The Maturity Needed for Intelligent Worship

January 10, 1960
Akron

Not all worship is intelligent; all intellectualism is not worshipful, but when one can achieve the splendor of worship without deserting reason and common-sense, then human aspiration reaches a high plateau.

Professor J. Paul Williams of Mt. Holyoke College told the story of the clergyman who advertised his religious service with the following musical jingle (to the tune of LITTLE BROWN JUG)

“Mother knows what’s good for you,
Go to church like she taught you to.
Brother, we’ve an empty pew,
Plainly labeled Y.O.U.”

This is a call to worship, but is it an intelligent invitation?

In a fundamentalist Christian church, prior to the beginning of Easter Sunday worship, an evangelist concealed himself in a coffin placed in the chancel. In the midst of the service, he jumped out of the coffin, shouting, “Resurrection day has come.” Such worship has the strong flavor of melodrama – but is it reasonable?

On the other hand, a scholarly report may be stimulating to the mind as it provokes a dialogue of academic assertions, but may fall to strike the chords of emotion. It is not inaccurate to describe violin music as sound produced by scraping horsehair across catgut which has been stretched tightly over some glued together pieces of wood. But does such a description convey accurately the total experience of hearing a concert master produce from his Stradivarius the creation of a great composer?

Maturity is a growing development of mind and a harmonious fullness of emotional experiences. If worship in some way is an encapsulating of life’s full dimensions, then it will be a strong interlacing of intelligence and feeling, with neither element doing violence to the other.

Therefore, let us consider what worship is and how an ancient definition points to those values in intelligent worship which demand both reason and maturity. These values will be described as discrimination, cultivation, and celebration.

All group experiences change in method and motive. Worship is no exception to this dynamic quality of human culture.

In ancient days in the Near-East, worship had the cultural hallmark of slave and master. The worshipers were bond-servants; the gods were masters. Ancient instructions for worship carry orders. “Is the disposition of men and gods different? No...When a slave stands before the master, he is washed and wears clean clothes; he gives the god something to drink and something to eat and his master is gracious to the servant. If the slave annoys the master or is neglectful...the gods either kill him or injure his nose, yes, and ears.”

Worship in those days had two basic duties.: first, to avoid doing that which annoys the gods; second, to perform those acts which please the gods. In these two requirements may reside some of the origins [of] later ritual practice – cleansing rituals and ceremonial purifications, such as baptism. Even the latterday American ritual of “Sunday clothes” may have faint but related cultural roots in the primitive desire not to annoy the gods with dirt or rags. From the second fundamental of pleasing the gods, may have grown customs of sacrifice, grain offerings and grandiloquent temples and altars.

Alfred North Whitehead has pointed out that group worship is one element in human experience which persistently shows an upward trend.

Amos, 8th century Hebrew prophet of righteousness insisted that morality is essential to honest worship. He doubted that the sacrifice of animals has any religious value for worship. Animal sacrifice was then the customary mode of worship. Among the wealthy, animal sacrifice was a very satisfactory way in which to fulfill religious obligations, for the rich deprived themselves of no necessity when they offered a bull or lamb on the altar of God. Amos shocked them by insisting that God wanted no feast or sacrifice -- “let righteousness pour down as a mighty stream.”

Amos and his successors in the line of the Hebrew ethical prophets, Hosea, Jeremiah, Micah, Isaiah had remarkable, continuing influence on religious practices. They insisted that the tests of religious honesty and devotion were not acts of outward piety, but one’s attitude in all aspects of the conduct of life. Some of you will remember one of Larry Abbott’s favorite stories about the visitor who inquired at the church door when the service would begin. He was answered by a forthright usher, “the service begins when the meeting is over.” Worship was not an end in itself for the Hebrew prophets, but a spontaneous, willing expression of living purposefully in order to achieve goals of uprightness and service.

To worship is to stake a claim on the highest area of human aspiration and to permit the influence of the highest [to] be the ground for interpreting answers to the difficult dilemmas about the origin of life and the regulating of human affairs.

The Apostle Paul asserted a startlingly relevant definition of intelligent worship, particularly as translated by J.B. Phillips in THE NEW TESTAMENT IN MODERN ENGLISH (Romans 12/1 ff.)

“With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give your bodies as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him. Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its mold, but let God remold your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves toward the goal of true maturity.”

Paul is saying that freedom is a condition of intelligent worship because inward integrity which resists the pressure of outward conforming influences will help us toward the goal of true maturity. We grow by honest non-conformity.

Who can deny that in a world tense with fears, anxious with our strivings and confusing with buzz and clamor that we need the re-creating power of acts of intelligent worship? A news story from London this week (NYT 1/5/60) quotes a warning that we may be turned into a race of shouting maniacs.

Sir Walter Fergusson Hannay, a prominent physician and chairman of Britain’s Noise-Abatement Society, attributes the prevalence of bad manners and irritated dispositions to “the vacuum cleaners that whine at men’s feet and the jet planes that scream overhead.”

When our spiritual stamina is depleted by noise, fear, gloom, we need intelligent worship to restore healthy imagination, to strengthen our desire to understand, to find safe harbor in emotional storm and to again come to terms with life’s important duties.

One measure of intelligent worship is the power to discriminate. This word is used in its basic sense of “careful distinction” not its current usage which infers bigotry. To discriminate in worship is to discern what words and ceremonies still have inspiring and reconciling power for you.

