Worship matters

 

Dear Friends,

One of the things I love best about the Bible are those vivid pictures of important characters engaging in the tensions and struggles of real life, and through them, those little moments of clarity we see breaking into our philosophical understanding. One such image can be found in Acts 17, when St Paul stands before the Greek people of Athens and addresses them. He has noticed that they have a practice of worshipping what they call an ‘unknown God’. In his address to them, he outlines that the very God they worship as unknown is the same God that Christians worship as known. This narrative, like most of those stories we read in the Acts of the Apostles, is captivating.

In our modern age, we worship many things: money, possessions, entertainment, celebrities, work, romantic relations… The list goes on. None of these things are problematic in and of themselves. The enjoyment they bring can be good for us. It is, however, very easy to develop the wrong kind of relationship with them. When that enjoyment turns to obsession, we are in trouble for they will inevitably lead us into dark places.

Scripture tells us that we are designed to worship God. And the evidence that over 90% of the world’s population is religious would seem to back this up. Indeed, there is even evidence from neuroscience that worship stimulates parts of the brain more effectively than other things we sometimes turn to instead. But I think there is evidence in our everyday life too.

Whenever we fall into the trap of worshipping other things instead of God, we inevitably exhibit traits that diminish us. Things like possessiveness, greed, obsessiveness, irrational fear of loss and failure, negative self-criticism, criticising others… But when we properly focus upon God, something else happens. We become more loving, accepting, compassionate. The fear begins to leave us because we are less worried about losing the things we possess.

If ‘God is love’, as St John claims, and to ‘live in love is to live in God’, then we find him by loving and serving others. When we worship him, that focus upon the all-loving God that we know, implants us into the very loving and self-giving nature of the Holy Trinity itself and leads us delight in the wellbeing of others.

With every blessing,

Fr Rob