Life on the Vine

More thoughts from Philip Kenneson's Life on the Vine:

Our gathered worship might also remind us that not all relationships must be rooted in self-interested exchanges. We do not offer our praise and thanksgiving to God because God needs it. God is ceaselessly and eternally praised by innumerable hosts whom we simply join when we lift our voices in praise and adoration. This is not to suggest, of course, that God does not take pleasure in our worship. I suspect, however, that the pleasure that God takes in our worship is inseparable from its being offered freely, from its character as a gift. We do not gather to praise God with an eye toward what we will receive in return, or in order to keep God pacified for another week.

Nor, for that matter, do we ultimately gather merely because "we are supposed to" or in order to make sure that we have checked off each of our five acts of worship for the week. Too often, local congregations have become so concerned with the actual performance of the acts that the significance of the acts (esp. the Lord's Supper) gets lost.

So, what is worship about? Kenneson provides more clues:

We gather first of all out of gratitude, as a response to God's prior activity. We gather to give God praise for creating and sustaining the entire cosmos and for creating us in the divine image in order that we might have communion with God and with one another. We gather in order to give God praise for creating a covenant people, Israel, who would be a light to the nations and through whom all nations would be blessed. We gather to give God praise for sending the Son in the person of Jesus Christ, in order that we might be reconciled to God and the rest of the cosmos. We gather to give God praise for pouring out the Spirit upon the church that we might be the body of Christ for the world.
There are, of course, many more reasons why we might gather to praise God. I hope, however, that the point is clear: in gathering to praise God as God deserves to be praised, we attempt to set aside our self-interestedness and focus our attention on the One who creates and sustains all life. (italics mine, CRC)

What sort of self-interestedness might we bring with us to worship? One that is often overlooked is the idol of precision and of the five acts. When the mere performance of the acts becomes our primary focus, focus on God and his mighty acts can (and often does) become secondary.