The Gospitality of Christian Worship
The most festive festival it is possible to celebrate is divine worship. And there is no festival that does not draw its vitality from worship and that has not become a festival by virtue of its origin in worship. —Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture
And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God.” —Revelation 19:9
During childhood I was bombarded with dad jokes. It was a steady barrage of genuine wit cheapened only by the occasional recycled groaner. For example…
“Dad, I’m hungry.”
“Nice to meet you, Hungry.”
“I’m gonna run to the store.”
“It’d be faster if you drive.”
As an ornery kid, I absorbed this humor with quiet appreciation. In fact, it was the only pun-ishment I regularly enjoyed. When I became a parent, I effortlessly repeated the “sins” of my father and my own children have now had to inherit this generational curse. Pray for them.
As I considered how to write about our worship, my dad brain went into default mode and coined a new word: Gospitality! Some may think it off-color to apply wordplay to the Eucharist, but at the center of our liturgy is the table—a symbol of delight and feasting. Playfulness and reverence can co-exist, especially for children in their Father’s house.
Our good Father designed us to worship him because he desires more than our allegiance. He wants our affections. We were created to worship God alone (Ex. 20:1-6), and it is only in Him that our souls find satisfaction and rest (Ps. 62:1). Christian worship, therefore, is for our ultimate joy. It is a gift from our heavenly Father who takes supreme delight in his beloved children.
So, in celebration of the richness and festivity of Christian worship, let’s play with our new word. Gospitality!
Gospel + Totality = Gospitality
Every church has an established order of service (a.k.a., liturgy). The Anglican liturgy is beholden to The Book of Common Prayer (BCP), which J.I. Packer says,
“teaches the gospel of Christ. The structure of those services [in the BCP] expresses the gospel, just as their words and phrases do, and the power of Anglican liturgy is to instill the gospel into human hearts.”
The architect of the Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer, was influenced by the early church and the Reformers, but the true beauty and richness of the BCP is its rootedness in scripture and saturation with biblical language and themes. The BCP at its best is a time-proven, gospel-saturated tool to help us faithfully and fervently engage with God according to His word.
Every element of our liturgy—from opening processional to parting blessing—is intentionally programmed to help us recognize, respond to, and revel in the glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit.
The gospel of Jesus Christ is the story we inhabit in our gathered worship. As such, our liturgy has cycles of gospel renewal, what Packer has called the “Sin-Grace-Faith” sequence. We see this pattern reflected in the biblical story of creation, fall, and redemption, and in various divine encounters throughout Scripture (i.e. Isaiah 6:1-8). This is the gospel pattern: we behold God’s glory, are confronted with our sin, receive His grace and forgiveness, and respond in faith and obedience (alliteratively put—glory, guilt, grace, and gratitude).
We must remember that the gospel as the good news of salvation is entirely God's free gift (Rom. 6:23), received through faith, rather than something earned through our own good works (Eph. 2:8-9). Therefore, since the liturgy is primarily about the gospel, we understand worship not as a performative work we do for God but a joyful celebration of who he is and what he has already done for us.
This truth is hidden inside the historical meaning of the word liturgy, as Nicholas Wolterstorff reminds us:
As almost every book on liturgy points out, the English word “liturgy” is simply the transliteration of the Greek word leitourgia. In classical Greek the word was used to refer to a service performed by an individual for the benefit of the public, usually at his own expense. For example, if a warship had to be outfitted, sometimes, instead of taxing the citizenry as a whole, the officials invited a wealthy individual to do the outfitting as a personal contribution to the public. Such a public service was a liturgy, and the person performing it, a liturgete (leitourgos). Etymologically the word leitourgia comes from two Greek words, leitos and ergon, meaning, respectively, “of the people” and “action.” In numerous books on liturgy it is said, accordingly, that the word originally meant action of the people. And often nowadays an argument for more participation of the people in the church’s liturgy is based on this claim. It is said that for something to be liturgy, it must be action of the people and not action of a few priests or pastors. But the word leitourgia never did mean action of the people. It meant action for the benefit of the people.
With this in mind, one could rightly argue that the the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the ultimate liturgy. The work of redemption was planned, paid for, and performed by the triune God in perfect collaboration. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit built a bridge back into the city of God for our eternal benefit. What a glorious and freeing reality!
