On Attending Weekly Worship

This piece is one I wrote for my weekly church newsletter as part of a series on the aspects of lay ministry as understood by the Catechism of The Episcopal Church. This aligns somewhat with what I’m preaching on this week, and it deals with one of the responsibilities for all Christians as understood by the Catechism, so I offer it here as a reflection, to be developed more latter especially in relation to work I’m doing on the nature and role of boredom in contemporary life, as a foray into thinking about what worship should do.

So far in looking at the distinctive responsibilities of lay ministry we have dealt mainly with personal and individual tasks. Bearing witness to Christ, carrying out the ministry of reconciliation, and taking one’s place in the life, worship, and governance of the Church all require other people to be sure, but discerning one’s place in those activities can be highly personal and can be done at one’s own initiative. The focus is on you discerning how God is calling your unique configuration of gifts, talents, and interests to serve the larger mission of God in the world through the Church. 

With the fourth responsibility, coming together (at least) weekly for corporate worship, the focus is squarely on one’s place in the assembled body. One’s unique role fades into the background as the attention shifts to the Church as a whole coming before God in praise and worship. It is important to see this aspect because all too often people can think that worship is primarily inwardly focused—it is good to take part in if one feels fed by it. But this is to get the order of priorities wrong—corporate worship is not so much a means to greater spiritual growth (although it does serve this purpose too), but is above all the goal and purpose of our life together. If we look to the book of Revelation, throughout we see that the holy ones are gathered in worship in heaven around the throne of God. The wedding feast of the Lamb is not so different from our Eucharist, albeit with the last bits of mediation between God and creation lifted, with the necessary absence that always accompanies God’s presence during our earthly sojourn stripped away. Regular gathered worship is not simply something that recharges us or helps us toward salvation—it is salvation, that act for which we were created and redeemed. Gathering together is not some great burden, but rather is a responsibility that is also a great privilege because in it we get to come before our Creator and Redeemer in a special way, in a way that God is assuredly present most fully, to give this God thanks and praise. In worship we are receiving a foretaste of and accustoming ourselves to the eternal celebration of God and God’s goodness that we hope for in the Resurrection. 

Many may hear this and think it is not, in fact, good news. I remember myself thinking, when heaven was essentially presented in stereotypical fashion as us sitting around like cherubs on clouds strumming on harps for all eternity, that such a vision would be miserably boring. Isn’t what I just proposed above more or less the same idea, except that now we’ll all be on the same cloud together? Doesn’t sitting in a church service for all eternity begin to feel almost like a… punishment? Indeed it may seem that way. Accustomed as we are to the hyper-stimulating media environment around us and a world saturated by advertising meant to make us feel like the center of the world, the other focused, silence- and slowness-saturated impracticality of corporate worship grates at the way that our desires have been de-formed by a world that wants to reduce us to consumers and commodities to maximize the profits of the powerful. Precisely when worship seems so boring to so many people, when it seems so “impractical,” when it seems irrelevant, when it seems like an imposition on already overburdened schedules, is precisely when we need to prioritize regular worship all the more. It is through participating in regular worship, worship that retains beauty and goodness but pushes against the hyper-stimulating media landscape that exists everywhere else, that we begin to have our de-formed desires re-formed toward what they are supposed to be. I once heard an Orthodox monk say that the Orthodox view of heaven and hell is largely of people going to the same place—whether eternity before the throne of God is reward or punishment will largely depend on whether you want to be there (this is, granted, not how all Orthodox thinkers conceive of the afterlife, but it is a good one). If we want to enjoy resurrection life, if it is to be for us what it is meant to be, namely, joyfilled rapture, then we need to start getting accustomed to that kind of life. And the part of how we get accustomed to that is through practice—the more the better. 

In fact, there must be something miraculous in the thinking that merely an hour or two a week can help us be formed this way. Few of us would expect to learn a new skill, such as a language or hobby, with just one hour a week of practice, so it is astounding that we may expect the progressive re-orienting of all our desires during that same amount of time. While the grace imparted during weekly corporate worship, especially through the Eucharist, may indeed help to effect this, I’d say this is also why doing preparation for weekly worship—something that is perhaps not talked about enough in this day and age—in the form of daily prayer, bible reading, and self-examination, plays such a vital role in truly being able to engage fully in that worship. It is through these practices, and truly we are practicing our faith in them, that we acclimate ourselves to truly experiencing God’s presence when we gather together. 

That there is this element of re-ordering and re-forming that happens as we gather to get beyond our individual selves and come before God in praise and thanksgiving means that we have to give it some time to work on us. We cannot expect ourselves to really start feeling and seeing the marks of this transformation through occasional participation. If you feel dissatisfied or miserably bored with worship, the answer is not necessarily that there is something wrong with worship but perhaps that we need to engage with it more, allowing the Spirit more time to work on us through the liturgy. If we feel that we are unable to experience God in a worship service, it is perhaps not that God is absent but that we need to give God more time to strip away the barriers we and our world have erected to being able to experience the subtlety of that presence. 

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