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Worshiping God in Likeness of the Trinity Not Determined ‘In Their Way’

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Worshiping God in Likeness of the Trinity Not Determined ‘In Their Way’ Worshiping God in Likeness of the Trinity Not Determined ‘in their way’ Kary A. Kambara ©2016 Kary A. Kambara All Rights Reserved www.4X12.org [email protected] Contents Ch 1 Confronting the Common………………………………………………………..1 The Incompatible Common 1 Exposing Reductionism 4 Raising the Lowest Common Denominator 6 Contextualizing Worship ‘in their way’ 9 God’s Relational Terms 9 Disembodied Lips 11 Counter-Relational Performance 15 Worship in Likeness of the Trinity 20 Whole Lips 24 A Relational Word for Our Voices 26 Ch 2 Worshiping “in my name”……………………………………………………..29 Relational Language and Referential Language 31 Virtual Worship 35 A Word about Intimate Relationship with God in Worship 37 Names and Titles in Referential Language 39 Epistemology, Relationship, and Hermeneutics 44 Understanding God’s Name 46 “I AM WHO I AM” 46 The Glory of God’s Name 49 “Do Not Misuse My Name” 51 Understanding “in my name” 53 Worshiping God “in my name” 56 Ch 3 Worship Whole-ly………………………………………………………………59 Antecedents for Worship 60 Jesus, the Uncommon Key to God’s Self-Disclosures 62 1. The Person Presented: the Uncommonness of God 63 2. The Quality and Integrity of Communication: God’s Uncommon Relational Language and the Embodied Word 65 3. The Depth of our Relational Involvement: Uncommon Family Love 68 Peter’s Common Path of Good Intentions 70 Hybrid Theology and Divided Hearts 75 Worshiping with Washed or Unwashed Feet 81 Washed Feet and a New Identity 85 Celebrating the Reality of the New Song 86 i Ch 4 The New Creation Family in the Trinity’s Likeness………………………..89 Our Unavoidable Relational Responsibilities 90 The New Relational Order of Worship: A Paradigm Shift 93 Wineskins of Worship Old and New 95 Uncommon Worship Leaders for the New Creation Family 100 The Former Prostitute: the Relational Paradox 100 Beyond Common Forgiveness 103 Mary: the New Relational Order Emerges 104 Mary’s First Steps 105 Mary Participating in God’s Life 109 Listening to Jesus and Mary 112 Whole-ly Communion: the New Creation Family’s Table Fellowship ‘Behind the Curtain’ 113 A Critiquing Antecedent 114 Face to Face Communion 116 Addenda: Worship Resources for the New Creation Family…………………….125 “Whole-ly Communion” 125 “The Global Church Celebrating” 126 Suggested Communion 127 Further Songs with Relational Clarity for Our Relational Significance 128 Scripture Index (Primary Source)……………………………………………………129 Bibliography (Secondary Source)…………………………………………………….132 ii Chapter 1 Confronting the Common You must not worship the LORD your God in their way. Deuteronomy 12:4, 31, NIV1 How do you think God feels about the corporate worship in his church around the world today? Related, do you ever think about who and what God receives from you and your fellow worshipers? Do these issues matter to God? Of the above words from God about worship, do you think those words still apply to us today? Or are they merely a brittle ancient historic record, the intent of which has no relevance to our contemporary time? In both the Old and New Testaments, God says challenging things about worship. If we believe Scripture to compose the relational communication from God that God communicates directly to us, then we need to take his words to heart. If, however, we don’t acknowledge that God communicates relationally to us today through Scripture, we are left to our own devices, guessing a lot about God and about worship in particular, and then shaping worship “according to our own desires” (Dt 12:8). For one thing, judging by the fact that much of contemporary worship today has little relational clarity as to who is the one being worshiped, it seems that many worship planners and leaders fall into the latter group of speculators, however inadvertently that may be so. Traditional liturgical worship may have more relational clarity, but it is difficult to discern that much of this worship has any relational significance of making intimate relational connection with God, whose presence has revealed himself in the most vulnerable ways for intimate relationship together. Who is being worshiped is reflected by how we worship, which raises the critical question of whether or not we worship ‘in their way’, regardless of our church’s style of worship. This study proceeds on the conviction that by and large the global church worships God ‘in their way’ across the worship spectrum that ranges from the most casual contemporary worship to the most structured liturgical worship, with all their contextual variations and sociocultural diversity. The Incompatible Common From early on in the covenant relationship between the Holy (Uncommon) God and the Israelites, those relationships frequently involved incompatibility and incongruence between the Uncommon God and the common default ways of the Israelites, leading to much tension and conflict. Central to this conflict was the Israelites’ worship of God. Here is what was involved, looking beyond the either-or worship of Yahweh or pagan deities. 