As before, you can preview the first two minutes of the film. The Work of the People is supported by a subscription-based model, so if you'd like to access the whole film, along with every other film at the site, it's only $7 a month for a personal subscription, which you can cancel anytime.
Today's film is entitled "Re-experiencing Jesus' Baptism." In this film, Travis and I discuss themes from my book The Slavery of Death.
My sentence that is cut off at the two-minute mark is, "What you're trying to do in worship is re-experience Jesus' baptism." With that sentence in hand, the point I make in the preview is the one I make in The Slavery of Death, that worship has two aspects.
The first aspect of worship is destructive. As I describe at the start of the film, what I do in both worship and baptism is reject the false gods holding me in thrall. In both baptism and worship I step away from all the idolatrous ways I've constructed my identity and have construed a false narrative of my life. In both baptism and worship I confront and straighten my disordered desires and malformed loves. In all this, both baptism and worship are renunciations.
The second aspect of worship is receptive. Having cleaned out and renounced idolatrous attachments in our worship of God, we go on to receive from God, and receive ever anew, our truest selves. As I describe in The Slavery of Death, our identity is not something we earn but is, rather, received as a gift. That is what I mean when I say worship is re-experiencing of Jesus' baptism. As Jesus stands in the waters of Jordan his identity is given to him: "This is my beloved, in whom I am well pleased." This is why I answered Travis' question "What is grace?" the way I did. Grace is God's declaration over you: "You are my beloved, in whom I am well pleased." Worship places us, over and over again, back into this baptismal moment. Worship reminds us who we are and whose we are.
And as I go on to describe in The Slavery of Death, this "eccentric identity," receiving oneself as God's beloved, creates psychological and relational capacities. No longer needing to construct my identity in games of comparison and competition, I can rest in grace, a rest that makes me available to others and God's work in the world. No longer neurotically striving to secure my own identify, I can turn away from myself as a perpetual self-esteem project to live more freely, spontaneously, responsively, and sacrificially in love.
