Heart & Soul - Part 2 (Worship)
April 24, 2022Today's message was given by Pastor Patrick Tanton. A video of the message can be found here.
Patrick mentioned that the early Christian folks, made up largely of Jewish people, celebrated 7 weeks of Easter. This is Easter to Pentecost, Pentecost being 50 days (about 7 weeks) from Easter. Pente = 50. In Jewish life this would be the period between Passover and Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks (7 weeks, there's that number again!).
Patrick mentioned that "worship" is making a relationship with God #1. One of the things Patrick mentioned is that there are many ways to worship: in song, in prayer, in study, in deed, etc. Worship is not just singing, he said, to which I thought, amen! The following is a personal thing... How/When did the word worship come to mean the singing part of a service and not the whole service? Back in "my day" the whole service was called a worship service and the bulletin for the service was called the Order of Worship. Everything we did during the service (pray, read scripture, sing, recite, sermon, etc.) was worshipful. Of course, the "bulletin" itself has gone the way of the dodo bird, too.
Patrick asked us to ponder what worship looks like in our lives. He noted three aspects: choice, posture, and action.
Choice first... What do you worship first and foremost in life? If it's anything but God, it's idolatrous. And God knows we have lots of idols, very few of which are gold statues on our dressers or in our living rooms. Rather, we worship fame, beauty, education, art, love, reason, even religion can become an idol; any end in itself that is more important than God. This is very Torah. See the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20).
The third point was "Action," or as Patrick noted, "moving toward God." This notion of moving in God's direction is exactly what the Torah describes as becoming holy. To make holy, sanctify, you must get closer to God. If you're getting closer to God, there's probably something you're moving away from? Yes! And in this case, the Torah sees a spectrum from animal through man to God. Moving toward God on that line is becoming holy.
Animal - Man - God
The Torah would absolutely agree with Patrick, "figure out how to move toward God." In fact, the Torah is jam packed with how to do just that in the form of ritual and law and wisdom for living life.
One last thought... Patrick mentioned the Shema (sh'ma, accent at the end), the basic prayer in Jewish life, that starts in Deuteronomy 6:4. The first word of that prayer is the Hebrew word that means "hear" (with an element of "and do"), shema. The Torah is big on the ears and quite leary of the eyes (we'll talk about that at length some day). Also, see a previous discussion we've had about the Shema and how "heart, soul, and mind" is not quite the right translation into modern English, here (last paragraph).