God is here

I found this post a while back, and added it to my Google Notebook, saving it for a post someday:

God is here -- Is it arrogant to invite him to worship? My Sunday morning greeting, “God is here and you are welcome” is meant to be a kind of congratulations on choosing to be here this morning. A way for me to say on behalf of the congregation, “High five on getting up and getting dressed this morning. Kudos on doing whatever it took you to get to church. You made the right choice.” I don’t say it every week, but I say it often. This morning I wonder if it a presumptuous thing to say. We Presbyterians don’t pray an invocation in our worship services because an invocation is an invitation to God, and we are not yet so arrogant to think that we can invite God to God’s own house. So I declare instead that God is already here. But do I—do we—really have the right to declare that?

In my church, we begin worship with a Call to Worship and an Invocation. I thought I would share why I think we do it:

• I think that the Call to Worship is a message to the congregation -- you've made it to the room, now step forward and come into Worship. It's also a time to ask God to join us in the act of worship. God inhabits the praise of his people. I'm confident he'll come if we seek him. I think the call to worship reminds us of that.
• Invocation -- Hopefully, we know that God is already in the house. I think we invite him to do more than that in the invocation. We invite him to come into our hearts and minds. God is God, but he will only enter into our lives if we invite him -- he has given us the choice.
• As for declaring that God is present, isn't that what we are called to do everyday, all the time, for all of those people around us? As a community, don't we point to God and say, "Please pay attention -- God is here with us."

I don't think any of it is arrogant. I think it is the beginning of worship.