worship hooky

Our family was heading to 701 E. Meadow yesterday morning. There was a JAM training session and then we were going to participate in the Stop Child Trafficking Now Walk. One of the kids asked, “Are we going to worship?” So I thought about it and replied that there are things that God cares about besides worship.

In Isaiah 1 God tells his people, “…your special days for fasting—they are all sinful and false. I want no more of your pious meetings.” (verse 13 NLT). That sounds pretty harsh, but here’s what God’s looking for: “Learn to do good. Seek justice. Help the oppressed. Defend the cause of orphans. Fight for the rights of widows.”

So what’s more important to God, our Sunday morning worship or doing something to look after the fatherless and women who are being treated as mere commodities at the cost of their humanity? We can’t say that we truly worship a God of mercy and justice if we aren’t doing something to make mercy and justice a reality in our world.

Too often our worship services are about our looking good to God (and each other). The more we re-tell who God is, the more it should impact us. The more we proclaim God’s greatness and goodness, the more the Holy Spirit should be able to transform us into reflections of that greatness and goodness in this world.

I don’t recommend skipping worship every Sunday. Regularly re-telling, re-living and re-creating the gospel is an important formative event in our life together. But sometimes I need a reminder of why God doesn’t just whisk me away to heaven. If Jesus thought that journeying through our world as a human was important, than it should be important to me, too. And Jesus said his mission was “to preach good news to the poor …to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (Luke 4:18-19) What's mine?