I get emails —
It is my belief that worship is more of a lifestyle than an event. That being said, have you ever written anything regarding body language/posture as we worship? I’m thinking of the broad spectrum of what I consider worship, as well as the corporate assembly. (Remember that I’m from the background of singing “Hallelujah” in a song with the same intonation as used in a dirge ~ almost).
It has made sense to me (partly as a result of recent TV sports-overload during the holidays) that body language is simply an extension of the emotion/ feeling/passion felt by the participants ~ including fans. … If it doesn’t make sense to me, then I don’t care who does it ~ I won’t. But it’s beginning to make sense. Do I make sense in all of this? 🙂 I guess part of my desire here is to be able to defend rationally (even to myself) practices that will draw fire from other dirge singers.
I know that you are way ahead of me in this. At my home church there is some hand-raising, a smattering of clapping (mostly among young) and such. Nothing is frowned upon there, but it still has to be rational for me to give in to the urges I sometimes have.
So I’m sick, barely able to type subject and verb, and I’m taking these powerful drugs that swing my mood about every 10 or 15 minutes.
Sorry. You’ll have to hear from seven different moods of Jay to get the full picture of what I think. (And please recognize that my moods have nothing to do with you or your question. It really is the drugs.)
Mood, the First
It’s an interesting question. Obviously, the correct approach is to see what divine authority we have for how to stand or sit in church. After all, if God had no opinion on the matter, we could sing standing on our heads!
Let’s see. There’s —
(1Ti 2:8 ESV) 8 I desire then that in every place the men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling;
Paul gives men (males) express authority to pray by lifting their hands toward heaven, in the traditional Jewish mode. “Every place” emphasizes the universality of the command. The “without anger or quarreling” part has, of course, been repealed.
Paul also records bowing toward God as a posture for worship —
(Eph 3:14 ESV) 14 For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, …
(Phi 2:9-11 ESV) 9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Of course, this is merely authority to bow, not a command, despite the phrase “so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow.” “Bow” should be taken as metaphoric, because there’s an even higher command —
Thou shalt do nothing at church that makes older members uncomfortable.
This command is, of course, of the very first order of commands, as the comfort of our older members is vastly more important than such secondary issues as obedience.
Close behind is the biblically mandated rule —
Thou shalt do nothing that might make people think you’re Pentecostal.
Sorry. Sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Someone sent me a note about a “men’s business meeting” and that, together with the post-surgical pain pills, sent me tripping back to the 1950s.
And yet it’s hard to see how, in a CENI culture, lifting holy hands to God is not considered mandatory. I mean, we have authority for that posture. Maybe some others. We have no authority for sitting on a padded pew and staring at the floor. Why do we act in a way that plainly lacks authority when there are postures with clear scriptural authority?
Well, it’s because CENI is and always has been a post hoc rationalization, where we justify what we want to do for entirely different reasons than the real ones. (Ask yourself what percentage of CENI splits have to do with how we spend church money?) We don’t want to lift holy hands, and so CENI doesn’t apply.
Well, you know at once, this is a church of Christ blog.
Can I have some of those drugs? Legally of course! Good stuff you have written!
It seems, at first, quite sad that we who have grown up in the Church of Christ are constantly asking, “Is this OK? Is that allowed? How much of this and how much of that can we do?” It is our baggage, and God bless us, please! If grace is needed anywhere it is needed in the minds and hearts of those whose most profound theological question is, “Can we do this?”.
I know how heavy this baggage can be. Even now, when reading scripture, I sometimes find myself tensing up when coming across those passages that our “grand champion debaters” used as ammo, finding myself over-thinking how I would answer these people if they were standing before me firing one “scriptural cannon ball” after another; knowing that if my Methodist and Episcopal sisters and brothers knew what was going on in my mind, they would ask me, “Are you serious? Why does that bother you?”.
So, the reality is, “Proper Posture for Worship” remains one our questions for the ages. Please believe me, this is not a criticism of Jay, the sender of the email, or anyone else…this is US, whether some of us are still a part of us or not. And my conclusion is this: maybe this is the cross, or a piece of it, that we are called to bear. Maybe this cross, when accepted as such, is what makes us more compassionate to those who seem confused and angered by all the religious hypocrisy and quackery that gets passed off as “the gospel of Jesus”. It should make us a more tender people, and God knows I need to be more tender today than I was yesterday, every day. So, God bless the sender of the email, God bless Jay, and God bless us.
It would be good if ALL of us who love Jesus would realize that the New Covenant is not a law code. Some imagine that we are only allowed to do what we are told we MUST do. They do not understand the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This is funny, because in the culture I grew up in, direct eye contact was inappropriate, in general. So the “proper” posture for church WAS sitting and looking at the floor. Or staring out the window. Or anywhere except at the preacher. It was also appropriate to interrupt the preacher at any time with a question (even one not related to the sermon), or for two people to get up and go off to one side, because they heard something in the sermon that they wanted to talk about. But we sat in a circle, NOT in straight rows.
But we would have had an interesting conversation if someone had decided to “lift holy hands.” And we would have considered all the same scriptures.
So much for being a body (or a family)when the body parts don’t communicate with one another…. how does one celebrate the LS – a communal activity – when everyone is silently communing with God but no-one is communing with each other…
The only examples we find in apostolic writing about partaking of the Lord’s Supper has the brethren eating a MEAL together, a SUPPER rather than a rite, a ceremony, a ritual. During a meal, there’s time for fellowship as well as for together remembering and reminding others of what Jesus said and did.
