More Than A Feeling (the Boston version)

My friend Lisa questioned on my last post what I meant by the offhand comment I made about getting rid of music in church. I figured that was the perfect excuse to make a new post!
We have a screwed up view of worship. I mean, top to bottom, side to side, we as the Church in the 21st century have been fighting over the wrong things. We fight over hymns versus chorus, guitars versus organs, and all of it shows we have no clue what worship is.
The first use of the word "worship" is in the sacrifice of Isaac; the clearest New Testament reference to worship is Romans 12:1 - both these verses make clear the connection of sacrifice to worship. And yes, our singing is "the sacrifice of praise", but it is hardly the main expression of worship in the Bible. Yet, it has become so central in churches as time has worn on, because this "sacrifice of praise" generally only requires a sacrifice of an hours sleep and standining up. Not to mention that most music worship is judged on our feelings of "worshipful-ness", basically the emotional feedback we get. Sacrificing something is harder to get warm-fuzzies from. In fact, generally the sign of real sacrifice is that it is profoundly uncomfortable.
So, in our never-ending quest to swell the numbers of pew warmers, we make music more and more central to what we do. The mark of a church that is beginning to "modernize" or become relevant or start to actually reach out to people is that they change their music. Even house churches that I have attended had some music component (whether or not any of us could carry a tune in a bucket). Did the early church share in music? Yes. Did Paul or any of the great writers in the New Testament feel the need to include it on the list of things the church did? Not really. The Bible does mention "sing to each other with hymns, psalms, and spiritual songs", but the whole point is to sing to each other to encourage each other. The keys, the mark of the gathering of the saints was Acts 2:42 - prayer, breaking of bread, fellowship, and the teachings of the apostles. You could say that we do all of those, but to look at the time breakdown, you would summarize our meetings with "singing and preaching". And by the way, the preaching done today is not like that done then, and this is clear from Paul's description of the orderly church - that multiple people were to share what God was showing them, not just one person. But that is another rant.
So, music. I am just saying, not that I don't like the stuff, and I would feel weird if it was gone (for a while), but neither of those criteria are very good reasons to have it around. I think that by allowing the word worship to become so nearly synonymous with music, we have created a church that can't approach God one on one, can't worship in the truest sense of the word.