This is the first of two articles I wrote for the congregational newsletter on the multisensoryness of worship.
Multisensory Worship, Part 1
By Pr. Rich Futrell
In Matthew 15:8, Jesus said, “These people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.” When Jesus said that, He wasn’t setting up an either-or scenario. Jesus didn’t mean that we aren’t supposed to worship Him with our lips. (If He did, then we’d have to throw much of the Bible away!) Jesus meant that we are to worship Him with our lips AND our hearts, with our entire being: body, soul, and spirit.
For worship is not only a mental experience, as if worship were only to learn facts, as if the preached Word were only information. The sanctuary is not a classroom. Oh, to be sure, learning does take place during worship. But worship is not a classroom. It is worship. So don’t decide if you’ve had a “good” worship experience by what you have learned.
Worship is not only an emotional experience. For often our emotions often lead us astray. So don’t decide if you’ve had a “good” worship experience by how you feel.
Worship is to be a full-person experience. That means worship involves the entire person. That means if worship is something done with one’s entire being, then worship is also something received with one’s entire being. Think about it.
How does God come to us in worship beyond His omnipresence? In baptism, He touches us with water. In the Lord’s Supper, we see and taste Him in His body and blood. In the preached Word, we hear the Word as it (He, through the Spirit!) vibrates our eardrums. In private confession and absolution, we not only hear the Word of forgiveness, but it is also given to us by the laying on of hands. That’s multisensory!
But are our senses and whole being to be involved in others ways? Here we look to Scripture.
First, worship involves body movement. The two words for worship in Old Testament Hebrew are ebed and shachah. Ebed is a word with several meanings: work, serve, and worship (used generically). Shachah means to fall prostrate before, bow down, etcetera.
In the New Testament, proskuneo is the primary word for worship. It occurs 59 times. Proskuneo means fall prostrate before, kneel, or bow down. Latreuo is the generic for worship. Sebomai means to be in fear of, to reverence, or to be in awe of.
So worship involves the body, where the body form is meant to reflect what is going on in one’s heart. That’s why we kneel to receive the Lord’s Supper. Since we can’t fall prostrate before God (we have pews), and we can’t kneel (no kneelers), perhaps we can increase body involvement by bowing during the Confession of Sins. In such a way, the form will better reflect what is in the heart.
Yet, God also wants to involve our senses in worship. (In this article, I’ll only touch on this in part. Part 2 of this article will come in February 2011.)
In the book of Exodus, God commanded Moses to make an altar of acacia wood for burning incense. Aaron was to burn incense morning and evening. God gave Moses specific instructions for making the worship incense (Exodus 30:34-38). One of the main ingredients given in God’s list was frankincense.
Frankincense is the “hypoallergenic” incense. Even more, Frankincense was the one of the three gifts Jesus received from the wise men. Frankincense was for worship, Myrrh was oil to anoint a dead body for burial, and gold symbolized giving of our treasures to God.
But why would God want His people to use incense? Incense is a symbol of the prayers of God’s people rising to the throne of God. Psalm 141:2 says, “Let my prayers rise before You as incense.” In the New Testament, the people would pray outside the Holy of Holies while the priest inside offered incense on the golden altar. “And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense” (Luke 1:10).
In Revelation, the Apostle John saw a glimpse of heavenly worship. “And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer [bowl], and he was given much incense to offer with the prayer of the saints” (Revelation 8:3).
So we see, so far, worship as the Bible defines it involves a wide range of body movements and uses incense to represent the prayers of God’s people.
To move toward a more-biblical model of worship (after all Lutherans claim to be “Scripture alone”), as your pastor, I would like to incorporate the following at different times in our corporate worship:
- bow during the Confession of Sin,
- use hypoallergenic, frankincense during some of our services. [Note: Incense has caused headaches for some, so using incense has been stopped.]
Now if what I’ve written sounds freaky, or even offensive, it’s only because we’ve let other things beside Scripture (our traditions, preferences, anti-Roman Catholicism, etcetera) shape our worship of God. With Scripture as our norming norm, what I have shared with you in this article is just a fraction of what God has for us in His Word.
