Worship

I

Introduction

Worship, homage or reverence paid to a deity. The word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon weorthscipe, meaning “honour”, and was originally used to address people of high rank. Today, it is used almost exclusively in a religious context. It is significant that some form of worship, whether of ancestors or of forces of nature, seems to have existed in all civilizations.

Central to worship is its priority over the formulations of creeds and theologies. Although the latter provide form and meaning, it is worship that is their source and basis. Christians worshipped Christ long before they began to define His nature and person. This priority of worship over creed is encapsulated in the time-honoured Latin phrase “Lex orandi est lex credendi” (“The law that is worshipped is the law that is believed”).

Worship may be spontaneous and expressed in informal language by an individual believer either in private or in public. It may also be expressed in set formulas, rites, and rituals prescribed by different religious traditions and conducted by one or more celebrants. Collective worship, when the congregation prays together, is common in many religions. Often a sacred place is reserved exclusively for worship, such as a church, a Gurdwara, (Sikh place of worship), or even a sacred grove (jaher), outside a village, as among the Santals, an indigenous people in West Bengal. A worshipper combines his inner disposition with his outward bodily expressions. Thus, standing is sometimes meant to indicate respect and alertness; kneeling, one's submission; and prostration, one's self-abandonment in abasement.

The performance of rites with the attention to minute details (rubrics) has been variously stressed by different religions. They vary from attributing inner efficacy to the rite itself, if strictly adhered to, to allowing considerable freedom as to the form and content of worship. Some religions require a qualified or ordained minister, a priest, or a pujari, while others, like Islam, do not.

II

Judaism

Jewish worship encompasses the whole of a believer's life. The wish of every devout Jew is to live always in the presence of Jahweh (Psalm 16:8). Jewish worship takes various forms: prayer, the study of the Torah, and the celebration of festivals and other special occasions. Jewish prayer is both public (or institutional) and private (or personal). The basic structure of public (or liturgical) worship, held in a synagogue, is the recitation of benedictions (Tefillah, “prayers”) on weekdays, replaced by prayers for specific occasions on sabbaths and festivals. In the liturgy too, the Shema, a confession of faith composed of passages from the Torah, is recited twice daily. All liturgies end with two messianic prayers, the Alenu and the Kaddish, an Aramaic prayer of praise to God.

A devout Jew prays to God privately three times a day—in the morning, afternoon, and evening—and a man will cover his head with a hat or skullcap (in Hebrew kippah, or, in Yiddish, yarmulke). These three times are deemed to perpetuate metaphorically the three times each day when, in the pre-Christian era, before the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 ce, priests offered sacrifices there. Jews often recite benedictions in their daily activities to acknowledge that God is the Lord of everything and that they are merely His stewards.

In rabbinical Judaism, the study of the Torah is considered an act of worship. Passages from the Torah and Talmud are recited during the daily morning services. The reading of the whole of the Torah is spread over the sabbaths of the liturgical year (a cycle which begins in the autumn with a celebration called Simhath Torah, (“rejoicing in the Torah”). At festivals, readings from the Torah are chosen for the occasion. Thematically suitable readings from the prophets are also read on sabbaths and festivals.

Jewish festivals celebrate historic events that have given the Jewish people their identity. Three major feasts, originally agricultural, are Pesach (Passover), commemorating the exodus from Egypt, Shabuoth, to mark the time of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai (the Ten Commandments, in the Bible), and Sukkoth (the feast of Tabernacles), to remind the Jews that their forebears dwelt in tents on their journey to the Promised Land. A ten-day period of self-examination and repentance precedes Sukkoth. It starts with Rosh Hashanah (New Year's Day, in September-October) and ends with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. This is the holiest day of the year, during which Jews fast, pray, and confess their sins, asking God for forgiveness.

Birth, marriage, and death are also celebrated by acts of worship. Eight days after birth, all male children are circumcised, symbolizing their initiation into the covenant of Abraham. At marriage, the seven wedding benedictions are recited. The Shema is recited as a person is dying. Unlike in Christianity, no prayers for the dead are said, but the Kaddish is recited by a son in honour of his deceased parent.

III

Christianity

At the heart of Christian worship is the adoration of, praise of, and thanksgiving to the Triune God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Most liturgical formulae are addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. God is worshipped as the creator of all things, and thanked for all His gifts, especially for having saved all men and women in (or through) Jesus Christ. Though Christians are also expected to worship God by the way they act in the world, the more specific act of worship is expressed in the liturgy, with Church-established and supervised services suited to different occasions.

A

Eucharist

Central to all Christian worship is the Eucharist, a prayer of thanksgiving and praise. Although the details of this act of worship vary between different Christian traditions, the essential pattern remains the same: a preparation consisting of a confession of one's sins, usually followed by an absolution by an ordained minister; the liturgy of the Word (readings from the Bible); and a homily (or sermon), an explanation of the reading with an exhortation to put its religious message into practice in one's daily life. In many Christian confessions, the liturgy follows, called by different names (for example, The Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, or Mass). The main purpose of celebrating the Eucharist is to declare the saving power of God and to participate in this saving power in daily life.

One of the causes of division between the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian Churches in the 16th century was the way the Mass was perceived, the Roman Catholic Church insisting that it was a re-enactment of the sacrifice on Calvary while the Reformation Churches stressed the memorial aspect of the Last Supper. Today, sacrifice and memorial are seen by both sides as two aspects of one reality, the mass being a “sacrificial meal”.