In God’s hands

One of my favorite stories in scripture is in the 16th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. It’s a bit long (verses 16-34), so I will share only a brief summary here. Paul and Silas are in Philippi, their first time on the European continent, to spread the gospel and plant a church. They have a run-in with a “slave-girl who had a spirit of divination” which does not go well. They endure a “severe flogging” and are thrown into the “innermost cell” of the prison.

What happens next? Luke writes, “After midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.” In other words, Paul and Silas conducted a worship service for themselves and the others imprisoned with them.

Of all the details in this story, some quite miraculous, this is the one that always makes me wonder. Paul and Silas are strangers far from home. No one is adding them to the prayer list. The meal train is not showing up. No one cares for their wounds. No one is going to visit them in prison, let alone bail them out. I understand why they pray. But leading a worship service? For what purpose?

“Why do we Christians worship God?” Debi Thomas asks in the October edition of The Christian Century. “Why does God want us to and even command us to? Why is scripture filled with exhortations to give God honor, glory, praise, and adulation?”

Excellent questions. Especially for those of us who gather for worship each Sunday even as we note that most of our neighbors aren’t going to church. As the number of people in the United States who participate in church continues to decline, our worship can seem irrelevant.

But worship is not limited to our formal Sunday liturgy. Worship, Thomas writes, “is as natural as breathing. We’re wired to do it: to flock to objects of devotion, to pay exquisite and adoring attention to things that draw our gaze and elicit our respect, to put pretty things on pedestals. We’re wired to ascribe greatness to people, places, ideas, and objects outside ourselves.”

So, it’s not a question of why we worship but what we worship. Worship, Thomas continues, “is formational. It makes us. It focuses our attention. It orders our priorities. It teaches us what’s important and what isn’t. As Richard Rohr puts it, we have to be careful, because we will always become the God we worship. Our prayer, our devotion, our praise — these rewire us. They enable us to see, hear, and think in new ways. What we worship makes us who we are.”

God doesn’t need our worship. We need it. Lifting our voices in song, reciting the Nicene Creed and the prayers, kneeling for confession, receiving communion. At times any of this can feel rote and disconnected from the rest of our lives. But over time, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, we become what we worship. We become the people God desires us to be.

Luke tells us that as Paul and Silas worshipped an earthquake shook Philippi so violently that “all of the doors [of the prison] were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened.” Miraculous? Sure. But here’s the thing. Paul and Silas were free long before the earthquake. Years of praying, singing, and worshipping had formed them, had given them confidence to trust that whatever happened they were, and always would be, in God’s hands.