What Is Worship?
Worship is a posture of the heart. It is an attitude of loyalty and trust toward the authority structures of your life. Ultimately, worship defines you, makes your life meaningful, and gives you security. Thus, we are all worshiping something or someone. Typically, whatever we worship is our “non-negotiable.” It is that one thing, should we lose it or part with it, which would bring both devastation and hopelessness. The chief posture of most people in our culture is that of giving primacy to friends, lovers, community, success, fulfillment, duty, morality, autonomy, rationality, authenticity, justice, and a host of other significant facets of life. However, the chief posture of Scripture and of Christ Church of Berkeley is the worship of the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
For many of you, the idea of God conjures up images of an angry old man clutching us by the scruff of our necks and giving us a piece of his mind or of an insipid and impotent deity who sits on a cloud, is detached from reality, and doesn’t care about our lives. Who could worship such a God? At Christ Church of Berkeley, however, we gather on Sunday mornings to worship the God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ.
Christianity may look more or less like other world religions in many generic respects: offering salvation, teaching high moral values, and encouraging regard for the neighbor. But Jesus is radically different from every other religious leader. No other such figures claimed to be God Incarnate, or to suffer for the sins of the world or to rise from the dead as the firstborn of a general resurrection to come. This God, who revealed himself in Jesus Christ, must be reckoned with. Our church provides an opportunity for any and all in the Berkeley community to investigate the historic Christian faith. This faith is either of ultimate importance or of no importance whatsoever. The one thing it cannot be is marginally important.
May our worship services be opportunities for you to come to your own conclusions in the context of Christ Church of Berkeley, and may you find St. Augustine’s insightful prayer to be true, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”