Israel’s God commands. Walter Brueggemann calls command the “defining and characteristic marking” of the true God. The most striking characteristic of communication between God and Israel is that of command-obedience. Because we live in a culture where submission to any authority other than our own egos is considered unduly authoritarian and unfair, command-obedience is difficult for us. We have freed ourselves from all external authority except servitude to the self. This we hail as freedom, though Israel testifies that slavery (particularly slavery as the necessity to do “what I want to do”) comes in many guises.

Sometimes slavery comes from Pharaoh, who ordered, “Go and get straw yourselves, wherever you can find it; but your work will not be lessened in the least” (Exodus 5:11).

Sometimes slavery comes from an economy that says, “Buy a lot of Pepsi, get a lot of stuff.”

So the issue is not if we shall live under some external command, but rather which external command will have its way with us.

Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, The Truth About God, pages 26-27

We cannot understand the commandments, the Decalogue (“Ten Words”), apart from the worship of the true God. Those who do not worship that God will catch a glimpse of that God when they, for example, tell the truth. But the obeying of an isolated commandment is not to know the commandments “perfectly.” The Ten Commandments are meant for those who are known by the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ. The commandments are the way we learn to worship the true God truthfully, not the way we make American democratic pluralism work.

[…]

The commandments are not guidelines for humanity in general. They are a countercultural way of life for those who know who they are and whose they are. Their function is not to keep American culture running smoothly, but rather to produce a people who are, in our daily lives, a sign, signal, a witness that God has not left the world to its own devices.

Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, The Truth About God, pages 14, 18

Sometimes our worship practice is criticized as being too passive, all sitting and listening and not enough action. But we need to recover a sense of how some of the most important work we do is sitting and listening to Scripture, taking time to sit and listen to a sermon, to be fed. In simply withdrawing from what the world considers its important business, in taking time to do nothing but worship in a world at war, in celebrating an order of worship in a world of chaos, Christians are making a most political statement. In takes courage to take time to worship God in a world where we are constantly told that it is up to us to do right, or right won’t be done.

Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon, The Truth About God, page 62

As Christians, we must never lose sight of the fact that what we do on Sundays is just as important as that which we do Monday through Saturday. I think the criticism Hauerwas and Willimon describe here is real, and that too many churches who are social justice-minded have internalized that criticism. Worship is not an intrusion into, or distraction from, the work of justice and mercy we are called to. It is, in fact, the very act that does that calling to us! How can we know the kind of world God wishes for us if we do not take time to pray, to praise, to read Scripture, and most of all, to be in community with one another?

Ultimately, this is why I ended up back in the church a little over a decade ago, after rejecting religion quite decisively during my time during and just after college. I never lost my passion for the work of justice in the world, but I found I had no moral foundation undergirding it that also infused that justice with compassion, with hope, or with a dose of perspective. I needed worship, even if I wouldn’t have termed it that way at the time, or for a long time even after I began the faith journey to where I am today. My moral and ethical commitments are not in spite of my desire to worship, nor are they driving my religious feeling. No, those commitments are borne out of the act of worshipping week in and week out. That is why the church is so important, and will never go away: people need more than policy papers and disenchanted justice.