Castleman Story-Shaped Worship

1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8308-8429-2
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

What is the right way to worship?Right worship does not require a return to the identical forms found in the early church or later in Rome or after that in Westminster. What it calls for is a faithful response today to the God of our salvation in light of those biblically ordered and historically informed patterns.In this study Robbie Castleman uncovers the fundamental shape of worship. What she unearths is a shape that is outlined in Scripture, enacted in Israel, refocused in the New Testament community, regulated and guarded by the Apostolic fathers, and recovered in the Reformation. It is a worship that can and does still shape the liturgy of many congregations today.

Robbie F. Castleman (D.Min., University of Dubuque) is professor of biblical studies and theology at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. She previously served for several years as a staff member with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, specializing in ministry to graduate students at campuses in and around Tallahassee, Florida. She is the author of the Fisherman Bible Guides Miracles, Elijah, David and King David (Shaw/Waterbrook) and the IVP Connect LifeGuide Bible Study Peter, and she is a contributor to the book For All the Saints (Knox/Westminster).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Castleman, Robbie F.

Leseproben

1

Genesis and the Gospel

THE BEGINNING OF WORSHIP

And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering.

GENESIS 4:4

Worship, like witness and mission, is part of a “living sacrifice” of one’s life to God that must be “holy and acceptable” (Romans 12:1). And God has every right to express what is “good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2)—what is pleasing to him and what is not. Worship must be focused on the character and the pleasure of the One who is worshiped. To “worship” with no thought of God, who is both the object of and mediator for worship, usually results in a service that merely manifests the effort, gifts or intentions that please worshipers and that they find acceptable. This chapter will highlight foundational principles of biblical worship from the beginning of God’s story in the texts of origins through the practices of the patriarchs of God’s people prior to the emergence of Israel as a nation under the leadership of Moses.

It’s not unusual today for Christian congregations to have two styles of worship, usually designated “traditional” and “contemporary”—and often meeting in two different settings. Often the decision to develop these two styles is based on congregational interest in attracting different kinds of worshipers with distinct preferences, especially in music. When worship is designed for congregational taste and preferences, however, God as the mediator and center of the worshiper’s intent is easily lost. Services of worship can become storefront windows advertising the attractions of a community instead of an offering of the congregation’s gifts intended for God’s acceptance and pleasure, centered on God’s glory.

Worship that is pleasing and acceptable to God can be offered in many different styles; style itself is not the issue. A liturgy encompassing biblical patterns and focused on God as the only “audience” can please God no matter the style of accompaniment, whether praise band and bongo drums or pipe organ and handbells. A congregation may use either hymnals or overhead projections, but worship itself is evaluated not by the satisfaction of personal preference but by its acceptance by God as pleasing and honoring to him.

The First “Worship War”

Today’s “worship wars” are often waged around issues, such as “style,” that are not of ultimate concern. A congregation may split into two communities, usually designed to offer what each group wants. People with the praise band in the gym, a short sermon with a shirt-sleeved pastor propped on a stool, assume the people in the sanctuary with no overhead projection—just hymnbooks, a choir, a robed pastor and a pulpit—really need to loosen up. And the sanctuary pew people assume the gymnasium people in their folding chairs need to get serious. But those who attend the traditional service and those who attend the contemporary service can both fail at worship that pleases God because they are more concerned with what pleases them!

“Worship wars” can be pretty serious. The first murder in the Bible happened as the result of a worship war! Genesis 4 is an account of two brothers who each brought an offering from their chosen work to the LORD as an act of worship. Both brothers were engaged in work that God had mandated (Genesis 1:29-30; 2:15). The elder brother, Cain, was a farmer who tilled the land, and his younger brother Abel engaged in animal husbandry as a shepherd. Genesis summarizes God’s response to each offering: “the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard” (Genesis 4:4-5). In the Hebrew text the word rendered “regard” literally conveys the idea that God “looked” at Abel’s offering and God “did not look” at Cain’s offering.