We do not have to earn God’s favor through our worship, and we certainly need not worry about appeasing Him by “getting it right.” Worship is not the anxiously-crafted prayer of the prodigal. It is the ready embrace of the Father (Lk. 15:22-24; Eph. 2:18). All of the content and ceremony (a.k.a. “the work of the people”) in our service is there to facilitate a faithful and fervent encounter with God. Our worship is made possible because of Jesus, our great High Priest, who took up the cross so that we may confidently draw near to the throne of grace. As we commune with Him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, God is working on us, in us, and through us, all for his glory and our good.
In sum, the totality of our liturgy is about the gospel. The good news of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ saturates the entire service. Indeed, our worship is only possible because of the gospel. All that we do on Sundays is simply a grateful response to what God has already done for us.
Gospel + Hospitality = Gospitality
The root of the word Hospitality comes from the Latin hospes (guest, host). This in turn comes from the older Latin root hostis, which originally meant "stranger" and later shifted to mean "enemy" (the root of words like hostile). From hospes we also get hospital. When we consider the etymological journey of this word, we see embedded within it some profound gospel truths. We who were once strangers are now members of the household of God (Eph. 2:19). Jesus himself is our Host at the feast (Luke 24:30-31) and by his wounds we are healed (Is. 53:5).
In their book on Hospitality, fellow ACNA rectors Mark Brians and Drew Knowles illuminate these gospel truths in the context of gathered worship.
Christian worship is divine hospitality. Having spent the previous week building God’s kingdom in the world—loving neighbors, disciplining children, casting anxieties upon the Lord in prayer, pursuing vocations, fighting temptations, experiencing loss, taking joy in life, and bearing the weight of brokenness in the world—the Lord calls us home. He welcomes us into His house. He receives our confession, and He extends His pardon. He washes us. He instructs us. He hears our petitions and complaint. And He lays out a table. The liturgy dramatizes the hospitality of God, and our proper response to the liturgy is to extend the hospitality of God into the world.
Here again we see the divine initiative. The Lord calls. He welcomes, He washes, He instructs, hears, feeds, and blesses. This is the gospel pattern: God acts, and we respond in joyful obedience. Throughout the history of the Christian church there has always been a tendency or temptation to reverse this so worship begins with what we do rather than what God has done. This leads to worship as performance, and it has manifested in various ways throughout history.
The high medieval mass was offered as a propitiatory sacrifice which the priest performed on behalf of the people. It became an elaborate attempt to appease God's wrath and secure grace for both the living and the dead (in purgatory). The English Reformers had some strong words in response to this practice. Here is article XXXI of the Thirty-nine articles of Religion:
The Offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is none other satisfaction for sin, but that alone. Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said, that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits.
The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) was a deliberate attempt to address these fallacies in the area of public worship. In his treatise on the BCP as a model of biblical liturgy, entitled “The Very Pure Word of God,” Peter Adam gets to the heart of it:
The message of the BCP is that we approach God solely through Christ our great high priest and through his sacrificial blood, and that we may do so confident in God’s mercy and his gospel promises….We do not gain access to God through the process of worship: worship is a response to our access to God through Christ’s death, not its substitute. Music does not gain access to God, nor does the beauty of the building or decor: aesthetic appreciation is no replacement of the blood of Christ…It is a common Charismatic, Catholic, and Romantic error to believe that music and worship are a means of access to God. As the BCP reminds us, our access to God is solely through Christ our priest and his sacrifice on the cross. (Heb. 10:19-23)
In our Sunday Eucharist, Christ is the host. He welcomes us into his Father’s house. We feast at the table that he himself has prepared. We earned none of it but receive it all with gratitude. This language of divine hospitality is beautifully expressed in many of our hymns. One of my favorite lines comes from “The Sands of Time are Sinking,” written by Anne Cousin in 1857:
Oh I am my Beloved’s, and my beloved’s mine. He brings a poor vile sinner into his house of wine!
Among all the poets, George Herbert said it best: “Love bade me welcome.”
When we come to worship, we do so as a response to Love’s call. We enter the Father’s embrace through the blood of Christ and by the power of the Spirit. Love has welcomed a sinner into the heavenly banquet.
That, my friends, is hospitality at its finest. Or, may I say, genuine gospitality!
