The liturgy of the Church

He might be astonished by the beauty of music, glass, vestments and tableware. Far from being just an outward and empty show, liturgical worship celebrates the glory of God and is not mortgaged over to human need. In the process human need is addressed but not in a way that invites us to wallow.

When the home of Christian worship is abandoned other spirits take up residence and worship is in danger of being taken over by pop psychology or indeed anything else that will bring the punters back next Sunday. Worship becomes an exercise in manipulation often dependent upon the personality and aspirations of the worship leaders. This happens because it has lost its focus on the worship of God and is centered on our own need or the needs of the church.

The great strength of liturgical worship is that the clergy presides over an already existing form. This means that it is not the personality or aspirations of the ordained that takes centre stage but words and actions that have been sifted down the centuries. The person who presides in such a liturgy trusts that the church is wiser than he or she and that to follow in its way is a faithful response to the Gospel. This understanding is subverted by the spirit of the times that accepts no authority but that of the individual who is invited to be creative (that most overused of words, along with that loveless construction “caring”).

The great temptation of worship is to see it as an instrument that performs a particular action whether that be personal healing, community formation or spiritual enlightenment. One of the roles of formal liturgy is to guard against this temptation because those who preside at worship must trust that anything that happens to people on Sunday morning is out of their hands. The hopes and wishes of the clergy must be put aside.

The set liturgy of the church sets up a distance between the president and that which he presides over so that the temptation to do something to the congregation is avoided. This allows a worship free from the various agendas that hover around any church and the subverts an instrumental understanding of worship.

This distance is aided by the set lectionary readings that jolt us out of our theological ruts and force us to preach on texts that we do not understand or even like. The growth of the mega churches is an illustration that an instrumental view of worship can be very successful but we wonder whose agenda is being worked out.

The home of Christian worship is not any old shack that we may create to fulfill a need but is fairly tightly specified by the logos or logic of the Gospel. This does not mean that you will find the Church calendar or the readings and colors that go with it specified in the New Testament as the elaborate worship of God is specified in Leviticus. Neither will you find a developed doctrine of the Trinity. Protestants need to understand that the liturgy of the Mass grows from the Bible, certainly with many twists and turns in history, but nevertheless faithfully lays down a form for the proper worship of God.

Churches that pride themselves on their creativity, making it up as they go along, inevitably fall into sentimentality or manipulation. Those that erase hundreds of years of faithful church tradition, insisting only on the Bible, in a distortion of what Luther was about, will end up with thin liturgies or no liturgies at all, Sunday worship becoming an extended Bible study or an exercise in community building.

Christian worship is serious holy play that reveals the world as it really is rather than what it thinks it is. It is as shocking as the scandal of the Gospel and a danger to our constructions of the world. We should attend Church in fear and trembling not knowing where we will be led each Sunday.