Frequency Worship.com

What do we mean by worship? Worship is not simply a song, a prayer or even meaningful liturgy rich in tradition. Worship isn't an event, a gathering or a church service. Worship is adoration. Worship is compassion. Worship is embodying God's love for us and our love for God.   In essence, worship is a lifestyle.

Reclaiming the true definition of worship is critical. By reducing worship to a music or even an event, we have only helped perpetuate an illusion.  For those who suffer the most, that illusion can be hard to grasp.  The challenge for many today is believing in the possibility that there is a good God; a God who hears our prayers, a God who we can't help but sing and shout about.

In fact, many of my friends around the world have legitimate reasons to question God's goodness. Where is God answering the prayers of children on the streets? Of children forced to sell their bodies in brothels? Of former child soldiers? Of children who are orphaned because of AIDS or HIV-positive themselves?    

Their cries are an invitation to worship in the true meaning of the word. Real worship allows God’s love to break our hearts, compelling us to love God in the parts of the world where God has been forgotten. Reclaiming the existence of a good God in a world that has legitimate reasons to question God's goodness, is a challenge to embody our adoration for our good God.

Suffering, Exploitation and Worship

Years ago while visiting Word Made Flesh staff members Andrea and Andy Baker in El Alto, they took my wife Phileena and me to some of the areas where they work and introduced us to some of their friends.  El Alto is the sprawling Bolivian village that's spilled out of La Paz. “Village” may actually be misleading, since El Alto has outgrown La Paz and continues in its exponential growth. “Village” may also be a generous term, since El Alto may in fact be one of South America’s largest urban slums with nearly one million residents. Urbanization, rural migration to the city center, and chronic poverty feed the bulging shantytown that El Alto has become.

Twenty- three year old Liliana is the one I couldn’t forget. When she was 15, she lost her leg in a car accident. That same year she was raped and her oldest child was conceived during the assault. Her family abandoned her and soon Liliana found herself overwhelmed by intense poverty. Due to her state of malnutrition she and her children became frequently ill, and subsequently overloaded with medical bills.  In an act of desperation, her “friend” brought her to the Ceje in El Alto and helped her get a job.

Liliana started working at Crystal; a local brothel.  She turns tricks for $2-3, her work space is a 6x6 foot room covered with pornographic images. The walls are cracked, and the pink paint is peeling off them. The floor is rough, uneven cement and hanging from the center of the water-damaged ceiling is a single light bulb that casts a dim and depressing mood.

When the four of us showed up one night, she was happy to receive us. She closed the door, although it hangs on its hinges and doesn't keep out the sound of all the foot-traffic of the customers. She then picked up an old plank of wood and wedged it between the door and the floor so that no one would come in and disturb us. But there was nothing she could do to block out the sound of the bed next door as it pounded against the wall over and over.  We sat on the old uncovered mattress that Lilianna had made her bed. My mind couldn't help but think how dirty it must have been and how many tears of pain had been shed on it’s soiled surface.

Liliana wept several times during our short meeting with her. She told us that she believed her 8–year-old daughter was starting to figure out why her mommy was gone every night.  She also showed concern for her son’s education. The last concern she expressed was in regard to herself.  Liliana desperately needed to replace the 8-year-old prosthetic leg that nearly forbid her to walk.

Whenever we tried to wrap up the conversation, she'd open up with another one; anything she could do to keep us there and keep the men out. As we left, she tearfully pleaded with us and defiantly admitted, "I can't do this much longer..."

Phileena then took her hands and said, "You're a beautiful person, and there is hope because God has much better things in store for you. We won't forget you. You'll be in our prayers." Liliana embraced Phileena and wept the cry of an abandoned child, afraid and hopeless.

Even now, her sad eyes haunt me; eyes so full of fear and misery at the young age of 23. She probably never dreamt that this is what life would hold for her.  Still, her prayers go unanswered.

Sometimes, when singing worship songs in a church service, I think of her. I ask myself, "What kinds of songs could Liliana sing or what would she write?"  Could her words ever speak of peace and restoration? 

Could we re-imagine worship as a prayer for justice? A prayer for peace? A prayer for hope?

Worship As Adoration

Of course, all of this starts by learning to love God. Adoration is a posture, compelling and irresistible—something we can't help but offer to the object of our affection. Do we really love God like that? If there were no threat of hell or promise of heaven, would we still love and serve Christ?

Worship must become adoration. This shouldn't be hard for most of us. Generally, I think we mostly identify worship with forms and expressions of adoration. We love God and therefore want to proclaim that love. We find things lovable and irresistible about Christ and can't help but want to offer ourselves back. We adore the kindness, compassion and love of our Father, our Divine Parent.

