A good friend who grew up attending a Baptist church in south Texas once told me of an unforgettable worship experience from his boyhood years.  He said that his church’s worship services were so regimented you could set your watch by when the first and second hymns were sung, when the offering was taken and how long the sermon would be and so on.  One Sunday something happened to change all that.  When the deacons came forward to take the offering the pastor spontaneously called on one of the men (they were all men, of course) to lead the offertory prayer.  This is what the deacon prayed.  “Dear Lord, please let something happen in this worship service today that isn’t printed in the bulletin.”  Kirk told me that by the next Sunday the preacher had changed the order of worship but he had also missed the point of the man’s prayer. 

It wasn’t the order of service, the style of music or even the specific events planned in the service that troubled the deacon.  What was troubling him was that he was missing something in worship.  He was nonspecific about what that something was.  But, he was very specific about wanting that undefined, mysterious “something” to happen in his life and his church, something that was the result of a divine encounter no person could orchestrate.  What do you think that mysterious “something” was?

This sermon, the third in a series of six based on our church’s Mission Statement, Sharing Christ Through Caring Relationships, is based on one of our Core Values, Christ-Honoring Worship and Praise.  As with each of my previous sermons on our core values, I’m coming at this subject presupposing certain things.  One is that we all value the worship of God as central to what it means to be Christian.  Second, most of us enter a worship service expecting something to happen but very few us can say with clarity exactly what that mysterious something is.  Of course, all of this is being played out against the backdrop of what some are now calling “worship wars” in churches all over America.  Should we use traditional hymns and music or contemporary rock or jazz or bluegrass or classical or just give up, put it all in a holy blender and hope we please everyone?

Without question, we ought to be constantly sensitive to whether our style of worship is effective and meaningful and sensitive to the fact that, because people are different, they’ll find some styles of worship more meaningful and appealing than others.  We ought to also avoid the trap of letting places of worship once meant to serve us now define us.  But, in my opinion, one reason among many for all this confusion over which style of worship is best is rooted in our failure to ask the right questions first.  The scripture is our best guide for that work.  There is no one passage of scripture that exhaustively defines Christian worship.  But, there is no way to define Christian worship apart from our text for the morning, Romans 12:1-2.  At least it should help us ask the right questions first.

Discovering that “mysterious something” about worship that we all seek means asking first, Where are our lives centered? 

It’s amusing the way our culture picks up words and beats them to death so that they have no meaning anymore.  Since 9/11 we’ve been getting news “alerts” every day, even every hour, until nothing alerts us anymore.  The word “center” has been horribly overused for years.  You stop at the 7-11 to get coffee and there on the counter a display reads, “Pain relief center.”  As though that aspirin display is the universal center of all pain relief.  We have entertainment centers in our homes.  How long until the dinner table becomes the family nourishment center?  In many churches what was once called the sanctuary is now called the worship center, as though what happens in that room is the center of all worship. 

One question.  If everything is the center of what it is then what is the center of all that is?  What happens if the places we find relief from our pain and we entertain ourselves and we worship God have absolutely no relationship to each other?  If our lives become multi-centered don’t they also become hopelessly fragmented?  Shouldn’t there be something that centers our lives and what should that be?  This text defines Christian worship, not in terms of style or place but as a life centered in God.  Bodies sacrificed to God in holy living and lives transformed by renewed ways of thinking that lead to understanding the will of God.

I’ve always had trouble with this commonly used expression that we should “put God first in our lives.”  I understand that expression to mean that we should properly order our lives.  But, that expression has always troubled me because it has the ring of having ourselves at the center making decisions about where God should fit.  The truth is, we don’t put God anywhere.  That’s like standing at the base of a 12,000 foot Colorado Rocky and debating about where we’ll make it fin into our travel plans.  It’s the fixed point around which all our plans will be ordered.  We don’t move it.  We move in relationship to it.  God is God and our only choice is whether our lives will be centered around the One who is the Center of all that is or be forever and hopelessly fragmented.  As the apostle Paul said of the one true God to the ancient Athenians whose lives were fragmented by the worship of many gods, “‘in him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).’”  We move in relationship to God, not him to us. 

