wholly, holy worship
In early March, my colleague Jorge Lockward invited me to preach at Church of the Village in New York City, as part of a series focused on worship. You’re welcome to watch my sermon, “Holy, Wholly Worship.”
Read Moremusic that nourishes and sustains
Music-making, especially singing within a spiritual community, is soul food. It shapes and integrates our experience and understanding of the Holy. It gives voice to our heartfelt praise and prayer. It connects us to other voices and bodies around us. It moves energy within a worship space. It engages our whole being - body, mind, breath, spirit. Words and tunes continue to sing in us even when we are not fully conscious of them.
But as I work with congregations around the country, I frequently see that the formative, generative, and enlivening potential of music is unrecognized or diminished. While congregations might be able to articulate a theology of worship (why they sing), their musical practices (how they sing) can be disconnected from, contradict, or subvert, their theology.
Read Morelive into new ways of thinking
Worship is one of the primary places where we enact our relationship with God and others. And more than a form or formula for worship, liturgy is the holy, meaningful work that God’s people do when they gather. Worship isn’t thinking about or talking about God, but is speaking to and listening for Divine. Worship joins breath, voice and body in words and action, embodying deep wisdom about the Holy One and our selves. In worship we become the Body of Christ, a mysterious manifestation of Jesus’ spirit in time and space.
If we “live ourselves into new ways of thinking” as Fr. Richard Rohr asserts, then worship is one of the most formative and integrative things that we can do in Christian community. What we say and sing shapes us; we become what we create together.
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