The world enters our worship, it is brought into the King\u2019s palace and made part of the King\u2019s worship, so that it can be transformed, so that it can reach its telos<\/em>. Worship is a microcosm, or, as Jordan puts it, a \u201cmicrochron.\u201d<\/p>\n What is brought into worship?<\/p>\n Our sins<\/em>. Christian worship is not based on the pretense that the world is fine, bright, and thoroughly cheery. Near the very beginning of most historical liturgies, there is an acknowledgement that we, together with the world, are desperately twisted and enslaved by sin and death. Not only is there a call to confession and a confession of sin, but certain forms of the Kyrie<\/em>, because they offer prayer for peace on earth, assume a world that is not at peace.<\/p>\n Music, and often arts of other kinds<\/em>. Even the lowest of low church worship includes singing, and in many traditions the singing is accompanied by instrumental music in varying degrees. Many traditions of Christian worship also incorporate visual arts and architecture into worship by incorporating them into the place of worship. The world of music and art is not alien to the liturgy.<\/p>\n History<\/em>. Scripture is read and preached in worship, and Scripture is largely an account of history. The history recorded in Scripture is obviously not some kind of \u201creligious\u201d tributary detached form the main flow of history. Scripture talks about man\u2019s beginnings and calling, and the living creatures created alongside man; the source of man\u2019s sinfulness; fratricide, the origins of civic life, and the development of arts and sciences; the diversity of languages and intra-family squabbles; empires rising and falling, kings with their glories and failures, battles and political intrigues and wars. Cornelius Van Til liked to say that Scripture \u201ctalks about everything,\u201d and this is not true simply in some \u201cphilosophical\u201d sense that Scripture implies a certain kind of \u201cmetaphysics.\u201d Scripture speaks quite explicitly about human experience in all its dimensions.<\/p>\n Bread and Wine<\/em>. Bread is the basic staple of human life in many cultures, and the production of bread (as Leon Kass points out in his wonderful book, The Hungry Soul<\/em>) assumes some degree of developed agriculture, the technology of milling flour and baking, and an exchange system that enables the bread to arrive at the Table. One could make similar points about the presence of wine, but wine bears not only agricultural, economic, and technological baggage, but also includes festival associations. When we bring bread and wine into the liturgy, we are bringing this whole complex world along with it.<\/p>\n Money<\/em>. Some Christians believe that it is impious to collect money during a worship service. It makes the pastor look mercenary, and somehow defiles the holy event of worship with profane mammon. In the OT, though, worship was fundamentally about bringing wealth into the house of God to offer it to him. Every animal offered on the altar represented and was wealth, and there were occasions when monetary payments could substitute for animal sacrifice. Plus, tithes on income were to be brought into the sanctuary to offer to the Lord.<\/p>\n Language<\/em>. Most of Christian worship takes place through the medium of language. The minister speaks and the congregation responds; we sing and offer prayers; the minister reads and preaches; even when we do<\/em> the Supper, we are conscious of performing the \u201cwords of institution.\u201d There is a place for silence in Christian worship, but the silences of worship, like the silences in music, should be the pregnant and expectant silences between two sounds.<\/p>\n A particular world<\/em>. All this is terribly general and abstract. No real church worships using \u201clanguage.\u201d All churches worship in English, Persian, Portuguese, or Mandarin. All particular churches confess particular sins particularly. The music and arts that are brought into the worship service share a great deal with the music and arts of the civilization in which the church exists. So, we don\u2019t just bring \u201cthe world\u201d into worship; we bring \u201ca world, our world.\u201d<\/p>\n Worship is not an escape from the world, from its sadnesses and evils, from the follies and violence of history\u2019s charnel house, from the world of work and production. The whole world follows on our heels right into church, and is put front and center. If someone is trying to find a religious experience that will provide respite from the challenges of life, he should find another experience than that of Christianity.<\/p>\n When the world is brought into the liturgy, it is not left alone.