But How Will We Worship Week 5 - July 12, 2020

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Psalm 150

Praise and worship, in the OT, is a kinetic act. It’s not a sit and be a quiet kind of thing. It’s a bodily action. The Israelites worshiped with dancing, with music, with instruments, with twirling and jumping, with kneeling down, bowing, lying prostrate on the ground. They were put your whole self in the kind of people!

It’ so interesting to me that over the centuries this type of full-body worship has been stripped from us. I mean, if we were up here dancing and leaping and banging drums and clanging cymbals, a bunch of you would think we were carelessly and irreverently worshipping God. Right?

Well, you probably wouldn’t even call it worship. Right? Because worship isn’t some crazy dance party or noisy raucous song.

Worship is reverent. Which, by that, we mean calm, quiet, sedate, and reserved. Don’t we?

But the scriptures challenge that. If we dig into the Hebrew, we find that worshipping God, praising God wasn’t just with our mind or our mouth it was with the body.

Yadah
Barak
Shachah
Hagag
Sabab
Raqad
Qippus
Dillug
Kirker
Pizzez
Pasah
Mahol
Siheq

These are the words in the Hebrew, often translated for us as praise or worship, but if you dig into the language a bit, you’ll find that they have this movement associated with them too...different movements for different ones, but as I highlighted for the kids...jumping dance, whirling dance, skipping dance, dancing like a calf, or ram or sheep, bowing, prostrating oneself, lifting your hands, saluting.

Do you hear it? There is not worship that does not include our whole being. For we are made by God, mind, spirit, and BODY, and we are to praise God with our whole selves.

Now, of the possibilities, dancing probably feels the most radical, especially if you are a life long Methodist. Dancing with our bodies?...but how? Am I even coordinated enough to dance or will I look like a fool? That’s our real concern, isn’t it?

But what if we could let that go? What if we could worship God with abandon?

When I was in seminary, I was assigned to do my internship at a place called Carpenter’s House. It was a rehab facility for men with both drug and alcohol addiction. Each Wednesday I would drive out with a fellow seminarian and we would go to worship, then a group session, and then we would offer individual counseling sessions to any of the men who needed a listening and pastoral ear. There are plenty of things that I learned in that place. But for today, I want to focus on this. My friend Eric and I regularly arrived in time for worship. So we would head down the hall to the chapel and slip into a pew for worship. And those men sang. You could hear them the whole time you walked down the hall to approach the chapel. They sang at the top of their lungs with all their hearts, and completely off-key. They were terrible singers—at least as far as the art of singing is concerned.

How many of you have ever seen the movie “The Little Mermaid”? Do you remember Skuttle? He’s the seagull. He loved to sing. But it was so off-key you could hardly call it singing. It was more like warbling. (model it) That’s what these men sounded like. Off-key. Offbeat. Loud. And proud. And, to be honest, it was glorious. It was glorious because they were so genuine in praising God. They sang because they meant the words, not because they had something to prove or because they cared what their neighbor thought. They simply sang to praise God.

I’m grateful for those men, for a lot of reasons. They taught me a lot and trusted me with a lot. And they transformed the shape of my ministry and my understanding of the world. And, they gave me a beautiful witness of faith—praising God with your whole heart no matter what it sounds like to people around you. Because no matter what it sounds like on earth, it’s a sweet sweet sound to God in heaven.

What if we could give ourselves permission to worship like that? Just give ourselves over in worship….with our bodies and with our voices in praise of God and who cares what it sounds like to the people around you? Who cares if you look like a fool twirling around your living room today? What if you could just worship God with your whole self? What if you could give yourself over to truly feel the Spirit during worship?

Some of you might raise your hands? Some of you might sway a little….it’s ok to take small steps, you don’t have to go all out the first day dancing around like a whirling dervish. =)

What if you started with just one of the things here in the psalm?
Grab a kazoo
Grab a pot and a wooden spoon
Grab two spoons
Grab a drum
Clap your hands
Lift your voice
Shout Hosanna!

Whatever it is you are invited to do it to praise God….here, there, outside, inside, in high times and low times….with abandon.