Worship as Haka
Liturgy and Worship - Exhortation
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, July 10, 2010
As you have been taught before, worship is warfare. But over time, there are some in the church who want to be known as warriors, but do not want an actual fight. What is necessary is to exalt what might be called ceremonies of fighting. This gets the blood pumping, but then you can just call it good. You enjoy the blood rush, and no blood shed.
The Maori used to have an impressive ritual called the haka, a rite of taunting the enemy that they went through before battle. Now the haka is performed before rugby games, and not before an actual battle, but it still impressive. Suppose the next step were taken, and the haka were removed to a concert hall, where gentlemen in tuxes and ladies in gowns could watch in genuine anthropological interest.
God has designed worship so that—unless we have worked it through the grid of our unbelief—it will bring us into conflict with the principalities and powers. When worship is led in this spirit and with this faith, it begins to dawn on many that this might result in an actual battle, not against flesh and blood, but an actual battle nonetheless. We are conservative, and the downside of this is we prefer things tidy. But warfare messes them up. Warfare is unsettling. Wars can be won or lost, and wars might requires sacrifice.
In our day, the great cultural battle is over sex, marriage and family. We are to live as Christians in our homes, and we are to gather here to worship as Christians who live as Christians in our homes. The world knows the stakes better than we do, and the world is more interested in pressing the issue than we are.
And so we are called to wake up, to get up, and to prepare for battle. We are called to declare their secular experiment a grand failure, and to point out that the cisterns they have cunningly devised have the one defect of not being able to hold water.
And so here is the issue. Christ is Lord. We are His body, His church. And His church is designed to function as the center of civilization.
No comments:
Post a Comment