So we begin to worship

Worship is our primary calling, and all life flows out of it. Birds sing, fly, eat, reproduce. We do all that too. But as human beings, worship is our highest calling, our truest and most honest use of time. After all it is what we will do forever in heaven. Just as Charles Wesley (whose grandfather was vicar here,  and his brother curate of our St Luke’s Old Street) says in his hymn Love Divine: ‘till we cast our crowns before Thee, lost in wonder, love and praise'. 

Some people are fond of saying ‘you don’t have to go to Church to be a Christian’. But being a Christian isn’t just a matter of what you believe - that Jesus is God. Or being nice or giving to charity. Plenty of atheists or people of other faiths can do that too! Christ came that we might be drawn into relationship with God, and that is built on worship. Can you be a Christian without coming to Church? … ‘Why try?’ Is my answer!

Time in worship is not productive. It can’t be measured or submitted to a Management Consultancy process of analysis and improvement. It is the beginnings (faltering with the limitations of our earthly life) of an ecstatic union that will last forever and fulfil all the longings of our nature. 

Medieval writers and saints often used sexual imagery for prayer and worship, being the closest we have with the blunt instruments of language to say what we are doing here. That’s why art and music are so key to our faith; they reach beyond what we can say, feel or know, to plumb the depths of being and alive-ness, that words cannot touch. When we worship we fulfil our place in the universe. We swim with the tide of life, like birds when they sing and fly.