When we discover these beautiful things of God, we don't have any problem singing about them. Often, the songs even touch us deep in our souls, sometimes eliciting profound emotions.

Adoration does touch us in the soft spots of our heart, but it's more than emotion. It's recognition of truth. It's a response to grace. It's a respect filled with affection.

Worship As Compassion

 Moving from adoration to compassion in worship is a stretch for many of us. But the Scriptures tell us that if we love God, then we'll obey God. If we really adore the beautiful things in God's character, then we are to model and practice those things. If our worship is to be authentic, it has to be embodied in very real ways. Worship as compassion is an invitation to demonstrate our love for Christ by loving God's children.

By making this commitment in worship, we move our theoretical and sometimes rhetorical confessions of God's love, into a felt sense of anticipation. Our compassionate worship leaves us anticipating a response. Anticipating the possibility that what we have experienced in our own faith journeys can become real for someone else. 

Worship as compassion is also an indictment of our reality, testifying to the pain and vulnerability of our humanity. When we see others unjustly suffering under cruel oppression, we know that it's not what God intended or designed. Compassion is what takes us to the next level and compels us to act on what we know.

Worship As Engagement

If compassion is an expression of love, then it must be embodied. The compulsion to move feelings to action is a necessary step in true worship.

Compassion leads us from observing reality to engaging it through a lifestyle of worship. What is a lifestyle of worship? Living worship means we act from a starting point of adoration that is translated through the lens of compassion so that we can re-read reality as a gift of grace. Re-reading reality gives us the chance to discover Christ in it all—the good and the bad. Re-reading reality through worship challenges us to find the nearness of God leading us in all things, recognizing the ordinary and mundane parts of life as opportunities to participate in God's ongoing process of discipleship in our faith journey. Living worship is doing all things unto God, for God, and because of God's love. It is embodying the ideals of our adoration and our understanding of who God is into very real and very practical expressions of God's love.

Living Worship in a Broken World

Joseph, a friend of Jesus, performed a unique act of worship for Christ. He was the man who volunteered his tomb to house the dead body of Christ. After the crucifixion the Scriptures tell us:

“Joseph took the body down, wrapped it in fine linen and laid it in a tomb cut out of rock, where no one had yet been laid. It was Preparation Day, and the Sabbath was about to begin. The women who accompanied Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph, saw the tomb and watched as the body was placed in it. Then they went home to prepare the spices and ointments. But they rested on the Sabbath, according to the Law. On the first day of the week, at the first sign of dawn, the women came to the tomb bringing the spices they had prepared. They found the stone rolled back from the tomb; but when they entered the tomb, they didn’t find the body of Jesus.” (Luke 23:53—24:3, The Inclusive Bible)

I can’t imagine how brutal a crucifixion must have been. I can’t imagine how thick the nails had to be to hold a struggling human body to boards or a tree all day long. I can’t imagine that once Christ died, the women would have had the strength to remove those nails themselves. I know I couldn’t have done it.

It’s terrible to imagine how to remove a dead body from a cross. I can only guess that they would have had to either pull the nails out, aggravating the wounds even more, or pull the body off, leaving the nails embedded in the cross. Either way, the holes in the corpse of Christ, those in his hands or wrists and feet or ankles, must have been gaping, atrocious. I wonder what happened to such gaping holes in the corpse over the course of the 40 hours Christ’s body was dead.

Because Jesus’ death coincided with the commencement of the Sabbath, his corpse was laid in a tomb unattended. The rules regulating activity on the Sabbath prevented the women from immediately dressing what must have been gaping holes in Christ’s body.

The spices were being prepared by the women to be packed into the open wounds of Jesus’ corpse. Upon arriving at the tomb, spices in hand, they were shocked to find his corpse missing. 

The symbols here—the Sabbath, the perfumes and spices, the wounds, the corpse of Christ—are important. The Sabbath rest is a contemplative posture. They prepare the perfumes and spices in a state of contemplative stillness and grieving. The women are doing so as a functional deterrent, to tidy up a decaying corpse. But they are also using materials that are commonly employed as symbols in worship. Spices, perfumes, myrrh, frankincense and other incenses are mentioned throughout Scripture in the context of prayers, offerings and worship. The Bible even tells us that these symbols are present before the throne of God: “golden bowls filled with incense, which are the prayers of God’s holy people” (Revelation 5:8 TIB).

The women find the tomb empty. Christ has come back to life. But we come to find that his resurrected body still bears those open wounds—those still-fresh lacerations, cuts, gashes and holes.

I have sometimes wondered why, in the great miracle of the resurrection, God didn’t heal all the damage done to Christ’s physical body? We discover the answer to this when the news gets out that Jesus is back. One of his disciples, Thomas, has questions. In John 20 he says, “I’ll never believe it without putting my finger in the nail marks and my hand into the spear wound” (v. 25 TIB).

