacrifice to God, as opposed to worship in the Jewish temple, which offered an animal’s death as a worshipful sacrifice to God. This is about a total transformation in your life, Paul is saying. Give everything you have to God, especially yourself. He knows this is a counter-cultural thing to say. But it is necessary, he claims, so that “you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Be who God wants you to be, not who the world wants you to be. Do what God wants you to do, not what the world wants you to do.
I’ve heard it said that we have forgotten that we are human beings and we have become human doings. That is one of the reasons that worship is so important. Because in worship we do not produce anything and we are drawn out of individuality and into community. We catch a glimpse of who we can be with God. It is a scheduled, dedicated, sacred time of being who God wants us to be and doing what God wants us to do, so that we can carry that out into our everyday lives. We praise, we confess, we forgive, we sing, we pray, we listen, we speak, we are generous in giving, we fellowship, and nothing that can be measured or sold comes out of it. We don’t come just to be fed but to share with others. Our culture does not know what to do with worship, and that’s okay as long as we do.
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