May 26, 2019 Scripture Lessons (NRSV):
Psalm 67
67:1 May God be gracious to us and bless us
and make his face to shine upon us, Selah
67:2 that your way may be known upon earth,
your saving power among all nations.
67:3 Let the peoples praise you, O God; let
all the peoples praise you.
67:4 Let the nations be glad and sing for joy,
for you judge the peoples with equity and guide the nations upon earth. Selah
67:5 Let the peoples praise you, O God; let
all the peoples praise you.
67:6 The earth has yielded its increase; God,
our God, has blessed us.
67:7 May God continue to bless us; let all the
ends of the earth revere him.
Revelation 21:10, 21:22-22:5
And in the spirit he carried me away to
a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of
heaven from God.
I saw no temple in the city, for its
temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon
to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and
the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day--and
there will be no night there. 26 People will bring into it the glory and
the honor of the nations.
But nothing unclean will enter it, nor
anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written
in the Lamb's book of life. Then the angel showed me the river of the
water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the
Lamb through the middle of the street of the
city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of
fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the
healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any
more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants
will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will
be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they
need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they
will reign forever and ever.
What is worship? “Worship is the offering of our prayers, our
thanksgiving, our adulations, our gifts, our devotion, and our very selves to
our God.” This is the working definition from the first week of the “Order
of Worship” catechism in our bulletins, which we began following the completion
of the Heidelberg Catechism.
The words from the
Psalm this morning are a poetic, song-filled call to worship. It speaks of why the people worship. God has blessed them. God has increased the yield of their
crops. God has made their way known and
saved them against the nations that are their enemies all around. God had acted and the people have reacted
with hearts and minds and voices. This
marks the immediacy of the relationship between God and God’s children
throughout the Old Testament.
From the Book of
Revelations, we read the culmination of all that God has done. Jesus has returned, the day of Judgement has
come and gone, the final battle against Satan and Satan’s minions has taken
place, and now all is at peace. The Lord’s
plan has been fully worked out. The New
Heaven and the New Earth, the capital being the New Jerusalem, have come into
existence. There is no sun or moon or
light for the light is God and the Lamb.
I have shared these
words most often as the final Scripture at a funeral service, called a witness
to the Resurrection in our church’s liturgy.
I have done so precisely because it conveys the final and completely
fulfilled promises of God to us, the promise that includes being reunited with
those who have gone before us. Our
response? John tells us the throne of
God and the Lamb will be in the New Jerusalem and his servants will…wait for
it…worship him.
Whereas the words of
the Psalm reflect the daily relationship of God and the people, the words from Revelation
reflect the whole relationship of God to us as God’s children. In this sixth week of Easter, it hails back
to the morning that Jesus rose from the dead, bringing us the free gift of
forgiveness and eternal life, won through Jesus’ death and overcoming of death
on the cross and from the tomb. It looks
forward, in a couple of weeks, to the coming of the Holy Spirit, God with Us,
God within us, God’s gift of divine presence in our lives from this time forth. The power of Christ is never away from us.
And our response, the
proper response, the expected response, is worship.
But what is worship,
really? I have seen people who worship
God with their hearts, minds, and souls.
Many of these people have been the ones whose lives were turned around
by the salvation of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Theirs were lives that were hell bound, mired in destruction and
brokenness, approaching death unredeemed if things remained unchanged. But then enter Jesus and true change.
I used to think
about the people who came to believe in Jesus Christ in the first centuries of
the church, the converts, those who had a way of life that was sinful and
broken in the past but became wonderous when the saving power of Jesus, through
the baptism of the Holy Spirit came upon them.
I wondered about the people I have met today, whose lives were broken
and battered, but who have found Jesus as their Lord and Savior and everything
has become new for them. The enthusiasm
and joy of the newcomer is an awesome thing to see.
I looked at them
with spiritual jealousy. I think that a
more common story in our church is not coming to the Lord from the rock bottom
of our lives, where there was nothing left but Him and each of us, but us coming
from a life where we were raised in the church, if not this one, then churches
of our own families. We are approaching
the second generation past the peak of denominationalism, where most Americans,
in some shape or form, would self-identify with one of the established
Christian denominations-the branches of Christianity-of the nation.