\u00a0Alexander Schmemann is right that this<\/em> world is the \u201cmatter\u201d of the kingdom. God\u2019s kingdom is not made from some pure \u201cstuff,\u201d but is this world purified and translated from glory to glory. That is anticipated and enacted in the liturgy.<\/p>\n Our language is brought into worship, but by shaping our language to tell the story of Scripture, our language is burst at the seams. That is what language is for \u2013 to tell the glories of God, to speak to Him and to one another, to praise. In worship, language reaches its eschatological climax.<\/p>\n Bread and wine are brought into the liturgy, and they remain, physically speaking, ordinary bread and wine; but these ordinary elements become an extraordinary means for communicating Christ to us through the Spirit. This is what grain and grapes are created for: Every grain of wheat longs to be ground and baked into Eucharistic bread, every grape aspires to become vintage wine in the feast of the Lord\u2019s table.<\/p>\n Money is offered in worship, but it becomes devoted to the uses of God\u2019s kingdom. The world is brought into the kingdom, but it is brought into the kingdom to be judged and transformed. <\/p>\n The liturgy is a sign of the future of the world, once it\u2019s transformed into the kingdom. It displays the telos <\/em>and end of all things, of language and art and money and production: All of it exists to become part of a cosmic, eternal liturgy.<\/p>\n We come into worship ourselves and are immediately reminded that we are sinners, who cannot draw near to God except through confession and cleansing. Our self-image that we bring from the world \u2013 we aren\u2019t such bad folk \u2013 is judged, and we are made new through the absolution. We\u2019re not merely informed that we are sinners, but that we are forgiven sinners, and we are reminded that our identity is in Christ, and that therefore we are righteous.<\/p>\n Music comes into its own in worship, reaches its created purpose. Music is not a natural phenomenon or artistic form that just happens to be used in worship. Worship displays to us that music was created by God to give expression to praise. We are voiced instruments that voice the praises of creation, and when we use instruments to make music, we are even more directly giving voice to creation. The use of music and other arts in worship immediately judges the notion that art exists for self-indulgence, or merely for the delight of human beings. Worship shows that art is ultimately designed to be an act of worship.<\/p>\n The history read and preached in worship judges the way the world tells the story of the world. History is not a closed, immanent process, but is entirely the result of a sovereign, just, and holy God, who is an actor in the drama that He has written. For individuals, this means that the story of my life is also not a closed cause-and-effect process.<\/p>\n Bread and wine are brought to the Lord\u2019s table to be means of communion with God, to be shared among a community of believers. This radically judges the way we normally think about our labors and technologies and systems of production and exchange. Labor and exchange and production are not ends in itself, nor means toward the end of unlimited wealth creation or upward mobility or the acquisition of tokens of status. The end of all our labors is festivity in the presence of God; we make bread so we can eat it, and wine to drink it. And this festivity in the presence of God includes charity and generosity to our neighbors. <\/p>\n We often use language to hide, manipulate, deceive, exercise power, hurt. Our language often has a loose fit with the realities of ourselves and the world. This is perhaps most obvious in our cultural euphemisms, designed to screen us from seeing the true horrors of our culture: \u201ctermination of pregnancy,\u201d \u201cremoving the feeding tube,\u201d \u201cpartial-birth abortion,\u201d and so on. But these euphemisms are of a piece with everyday misuse and manipulation of language. Worship should tell us the truth, call a spade a spade and a sin a sin. Worship judges our misuses of language and trains us in speaking and thinking of the world rightly.\u00a0<\/p>\n (This is a slightly revised version of a blog post written in 2005.<\/em>)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The world enters our worship, it is brought into the King\u2019s palace and made part of the King\u2019s worship, so that it can be transformed, so that it can reach its telos. Worship is a microcosm, or, as Jordan puts it, a \u201cmicrochron.\u201d What is brought into worship? Our sins. Christian worship is not based […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liturgy"],"yoast_head":"\n