So after a looong, very long indeed hiatus, I'm back in the blogosphere, mainly due to the multitudinous cries of my audience (meaning Pastor Steve and my sister Eunice). But since I'm too lazy to write anything new (and besides this is the second time I'm writing this 'cause my Word died and I lost my first entry), I'm going to post some of the notes I jotted down a while back for the "Art + Worship" (by the way it's pronounced Art AND Worship, not Art plus Worship) lifegroup I'm leading at Centerpoint. Hey don't judge me for being lazy, I actually think it's a good thing to post this notes, especially 'cause it's impossible for me to teach straight from a written down text, I just take some specific thoughts I want to convey and expand on them, which sometimes turns into something like improv teaching, not that I don't prepare for the teaching. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing, sometimes new ideas or ways of saying things that I hadn't thought about while preparing come out when I'm teaching, but at the same time, some of the ideas that I had wanted to share get left out, so I'm going to try to use this blog entries as a complement for the Monday teaching at the lifegroup, which of course, if you are not coming to it, does not mean much, but still some of this ideas are worth talking about, so here it goes:
We will begin our journey by discussing how everything is spiritual. The main idea of the session is to teach that every action and thought we make and have is spiritual. One of the main problems in understanding the true nature of worship is the distinction we make between the natural or physical world, and the supernatural or spiritual world. The common misunderstanding we have is that there is a divide between the material and the immaterial, which there is, but we think that the material is bad and the immaterial is good. So when we approach the issue of worship, we tend to think that since only the immaterial is good then worship must be immaterial, it is more of a feeling, something we can't see our touch, after all God isn't material right? Or is He? And while it is true that there are supernatural forces both good and bad that we can't see our touch or smell, that is not the whole picture, so worship is not only a feeling, or a spiritual ecstasy, and spiritual things are not only feelings and non-tangible thoughts or feelings. We take this thought even further sometimes, and split our lives in sections, so there is my relationship with God (the immaterial or "spiritual") and my relationship with everything else, my family, my friends, my workplace, this is all the material or "non-spiritual" or "physical." And this is a gross misconception, because everything we do is our relationship with God. Our relationship with our friends, family, coworkers, everything flows out of the intensity or lack thereof of our relationship with God, because everything is spiritual.
Splitting things into spiritual and physical comes mainly from the ancient Greeks, specially Plato's school of thought, that said that the physical world was bad and that we should to be free from it and seek the spiritual world. To a certain extent that was the main concept behind Gnosticism, even until this day. Some could argue that a similar idea is found in the Bible, especially Paul's discourse about the flesh vs. the Spirit. However, Paul's discourse was mainly about the war of good vs. evil, which exists, but it is very difficult to prove that what he meant by the "flesh" is translated as the physical world, as a matter of fact, most of the things he mentions, like envy and hate are non-tangible feelings, which makes them pretty much spiritual. Going even further, evil originated in the spiritual realm, Satan's heart, so evil is pretty much "spiritual" instead of physical. The Bible says that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities, again, the spiritual realm. Having a body is not a bad thing, the material world is not a bad thing, remember that God wants to fix the world, restore it, reconcile it to Himself, fix it, not destroy it. Even the passages that talk about the destruction of the world, are the prelude to a recreation, God is fixing the world, not just doing away with it. The book of Revelation shows a picture of the Holy city coming down from Heaven, and God coming to dwell, with us, here, in the physical world. Yes there is death and destruction and sin in the physical world, however, evil is not more powerful than good, and eventually God will restore all things to the way they are supposed to be. If we see Jesus as the center of everything, then Jesus is the perfect image of the spiritual meshed with the physical, not only as God made flesh, but also as the Glorified Lamb. The Bible teaches us that after His resurrection, Jesus had a glorified body, he was not only spirit, He shows that to Thomas when He asks him to touch his scars and put his finger where His hands had been pierced, so the Jesus that is sitting right now at the right hand of the father has a physical body, a glorified body yes, but a physical one, we can touch Him. The Bible says that in the age to come, He will wipe away every tear from our face, and I take that literal, after the judgment, Jesus is going to touch my face, He is going to wipe away every tear, with those glorious, marvelous, strong and yet soft majestic hands that were pierced for my transgressions. Because God has a body.
So the purpose of this session is to show that if everything is spiritual, then a "church service" is not holier or "more spiritual" than any other moment of the week, if the presence of God indeed does cover the Earth, then we can find him and worship him everywhere, and in everything, thus the act of worship goes well beyond singing a song.
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