“What Worship Is”: Sermon of May 26, 2019

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.