1 Scripture references are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted. Italics indicate my further renderings. 1 On the one hand, the Holy God initiated the covenant relationship with the Hebrew people to establish them in the relational terms of wholeness (tāmiym, be whole, Gen 17:1). Wholeness is the significance of biblical peace, namely, the inner-out well- being of persons both individually and corporately in covenant relationship together with God (shalôm, see Num 6:24-26). Shalôm stands in qualitative contrast to the common inadequate view of peace—for example, peace as the absence of conflict and war—that we get from Greek philosophy.2 Christians, notably those who toil in peace and justice efforts, commonly think of peace in this limited sense, which reflects their reduced view of the biblical peace distinguished by God (as in Num 6:24-26). Yet, it is also inadequate to move beyond the mere absence of the negative to a common ‘holistic’ view of peace (and the human person) by merely adding more parts of a person, such as physical and economic needs. The wholeness of shalôm is the inner-out emergence of persons and their convergence in the primacy of relationships that have been specifically redeemed from reductionism and reconciled to God and each other in intimate and equalized relationships (to be discussed throughout the study). By its nature, wholeness is the experiential truth that composes the experiential reality of intimate reciprocal relationship with God. On the other hand of the incompatibility and incongruence between God and his covenant people, God has always had to contend with his people’s development influenced by the context of the common, that is, shaped by the general human context (planet earth) and its specific contexts (e.g. religiocultural, sociocultural, family). Indeed, the whole of Scripture deals with this prevailing issue of human shaping in the common’s ordinary context, which is always in contrast to and in conflict with the uncommon context of God distinguished beyond the common. This shaping influence from the human context(s) is called human contextualization. And human contextualization’s most sinister yet unavoidable influence on all human persons ever since the primordial garden is the sin of reductionism. Reductionism, which is defined shortly, is the antithesis, the foe if you wish, of wholeness, holiness (uncommonness), and of God himself. For human beings, this reductionism is our lowest common denominator, and influences every aspect of human life and relationships, including how we practice church and how we worship God. Underlying this doxology in our theology and practice is our theological anthropology, which is the primary determinant for how we function as persons, yet is usually overlooked. Thus, the consequences of the sin of reductionism on worship escape our awareness because its subtle influence shapes how we function by the default mode of the unredeemed human context; but the consequences are felt nonetheless, as will become increasingly apparent. Wherever God’s wholeness emerges in the human context (the common’s ordinary context), there the presence of reductionism can always be found to oppose wholeness. It is therefore imperative that we understand and expose reductionism at the outset of this study on worshiping God in God’s likeness, because the serious relational consequences from reductionism are: (1) Our person is reduced to less than whole, and accordingly our relationships are less than whole. 2 See bibliography for all Hebrew and Greek word study resources. 2 (2) Against God’s warning, based on our human-shaped biases we impose our reduced preconceptions and interpretations of God’s Word and end up worshiping a human- shaped God (our shaping of God, resulting in diverse versions of God)—however knowingly or unknowingly. (3) Based on our shaping of God, we worship God in ways that have little if only relational clarity of God and no relational significance to God; thereby, we end up worshiping God ‘in their way’. The same relational tensions and conflicts in worship that took place between Yahweh and the ancient Israelites present themselves in today’s worship gatherings in different outer forms. The relational consequences will become more apparent as we move through this study. God’s words at the opening of this chapter—“you must not worship the LORD your God in their way”—are a direct challenge to us, a confronting challenge inseparably including our shaping of God that many may want to avoid.3 As we discuss reductionism in this chapter, I pray that readers will, with the help of the Spirit, come to understand a number of related issues that concern corporate worship, issues that get raised in many discussions among worship thinkers, planners and practitioners but are never completely resolved. These include how to deal with performance, preferences about worship styles, liturgical traditions, music differences, diversity among worshipers (i.e.
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