Some years ago, when my children were very little, I overhead them having an argument. My younger son was trying to get his older brother to do something, and it was clear that he was not making any headway. Finally, in a desperate attempt to convince his brother to listen to him he shouted, “But God says you must!”
This is what is commonly called “invoking” the name of God. The Oxford American Dictionary defines the word “invoke” as to “cite or appeal to (someone or something) as an authority for an action or in support of an argument”. This was certainly what my son was attempting to do! But there is another meaning to this word, and it relates directly to what we do every Sunday when we gather for worship: to invoke is to “call on (a deity or spirit) in prayer, as a witness, or for inspiration.” Of course, it’s not only on Sundays that we call on God for inspiration, but our worship gatherings are one time that we are particularly aware of doing this. They are also, perhaps, the one time when they way we do this may directly impact how we think of God – and of ourselves in relation to God.
What I mean is this. It is common in worship to hear prayers that ask God to “come” or to “fill” the place of worship. When I hear words like this, I can’t help but wonder where we thought God was before we invited God in. Sometimes we reverse the idea by speaking about the way we have “entered” or “come into” God’s presence – as if God does not dare venture out of the doors of our churches, and can be found nowhere else. Now this may seem like semantics, but I believe that the words we use strongly influence the reality we live in.
If we believe God is only present when we invite God to be with us, we will feel uncomfortable when we have forgotten to pray, or when we find ourselves in a place that we wouldn’t want to invite God into. Which means that we will tend to avoid ministering in any places that may be shady, broken down or ‘God-forsaken’ (as we sometimes refer to them). On the other hand, if we believe that God’s presence is something we enter when we walk into a church, we will tend to feel that we need to keep calling on God for special favours if we are to experience God’s activity in our ordinary, daily lives. Either way, we will find ourselves living a dualistic life where, in one part of our lives, we worship and encounter God, and in other parts of our lives God is absent unless we invite God in. Few of us would admit to living this way, but if we examine our lives, we may well find evidence of this tendency. And if we do, I’m sure you’ll acknowledge that it’s not the most helpful way to live.
But here’s where worship can help us. If we take the words of the Psalmist seriously (when he wrote that there is nowhere we can go where we won’t find God’s Spirit and presence – Psalm 139), we will pray the prayer of invocation very differently. We will find ourselves asking God to open our eyes to God’s presence that is already within us and among us. We will also acknowledge that God’s presence fills not just our building, but the universe. And as we worship week after week, these words will settle into our souls, and we will find that we live in a very different world – a word that is flooded, at every moment and in every place, with the glory and presence of God.
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John van de Laar is a Methodist minister, liturgical consultant and the author of the book Food for the Road – Life Lesson from the Lord’s Table. He holds a Master’s Degree in theology from UNISA, and is the founder of Sacredise.com, an international worship training and resourcing ministry. John is married to Debbie, and they have two sons.
Visit www.sacredise.com for more articles by John, as well as resources for personal and public worship – music, prayers, liturgies, images and drama scripts.