Sabbath Day Worship

Worship is so much more than a weekly activity that we "go to."  In class, we have been exploring how we might experience Worship as "loving God with all our hearts, and with all our souls, and with all our minds, and with all our strength!"  That's not something that is happening everywhere in town!
In our faith practice, Sabbath Day Worship is a core activity (maybe the core activity) of communal life, where we gather together weekly to love God and one another with everything we have.
The practice of "sabbath" is more than just coming to worship.  For us, worship is an essential part of sabbath, something that God includes as one of the Ten Commandments.  Here are some things you may not know, or haven't thought so much about recently.

(1)  Sabbath is a radical practice.  It honors God breaking into weekly life on our behalf, rescuing us from busyness and exhaustion and activities that do not satisfy our spirits.  It is a time of renewal, refreshment, communion with God, and celebration of life as God has always intended it to be.  Sabbath is a real-life experience of being delivered by the God who loves and saves us.  In the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:8; Deuteronomy 5:12-14), Sabbath is to be "remembered" and kept holy, a gift from God.  Re-membrance is putting all broken pieces (members) of our lives back together and experiencing wholeness. In Exodus, God is described as resting on the seventh day of creation, the sabbath.  When we rest after six days of creative work we are sharing in God's wholeness.  In Deuteronomy, God's people are to remember on the sabbath that God is a God who delivers God's people from slavery to freedom.    I have called sabbath a "radical" practice.  Radical means rooted; in this case, our lives are rooted in God!!!

(2) Our Worship liturgy is a daring act of imagination.  Our worship service at St. Andrew's begins with us  declaring the peace of Christ among us and sharing it with one another.  Jesus is the one who comes to free us from anxiety, offering us a peace far beyond our present understandings!  Our Call to Worship draws us into intentional communion with God, putting God at the center of our attention rather than the million other things that dominate our attention.  Already we have an opportunity to break free, and we haven't even sung yet!  The first hymn, and those that follow, allow us to offer our voices and hearts to God in soulful praise, to "lose ourselves in order to be found!"  God's for-giveness frees us in God's eternal love for honesty, for expression, for healing, for repentance, for new starts.  The Time of Confession and Hope is an opportunity for honest expression and speech to God about our needs, our hopes, our pains, our struggles.  Liberation is realized in such honest encounter with God.  The Scriptures open up the rich story of God and God's people; the Gospels declare and show us God's astounding love for all people without exception--a loving power that never ends!!  The sermon(s) proclaims this good news and identifies where it hits ground in our lives.  We respond to the invitation to recognize ourselves as part of the holy story, and are equipped to follow Jesus in our own lives today.  This is transforming!  There are many places where we are given opportunity to offer ourselves, our gifts, our investment in these values and the new life that is embodied when we do this together.  We pray to God; very importantly, we share prayer concerns and people in need and lift them up.  We identify blessings and joys and thank God for them together, freed in our thanksgiving.  We celebrate God's abundance, rather than what the world defines as scarcity.  It is a different way of seeing!  Each month, we gather together at the Lord's Table. We leave as people whose lives and priorities have been reordered and replenished in the love of our Creator.  That's what worship is about!

(3) Our Worship expresses belief in God who is doing hands-on work to make new human futures.
When we worship we are engaging the God who is committed to our well-being and to the deliverance of all God's people.

(4) Worship is resistance to the dominant, life-flattening order.  God did not make any of us merely to "fit in" to the world's order.

(5) We explore the experience of covenant community. The real practice of community is a revolutionary practice and a sign in the world of God's new order for the world.  We are precious as individuals who are God's children, beloved, created for God's pleasure.  But we are more together than we can ever be just by ourselves.  We love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and we love our neighbor as ourselves.

(6) Worship is celebration of a world that is fruitful and generative.  Ours is a liturgy of God's abundance, not the world's myth of scarcity.

(7)  God's themes of wholeness and completion break into a world that is often half-baked and distorted. Everything about us matters to God!

(8) Our worship is rooted in the peace of Christ (an antidote to anxiety).  God is delivering us from anxious lives!

(9)  The fabric of our lives depends on fidelity, not "productivity."  The measure of our value in God's eyes is never in how "useful" we are!!  even though it can be good to be productive in life, especially when it benefits others, God did not put us in the world merely to be "useful!"  Faithfulness to God, and loving solidarity with one another, are what we are made for. We celebrate this in worship.

(10) Liturgy is an act of imagining the world differently and acting according to that inspired imagination.



(Thanks to Walter Brueggemann and all the participants in our mid-90's Kirkridge retreat!)