Worship, Praise beyond understanding

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. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God--what is good and acceptable and perfect.
(Rom 12:1-2)

This appeal from Paul to the Romans contains the central truth about the Anglican understanding of worship. Worship comes first. It comes before thinking, before discipleship, before outreach, before everything. It is in worship that Christians are "transformed by the renewal of their minds", and first come to see what is "good and acceptable and perfect" to God. Without worship, Christians are nothing. A famous Archbishop of Canterbury has listed some of the ways in which worship is so central to our lives:

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the Holiness of God
To feed the mind with the Truth of God
To purge the imagination by the Beauty of God,
To devote the will to the Purpose of God.
                     -William Temple, (1881-1944), Archbishop of Canterbury.

The actual shape of this worship in the Anglican Church varies enormously. In some churches, it is done with overhead projectors, choruses, altar calls and personal testimonies; in others it is a highly formal activity, with vestments, incense, bells and chanting. In most, it is somewhere in between. But whatever outward shape it takes, Anglican worship always holds two contrasting truths about God together. It is a joyous celebration of God's presence with his people, a lively (sometimes riotous) communal celebration of salvation. But worship is also coming into the presence of a transcendent and majestic Creator, a time of awe and reverence, in which we remember that "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Heb 10:31). Different parishes do this is in a different mix, but the fullness of Anglican worship must encompass both.

As we worship God acts on us in different ways. Firstly, in worship a community is glued together. We all come to worship as individuals, rich and poor, caucasian, black, and brown, male and female, middle class and working class, but in worship we begin to speak and praise God with one voice. We are moulded into one Body. This is true on a bigger scale as well. The Anglican Church has never had a declaration of key doctrinal beliefs that we have to assent to, like the Westminster confession for Methodists, or the Augsburg confession for Lutherans. Until very recently, our Church has been held together all over the world by using a single book for worship, The Book of Common Prayer (1662). Anglicans have found their unity in shared worship, not shared doctrinal statements. (Some might say this is just as well, as no two Anglicans believe the same things!).

Worship is the school room of the church. As we gather, God is forming us into a people who know their bible. In the ministry of the word we are fed by Scripture and preaching. But something more fundamental even than that is happening. We are not only learning about these things, we are learning to live them. We might know in our heads that we are forgiven, but because our hearts are stubborn, God gives us the liturgy to teach us week after week through confession and absolution that we are indeed forgiven. We don't just know its truth, we act out its truth, we participate in the truth. We might know in our heads that we are one Body, but by the greeting of the peace, God forces us to do more than know it, he forces us to do it. In worship we are learning to be what we are.

Worship is the hospital of the Church. After a week's hard discipleship we are all a little injured and sick. In worship God binds up our wounds, wipes the slate clean and charges us up for the week ahead. In the early church, Christians spoken of communion as food for the journey. In some Churches of the Anglican Communion we have revived this understanding recently, and the words spoken at communion, "the Body of Christ, the bread of heaven" are a recognition that this meal we celebrate is not only a pledge of our redemption and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, but is the fuel we need to keep following Jesus. One early theologian, Ignatius of Antioch, called communion, 'the medicine of immortality' for just the reason.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, worship is a mystery. In this week's gospel reading we saw that Nicodemus has a lot of knowledge about God, but not much knowledge of him. We have considered Paul's appeal to worship before thinking. When Christians come to worship, they are coming to know God personally, to share in a "peace which passes all understanding". We are acknowledging a great Anglican truth,

There is in the things of God to those which practice them a deliciousness that makes us love them, and that love admits us into God's cabinet, and strangely clarifies the understanding by the purification of the heart. For when our reason is raised up by the Spirit of Christ, it is turned quickly into experience; when our faith relies upon the principles of Christ, it is changed into vision. And so long as we know God only in the ways of man, by contentious learning, by arguing and dispute, we see nothing but the shadow of Him, and in that shadow meet with many dark appearances, little certainty, and much conjecture. But when we know Him with the eyes of holiness, and the intuition of gracious experience, with a quiet spirit and the peace of enjoyment, then we shall hear what we never heard and see what our eyes never saw; then the mysteries of godliness shall be opened unto us, and clear as the windows of the morning.
                              -Jeremy Taylor, (1617-1667), Anglican divine