Passionate Worship

Consider passion. With a capital P -- as in the Passion of Christ. I've always thought of that to mean the suffering of Christ. I avoided the movie by the same name. My theory was that if I allowed myself to be put to death because of love for my children, I would not want them to watch.

But, anyway, Passion of the Christ -- suffering.

This morning, I read about Passionate Worship in Bishop Schnase's book. He says, "In theology, the Passion refers to the complete outpouring of Jesus Christ, the offering of himself, even to death on a cross in order to complete our relationship with God through Christ." I like that, because it focuses on the purpose rather than the pain. The love of God is evident in a definition such as that one.

We often speak about worship -- what we like and don't like -- why we do certain things -- should worship be traditional or alternative.... We were having such a conversation in Sunday school a couple of weeks ago. JtM said that worship is about what you bring with you rather than what you get out of it. What do we bring with us to worship?

Passionate worship. Worship that is a response to the love of Christ as expressed in his own Passion. Do we bring our love of God with us to worship? Does it seem like our worship is an acceptable response of love?

Don't read in that sentence "equal" or "worthy." I don't believe our worship can ever be equal to Christ's passion, but does it seem to be a response?

When we were discerning our church's mission and vision statements, the one phrase that causes a whole lot of angst was that part of our mission was to "worship God joyfully." Why would that bother people? I think the issue was that joyful was thought to be the opposite of somber -- the opposite of thoughtful. I think it was a reaction to loud worship. We kept the phrase "worship God joyfully" in our mission statement, and I'm glad.

Joyful worship -- passionate worship -- is worship that expresses our love of God. It has nothing to do with volume or instrumentation or the presence or absence of screens. It is about relationship with God and response to God in love.

Be passionate in your worship, and I'll try to do the same.

Image: Some kind of red berry on a tree in Ritter Park (image taken in October).