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First the bad news. Many churches are performing acts of heresy when they worship God on Sundays. They are locking God into the church and shutting the world out.
Heresy is attractive and pernicious because it is partial truth masquerading as the whole truth. This heresy is so familiar that it sounds pious and comfortable. Some worship leaders apparently believe that this heresy honours God, so they express it openly as they lead their congregations: "I invite you to focus your attention on God, and God alone. This is a time to leave behind the issues of the past few days and to forget your anxieties about the week ahead. This is a time to worship God."
Then the worship proceeds. The congregation sings hymns and choruses, prays, hears Scripture and listens to a preacher. There are usually some unavoidable announcements of special church events, or of births, engagements, weddings, illnesses and deaths among the congregation, and some of these may be mentioned in a pastoral prayer, but they are kept to a minimum because they disrupt the flow of worship. There are no comments about the world outside the congregation, unless someone quips about the weather or a sports event.
This is not true Christian worship. That's the bad news. And it's bad news I've written about before. Earlier this year, after attending the Mennonite World Conference, I wrote that I was disappointed that when Mennonites from all over the world were together in Calcutta in January, 1997, they spent so little time praying for that city. I said that I was deeply concerned about how often we repeat that pattern in our local congregations and ignore our world in our worship.
Recently I've heard other people express the same concern. They wonder why they hear so little in their church about the news and issues that they talk about all week in the workplace and coffee shop: no mention of Princess Diana or Mother Teresa or Remembrance Day or the massacre in Egypt or the Canadian constitutional talks between premiers and aboriginal leaders. They are confused about how to respond to the trial of Robert Latimer. They quietly attend a vigil for murdered women in early December on the anniversary of the Montreal massacre in 1989, and grieve that the murders have never been mentioned publicly in their church. They need the church to help them pray, care and become involved, but all they hear is enthusiastic encouragement to worship God. The God of our public worship seems abstract, far from the world in which they live.
But there's also good news. The good news is that it's Christmas again. At Christmas, God is revealed in such a radical, surprising way that our worship is transformed. Christmas is the season to celebrate the true and full meaning of worship.
The central Christmas message is this: "The Word became human and lived here on earth among us . . . full of unfailing love and faithfulness" (John 1:14, NLT). That changed our human experience of God, and therefore it changed our worship. The Word became human. The Word did not become an abstract "spiritual Truth" or a proposition. God took human form in Jesus. God came into the world. The everyday experiences of our lives are where God meets us, where our relationship with God is confirmed and where the love of God is demonstrated. This transforms our lives: our concerns about financial security; our grief over a broken friendship; our helplessness in the face of bureaucracies that keep us punching numbers on touch tone phones; our cynicism about those in power who manage an impersonal macro-economy and seem so unmoved by our personal desperate search for work; the confused values we hear expressed in the coffee shop when people debate vengeance against those who do abortions. The Word took human form in the middle of all this.
The world in which we live and the relationships that connect us to others are so important that Jesus once told His friends, "If you are standing before the altar in the Temple, offering a sacrifice to God, and you remember that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice there beside the altar. Go and be reconciled to that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God" (Matthew 5:23-24, NLT). Jesus assumed that people who came to the Temple with a troubled conscience would not tune out their conscience at the gate. We don't leave our worries and hopes in the church parking lot. When Jesus taught His disciples the Lord's Prayer, He included our concerns for food, for our failures, for those who offend and harm us and for the struggles we face in our daily life. That's the stuff of life that we bring with us when we worship. The Bible tells us that God knows and cares about all of that and invites us to bring it with us.
As we bring our world to God in worship, we'll find that the message of Christmas, the incarnation, really is true. God comes into our world, just as Jesus came and brought new life to stables, fishing boats, homes, synagogues and palaces 2000 years ago. It's worth mentioning--and celebrating.
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