Sermons

“To Worship in Spirit and Truth”

Matthew 5:23-24; John 4:7-29 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – September 27, 2015

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might open our hearts to our brothers and sisters, and thus worship you more faithfully. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

Today is the second of the two Sundays each fall when we focus on Reconciliation Ministry, the arm of our denomination that is tasked with helping us move toward our goal of becoming an anti-racist, pro-reconciling church. Every year, we have the opportunity to reflect on the damage racism has caused and is causing within our society, and consider how God would have us respond. One of our responses is to give to the special offering we will receive again today. As you heard in the video from Hannah Moss, these funds go to support real and transformative ministry within the lives of our young people and many others. Half of all the funds collected within our Region will stay here, for projects like the one Hannah participated in. The other half goes to our general office, where April Johnson, our denominational Minister of Reconciliation, coordinates our efforts to learn and share experiences across regions.

Last week, because we were dedicating a baby, we focused on how we can teach our children to do better with combating racism than we have. I promised then that I would get more deeply into this year’s theme scripture from Matthew 5, since I didn’t have much time to do more than mention it, so let’s get started.

So what does the Passing of the Peace have to do with capital-R Reconciliation? Perhaps we will do well to look first at the scripture that connects them: “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” This is the passage that inspires the ritual that we refer to as “The Passing of the Peace of Christ.”

Now, just to be clear, we’re talking about the technical meaning of the Passing of the Peace, not necessarily the way we experience it. There is a reason I say what I say to introduce the Passing of the Peace, about Jesus teaching us to reconcile ourselves one to another before we come to worship God. This isn’t about “meet and greet” or a chance to chat briefly with a friend about your weekend. It’s about a very specific ritual, with a very particular purpose – namely, reconciliation, that is, by offering and receiving the peace of Christ with one another, we are symbolically reconciling ourselves with the brothers and sisters we have hurt or need to forgive.

Now, obviously, the person you truly need to seek reconciliation with may not be here. Then again, chances are high, within any congregation on any given Sunday, that there are people in the room who need to reconcile. They may be members of your own family. They may be members of the same committee. They may be people who’ve been holding a grudge about something the church did 30 years ago. Churches, after all, are full of human beings.

And it’s because Jesus knows that, and because Jesus loves human beings and wants us to worship God in spirit and truth, that he gave us this lesson about reconciliation. Given that in order to worship as a community, we need to have a common start-time, we don’t actually gather everyone here and then send everyone out to do our reconciling and then try to get back together afterward for worship. Instead, we engage in this symbolic act, the Passing of the Peace of Christ, which is intended to invite our hearts into a posture of reconciliation with those present and with those who aren’t here.

And what is it, to offer the peace of Christ to someone? What is the peace of Christ? “My peace I give to you; I do not give to you as the world gives,” said Jesus. We are told it is a “peace that surpasses understanding,” so how do we even know what it will do? And yet, we do know, a little. We know that the peace Christ offers us at the table is about forgiveness of sins; it’s about unconditional, sacrificial love, and compassion for ‘the least of these’. When we offer the peace of Christ to someone, we are doing one of the most powerful things we ever do. To be a channel of God’s unconditional love and restorative grace is an incredible privilege, and yet, so often, we do it without even realizing what’s happening. If we are to worship God in spirit and truth, we need to take our worship rituals seriously and know what it is we are opening up with our words. Are we really ready for the reconciling power of Christ’s peace?

I think that the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well outside Sychar can offer us some help in learning what it means to open ourselves to Christ’s reconciling peace. It is here that Jesus talks about worshiping God “in spirit and truth.” In the end, he says, it won’t matter what sorts of sacrifices you brought or where you offered them; what will be important is that your worship is whole-hearted and honest. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” And what does it mean for us to worship in spirit, other than what Jesus was teaching back in Matthew 5? Don’t come before the altar with things inside your heart that you need to try to hide. Don’t pretend to worship a God of love, while harboring hatred within your soul. “Leave your gift… and go; first be reconciled.” We cannot worship God with an unresolved, uneasy, torn spirit. “Go; first be reconciled.” There is a reason we pass the peace at the very beginning of worship. We aim to worship in spirit and truth, so we have to get the reconciling-our-spirits part out of the way first.

