Today we’re thinking about worship, and in particular about worshipping God and what that means. In a minute we’re going to look in more detail at this conversation between Jesus and the woman at the well. Before we do that, though, I thought it might be useful to look at an example of worship that is broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday evenings and attracts over 6 million viewers live each week, plus millions more round the world via online and repeats. I am, of course, talking about Top Gear. If you don’t believe me, lets watch a short extract from a recent Top Gear report and I’d like you to listen out for words or expressions that might be described as worship.
When I watched the clip earlier I picked out these phrases:
“At one with it”
“joyous experience”
“most alive”
“beautiful”
“absolutely dazzling”
It seems to me that these are all the kinds of words and expressions that are words of worship. They express how much Richard Hammond thinks of the car, they tell us about the positive emotions that the car gives him, they talk about how much he loves this car. There’s something else about this that strikes me: Hammond is not embarrassed to sing this car’s praises, he is excited about doing so, he thinks the car is fantastic and he wants everyone else to know how fantastic he thinks it is. He is proud of thinking it’s brilliant.
I wonder if we might just hold that in the background of our thoughts as we think about worshipping God (who is far more dazzling than any car).
The first thing I want to think about is what doesn’t matter.
Jesus is on a journey through Samaria and outside a town he sits down by a well and sends his friends into town to grab some lunch. As he’s sat there a woman approaches the water hole. This is a bit odd. It’s the middle of the day, a really daft time to by lugging water around. And she’s on her own, which is also odd, normally the women of the neighbourhood would gather in the morning round the well to catch up as the fetched the water for the day, much as we might meet round the water cooler at the office for a gossip. And, of course, she’s a Samaritan. The hatred between Jews and Samaritans is generations deep – racist and religious at its roots it festered on and on.
None of this matters to Jesus. He doesn’t care that she is a woman, that she doesn’t have any friends, that she’s been through five husbands, that she’s the wrong race. None of this matters, she is a human being created by his Father and he wants to talk with her, just as he wants to meet with each one of us, man or woman, boy or girl. Whatever we have or don’t have, whatever we’ve done or haven’t done, Jesus wants to spend time with us.
There’s something else that Jesus says doesn’t matter. Part of the religious dispute between the Jews and Samaritans had been about where it was best to worship God, on the holy mountain or at the Temple at Jerusalem. Jesus says that the time is coming when it won’t matter. True worshippers will worship where they are. There don’t have to be special places or buildings, which is just as well for us as we are meeting in a school hall!
But if those things don’t matter, then there are also things that do matter. Jesus says that true worshippers will worship in spirit and truth. This is really important, so important in fact that he says it twice:
“But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
If it’s this important, it seems to me that we need to get our heads round what it means to worship in spirit and truth.
Think for a moment of a spirit level. The spirit tells you if it’s level, the ruler tells you if it’s straight or, to put it another way, if it’s true. You need both working together, linked together to make a good set of shelves that things won’t fall off.
Sometimes we talk about the letter of the law, and the spirit of the law. Maybe particularly when we’re talking about sport. If a competitor has done something that is strictly speaking allowed in the rules, but doesn’t really seem fair then we talk about it being against the spirit of the game. I wonder if you’ve ever been in a church service where all the rules were being followed but somehow there didn’t seem to be much spirit to the worship? Truth without spirit can seem very dead.
Who’s been watching The Voice or the Great British Sewing Bee. My family laugh at me because when we watch that kind of programme on catch up I fast forward through the little chats and the emotional back stories, and the judges agonising over who to send home. This is largely because I don’t believe them. There is a whole load of emotion being expressed and most of the time it doesn’t seem to me to be very genuine. It’s as if there is plenty of spirit, but precious little truth. Maybe we’ve felt something like that in church services before, that the emotions being expressed don’t always seem to be related to the truth of people’s lives.
If we want to be true worshippers of God then we need to worship in spirit and truth. It has to be like this because we are worshipping a God who is spirit and truth. At other places in his account of Jesus’ life John calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of truth.
So when it comes to worshipping God, we can’t fake it. We can’t pretend, it has to come from the heart of who we are. Sometimes that will be difficult. Life can throw things at us, and we might feel ill, depressed, disappointed, sinful, fearful. There can be all kinds of emotions that can tempt us to doubt God and to make it hard to worship. It is likely that these kinds of emotions were in the heart of the woman at the well. And yet Jesus drew her into conversation and wanted to meet her. When we worship in spirit and truth we do not pretend that life is rosy if it isn’t, but we can choose to worship God’s love and power despite those things. It is my experience that when we do that then the power of those negative things in our lives becomes less as we focus on the one who promises never to leave us.
And when it comes to worshipping God, we can’t divide our lives into little boxes. Little dividers are very helpful for sock drawers but are fatal for our Christian lives. Worship isn’t just what we do when we gather together on a Sunday, or when we put on a CD of worship songs, or when we read our Bibles and pray at home on our own. Worship is what we do with our whole lives. If a stranger where to watch us for a whole week, 24 hours a day, what would they conclude is the thing that we think is worth most in our lives? What would they see us giving our time, our effort, our money to? Because that thing is the thing that we worship most, it is the thing that we actually value most highly. If we are to be true worshippers, worshipping in spirit and truth then we are to worship God with our whole lives, our whole hearts, our whole selves.
So we’ve thought about what doesn’t matter in worship – who we are or where we are. And we’ve thought about what really matters – spirit and truth. Now we are going to spend a little time thinking about who and why we worship.
As the conversation between Jesus and the woman continues she introduces a new character. She starts talking about the Messiah. This is one thing that the Jews and Samaritans did have in common. They were all waiting for God’s chosen one, the Messiah, to come and change things, to come and get rid of the Romans, to come and explain everything to them so that they could worship and follow God. And Jesus says, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
Jesus is the one that God chose, God’s own Son, who took part in the creation of all things – chosen to leave heaven, to become a creature of earth. Jesus is the one who came to free, not just those people at that time from the oppressive forces of the Romans, but to free all people for all time from all the oppressive forces of darkness and evil. Jesus is the Messiah, God’s chosen one, but that meant so much more than the Samaritan woman knew.
Yesterday we started filming scenes of the Easter story around Priorslee. We filmed the time when Jesus was betrayed and deserted by his friends. We filmed some of the times that he visited with his disciples after he was raised from the dead. Next weekend we will film his death on a cross. This is what Jesus was chosen for, and chose to do, so that we could live with him forever. This is who and why we worship. We worship God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, because we are loved so much that we were created, because although we chose again and again to turn away, God comes to meet us and draws us back into the arms of love. Because Jesus gave his whole life so that we could live, so we give our whole lives to worship in spirit and truth.
Part of that whole life worship is to tell others about it. The Samaritan woman went off into town to tell everyone else about this man she’d met and brought them to meet him (and remember these were people in a community that she was so much on the edge of that she had to go to fetch water on her own in the heat of the day) In our introductory clip Hammond was bubbling with enthusiasm about his car – he wants to tell the world. Our worship does not end when we leave this building this afternoon, in many ways it is only just beginning as we go out into the world. As we share with others how fantastic God is, so we really will be worshipping in spirit and truth.
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