Worship as Sacrifice

A while ago, I was listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast on Ancient Faith Radio, and during the episode of "His Ministers Flaming Fire", Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick said something that really stuck out to me. What he said made a lot of sense to me, and put to words what the real difference between veneration and worship is.

Now, I've written on this blog before about the difference between the act of veneration - such as Orthodox Christians praying to the saints, bending down in front of icons, and kissing said icons - and worship which is reserved for God alone, but I felt that the explanations fell a little short and left a lot to be desired from a Protestant POV. The issue is how low-church Protestants view worship as opposed to how liturgical Christians (Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, etc.) view the act of worship. I believe that this difference in how we view worship is preventing us from real dialogue with other Christians. 

And, I think it is important that we do dialogue with other Christians. Sure, inviting our friends and family to "come and see" our worship services works some of the time to break down barriers and get people interested, but it doesn't work all of the time. For example, both my mother and my father have been to liturgy with me; my mother was respectful but felt that the Orthodox Church is too iconographic (nevermind all of the figurines of biblical scenes that she has throughout her house as decoration), but my father always claimed to be bored and would whip out his tablet to do whatever he did on his tablet. 

We might be able to tell people that the whole focus of the Divine Liturgy is the Eucharist. But can we tell them why? Can we explain that the Eucharist is a sacrifice? Can we explain the different parts of the Liturgy and what they mean - what they represent - to our friends and family that may be interested in our faith? 

Being able to dialogue with others is very important so at the very least they understand where we are coming from. And I think this is why what was said, even if I've heard it before, stuck out to me so much. 

Fr. Andrew states,

"Anyways, with the second part of our show tonight, we want to talk about some possible objections that people might have to what we described in the first part. The first objection we want to discuss is something that especially Protestants who encounter the Orthodox Church can tend to have a big, big problem with. And it’s an understandable problem; I totally get it. I used to see things this way myself, because I was not always Orthodox; I was raised as an Evangelical Protestant. And that’s that when Orthodox Christians give veneration to angels, to saints, a lot of Protestants will look at that and say, 'Why are you worshiping saints? Why are you worshiping angels? Isn’t that idolatry?' The Orthodox person will respond by saying, 'I’m not worshiping them; I’m venerating them.' The response to that might be, 'Well, six of one, half a dozen of the other.'" (Source)

Here, he hits on exactly what I was talking about; Protestants don't understand the difference between veneration and worship, to them they look like the same thing.  

Fr. Stephen de Young replies,

"I want to make sure we’re being as charitable as possible. Even, yeah, in one way it’s objections, but I want to give our Protestant friends who have this issue even more credit than that, and say that this isn’t just them wanting to have an argument, although some of them, that probably is it, but that this is a difference that they don’t see. So the whole idea—they’re good-hearted people, they love Christ, they want to worship only the true Christ, and since they don’t see the distinction, the whole thing makes them really queasy and nervous. It’s not just a sort of intellectual objection or something."(ibid)

Again, the low-church Protestants don't see the distinction. We can throw Greek and Latin words at them all day long to show that veneration and worship are different, but they don't see the distinction. To them, it looks an awful lot like we Orthodox are worshipping the saints and angels.

Fr. Andrew goes on to explain why Protestants don't see the distinction between veneration and worship,

"Right, it looks like worship to them, what we do with saints and angels. I think that the basis for that is—and we’re going to get into this especially—that the actions that most Protestants do in their worship services… Let’s be explicit: singing to God, praying to God and telling him how awesome he is, and in some cases, if you’re more affected by, let’s say, the charismatic movement, they might lift up their hands. These kinds of things are what is identified as being worship in those contexts. Especially as you get to more of the “low church” side of things, more of a Zwinglian, for instance, communion, even if they do have communion, interestingly, that action is not described as being worship, but rather as being a memorial, like, we’re doing this to remember what Jesus did for us."

Fr. Andrew then goes on to state,

"The actions that are described as worship in many Protestant contexts—singing, praying, praising God, and so forth—Orthodox look at that stuff and say, “Well, that’s just veneration.” So when we sing to a saint or tell him that he’s awesome or ask him to help us, we don’t regard that as worship; we regard that as veneration. We’re not making this point as just pure apologetics—this is not an apologetics show—but I think this is an important point to make, because, like you said, we’re trying to get people kind of off the grid, off the matrix that they’re in, and say, 'There’s a whole different world here, actually, that we’re trying to help people see and experience.'"(ibid)

So we see here that to us Orthodox we definitely view veneration and worship as very different things. The things that the Protestants do (and view) as purely worship - singing, praying, etc. - we Orthodox see as merely veneration. This is because of how we ultimately view worship, which is a sacrifice. I mentioned in my post about communion how we view the Eucharist as a sacrifice, but we also view worship as a sacrifice.

