Woerth-schyppe

The Prayer Book teaching is plain: “It is my bounden duty…to worship God every Sunday in His Church” (BCP page 291). Give or take a few Sundays, Christians have been worshiping God every Sunday for the last 102,856 Sundays. It all started the First Sunday, the day of His Resurrection, when He appeared to His disciples and they worshiped Him. That same day He’d met two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus (though they didn’t know who He was), spent the afternoon talking with them and, when they sat down with Him to eat, He “was known to them in the Breaking of the Bread.”

He’s known to us in the same way. This Breaking of the Bread remains for the last 102,856 consecutive Sundays as the distinctive thing Christians do when we gather to worship. “As often as you eat this Bread and drink this Cup, you show forth the Lord’s death until he comes,” St Paul wrote to the Corinthians. The Mass, the Eucharist, Divine Liturgy, Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion: called by whatever name, Christians have gathered Sunday after Sunday, century on century, to follow His command that we “Do This.” It sets Christian worship apart from all other worship.

That means Christians understand worship differently than other people.
To see what’s distinctive about Christian worship, we need to consider the idea of “worship” itself.

Worship comes to us as a combination of to old Anglo-Saxon words—not as in “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” but as in the Germanic tribes of Angles and Saxons who conquered Celtic Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries after Christ. “Woerth” is value, or worth. “Schyppe” is the Old English word for “the state or condition of something.” Worship, then, is when we acknowledge the value of something. Some of us worship our car (or, in Texas, our pick-up), some of us worship our bank accounts, some of us worship the image we see in the mirror.

To worship God, is to give honor or praise-or at least-recognition to the Being each of us says fits our definition of “God.” Some people say they can do this better on the Golf Course or on a mountaintop than they can in church. They’re right, they can. It’s just that the God they’re worshiping on the Golf Course isn’t the same One Who said “Do This.”

The god of the Golf Course has an altogether different set of commandments than the Ten with which we’re familiar. He’s much more popular—there are no “Thou shalt nots” in his commandments. Even the “thou shalts” of the Golf Course god are more pieces of avuncular advice that rules.

The first basic notion of Christian worship is that we don’t know God. We can’t. He’s utterly and completely different than us. We are creatures, with limited minds and hearts. He is Uncreated, Unmade, Unknowable—except to the extent that He reveals something of Himself to us. St John of Damascus says “the few things we can say about God are all things He has shown us of Himself. God Himself, however, is completely beyond human understanding.”

When Christians worship God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, we join with Angels and Archangels and All the Company of Heaven in woerthschyppe—in showing what matters most, not merely to us, but to all creation—and before Whom all creation can only kneel in adoration, singing words beyond our comprehension: “Holy, Holy, Holy, Who Was, and Is, and Is to Come.”

The uniqueness of Christian worship is grounded in the Uniqueness of God. We “Do This” because all other “doing,” all other worship, is just stuff we’ve made up, made to order for the gods we make up.—Fr Gregory Wilcox