{"id":33768,"date":"2023-11-07T06:00:14","date_gmt":"2023-11-07T14:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=33768"},"modified":"2023-11-05T22:45:13","modified_gmt":"2023-11-06T06:45:13","slug":"worship-that-changes-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/worship-that-changes-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Worship that Changes Us"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God\u2019s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God\u2014this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God\u2019s will is\u2014his good, pleasing, and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2 NIV)<\/em>

We are fundamentally worshipping beings, created and made to desire and worship something outside of ourselves. [1] By design we are made to worship God, but a simple look around reveals how easily that can go wrong. It is all too easy for our innate need to be hijacked, and we end up worshipping all the wrong things.

Romans 12:2 speaks to the \u201cpatterns of this world\u201d that our culture teaches us to worship. In our day, these might be the same things that Vincent J. Miller delineates as he explains the \u201ccommodification of culture\u201d most notably throughout the Fordist era of the mid-twentieth century. As consumerism grew ubiquitous our worship (i.e. attention and desire) turned more and more toward the comfort of material things. The \u201cAmerican dream\u201d, represented by the single-family home filled with all sorts of appliances designed to make life more convenient, became a much-sought-after goal. [2] But beyond the simple idolization of the \u201cAmerican dream\u201d, Miller contends that even our religion, our faith rituals and our worship practices have become commodities. [3]\u00a0

Even as we desire more and more consumer goods, the problem is still rooted in worship. As Miller puts it, \u201cConsumer desire is, surprisingly, not really about attachment to things, but about the joys of desiring itself. It is the joy of endless seeking and pursuit. Actual consumption always comes as something of a disappointment, as the object can never live up to its promise. This form of desire is hauntingly similar to Christian portrayals of desire as an endless, unquenchable seeking after an infinite God.\u201d [4]\u00a0

So we are stuck. We are being pulled between this \u201cendless, unquenchable\u201d desire the only \u201ctrue and worthy object\u201d of which is Jesus Christ [5] and the \u201cmigration to the commodification of all aspects of society\u201d [6] which drives us to materialism.

At about this point in reading and processing this week\u2019s texts, I\u2019m starting to despair. What is the solution to this problem of conspicuous (religious) consumption? Dr. Jason Clark\u2019s answer surprised me, but it resonates deeply. The answer is worship. More specifically, training our desires, imaginations and hearts to worship Jesus by practicing rituals and disciplines of worship that bend our hearts toward him. [7] And I would add, practices that bend our hearts away from consumerism<\/em>.

Practically speaking, what habits might draw us deeper into a lifestyle of consumerism that prioritizes comfort above all? And what habits might we put in place to intentionally correct that all-too-common human tendency? What limits do we put on our own consumption? Do we ever choose discomfort as an act of worship? Do we ever intentionally limit our choices in order to lean into what God wants for us? Of course we do; Every time we sacrifice something, give of our time, engage in fasting, and many more examples come to mind. I\u2019m curious to hear from you if you have a particularly meaningful discipline in which you sacrifice something in a \u201ctrue and proper act of worship\u201d as we see in Romans 12:1.

To go one step further, what we worship ultimately forms our identity. This harkens back to Francis Fukuyama and his Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. He too ties our identity to our faith practice when he posits that the modern, Western sense of identity was born out of the Protestant Reformation. [8] Five-hundred years later our worship is still forming our identity because it is the vehicle by which we orient our desires.

Predictably, I\u2019ve come to the end of my available space, and I\u2019ve barely scratched the surface of this topic. I\u2019ll conclude with a hymn, which is a prayer, for all of us. As we desire to worship Jesus alone, but recognize our own human frailty, we need God\u2019s grace even to worship truly and properly.

Oh to grace how great a debtor<\/em>
Daily I’m constrained to be<\/em>
Let Thy goodness like a fetter<\/em>
Bind my wandering heart to Thee<\/em>
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it<\/em>
Prone to leave the God I love<\/em>
Here’s my heart Lord, take and seal it<\/em>
Seal it for Thy courts above [9]<\/em>

_______________________________________
1 Or \u201cliturgical animals, creatures who can\u2019t not worship\u201d as James K. Smith articulates it in Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works <\/em>Cultural Liturgies. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2013.<\/p>\r\n

2 Vincent J. Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (London: Bloomsbury, 2003) 47.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

3 Ibid., 105-106.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

4 Ibid., 7.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

5 Clark, Jason. Evangelicalism and Capitalism: A Reparative Account and Diagnosis of Pathogeneses in the Relationship<\/em>. London School of Theology, 2018. 211.<\/p>\r\n

6 Ibid., 201.<\/p>\r\n

7 Ibid., 216.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

8 Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment,<\/em> 29.\u00a0<\/p>\r\n

9 Robert Robertson, Come Thou Found of Every Blessing, 1758.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God\u2019s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God\u2014this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2489,2736],"class_list":["post-33768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp02","tag-miller-clark","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33768"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33949,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33768\/revisions\/33949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}