Fr. Andrew explains this really well,

"For the Orthodox, worship is focused on the act of offering. It’s not just offering prayers but actually offering sacrifices. In the Orthodox Church, there’s essentially two sacrifices that are offered. Now, I mean, the term gets metaphorically used to refer, for instance, to the sacrifice of praise, right? But there’s really two sacrifices being offered. One is the sacrifice of the Eucharist: bread and wine being offered on the altar, changed by God to be the body and blood of Christ, and then we share that sacrificial meal with him, because that’s what a sacrifice is. And then also, incense is sacrificed; incense is offered. It’s offered to God, but, again, we share it with him. We smell it. It’s not just offered to God for him to smell, so to speak, but it’s offered to God, and we share it with him. Again, it becomes a means of communion between us and him. Even though it’s not a meal, it’s still ingested, literally. We’re still bringing it into ourselves. So incense and the Eucharist are the things that are sacrificed, offered, in the Orthodox Church, and that we understand as being… That is what worship truly is."(ibid)

Fr. Stephen Freeman, in his blog, "Glory to God for All Things", wrote a similar post, and here is an excerpt from that,
 

"What we have is a clash of grammars.

I suggest a working definition for contemporary worship: any number of activities, including singing, dancing, waving hands, shouting, weeping, when in a religious setting. The same actions in a non-religious setting are not worship.

In the grammar of Orthodoxy, and in the grammar of Scripture, worship has a different definition. Worship may be defined as the offering of a sacrifice to a Deity.

The trouble comes when one grammar seeks to understand the other. That which the Orthodox render to saints and holy objects (relics, the Cross, icons, etc.) is understood to be honor or veneration. No sacrifices are ever offered to saints as though they were gods. This distinction is difficult for contemporary Christians because the notion of sacrifice, in its original meaning, has been lost. It is certainly the case that honor and veneration are given to God, but they do not, of themselves, constitute worship."(Source)

Now, I've heard and seen those in the Protestant world say that worship is sacrifice before. But, I think another problem arises when we look at what it is we sacrifice. 

Fr. Stephen Freeman makes the argument that much of what Protestants think of as worship - much of what they do as worship - looks very similar when you remove it from the religious center and put it in front of athletes, actors, or other celebrities. I'd have to say that I agree with him - having grown up as a Protestant - looking back now it really does seem like Protestants worship all of these other people, or even that they worship things.  

I think this is because those low-church Protestants have forgotten what worship is. They removed the sacrifice from the Eucharist and made it merely a symbol. They removed the sacrifice of incense altogether. We both agree that worship should involve a sacrifice, but we differ on what that sacrifice is. 

In ancient Israel, sacrifices were made in the Temple. Pagans would offer sacrifices to their idols - to their gods. These were blood sacrifices that were offered. This is how those cultures worshipped. This is what worship is - a sacrifice. 

The Eucharist has taken the place of the blood sacrifices. It is the bloodless sacrifice. 

"The Divine Liturgy has two main parts. The first part is the gathering, called the synaxis. It has its origin in the synagogue gatherings of the Old Testament, and is centered in the proclamation and meditation of the Word of God. The second part of the Divine Liturgy is the eucharistic sacrifice. It has its origin in the Old Testament temple worship, the priestly sacrifices of the People of God; and in the central saving event of the Old Testament, the Passover (Pascha)."(Source)

We see from the above that the Liturgy in its first part is akin to the synagogue gatherings, while the second part is akin to the Temple worship. The difference between the two (the synagogue meetings and the Temple worship) is that a sacrifice is offered at one, and not at the other.  

The veneration of the saints is not worship! We do not offer sacrifices to the saints. This is what we mean when we say that worship is for God alone - worship is sacrifice, and we only sacrifice to God. We do not sacrifice to icons and the saints that they represent, therefore we do not offer worship to the saints.

True worship is sacrifice. I think that even we Orthodox - especially those that come from a Protestant background - forget this universal truth. True Christian worship IS the bloodless sacrifice of the Blood and Body of Jesus.

I think that the way that we see worship is the one thing that we need to get others to understand. Perhaps from here we can dialogue with others.  

Also, please read the rest of the articles that I linked to, they are definitely a wealth of knowledge, and they explain much more than I can.