One of the reasons for these worship wars churches are having is because too many conversations about worship start with questions about how we feel about it or how we experience it, questions that have us at the center, not God.  Any conversation that starts with how we feel about worship and moves out from there is a dangerously centered one that will lead to spiritual fragmentation.  George Barna, who is something of an American church research guru says that, “‘Americans tend to see ourselves first of all as consumers.’  As a result, (we) often view worship as a transaction for personal benefit (Greg Warner, “Americans don’t understand worship, Barna research says,” Associated Baptist Press, October 23, 2002, Vol. 02-1).’”

Christian worship, whatever else it is, is first a sacrificial presenting of ourselves to God, mind, body and soul.  It is the centering of our lives around the One who is the source of all life.  Worship is not a time when we conjure up God’s presence, where we try to get his attention.  It is the celebration of our presence in his world and his presence in our lives, too.  If Jesus were to come today and serve as a worship consultant for Cliff Temple, his first question to us would not be where we worship or what style of music we use or whether we have congregational readings or whether we are high church or low church or whether the thermostat is properly set or whether the sound system is effective.  Wouldn’t his first question of us be, “Where are your lives centered?”  And, not just our lives when we’re gathered together in this place but where are our lives centered, mind, body and soul every day.  All of which leads to the second question this text begs.

How far does our worship reach?  Again, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice . . . be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”

If anything, our tendency is to restrict our understanding of worship to what happens in this building on Sunday.  The scripture has just defined worship as the centering of all of our lives around God even in the ways we think and the ways we use our very bodies, as the nature of true spirituality.  Otherwise, we become something that should seem impossibly oxymoronic, secular Christians, people who know how to sing praises to God but whose daily lives are ordered by other priorities, or, fragmented by other gods. 

I’m back to imagining Jesus serving as our worship consultant.  If we complained that we wanted something to happen that wasn’t printed in the bulletin, I’m thinking he wouldn’t be asking us yet about whether we have a traditional or contemporary style or whether we enjoy worshipping in the Temple or the Fellowship Hall more.  I’m thinking he’d ask us where our lives are centered.  He’d go further.  He’d also ask us about how we’re doing in our relationships with each other, how we’re spending our time and the money we don’t give to the church.  He’d ask us very specific, pointed questions, like how we’re handling our anger.  He’d ask us who we’ve been gossiping about lately and whether we’ve thought of the damage that kind of talk can cause and the pain it can inflict.  He’d remind us of words

from one of his own sermons that speak of what worship means.  “‘When you’re offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there . . . and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister and then come and offer your gift (Matthew 5:23-25).’” 

Jesus is saying that paramount to experiencing the mysterious presence of God in worship is the willingness to work toward reconciliation in our relationships with each other.  Jesus is saying that God is not interested in our worship if our anger and pride are more important to us than our sisters and brothers in Christ, our mothers and fathers, daughters and sons.

Jesus is saying that worship that only focuses on what kind of experience we have when we gather on Sunday and whether or not it got us all charged up but in no way affects how we live, our most private thoughts, the words we speak and especially how we’re living in relationship to each other, is void of meaning, hollow, empty. 

The worship wars churches are having won’t be won or lost in committee meetings where it is determined which style best fits a given congregation.  They’ll be won or lost on the holy ground of surrendering to God’s command to “wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:16-17).”  Worship is not a service or a program, a song or a sermon anymore than gardening is a shovel or music is a piano.  Worship is a reunion with God that grows out of a faithful relationship (Marv Knox, “Worship quests last more than hour,” The Baptist Standard, March 12, 2001).”  A faithful relationship in which we walk with God, talk with God, live in holy surrender to God every moment, every day.

True Christian worship is a life centered in the Holy God of all creation in a sacred, personal relationship that extends to every corner of our existence.  If we genuinely want to discover that mysterious “something” that occasionally eludes us when we gather here, we might ought to ask what’s missing from our lives when we’re not here and whether they are so multi-centered every day that they’re too hopelessly fragmented to piece back together in one hour on Sunday. 

To worship God means to live in such a deeply personal relationship with him that everything we know of him and every experience we have with him continually extends itself further and further out into our lives until every part of our existence is engaged in a daily walk with the God who came to walk with us in the person of Jesus. 

When we live a life of daily worship like that we won’t have to worry about something happening on Sunday that’s not printed in the bulletin.