Because another faith indulges in ceremonies which seem primitive or pointless to us, means neither that we must pursue the path of bigotry nor that we must conclude that the habit of worship is an outworn cult as far as educated people are concerned.

In a free church which provides hospitable atmosphere for experiment in worship, we can seek out those modes of artistic expression and ethical prophecy which will enable us to share the wonder of worship. We need not recite a rosary or bow the knee to images to find emotional pathways to the “Mysterious Presence, Source of All.” All persistent experimenters will blunder more frequently than succeed, but when the worship plan molds feeling, thought and commitment in a poignant or joyful group experience, then the venture in new formula has been rewarding.

Our faith puts greater weight on the side of the optimistic view of human nature. Finding neither relevance nor historical foundation for truth to the doctrine that nature is inescapably depraved and powerless to exert any redemptive power, we are exposed to another hazard -- that of a naive, passive sentimentality believing everything will always be good and sweet in a rose-colored world.

Intelligent worship will discriminate between good and evil, not blink the realities of fears and suffering and never suppress the inevitability of tragedy and death. Only services touched with hope and conditioned by reality will release the imprisoned splendor of high worship.

The life of Albert Camus is a vivid illustration of the need to recognize distinctions. Camus, who died so tragically this week, recognized the dirt, suffering pain and anguish involved in the experience of living. His writings will endure long after most of the literature of our age has been filed and forgotten. When he accepted the Nobel Prize in 1957, Albert Camus said, “(MY) generation has had to re-establish, both within and without itself, a little of what constitutes the dignity of life and death.”

Camus had a discriminating phrase which was much like Paul’s appraisal of intelligent worship. Camus said, following a painful re-appraisal of his philosophy, “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.”

To cultivate is a second measure of intelligent worship. The Latin root for worship is CULTUS, and the word has two meanings. The first was adoration of deity. The second meaning for CULTUS was the tilling of a field or the care of a human body.

It may be said, then, that the maturity needed for intelligent worship requires preparation or there will be no growth.

Jesus pointed to this when he said in the Sermon on the Mount, (Mtt. 5/23), “If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift before the altar and go; first be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”

As one enters worship, one cannot look back in meanness at his fellow or cherish feelings of scorn or hatred. When one does, there is only barren soil. To cultivate a receptiveness for worship, one must prepare, by the inner disciplines of reconciliation with, acceptance of and empathy with the feelings of persons who disturb us. For our self wit [will?] respond to the preparation if the soil is healthily ready for deep roots and new growth. Hate destroys spiritual health.

It was said of the famous philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, that on his daily walks he formed the habit of thinking of his problems while looking at his neighbor’s weather-vane. When the neighbor took down the weather-vane, Kant considered suing, because he claimed that the absence of the weather-vane interfered with his work.

The cultivation of worship is like that. It needs the seed-starter of self-honesty and acceptance and forgiveness of any real or fancied injuries by others.

A third function of intelligent worship is to celebrate. We will not achieve religious maturity until we can raise the songs and voice the praise of the great festival times of man. Festivals of seed-time and harvest may now be but faint memory tracks for city people, but the basic rhythms of the seasons still pulse through our blood.

The conviction persists among many of us that we will not know the deep edge of religious feeling until we are persuaded that the reverent celebration of life has a more profound origin than habit or social pressure.

Our need to refine old ceremonies and intensify the religious meaning for ourselves of the ritual celebrations of Autumn, Christmas, Easter and Spring does not lessen with the urbanization of an industrial civilization. We still need to be washed by the full tides of human emotion, which we feel at the great human crises of birth, christening, adolescence, marriage and death. We will be ignorant of the richness of the human cycle if we fail to perform publically, with ever more appropriate rituals, the swing of the seasons and the pageant of man.

Discriminate, cultivate, celebrate, for as Emerson said, “Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending from we known not whence.”

In 63 BC, a Roman general at the head of conquering [legi]ons triumphed over an independent Israel. But Pompey did not stop with geographical conquest for he wanted the God of Israel as well. The historian, Tacitus, told us that this rude soldier entered the Temple at Jerusalem and insisted that he be escorted into the most sacred place of the Jews, the inner shrine, the holy of holies. Therein no person ever entered, except the high priest, and he but once a year. Pompey had no consideration for the sanctity of the shrine. He went in – he wanted to see and touch the Hebrew god, Yahveh -- perhaps bring Yahveh to Rome, as so many Asian idols and their cults had been carried to Rome by returning generals. Pompey entered the holy of holies, and tore away the veil. There was nothing in the holy of holies – it was empty of any material religious relic or symbol.

Pompey's motives may have been those of a brutal conqueror, insensitive to the awe and love with which the Jews worshiped Yahveh. On the other hand, perhaps this calloused soldier was seeking something he had never found in the Roman world of many deities and idols. Perhaps Pompey was seeking something worth worshiping Perhaps he could not comprehend the Hebrew attitude toward religion, expressed by Jesus, years later, “God is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and truth.”

Men have always sought out that which they could worship. Man seems incomplete unless he can express his respect, wonder and love for some superb concept of value – to some idea of God or some concept of purpose, “over all and through all and in all.” William Wordsworth expressed that longing when he wrote,

“I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is in the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”