The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

What are we doing this evening? What is our worship?
It’s question which I suggest we shouldn’t ask too often; for me, and I suspect, many, worship is something of a habit; it’s what I usually do at certain times and places and I feel a bit lost if I don’t. The effects, beneficial, I think, of worship accrue quietly, unobtrusively and without much reflection. So while I hope sharing my thoughts with you this evening may be useful, I don’t suggest we indulge in too much self-examination.
In some senses the answer to my question what we are doing is easy; As we are told in Cranmer’s rather prolix preamble; what we are doing is “assembling and meeting together to render thanks for the benefits that we have received at God’s hands, setting forth his most worthy praise, hearing his most Holy Word and asking those things which are requisite and necessary as well for the body and the soul.”
So; thanks, praise, learning and intercession preceded by penitence and confession; these are all mostly logical, natural reactions, corollaries to believing in God. As we do with parents and indeed anyone whom we love, we can’t help wanting to know more and to say Sorry, Thank you and Please.
But praise is a bit different, and I think not the natural response to one whom loves and owes one’s being. And plainly, God does not need our praise. When we praise a child, or a colleague we are in part saying thank you for something well done and in part encouraging a repetition or continuation of the good work. There is something of this when we praise God, but it is scarcely an adequate analysis, not least because He will be unaffected by such praise, however much it may make us feel better. Yet praise is really at the centre of what we are doing this evening.
Of all the words which we use to praise God, magnifying his name, joining the Cherubim and Seraphim saying Holy, Holy, Holy, the most common is “Glory”; we have said the doxology “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen” four time so far. The words are so familiar, we hardly think about them.
The word for Glory in Greek is Doxa (hence doxology) and its primary meaning is opinion or belief-knowledge which is founded in trust rather than empirical experience. Yet it came to mean how things really are from how they seem to be, so reputation, characteristics; how we know and recognise someone or something by its, or his, essential attributes. Glory is an attribute of God, and came to mean the halo or golden surround which identified God and the saints in art.
So in saying Glory be to God, we are acknowledging that the object of our worship is God; and we ourselves form part of that acknowledgement, even definition, of who God is. It’s not of course that anything we can do could define God, who anyway needs no acknowledgement from us. But it is significant for us that we are able to bind ourselves up with his divinity in worshiping him and being his Glory, reflecting it and absorbing it; in this sense we can say in answer my question, that we are not doing anything this evening, but rather allowing ourselves to have an experience.
I remember Rowan Williams on the wireless describing prayer as rather like sun bathing (not, he admitted, something that he did very often) but it resembled prayer in that the essential experience of prayer should be to allow God in, to allow him, like the hot sun, to permeate one’s mind; the effort in prayer is to remove the barriers to that happening.
Worship should be a bit like this, in allowing ourselves to be caught up in the divine presence, recognising it and responding as naturally and inevitably as we should as creatures in the face of our creator. It should be a habit, a natural way of life.
We may be tempted to allow worship to be just an agreeable wallowing in nice thoughts (and nice music, and perhaps words too) that is not all that it is, or may be.  I have mentioned prayer, the saying sorry, thank you and please, which are our natural responses to recognising God. We should also be aware of more practical and outgoing consequences. We are witnesses, but a witness is one whose passive experience becomes active in making manifest, demonstrating the truth and reality of an event or state; and so it is with our worship. Because as I suggested our reflection of God’s Glory means that we share something of that Glory- the manifestation of divinity. We are capable, however feebly, of conveying that Glory into the world.
We have a sombre lesson in how that may be from St John’s use of Glory and Glorification in his Gospel. There service and sacrifice are the marks of Glory; the ultimate glorification of God, in his Son, is on the cross.
Glory is not all golden haloes, sunbursts and trumpets; it’s equally a recognition of the suffering in the world and the power of God to redeem that suffering. I hope we shall not be required to witness that Glory in martyrdom; many of our Christian brothers and sisters do now live with that possibility. But we have our own opportunities in the world about us, in our families, at work and as members of a wider community. Glory is not for basking in; it is part of our lives, responding to it is a habit or disposition, one which enables us to pass it on. What we are doing this evening is I hope preparing, recharging ourselves to just that. Amen.