I was in a place
where I thought that the salvific work of Jesus on an “unsaved” soul was more
profound to their faith makeup then someone who was brought up in the faith,
where familiarity, to overstate things using the old cliché, breeds contempt for
the enthusiasm of someone new to the love of Jesus Christ. It plays into the role and form of worship,
how we express ourselves in relationship to God, through our prayers and music
and outreach-one that is faded into an enforced reverence with little meaning
behind it.
Is it even possible
for the ‘oldguard’, for those who have known Jesus their entire lives, to find
that emotional power of worship in their lives?
Or does it fade from an emotional high to an intellectual certainty
to…what?
Another way to
consider this is to ask the question, “What then is the action of
worship?” What do we do to worship? What is it that will put us in the right
frame to celebrate as the Psalmist does?
To stand in the New Jerusalem and celebrate? Will it take going from this life to the
next?
It was being here, in the
sanctuary, last Sunday, looking at the stained glass, one piece in particular,
when the answer began for me. It is that
piece right there. It says “I Give Thee
My Heart Lord, Eagerly and Sincerely.”
And then there is that heart in the hand image, the heart on fire. In all my years here, I have basically
dismissed that as a variation on the “Sacred Heart of Jesus” found in Roman
Catholic imagery. It’s not that such
imagery isn’t powerful, it’s just not mine, not what I grew up with.
Doing a little
research on it, I came to discover that image is not Roman Catholic in its
origin, but comes right out of our branch of the Reformation. It is the personal seal of John Calvin, whose
“Institutes of the Christian Religion” and “Commentaries” of the entire bible
continue to form the foundation of Presbyterian theological systematic and
biblical theology, to this day. The
Presbyterian Church is a Calvinist church in its origins.
John Calvin was not a “new-bee”
to the faith. He, like Martin Luthor and
so many of the Reformers, had been born and raised in the Catholic church. They knew the liturgy, they knew the stories,
they knew the expectations. They are
like us, people of the church, not those outside, brought in by the power and
wonder of the Living Jesus Christ, healing broken lives.
And that is what
worship is. For all the dusty theology
and ancient language of the thick translations of John Calvin’s works, which,
literally, have put me to sleep, those words on our window are the heart and
soul of worship. Where we give our heart
to our Lord, eagerly and sincerely, there worship is taking place.
When someone looks at
the sunrise and seen God’s finger painting in the sky, there worship has taken
place. When someone looks at the same
sunrise and covers their face with while commenting “too early”…not so much.
When someone invests
themselves in the words of the Padre Nuestro, and they follow the Spanish next
to the English, and, instead of being ‘our prayer’ in ‘their language’, we
connect our prayer to the language of the people in the community in which we
live and serve, maybe as simple as realizing “Padre Nuestro” means “Our
Father”, when we transcend “us” and “them”, worship has taken place.
Worship is, to put it
another way, what we invest into our relationship with Jesus Christ. In this service, using this liturgy, this order
of worship, we are given the open opportunity to invest in our relationship
with Jesus by the prayers we offer, the songs we sing, the presence and
application of Scripture to our lives.
Another example, Why
the books of the Bible? Why the memory
device of God Eats Pop Corn? Pardon the
pun, corny humor? Or, in today’s
terminology, Dad humor? Its just a list,
right? It can be. But knowing 1 Corinthians 13 is perhaps the
greatest passage on love in the Bible.
Matthew 25 contains the greatest commentary of what living Christianity
really is. John 14 speaks words of
comfort in time of death. Revelation 22
provides the image of heaven when all is made right by God. Every book contains gems and guidance and the
collective whole of our knowledge of God’s work through Jesus Christ. It gives content to our worship as nothing
else can.
We give our hearts to the Lord because the
Lord has first given His Only Begotten Son to us. We give our hearts to the Lord because, in
Jesus, eternal life has been given to us.
We give our hearts to the Lord because, by the Spirit, Jesus continues
to indwell us and give us what we need not only to live in a world of sin, but
to overcome that sin with good and love and grace.
What is worship?
“Worship is the offering of our hearts to the Lord eagerly and sincerely, in
our prayers, our thanksgiving, our adulations, our gifts, our devotion, and in
our very selves, offered up in response to what we have received from our
God.”
Amen.
