The word "worship" comes from the Old English, weordhscipe, which means something like worthiness. It is an unfortunate translation of the many biblical words (in both Hebrew and Greek) that have more nuanced and direct meanings that combine to form a deeper sense of what "worship" means. Let me provide some general background and context on these varied meanings before I focus on one aspect of worship, in particular.
Broadly speaking, the Bible's words that we translate into English for "worship" have to do with ideas of submission, service, gift-giving and fear of the Lord. The words can refer to private piety and practices, corporate worship, and even physical movements like bowing, lifting hands or holy kisses.
The Old Testament's words for worship tend to relate to what is happening at the Jewish Temple. There, "worship" refers to things like sacrifice, service in the Temple, fear of the Lord, and sole reverence to God. As the Jewish nation continually fails to meet God's standards, the focus shifts away from worship at a place and is focused more on the heart (Hos. 6:6, Mic. 6:6-8, Ps. 40:6, 51:16, Amos 5:23, Isa. 1:15).
In the New Testament, the words for "worship" get broader in meaning. It can be a lifestyle lived out of faith (Rom. 21:1), a charge to enact unity (Matt. 5:23, Lk. 10:25), and service to others, which includes gift-giving (Phil. 2:25). Worship includes the proclamation of the gospel (Rom. 15:16), and the corporate gathering where singing takes place (Eph. 5:15-19). There is a lot of meaning packed into the word "worship."
One Greek word often translated as "worship" is latreia, which has a strong sense of "service" about it. To worship, is to be the kind of person who is like Christ and loves their neighbors by offering them service. It is also where the use of "the Divine Service" comes in, as it can mean rendering service to God. It is not meritorious service, but service rightly ordered that comes from faith. Another Greek word, gonupeteo, means to "fall on your knees" and is equivalent to the Hebrew term, shachac, which has a sense of bowing down or prostration.
Interesting as etymologies might be, what are the practical benefits of such word studies? I want to focus on one aspect of worship, particularly as it relates to the Sunday morning gathering, and invite readers to reimagine what is taking place when we enter the local congregation for Sunday worship. Worship, in a summarized sense, is the act of embracing our creatureliness more fully. By "creatureliness," I do not mean our sinfulness, though, as we will see, an acknowledgment of this is important.
To embrace our creatureliness is to identify with the reality of our station in God's economy. God is not a creature, God is God, holy, other, Alpha and Omega, eternal with no beginning or end. We are creatures created by God for worship (service) to God and each other. The great temptation to sin with Adam and Eve was to exchange their creatureliness for divine status. It was a temptation to reject what they were and exchange it for polytheism. The reality that death is the consequence of sin makes logical sense when you understand the sin in the garden to be one of denying creatureliness. What happens? Separated from God and attempting to exist independently from him, creatures die; their life inertia (if you will grant the phrase) isn't sustainable without God's intimate presence. In rebellion with God, the creation fails to flourish and degrades, like a window fan whose power has been cut but whose fans still amble on until they stop.
Worship is the act of living more deeply into the poverty of human existence so that God can be the giver of gifts.
To embrace our creatureliness is to affirm the truth that we were created to worship. And what does that mean? Certainly, it cannot mean that we are realigned with God so that God gets what God needs. God does not need our worship. He lacks nothing. God is not a narcissistic, needy, selfish deity who created everything so that he could hear out of the mouths of his creation how great he is for all eternity. That view of God, however tempting to those who think God ultimately petty, is not the truth.
God created people to be worshippers because God is the type of God who enjoys giving gifts. To be a worshipper, in one sense, means to be dependent. The worshipper must give worship and receive in return. Not that worship is a meritorious exchange. No, worship is the act of living more deeply into the poverty of human existence so that God can be the giver of gifts.
Before sin, this "poverty" was not a lack but a blessed need. Just as Adam needed Eve to fulfill his sense of loneliness and community, Adam and Eve also needed to worship to fulfill their need to receive, and in that receiving, they learned to be the kind of people God wanted them to be. People like himself. In worship, we come to learn that God is far from petty but is love. To be the God of love, God creates creatures who worship him because by being dependent upon him, they are free from care and can relate to God as those whose open hands are filled.
As sinners (who are also simultaneously saints in Christ), our worship begins in the context of Good News, where the grace of God redeems us from sin and summons and gathers us around Word and Sacrament. That summoning, however, meets us in a context of poverty: suffering, injustice, fear, regret, rage, confusion, depression, anxiety, addiction, perversion, and violence. God summons us out of this context to his gathered community so that, in our poverty, we might be filled up. In this narrow sense, worship acts as a posture of grace, inviting the sinner to the underserved table of the King where goods, blessings, and righteousness are distributed in such bounty overflow.
Our hands are filled up so that we might give away much of what we have received to others
To worship in this sense, then, is to more fully enter into the reality of being a creature and to receive the reality that God is a good God who gives gifts. To worship is to bend down, not because God is a megalomaniac and enjoys having us crushed into submission, but because bowing down assumes a posture of reception and humility. Open hands; poverty-stricken hands come to be filled up in a submissive (not self-righteous) posture of hope and expectation.
And worship does not end in that filling. Our hands are filled up so that we might give away much of what we have received to others. Worship, seen only as a way to make God happy through praise, is an utterly cheap description that robs worship of its corporate sense, in which the God of gifts transforms his people into the image of his Son by making them more like himself. Worship, defined by an insecure god demanding praise and bowed heads so that he can raise his ego by distributing gifts, fails to understand the communal transformation that God envisions as he prepares his people to be sent out into the world as heralds of Good News and healers of hearts and bodies.
So, this Sunday, embrace your creatureliness and your poverty. Hear the summons of the One who calls you to worship. And, in this narrow sense of the term, come to receive the gifts from your good Father and his beloved Son. And when you do, share them. "Therefore, I urge you brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual act of worship" (Rom. 12:1).
