Worship

Gospel Reading: Matthew 18.15-20
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

My daughter Kate and her friend Clare are spies. Which means, of course, they have invented a code language. No respectable spy is without a code language. 

Most correspondence-written or verbal-between Kate and Clare includes the phrase "doog si efil". You won't need a Cracker Jack decoder ring to break this one. You don't need to speak pig latin. "Doog si efil" is the reverse of their favorite line of t-shirts: "Life is Good".

The fact that encoding and decoding is irresistable to kids is worth noticing, I think. There are any number of reasons this is so. Besides the mystique of spy work in general, there is something satisfying about having the answer to something that mystifies everybody else. It' s all great fun. 

But I think our encoding/decoding instincts lead us astray as soon as we stop playing. Or as soon as we don't realize we're playing.

Let's turn to the topic o' the blog: worship. One view of worship is as a very serious, adult kind of encoding. There's an idea that we intend to deliver. Let's say the idea is that God loves you. Well, we could send this message in an email or spraypaint it on a bridge. But we choose to deliver it along with smoke and bows and chants and hand gestures, presumably because each of these has encoded some bit of information about the mystery itself. 

Our assumption that this is so is made plain by almost every newcomer to liturgical worship. The question we all want answered is "What does it mean when....?" Whether we're talking about kneeling or making the sign of the cross or being delivered into the chancel on a zip line, our first instinct is to ask what something means. But a better first question might be "What does it do when..."

We tend to assume that worship is an encoded mystery. But worship is an embodied mystery. 

When we think we're encoding the faith in the vestments and the gestures and the words of our worship they are quickly put to use for "didactic purposes", as Kathleen Norris says. When put to use to deliver someone's agenda, liturgy stops being the work of the people and becomes a kind of work on the people. 

Maybe this is why worship has long been described as a kind of holy play. Kids don't play spies in order to gain information. Kids aren't so interested in what that encoded secret message actually means. They play because they like what the game does to them. They like inhabiting a world of mysterious unsolved things. Once the mystery is solved, the game is over.

And so it is with faith and worship. Worship is a way of inhabiting a mystery, not solving one. Worship isn't a code, and it's not just a pretty way to deliver important information about God to us. Liturgy can never be reduced to the information it delivers. Once the mystery is solved, the game is over.

Kate and Clare don't play spies to learn that "Life is Good". They play because life is good when you're a spy. Maybe that's the best reason to worship as well.