Given the tenuous, dangerous, and ultimately deadly nature of existence, it is understandable why persons and communities might come to the conclusion that there is some power behind it all that needs to be worshipped and perhaps even appeased; but if one believes that love is at the very core of the Divine, the appropriate response is not worship or appeasement, but rather to love as the Divine loves.

It seems to me that if there is a genuinely good and loving divine entity in the universe that such an entity would be utterly uninterested in being worshipped. Such a desire for worship would be more consistent with divine narcissism rather than divine love.

Many persons and communities view the Divine as being like a parent. I cannot imagine any good parent wanting to be worshipped by their children. The goal of parenting is to love our children into their full humanity, not to be worshipped by them. Persons would be rightly aghast at parents who required worship from their children. Why would we expect something different in relation to our Divine Parent?

Perhaps one of the reasons Christians in the United States are so prone to follow Trump and to embrace authoritarianism and autocracy in general is that so many of our churches focus on expressing faith through worship of divine power rather than through following the way of divine love. Our churches far too often model worship of power rather than loving service in community with others.

So much of our Christian gatherings are about praising and worshipping Jesus as a divine being that we lose sight of Jesus’ call to action in the world to be peacekeepers, caregivers, loving servants of the most vulnerable, and liberators of the oppressed. Our obsession with adherence to doctrines about Jesus overshadows Jesus’ teachings about practicing and living out the way of love and justice in the world. We spend billions of dollars on worship spaces and performative praise and worship, while spending a pittance in time and resources by comparison to be in service with others in the ways Matthew 25 and the Sermon on the Mount call us to be.

Instead of coming together each week to worship God, which makes the Divine out as a narcissistic attention seeker, and instead of focusing on required belief in God as the only way of avoiding hell, which makes the Divine out as jealous and sadistic; imagine if persons and communities who are attempting to follow the way of love and justice of Jesus in the world came together to celebrate the love we have for each other in community and to challenge and encourage each other to live more fully into Beloved Community by working to bring truly good news to the poor and real liberation to the oppressed – in other words, loving each other into the fullness of our humanity as we care for each other and the community of all creation.