Tuesday • 7/25/2023
This week, we are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.
Samurai Sanctification: The Seven Deadly Sins & the Beatitudes
A few years ago, I took up samurai swordsmanship. It has not been easy, because the sword is not just about cutting stuff. It’s as much about how you move your body. My body doesn’t do Japanese well. When my sensei shows me what I look like to him, he bounces like Tigger and sways like John Wayne. What my sensei is looking for, instead, is Obi-Wan Kenobi’s liquid smoothness. To learn fluidity of motion I have to force myself to take on a persona — almost an alternate me — when I’m on the floor of the dojo. I feel like a total phony, because I’m saying “No!” to everything that feels natural. But every once in a while, when I glance at myself in the dojo mirrors, I see what my sensei is after.
The “liturgy” of the dojo reshapes me so I can take on the other me that I must be if ever I wish my swordsmanship to be samurai. Christian worship does something like that for followers of Christ. Worship shapes us to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Worship invites us to take on a new persona: a persona so new it feels phony sometimes, even though it’s not.
It’s simply the character of Jesus.
True Selves
In Matthew 5:3-12 Jesus announced that the Kingdom — and therefore life with and in him — belongs to the humble, the mournful, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, the merciful and peaceful, the pure in heart, the courageous in suffering. Jesus prefaced each saying with, “Blessed are….” He was not piling on guilt to prove we need a savior. He was describing himself and issuing a promise — on the far side of his cross — of what he had come to make us into.
In the first few centuries of the church, certain believers “followed” Jesus into the wildernesses of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, thinking the desert would be a place to free themselves from the dangers and distractions of the world so they could become more like their Lord. Unexpectedly, what many of those first monks (“monk” means “one who lives alone”) discovered was that they brought their problems with them. Thankfully, they provided a rich vocabulary of the obstacles to realizing the character of Jesus: the “seven deadly sins” of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, lust, and gluttony.
The Deadlies
Worship reshapes me to take on the “other” me Christ says I am in him and to lose the “default” me the desert fathers describe in “the deadlies.” There are a thousand ways in which worship does this work in us. At the Table, in particular, to borrow an elegant phrase from C. S. Lewis, “a hand from a hidden country touches not only my soul but my body. … Here is big medicine and strong magic.”
The Table is indeed “big medicine and strong magic” for life-transformation. I love the fact that in many churches the entire communion portion of worship is offered in prayer: “We give you thanks, Heavenly Father, that the Lord Jesus, on the night before he died, took bread, and after giving thanks to you, broke it, and gave it to his disciples….” Accordingly, I find myself coming to the Table praying that the Lord would impart more of that new other me for my default “deadlies.”
Humility
Lord Jesus, you came in the humility of our humanity. You freely accepted a cruel and shameful death to take away our shame and guilt. Touch me now, please, in the simplicity of this bread and wine to break my pride and give me your humble heart.”
Compassion
“Lord Jesus, you wept beside your friend’s tomb and showed compassion to the shepherd-less crowds. By the cup of your sorrow, teach me to mourn my neighbor’s hurts. Forgive my envy of those who have more, who seem to be in a better place than I. By the bread of your suffering, may I long for their well-being...”
Forgiveness
“Lord Jesus, in the strength of your meekness, you broke the back of evil. Forgive my bitterness towards betrayers, my self-protective ire against reality that won’t bend to my will, my offense at the merest slight. As you have drunk to the last dregs the cup of judgment, tether my anger and show me the power of forgiving love...”
Involvement
“Lord Jesus, you ‘troubled yourself’ (John 11:33) to come to our aid. You gloriously rose from the dead to reign over us. Forgive the sloth of my spirit. Forgive my indifference to you — and to the good, the true, and the beautiful. As this bread and wine are a foretaste of a great wedding festival, may I rise from this Table and live as one who hungers and thirsts for all things to be made right...”
Sacrifice
“Lord Jesus, your coming was but the overflow of the eternal self-giving communion between Father, Son, and Spirit. Forgive my greed and avarice. Forgive my obsession with gaining things and financial security. As you give yourself to me in this bread and cup, may I give myself to you, to all who share this feast, and to your good purposes in this world...”
Restoration
“Lord Jesus, creator and restorer of all things beautiful, you came to us in our corruption. You loved — and love — with holy passion, clean hands, and pure heart. Forgive the countless ways I corrupt your beautiful gifts. By this bread and wine, offerings of your lovely creation, give me satisfaction in you, and use me to restore honor and beauty and nobility to the creation you love...”
Deliverance
“Lord Jesus, you said that it was your food and drink to do the will of him who sent you and to accomplish his work (John 4:34). You place me in a world of hunger, and all I think about is food for me. Forgive my blind eye to the way the righteous suffer and your prophets are persecuted. Fill me now with heavenly food and send me to fill others. Send me not to devour but to deliver. May this meal truly be one in which I become what I eat. May my life leave a trail of crumbs to lead others to you, life’s Living Bread...”
“Amen.”
As to the samurai me, I got a vision of the long-term payoff for working at samurai swordsmanship, when my sensei (who is Anglo, by the way) got promoted to some ridiculously high rank by his Japanese sensei. One of our more senior students whispered in my ear during the proceedings: “You know what this means, don’t you? Now they consider him Japanese.”
May the Lord Jesus so feed us with his own self that we become more and more “Japanese.”
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+