Poor Thomas: Because of that statement, he’ll forever be condemned as “the doubter.” But I’m not exactly sure he doubted.

The wounds were the proof of the crucifixion. And the incident is central to history. Maybe Thomas understood the theological need for Jesus’ wounds to be real; maybe he simply wanted his hopes verified. I feel like I can understand. The presence of Jesus’ wounds seemed to be proof to Thomas that Jesus was the Messiah. The man who always took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it, now stood before him as the Broken One. The bread, incarnate in the resurrected body of Christ, had to be broken so that in the miracle of the resurrection, it could be shared with all. Thomas’ questions, rather than an indication of doubt, might have been an expression of hope for the Broken One on the other side of the cross.

The body, is in fact central to this story—both the corpse and the resurrected body of Christ. The metaphor rings throughout Scripture that the worshiping community of Christ, is like that of the human body:

“The body is one, even though it has many parts; all the parts—many though they are—comprise a single body. And so it is with Christ … God put all the different parts into one body on purpose. If all the parts were alike, where would the body be? They are, indeed, many different members but one body… And even those members of the body which seem less important are in fact indispensable. We honor the members we consider less honorable by clothing them with greater care, thus bestowing on the less presentable a propriety which the more presentable do not need. God has so constructed the body as to give greater honor to the lowly members, that there may be no dissension in the body, but that all the members may be concerned for one another. If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members share its joy. You, then, are the body of Christ, and each of you is a member of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:12;18-20;22-27 TIB)

Our prayers, our worship, our praxis of living a simple spirituality and a grounded theology are all, in a sense, attempts to tend to Christ’s open wounds. Unless we have the courage to put our hands into the hurting places of Christ’s body—the hurting places of the world—the world will have no reason to trust that God is truly alive.

Not long after our visit to Liliana’s brothel, Phileena and I found ourselves in an old, dilapidated building in the center of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Sitting in a circle with friends, we reflected on the story of Christ’s resurrected corpse, considering the details and trying to figure out what they represented. With us, were a group of former child soldiers who lived on the streets.  All of them had seen the ghastly wounds of many in the midst of civil war.

As I spoke to them of the wounds in Christ’s corpse, I asked them to help me figure out where the open wounds of Christ would be today?  Quietly, insightfully, profoundly, they touched their own chests and said, “We are the open wounds in this body of Christ. We are forgotten, orphaned, and homeless.”

Thomas got a bad wrap for not having faith. But he was on to something. We must ask the hard questions, we must place ourselves in the world and touch our friends who are suffering, touch their wounds and ultimately touch the wounds of Christ. Thomas’ questions still echo today.

Naming these wounds involves a contemplative discovery that ultimately leads to newness in our own vision. Where do we find the motivation to respond? Where do we find the courage to face these wounds? Naming them brings us into a new community with the broken. We befriend those who have been broken by the world we inhabit, and in learning their pain we come to learn of our own brokenness. And as Jesus promised his disciples, in the midst of any such broken community, He will be there.

Thomas’ story ends well. A week after Thomas states his desire to see and touch the wounds, we find him hanging out with the other disciples behind a locked door. Suddenly Christ is among them, presenting his wounds, allowing them to believe. Thomas recognizes him and proclaims, “My Lord and my God!” Thomas, humbled in the presence of his community, is met with a simple presentation from Jesus: “Look at my hands and my feet; it is I, really. Touch me and see” (Luke 24:39 TIB). Thomas’ aloof skepticism is broken as he submits to this broken Jesus, whom he proclaims as Lord and God. Thomas’s eyes are opened; he was blind, but now can see.

Today, years after meeting Liliana, she still seems to follow me.  I often think of her and wonder where she’s at and what she’s doing. Liliana is also an open wound of Christ in his resurrected body—the church. In our adoration can we pray for the courage to find a real compassion for her? A compassion that moves us to embody God’s love for her as a tangible act of worship?

Liliana has legitimate reasons to question the possibility of God’s goodness. May we learn to let our worship be a way of life that proclaims God’s goodness in the world—especially the world that oppresses God’s children like Liliana.

Let us worship.

An activist, author, visionary and public speaker, Christopher L. Heuertz has traveled with his wife, Phileena, through nearly 70 countries working with the most vulnerable of the world's poor—Roma (gypsies), children with AIDS, prostituted women and girls, recovering drug addicts, children on the streets, unreached people and refugees. Chris has led the Word Made Flesh community as the International Executive Director since 1996. His first book, Simple Spirituality: Learning to See God in a Broken World (InterVarsity Press 2008) is now available. He and Phileena reside in Omaha, Nebraska.