When I was a boy my mother would cook stew about once a month. Not just any stew; stew that would make a boy leave a water fight on a hot day to come to dinner. I realize that some people use stew to get rid of leftovers, but at my house stew day was a high holy day. Ask a person if they like stew, and they answer according to their experience…what they know. They describe the kind of stew they had growing up; sometimes very different than the kind of stew I experienced. At times their answer is colored by the times and situations in which they ate stew. I have heard everything from comfort food, to a cultural specialty, to a catchall to clean out the fridge.
Worship has some similarities to stew in that people think and speak out of their prior experience. And their circumstances may color and even define their concept of worship. We may be using the word “worship” but depending on who we are, where we were raised, what denomination we belong to, or what rituals we hold dear, what we mean by it can be completely different. Was our experience a somber and regulated service, a free-for-all rock-fest, a lecture? Was it a “spectator sport” or did you get to participate? Did everyone look and think like you, or were there different ages, races, or levels of economy there?
The thing is, talking about something we “know and have experienced” can keep us from tasting what others know and have experienced. It can also leave us feeling confused, and maybe a bit angry. So before we get into the nuances of true, authentic, God-exalting worship let’s see if we can at least move towards a similar definition. Even the people who translated the Bible into English had a bent according to their experience. They used the Middle English word worthshipe to communicate their understanding of the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic Scriptures. This was their way of saying that something possesses worth—more than anything else we can experience.
What’s in the Stew?
The ingredients, or definitions of worship that we get from Scripture most often fall into two basic categories; reverence and action. The Hebrews used the word shachah to describe the way they approached God. It meant to prostrate, bow down or stoop, and was a way of paying homage or showing reverence. This shows up in passages like Psalm 95:6 which says “Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker.” In the United States, we don’t have a king or a queen, so we’re not really used to this bowing thing, but in other parts of the world it is second nature for people to bow or courtesy in the presence of royalty.
In other cultures bowing is a natural greeting, and is a way of giving someone respect and honor. The Catholic and Eastern Orthodox branches of Christianity, as well as other religions, use bowing and kneeling as a significant part of their observance. The attitude and intention that drives this understanding of worship seems to be humility. Humility is not self-denial or self-effacing, because they both have “self” at their center. Humility is not thinking about yourself at all, because you are thinking about someone else. Sometimes humility, or giving preference to another, comes naturally, like to a king or a judge. On rare occasions humility is offered as an act of great love, as in Philippians 2:8, “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!” In this case, the superior submits himself to the inferior, in order to love them.
The early Church used the Greek word proskuneo as one way of describing how they approached God. In their culture, this word meant, again, to prostrate, but also to “do reverence” and to “kiss towards.” This word, in John 4:24, says, “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” This ingredient, like its Hebrew counterpart, shows an attitude of homage and reverence.