Brutal Worship

Back in August I pondered coining the term, 'Brutal Worship'.

God is a big and creative and mysterious and awesome God.  Because of this reality, it seems good that there would be many forms of worship.

This may be true, that worship can exist in many forms, yet, I think we tend to homogenize our views when we come into the context of community.  Worship when it comes to Church often is left to the lone act of singing. Mind me, I am not criticizing, only observing.

While singing, my inner being (my masculinity?) gets an extra bump of excitement when I sing things like the bridge to Better is One Day:

My heart and flesh cry out,

for You, the living God,

your Spirit's water to my soul.

I yearn to worship with such power and emotion.  I want to be the type of zealous follower that cries out.  I want my flesh to cry out.  But what does that look like?

Sports has something of that, I believe.  When your whole being is enthralled in the current journey on that field... there's a sense of peaceful purpose.  I'm using my body and my mind in single accord with a group of other people.  If such deeds are done with an eye to serving the Lord, this seems quite good through my lens.  Just standing there singing can be a bit passive, no?

The men and women of the documentary Rize have concocted for themselves a bizarre form of dance.  It is at once frightening, electrifying, dangerous, and provocative.  To summarize such a style of dance is useless, it has to be seen.

We learn in the documentary that the style of dance, Krumping, has its origins in Clowning, which itself was started by a dude who drove around Watts in full-fledged face paint dancing for kids at their birthday parties.  For these people, dancing exorcises them of the all-surrounding world of drugs, gangs, and death.  It is kinetic freedom.  Freedom.

Hear the words of Tight Eyez: We're not gonna be clones of the commercial hip-hop world... because that's been seen for so many years.. Somebody's waitin'on something different... another generation of kids with morals and values... that they won't need... what's being commercialized or tailor-made for them... custom-made, because I feel that we're custom-made. And we're of more value than any piece of jewelry... or any car or any big house that anybody could buy. 

Amen brother.  

I wonder, when Moses first wrote, "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength"*, is this what he had in mind?

Check out the trailer.

*Deuteronomy 6:5, New King James Version