It is no accident that this lesson about sincere worship comes in the middle of a story about Jesus engaging with a Samaritan woman. “How is it that you, a Jew (and a Jewish man, no less!), ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” she said to him. This is a story about barriers being broken down. The whole story is a hint to the rest of us about how to make our worship more Spirit-filled and truthful. We, too, are called to break down barriers, to seek reconciliation across the divides society has put amongst us.

And here is where all our themes converge – the small-r reconciliation of the Passing of the Peace, the call to worship in spirit and truth, and the capital-R Reconciliation Ministry that leads us as a denomination in addressing the damage caused by racism, confessing our complicity and working to dismantle the systems that keep our racial hierarchies in place. This is also where it gets more complicated. What if you come to worship God, and your brother or sister has something against you, but you’re not fully aware of it? What if it isn’t something you did on purpose or even yourself, but something that is causing your brother or sister pain, while benefitting you? I’m sure there are some people in this room who have been the favored child. You didn’t ask for that dubious honor, but there were likely at least a few times when you took advantage of it, even if it caused more awkwardness with your siblings. What kind of healing can take place when the favored child recognizes the hurt experienced by the non-favored siblings and apologizes for not doing more to mitigate it? The parent is unlikely to be changed, but the relationship between brothers and sisters can be made new.

What does this look like within the church? Are we even aware of what baggage we’re carrying when we come before the altar here? I submit to you that if we haven’t heard the cries for justice from our brothers and sisters, it’s because we’ve stopped our ears from listening and numbed our hearts against the pain of others. We must fix this, not only for their sake, but because we simply cannot worship God in spirit and truth until we’ve reconciled these hurts.

What do we know about communities of color within the Disciples of Christ? We’ve heard about Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone and maybe Walter Scott and Raccoon John Smith. But do we know any of the names of African-American leaders within the early Disciples movement? Do we know how the Convocation churches came to merge with the white churches of the Disciples of Christ, giving up much of their autonomy for the sake of unified witness? Do we know about the nuances of Disciples work in Mexico, versus how we operated in Puerto Rico? Have we heard about the Japanese churches that were taken over when their occupants were shipped to internment camps during World War II? The history of our denomination is not simply a white, frontier history. That may be the way we’ve heard the story told, but it’s not the whole truth, and these days, we have the resources to do better. Sandhya Jha, one of our preeminent anti-racism ministers, has written a book that tells these stories, which make our history more complete. If we want to worship God in spirit and truth, we must avail ourselves of this knowledge. Even more recently, a movement has grown up with the Disciples to examine our complicity with what is called “the Doctrine of Discovery,” which led to the decimation of native peoples across this continent. We are being asked to explore how such cultural assumptions were interwoven with the founding principles of our church and how we carried out our mission. These calls to action are fundamentally about the work of reconciliation. David Bell is a minister who works in Yakama, Washington, and who is centrally involved with Landscape Mending, the group pushing us to engage in this dialogue. “The greatest problem is broken relationship,” David wrote recently on Facebook, “which I believe is exactly what the Doctrine of Discovery encourages historically and in our current context.” Relationships in which we don’t see others as fully human like ourselves are broken relationships. Such relationships must be mended in order for the Body of Christ to be whole, and in order for us to worship God in spirit and truth. “First be reconciled,” said Jesus. We live in a far too well-informed society for ignorance to be an excuse. Those we have hurt, whose pain keeps us from offer our whole hearts to God in worship, have been struggling to tell us their stories for years now. It is time to be intentional and listen. It is time to lay our gifts down beside the altar and go be reconciled. May the peace of Christ sustain us all on this important journey. Alleluia and Amen.