Biblical scholars often affirm the ancient opinion that Abel’s offering was consumed by fire as a sign that God accepted the offering of the younger sibling, but that Cain’s offering was essentially ignored, as no fire fell on it. Regardless of this ancient interpretive assumption, it is also common for scholars, as well as pastors and Bible students, to note the subtle distinction of quality in the offerings themselves. Abel offered “the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions” (4:4); Abel offered the first and best of the flock’s increase. However, Cain’s offering is an apparent contrast in quality, as he brought the LORD, without any superlatives noted in the Hebrew text, “an offering of the fruit of the ground” (4:3). From this it might be surmised that God is pleased with an offering of the “best,” not just the ordinary. However, this may or may not be helpful in discerning biblical patterns of Christian worship. Aren’t all believers called to “sing to the LORD a new song,” not just the choir-worthy or those with great voices fit for the worship team? One must look carefully at the text to rightly discern what pleased or failed to please God in the offering of worship given by these two brothers.

The most significant indicator of what may have pleased or not pleased the LORD in this biblical account is Cain’s reaction to God’s disregard of his gift. Cain got angry and “his countenance fell” (4:5). The repetition of Cain’s reaction in the following verse (4:6) is one way that Hebrew writing reflects what is important and is to be remembered in the text. The repetition may reflect the long oral history of the story. The storyteller is saying, “Now listen and remember this point.” The point in this text is that Cain’s anger and resulting emotional frown betrays his thorough preoccupation with himself. In fact, Cain is so angry about the LORD’s regard for Abel’s offering that he kills his brother! God’s pleasure in Abel’s gift and how he might make a pleasing offering was the farthest thing from Cain’s mind.

Furthermore, this self-centeredness is underscored in the text by Cain’s protest of the LORD’s discipline and banishment. Genesis 4:13-14 recounts Cain’s biggest concerns about how the situation affects him, his punishment and his estrangement from all he had known. And this reveals the heart of what was wrong with Cain’s worship. It was all about Cain himself from beginning to end.

The LORD’s attempt to refocus Cain’s attitude toward worship is reflected in God’s last question, “If you do well, will you not be accepted?”(4:7). The LORD knows that Cain’s true self is reflected in his offer of the fruit of his labors as worship. How one “serves” the LORD is indicative of how one “worships” the LORD. What one does and how one does it really is indicative of who one is and what one truly believes. Cain’s heart, life, being was centered on what he wanted, even in his worship.

Genesis 4:1-16, for the most part, centers on Cain’s dilemma and serves as a cautionary picture about the fulminating nature of sin, and the divine willingness to reach out to this wayward son even as the Lord God had sought his parents (Genesis 3:9; 4:6-7, 9). However, one must ask, what was it about Abel’s sacrifice that caught God’s eye in his divine regard? While acknowledging the limits of what the texts of origins in Genesis reveal, one must also consider the whole of Scripture’s story, which affirms that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22); it may be that Abel reenacted the story of salvation that he had learned through his family’s experience with Yahweh. Yahweh himself, in “making garments of skins,” had sacrificed an animal as a foreshadowing work of atonement to cover the sin of his parents (Genesis 3:21). Abel had discerned by grace that worship was all about God and his saving work on behalf of humankind. Abel symbolically reenacted that story of salvation—and this is the heart of worship that God still regards as acceptable and perfect. God regarded (took notice of) Abel’s sacrifice because God saw himself reflected in this act of worship.

Lex orandi, lex credendi is an ancient Latin phrase coined by the early church fathers. It translates as “The law of prayer is the law of belief.” The phrase highlights the reality that how people pray and how much people truly depend on prayer reflects not just what people say they believe, but what they actually do believe. How people worship, what they say and sing in worship, how they listen, respond, and act during worship (disregarding for the moment the possibility of physical constraints or situational factors) does reflect what they truly believe about the God they worship.

In the Beginning

Who is the God of the Bible? What does Scripture reveal about this God who is to be worshiped? The beginning texts of Genesis reflect a God who is a Creator radically distinct from what he creates. God creates all that is ex nihilo, out of nothing. The affirmation of this idea is foundational to biblical faith. Faith as defined in the New Testament book of Hebrews is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1-2). To illustrate examples of such a faith for God’s people, Hebrews 11:3 begins a long litany of the faithful with a declaration of divine creation ex nihilo: “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible.” Hebrews’ first “Hall of Faith” inductee is Abel, who...