Sermons

“On Worship – Part Three: God”

Exodus 20:1-5a; Matthew 22:34-38 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – August 30, 2015

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might worship you and you alone, with all that we are. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

This morning’s sermon is the third in a series of three that I’ve been sharing on worship. In a couple weeks, we will be trying some new things with our order of worship, so it seemed like a good time to reflect on what is important about worship. Two weeks ago, we talked about Community – the gathering of the faithful that we worship with. Last week, we considered Word, both the capital-W Word and small-w words and how we use them. I guess you could say we saved the best for last, because today we’re going to talk about God. So finally, we are getting to the bottom line, the main point, the heart of it all. For indeed, if God is not the center of our worship, why do we bother?

And yet, we struggle. If we closely examine our worship services and honestly assess our lives, we must admit that the moments when we’re truly loving God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind are rare. I would argue this is precisely why we need worship, and why we should take care to ensure our worship really does aim to usher participants into an encounter with God. There are so many things pulling at us in contemporary life, so many things demanding our attention, our time and our loyalty. So much of life is structured to make us focus on ourselves, deluding us into thinking we’re on our own, intended to be masters of our own destiny, congratulating us when we succeed and humiliating us when we don’t. It is vital for our spiritual and emotional health to spend some time consciously seeking the presence of Something larger than ourselves. To worship Almighty God, the Creator of the Universe, is both humbling and relieving. But perhaps more importantly, giving thanks and praising God is simply the most appropriate response to the gift of having been created.

And yet, we struggle. And here is where we need a little bit of translation. You can’t cast a stone into the Hebrew scriptures without bumping into a passage without Yahweh complaining about the Israelites worshiping idols or darkly warning them that they’d better not. It seems prohibitions about idol worship, with their mocking dismissals of the impotence of human-made wooden or metal statues, are woven into almost every conversation about faithfulness to God and who the Israelite people are. And they may not seem that relevant to our modern lives. But if we distill two important principles out of those prohibitions, we can begin to see how they speak to a struggle that continues to plague us today. If we assume that Jesus’ understanding of the greatest commandment is the opposite of idol worship, then it could stand to reason that anything that detracts from us loving God with our whole heart, soul and mind is at least partial worship of something other than God. That should give us pause. And if we understand that a primary motivation behind the insistence on the Hebrew people worshiping the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was so they could remain a distinct people, with clear lines about who was in and who was out, then we can understand that what we worship – that is, what we give our time and attention and loyalty and devotion to – shapes our identity. Worship is hugely about the words that come out of our mouths. But those words only qualify as true worship if they are backed up by our actions and our priorities.

If we assess our lives by these two standards – what we give our hearts, souls, minds, time, money and devotion to, and how we construct our identity – I am afraid we will discover that there are far more false gods in our lives than we may have thought. There are so many options to choose from! Money, power, status, sports, work, country, hobbies, even family. Some people say that to determine what you truly worship, you should evaluate your calendar and your checkbook. What are we putting our resources into, whether time or money? How are those things connected to our faith, and how do they detract from our relationship with God?

What do we do if we discover that we are idol-worshipers? How do we wean ourselves away from things that have become part of our identity, once we’ve admitted that they’ve taken the place of God in our lives? I would suggest that, as with all sin, such transformation begins with confession and repentance. If we truly want to be people who ground our lives and identity and purpose in Christ, then we do that by giving more time to our relationship with Christ. If we can get to the place where we’re willing to confess our fascination with false gods – whatever they may be for you, the grace and love of God will meet us where we are and fill in the gaps.

While we’re on the subject, we might as well talk about how we sometimes even worship idols when we’re acting like we’re worshiping God. The topics we covered the past two weeks – Community and Word – are themselves ripe for becoming idols. The line between appropriately building up the body of Christ in worship and treating the gathered community as the main point of our worship is a fine one. Just as we can, as individuals, make gods of ourselves, congregations can subvert God’s primary position with worship of the faith community itself. Who do we talk about more? Who do we listen to more? This kind of false worship is perhaps most dangerous because it’s so subtle.

We can also make idols of the way we worship. Yes, it matters that we put the words and form and flow of worship together carefully. But there is a point at which the passion with which we’re willing to have those arguments becomes a sign of idolatry. I’m telling you this confessionally, because this is one of my biggest temptations. When we get mired in whether this should go before that and whether this song or this phrasing or this form of prayer is better than the other, we have left behind love of God and returned once again to the comfortable idolatry of self-worship. But because it’s for the sake of the worship, it’s even harder to see!

So how do we keep our worship focused on God? Are we simply supposed to stand here and shout Hallelujah for 90 minutes every Sunday? As we experience every week, there are different ways of praising God in worship. We usually begin with direct praise, in song and prayer. It is fairly easy to see how these portions of the service are worship of God, as long as our prayers remain focused on God and not on celebrating other things that pull our attention away from God. But what about the other parts of the service?

We give quite a bit of attention to communion in the Disciples tradition. This ritual has been part of Christian worship from the very beginning. And it clearly includes moments of praise. Communion can also be what you might call instructional, as we remind ourselves of its meaning and purpose. But primarily, communion can be worship on a whole other level, because it can take us beyond talking about God or to God, into actually experiencing God. When we engage in worship with our whole beings, rather than just our ears or our mouths, we are more likely to be pulled into a place of loving God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind.

And then, of course, there’s this part. Are we worshiping God right now? Am I worshiping God and telling you about it? What is a sermon about, anyway? I’m going to borrow from Marcus Borg a bit here. The late progressive theologian suggested that if we’re going to claim to love God and be in relationship with God, then we must care about what God cares about. That’s how relationships work. And that, I hope, is what we’re doing here. When we read scripture and reflect on it, as part of worship, it’s because we’re aiming to get to know God better and understand and assimilate God’s priorities more faithfully. Worship is not just repeated hallelujahs because the life God has given us is far more complex than that. To seek God’s will for the dilemmas of our lives, to seek God’s Spirit to shape our characters as we go about our lives, to reflect upon and hear another’s reflections upon how the biblical witness still reveals God’s desires for our world is also worship, and robust worship for a world in need of healing and wholeness.

And here is where we get to mention a funny word-play that is ever-present in churches. When I say the word “service”, what do you think of? The worship service or service to others? Let us proclaim together that the answer is Yes! What a wonderful gift it is that we can’t really distinguish the two. For our worship doesn’t just happen in this room, in those seats or at this table. The service continues, as we love God and seek God’s will in every day and every situation. The service continues as we go out and care about what God cares about. Giving our whole heart and soul and mind to God means giving them to the world God created and loved and pronounced good. And perhaps this is the most important observation we can make about worship: If it isn’t connecting us to both God and God’s world, with love and mercy, we’re probably doing it wrong. If we’re too focused on what’s happening in this room, then false gods may have infiltrated our hearts. If we’re too focused on what’s out there, then false gods have probably captured our attention. But when the two are seamlessly connected, with a joyful cord of sacrificial love and humble thanksgiving, then true worship is happening, glory be to God on high! Alleluia and Amen!