Ray wrote,
Exactly. This first hit me when I was studying the Passover celebration. The Jews consider the Passover as of great importance and seriousness, but it’s a family meal and involves celebration. Children talk and ask questions. The children eat with parents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passover_Seder#Focus_on_the_children
We argue over whether children should partake of communion and whether to stare at the floor or study the Bible or what — while the Passover, from which we take communion, was a meal that carried with it a story that defined the people who took it.
True restoration would call for us to move the Lord’s Supper to our small groups and houses and eat together, sharing bread and wine and remembering together the story of our atonement. There is so much we could do if we weren’t afraid of the criticism we’d suffer for doing it right. Tradition trumps truth.
Wendy,
It’s obvious. To avoid the sin of eating and drinking separately, because this is to ignore our brothers and sisters, we carefully eat and drink simultaneously while ignoring each other.
We gather in order to exclude one another from our private meditations.
We are a strange group indeed.
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We have adopted the multiplex theater model of worship: find a seat at the last minute, don’t talk to anyone or you’ll get shushed. Watch the performance in silence, speak to a friend if you happen to bump into him on the way out of the theater, ignore the people leaving all the other theaters at the same time, and try to beat the lot of them to the parking lot– and subsequently, to Denny’s.
If we could just institute pre-show ticketing, we’d have it locked.
Why do we do it this way? Because this is the way we do it.
“What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching…” –2 Tim 1:13
Charles,
your reference to multiplex theater model reminded me of the shooting in the theater by the gun-carrying person because the cellphone carrying person texted. The same rules applied there.
Watch the performance in silence. Ignore the people leaving the theater. Speak only to a friend if you bump into him. If carried to its worst end, there may end up being a shooting in a church service because someone texted, or someone whispered loudly to the one next to them, or some other offence. We really do need to begin eating and drinking together more to lessen the walls of silence we build around ourselves.
I have a question to those who advocate having a “larger meal” between the eating of the bread in memory and drinking of the cup in memory of our Lord. Are we in SIN if we just eat the bread and drink the cup in memory of Jesus WITHOUT the common meal in between? I ask this question because some are condemning churches that continue in the traditional manner.
Raymond,
Thanks for a thought-provoking question. Please be patient. I think this merits a response too long for the comments because your question gets to the heart of the division within the Restoration Movement. I would not want to let this question slip past unremarked.
While I would not deny that some condemn traditional habits– so much cross-condemnation goes around that it hits about every topic– I would suggest that we sometimes conflate condemnation with challenging or questioning. I do not condemn my brothers, period. Whatever their habit involving the Lord’s Supper. We need not dig opposing trenches from which to lob shells at other positions, nor to protect ourselves. We can sincerely call certain practices into question whether from concern about the fundamental reasons behind them, or simply in an effort to encourage freedom to be led by the Spirit in a variety of ways.
Don’t they KILL and ROAST the Passover lamb. Notes I have read is that they light a candle and search for leaven in silence. After Supper probably means that the Feast of Unleavened Bread was celebrated after the Passover. Jesus would become the true Passover.
The Jewish Passover was derived from Babylon where everyone, even children, were to get so drunk they couldn’t tell one person from another. Scripture makes the point of saying “fruit of the vine” and not wine. Esther turned the table during the Babylon celebration.
In 1 Corinthians 11 Paul said that their services did more harm than good and says that the supper is to show forth or PREACH the Death of Christ. That might not call for celebration. If we fully grasp that Jesus died and PAID IT ALL then Isaiah 58 has Christ saying that in the true REST, then and now, we should not seek our own pleasure or even speak our own words. From the wilderness onward, the command was to PREACH the Word by READING the Word for Comfort and Doctrine: that is what Paul commanded Timothy.
Habakkuk 2:14 For the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.
Habakkuk 2:15 Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on their nakedness!
Again, the Spirit OF Christ defined the true REST:
Habakkuk 2:19 Woe unto him that saith to the wood, Awake; to the dumb stone, Arise, it shall teach! Behold, it is laid over with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in the midst of it.
Habakkuk 2:20 But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him
Paul said that we should pray for peace and silence by all so that “we might all be saved and come to a knowledge of the Truth.” That was a one-piece pattern for the Church in the Wilderness were work prevented “sending out ministers of God.”
Jay said,
“We argue over whether children should partake of communion and whether to stare at the floor or study the Bible or what — ”
It would seem obvious to most casual observers (IMO) that the LS is to be carried out as quickly as possible. Perhaps we are just following the pattern in Exodus 12: 11 “Eat in haste.’ In smaller churches there isn’t much time for reflection. Those serving the supper get a little antsy, when the tray passing slows a little. Military precision is the drill. But at least we did it, right?
Monty,
Well, like the Israelites, we sure don’t leave enough time for the yeast to rise! My impression is that we figure we paid for the sermon, maybe even the song leading, and so we want to give those Acts of Worship enough time. That’s what crowd showed up for!
We’ll come late and leave early — just be sure to take communion — but we won’t invest time in the ritual. It’s part of our Western culture. Meditation and silence don’t suit us well at all.
Of course, I’m not sure the LS is about meditation and silence. But in a big-box auditorium, what else can you do? Our assemblies aren’t really structured to encourage a robust LS celebration. (More to come on the LS in the next few posts.)
I’m sure the Lord’s SUPPER is about eating a meal with friends and brethren in Christ. The apostolic church knew nothing about a ritual involving a bite of bread and a sip of wine. That seems to be all we DO know now. And yet none of us would claim to be wiser or more spiritual than the apostles!
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