Grace and Peace from Our Lord Jesus Christ!
At a time when many on the rolls of American churches have come to believe that attending church is a good thing, like taking your vitamins, but that it is just one option among many for good health, it is all the more important to reflect on some reasons that we do attend church. We will continue over the next several “Pastor’s Green Pastures” to look at how your Sunday morning worship is molding your imagination and how it is an essential part of your overall Christian formation. The plan is to look at the major elements of worship—starting this month with the call to worship. Niagara Presbyterian Church has been called by God to be a congregation of disciples of Jesus who call the nations to be disciples of Jesus Christ. And that all begins with the call to worship on Sunday morning – actually it begins with the call that has gone out even before we gather on Sunday.
Yes on Sunday morning the adventure officially begins with a call to worship summoning the assembled congregation to gather at the foot of the heavenly Mount Zion. But as James K.A. Smith says, the “scandal” of it all is that not everyone is even there to hear it – the neighbor down the street may be working in their garden or tidying up around the house, the neighbor next door may be away at work, a family member may still be fast asleep. The realization that not everyone is there is a reminder that not everyone responds to God’s universal call because not everyone belongs to this chosen people. But those who do come out of their homes and neighborhoods to meet for worship become a community. Thus the very act of gathering for worship is an exercise of eschatological imagination. (I would say that it is “eschatological” (meaning last or ultimate things) imagination because it is both gathering in heaven above right now and it is practice for when we will all gather together at the end as described in Revelation.) And those who have heard and heeded the call that went out before the service even began, hear the call publicly proclaimed at the opening of the liturgy. (James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, p.159-161.)
We normally use a passage from the Psalms as the call to worship, but not the same verse or two every Sunday. Instead, we have been reading continuously through short portions of the book each week. After all, the Psalms are one of the best liturgical resources (given by God himself) for use by churches to produce people with an increasingly mature faith. Worship is a conversation between God and his people. What makes the Psalms so effective is that they are simultaneously the written word of God and words intended for the people of God to speak to him. James K.A. Smith notes that the Psalms even serve “as a sort of language training manual—an affective means of training our speech, which is so centrally constitutive of who we are and how we imagine ourselves,” teaching the very “vocabulary and grammar for worship.” He also rightly observes, “Angels could never have written the Psalms!” (Ibid., p.139, 172.) Indeed, when we learn to speak to God using the Psalms
we learn a rich vocabulary and grammar and how to express the full range of human emotions, which is why worship without them can be so impoverished and sometimes even superficial. Superficial worship is fake – like pretending that we are happy when we are anything but happy. The Psalms meet us where we are. They do not shy away from the reality of suffering during the journey of faith. Consider devotionally reading the Psalms each day this month and listen to the call of God on your life as you use the words of the Psalms to speak to Him no matter what you are feeling.
In Christ,
Pastor Justin
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