This is worship. This is worship.

Scripture: Revelation 7:9-17

In heaven there are no committees.

Now, I know for some of you that is a pretty blasphemous way to start a sermon, and I don’t want to give the wrong impression here. I love what committees do for the sake of the church and for my sanity as well. We have many dedicated, hardworking and genuinely necessary committees in this church. They mostly function very well together and I could not do my job without them. However, in spite of these things I am sorry to say that heaven still has no need of committees.

This is why.

If a committee were charged with organizing this giant worship service with the Lamb on the throne in Revelation 7 it would have been bogged down in all sorts of disagreements, and it never would have happened. The idea of opening up worship to great, uncountable multitudes from every corner of the world, every tribe and tongue, would have paralyzed the heavenly worship committee. How could we possibly all worship together? And, most importantly, how could we make enough coffee and bars to serve them all?

You thought planning joint worship for a parish was hard, try doing it for the entire universe. Imagine the questions you would have to consider: Who are “members” and who are “visitors”? Where does the offering go? What language is the service going to be in? (Obviously Norwegian, since we all know what language Jesus spoke, but some people don’t want to be so traditional) How long will the sermon be? Are there going to be testimonies or an altar call? Will we pray out loud or in silence? Is clapping allowed? Will there be a band or an organ, hymns or praise music, congregational singing or solos? Should we kneel or stand? How should we dress? And, oh man, what if we have communion? Who can come to the rail? Will we have real bread or wafers? And, most importantly of all, how long will this service be?

No committee could handle all this.

Of course, since most of us are able to separate our idea of life down here from the kingdom of God these appear to us like silly questions, and, yet, I wonder if they should be. I don’t mean that we should worry about all the objections I raised regarding heavenly worship; instead, I worry that we have too many expectations about worship down here. Our worship lives are divided by a ton of imaginary lines.

If I step out of the pulpit while preaching I break one of those lines. That’s a no-no, because our implicit understanding of the preaching time during worship is that the Holy Spirit will do its work within the confines of a rectangular box we call the pulpit. Everything outside of this box is the realm of Joel Osteen and those guys who pace when they speak, and talk about the three syllable God—Juh-hee-sus.

The pews are filled with imaginary lines (If you have chairs instead of pews it's the same way). Some people in the congregation move around from time to time—you are clearly the wandering rebels of the church, forever, like Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory, trying to find the acoustic sweet spot—but the rest of you have mostly planted yourself in one place from the beginning of time and never again shall you be moved. That’s an imaginary line.

At any given time if we have more than four seconds of silence during worship you will probably start to become uncomfortable. The silence will have crossed an imaginary line. There are so many of these lines that I could point them out until you get rather sick of me and suggest we just get on with a hymn.

It’s not that imaginary lines are bad. They aren’t. They are what gives definition to what we experience in worship and how that is meaningful for us. If we removed all our imaginary lines from worship you would become extremely uncomfortable and I would quickly be looking for another job. The point is not that imaginary lines are bad; the point is that beyond this world they do not matter. It doesn’t matter how you worshiped in this life when you are in the immediate presence of God; you just won’t care about whether the candles are lit from the center to the outside or the outside to the center. I guarantee that will not be an exam question before being admitted to the heavenly throne room.

The 7^th chapter of Revelation is interesting if you read it as a template for how to worship, because it says almost nothing regarding the how. Around the throne people were worshiping; that’s all the explanation you get. It does not say what hymnals they were using or whether or not there was power point. This is—I would wager—very important for a Christian world that is deeply divided over worship. John does not lay out a systematic way for all of us to correctly worship before God because, honestly, it just doesn’t matter. The imaginary lines are obliterated. You can come before God in whatever way you see fit—even, God forbid, in jeans and a t-shirt. The point is not the theological correctness in your worship; the point is that you come because this God is worthy of praise.

Forgive me for extrapolating heavenly worship into our daily lives, but I believe this has giant implications for how we worship today. If Revelation 7 is a model for worship then nobody can tell you that you are worshiping wrong. In some churches people like to raise up their hands; that’s not the only way to worship, but it’s also a fine way to worship. In some churches people will pray by laying face first on the ground. That’s a good way to worship; it’s also not the only way to worship. In our church we do all sorts of weird things. The pastor wears a white alb, signifying not purity (that’s what you think it is but it’s not), instead signifying that we put on Christ and cover the clothing that points to brands and designers and things of this world. The pastor often preaches from a pulpit and prays prayers composed ahead of time. Of course the pastor doesn’t need to do that for faithful worship—he or she could wear a suit or preach from the floor or pray whatever the Spirit puts on his or her lips. But the way we do it is fine. All of these things are faithful; all of them can aid in making worship more meaningful.

There is not one faithful way to worship. You are not going to be judged if you sing or don’t, pray aloud or silently, occasionally laugh when something embarrassing happens, even applaud when our young people or our choir performs. Worship takes all those things. It absorbs all those things. All can be faithful ways to praise God. Our church does things a certain way because we believe that this way is faithful. We are constantly aware of the things that we do that might be a detriment to hearing the Gospel—things that might point away from God in our worship time and space. So, we have decided on a way to worship that we now consider normal. That means that those people down the street—the way they worship—is now not normal for us. This is the danger.

You might be uncomfortable worshiping in a strange place. You might be uncertain of customs and even feel attacked for the way that you worship at your home church. Just know that that is exactly the same experience for many people who are not familiar with your mode of worship. Your average evangelical Christian or non-churchgoer would come into the worship space in which I feel comfortable, eyes wide open, constantly aware of the nearest exits. We don’t need to change the way we are to accommodate those people, but we should be aware of the obstacles a person faces to stay even after they’ve come through the doors. This is not a comfortable place if you are an outsider; just as some other churches are not comfortable for you. So we had better do our absolute best to own what it is that we do and why it is meaningful to us. If we don’t, there is little chance anybody will want to experience it again.

We all need that experience of being an outsider from time to time to remind ourselves why our tradition is meaningful to us in the first place. In 2006 I was traveling with the Augustana Choir in Tanzania when we visited a small Masai village church for worship on Sunday morning. The church was a shabby, clay building that could fit a couple hundred people. We arrived before 9 o’clock in the morning because we were told that worship would begin sometime around then. Over an hour later we finally settled in to our pews because this was the time when the congregation happened to arrive that morning—we were on Africa time which does not work according to the watches on our wrists. The service lasted around three hours with a sermon that took up a little over half that time. The pastor paced to and fro, sometimes doing call and response with the people, sometimes speaking softly, sometimes loudly. Everything was in the Masai language in which I knew exactly zero words.

We were American college students, almost exclusively white and fairly privileged. The juxtaposition could hardly have been greater. The location was foreign, so was the language and style. There was no communion, no liturgy with which we were familiar, the music was attractive but strange, and there was no mistaking normal for abnormal—we were the abnormal ones. But here’s the thing about worship at that church. I knew it was worship. The congregation was engaged. There weren’t a ton of “Amens!” or anything like that, but you could see it in their eyes, something that screamed out, “This is worship. This is worship.”

That is what we need to reclaim. I don’t need an “Amen!”—I’ll take it if you give it—but if that’s not how you worship I’m OK with that. God doesn’t need you to praise Jesus with your lips every seven seconds to be faithful. Those are not requirements for worship, though they’re also not forbidden. All that you need to bring to worship is vitality that screams to the stranger who walks through the door and does not know our language or our customs or our imaginary lines, but who can see in our eyes, “This is worship. This is worship.” This is on me, and it’s on you. If this is worship then show it, live it, breath it and share it.

This is worship. This is worship.

Amen.