Just a quote today, from an excelent multi-denominational discussion on salvation over at internetmonk.com. This comes fromWilliam Cwirla, a Lutheran pastor:
"As a sacramental aside, worship is a kairotic moment in chronos, an eternal moment in historical time and place. “Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). Every act of God, whether the preaching of the good news of salvation or the application of salvation in Baptism or the Holy Supper is a kairotic moment of salvation in chronological time and place. The eternal breaks in to the temporal, the infinite resides in the finite, and all that God has done for us and for our salvation is brought to bear on us in our own here and now."
I love the almost paradoxical relationship of chronos (our own chronological time) and kairos (God's infinate time). Makes me feel like the Red Queen (or was that the White Queen, I can't keep them strait.)
30 January 2009
28 January 2009
Why do we Worship?
From Planet Narnia, by Michael Ward:
'Enjoyment,' for Lewis, was to be distinguished from 'Contemplation,' a distinction he first encountered in 1924 in the work of the philosopher, Samuel Alexander... He applied what we might call 'the Alexander technique' to many departments of life in addition to literary criticism and he thought it so useful that he eventually wrote his own essay on the subject, 'Meditation in a Tool-shed,' in which he recast 'Contemplation' and 'Enjoyment' as follows:
"I was standing today in the dark tool-shed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.
Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no tool-shed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, ninety-odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences."
'Looking along the beam' is what Alexander had called 'Enjoyment' (participant, inhabited, personal, committed knowledge) and 'looking at the beam' is what he had called 'Contemplation' (abstract, external, impersonal, uninvolved knowledge.) For Lewis, this distinction was so fundamental that he was prepared to divide conscious knowledge accordingly: 'Instead of twofold division into Conscious and Unconscious, we need a three-fold division: the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated.'
For a long time now I have been asking myself "What is worship? How do we do it? What's the whole point of it anyway?" We come together and we do all these things, and not any of them can by itself be called worship. Certainly music, by itself, is not the same thing as worship. And neither are sermons or scripture readings or anything else. It all appeared to be a matter of attitude, of motivation, and even sometimes of emotion. And it was frustrating, because I had used to understand this intuitively, but once I asked myself the question my understanding slipped from my grasp. I could still do worship, I could still assess it, boy could I still do that, but I could no longer understand it.
And then, last night, as I read the above passage, it struck me, and my understanding came rushing back, more fully formed than before.
Worship is knowing God.
Worship is knowing God by Enjoyment of Him. It is the "participant, inhabited, personal, committed knowledge." We engage with Him and so he reveals himself to us through love and interaction. It is like the life of a married couple. They know each other through their enjoyment. And our enjoyment of God through worship should be not only in this technical sense but in the common sense that we delight in Him and in being with Him. This is what worship is. Almost everything else we may do in the Church is Contemplation, certainly Bible studies are, and those things are very important and nessecary, but with out the Enjoyment, without the Worship, we can never fully and truly know our God.
'Enjoyment,' for Lewis, was to be distinguished from 'Contemplation,' a distinction he first encountered in 1924 in the work of the philosopher, Samuel Alexander... He applied what we might call 'the Alexander technique' to many departments of life in addition to literary criticism and he thought it so useful that he eventually wrote his own essay on the subject, 'Meditation in a Tool-shed,' in which he recast 'Contemplation' and 'Enjoyment' as follows:
"I was standing today in the dark tool-shed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.
Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no tool-shed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, ninety-odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences."
'Looking along the beam' is what Alexander had called 'Enjoyment' (participant, inhabited, personal, committed knowledge) and 'looking at the beam' is what he had called 'Contemplation' (abstract, external, impersonal, uninvolved knowledge.) For Lewis, this distinction was so fundamental that he was prepared to divide conscious knowledge accordingly: 'Instead of twofold division into Conscious and Unconscious, we need a three-fold division: the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated.'
For a long time now I have been asking myself "What is worship? How do we do it? What's the whole point of it anyway?" We come together and we do all these things, and not any of them can by itself be called worship. Certainly music, by itself, is not the same thing as worship. And neither are sermons or scripture readings or anything else. It all appeared to be a matter of attitude, of motivation, and even sometimes of emotion. And it was frustrating, because I had used to understand this intuitively, but once I asked myself the question my understanding slipped from my grasp. I could still do worship, I could still assess it, boy could I still do that, but I could no longer understand it.
And then, last night, as I read the above passage, it struck me, and my understanding came rushing back, more fully formed than before.
Worship is knowing God.
Worship is knowing God by Enjoyment of Him. It is the "participant, inhabited, personal, committed knowledge." We engage with Him and so he reveals himself to us through love and interaction. It is like the life of a married couple. They know each other through their enjoyment. And our enjoyment of God through worship should be not only in this technical sense but in the common sense that we delight in Him and in being with Him. This is what worship is. Almost everything else we may do in the Church is Contemplation, certainly Bible studies are, and those things are very important and nessecary, but with out the Enjoyment, without the Worship, we can never fully and truly know our God.
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