In Spirit and Truth, Ch2

Chapter Focus: "five biblical passages that indicate how faithful worship involves seeing the world as it really is--that is, to see the world as revealed by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ" (33).

Main Points:
Reading 1: John 4:1-30--the Samaritan woman at the well
**Three major points of dramatic tension (pg 34):
*Jews and Samaritans generally didn't associate with each other
*Jewish men generally didn't associate with women not in their families
*This woman was an acknowledged sinner and rabbis didn't generally associate with acknowledged sinners

**"To worship in spirit and truth does not mean to worship in some sort of internal or private 'spiritual' manner as opposed to the public worship of the Jews or Samaritans. Spiritual worship is not opposed to life in the created world per se, but to the systems of the fallen world" (35-36, original italics, bold mine)

**"True worshippers, Jesus claims, will worship in a way that overcomes..divisions" (36)

Reading 2: Romans 12
**"When Paul tells the Romans to present their 'bodies as a living sacrifice' [he is] defining Christian worship within the sacrificial tradition of the Old Testament [Micah 6:6-8, Psalm 51:17], but especially the part of the tradition that stresses the ethical life of the worshiper" (36-37)

**"Reasonable worship with our bodies involves a transformed mind...a transformed way of seeing the world" (37). Reasonable worship is embodied, and involves more than individual bodies, but also the corporate body of Christ.

**"Our sacrifice requires that our life and work in the world conform to our worship, not that our worship conform to the world" (38, original emphasis)

Reading 3: 1 Corinthians 11--eating together as worship
**The context is a full meal, not the symbolic communion of today's services. So when the meal is/was stratified along socioeconomic lines, the divisions of the community prevented full communion of/with/as the Body of Christ. That's no good. This points to the importance of worship as corporate, not solely or primarily individual.

Reading 4: 1 Corinthians 14
**Community (that welcomes/honors/nurtures all) as worship

**Problem addressed: "members who did not care whether their personal worship habits were edifying for the community" (speaking in tongues in ways that are creating problems for the worshiping community as a whole) (39).

**Worship should/can/must be enthusiastic, but it also must be the case that personal worship habits that are performed in community are not detrimental to the community (40)

**One possible "solution"-style interpretation of 1 Cor 14 33a-36 is to say that Paul is insisting that women are subject to the same rules of controlling themselves as men. I don't buy it, as Paul didn't seem afraid of running out of paper in order to get across specific points, and adding the "when appropriate" or "just like men" suggested by the authors doesn't seem to be that difficult. And comparing women to petulant children does nothing (good) for me. (41)

Reading 5: The book of Revelation
**Rather than trying to figure out exactly what John meant and predict the end of the world, the authors "suggest that the Revelation to John is about how worship enables us to see more clearly what God has been up to in the world in every age between the first coming of Jesus and the second coming of Jesus. The Revelation gives us insight into how the world of the spirit (the divine realm) corresponds to the world of the here-and-now"( 43)
**That there is tension in the choice of who/what to worship is not intended to suggest that Christians should withdraw from the world, but rather that the world in which we live now does not function as it was intended to function, and in a world that is truly worshipful, "the glory and honor of the nations is a future of peace and abundance, with no more domination by death, poverty or privilege" (46)

Things I Really Like:
**Context and explanation for claims that might be otherwise unfamiliar--pg 37 is a well-reasoned explanation of why "spiritual worship" in 12:1 might better be translated as "reasonable" and the implications of that change.
**Pg 45, first full paragraph, is a very interesting way of thinking about "The Beast" and what it might look like today. It's refreshing to see proposed interpretations that not only acknowledge the presence of social and socioeconomic injustice, but link them very closely to God's heart.

Things I Need to Vent About:

**Saying that spiritual blindness has nothing to do with physical in/ability to see does absolutely nothing to stop privileging physical sight. This sort of language, along with other healing passages that link spiritual deficiency or problem to physical "defect," have serious historical and contemporary real-life implications for those of us whose abilities aren't normate, and just saying "but I don't mean REAL eyes!!" doesn't fix anything. I'm not going to call this something I need to get over. It's something that needs to be worked through, not only by me, but by theologians and Christianity in general.

**Is "complete fellowship with God" (36) possible for those of us not fully divine in addition to fully human? Genuine question.