Heart of Worship

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The texts were Ephesians 1:15-23 and Luke 24:44-53:

There is a church in Albuquerque, and on their marque it says “church like it used to be,” and I have a guess what that mean by that, but I’m not quite positive that I understand what that means. Several years ago, I took a month off in order to study worship, and in that time I went to 12 different churches in the Albuquerque area. One of the 12 was the Greek Orthodox Church. As I was listening to the divine liturgy, which, except for being primarily in English now, has been the basically the same for the last 1500 years or so. Is that what they mean by church like it used to be? Probably not. But I do think much, or even all, that church like it used to be has to do with worship. Indeed, when someone says they are going to church, what they nearly always mean is “I am going to worship”, the immediate circumstances being an exception. I heard last week that 90% of churches have gone to some type of alternative worship, with the vast majority being online. I don’t know about the other 10%, perhaps some of them never stopped worshipping in person, or more likely they stopped worshipping at all. Can you be church and not have worship? I think the two are inherently linked together, and worship is at the heart of the matter for who we are as a people.

What we hear in the passage from Luke for today is that after the disciples watch Jesus ascend, which Luke doesn’t really describe, that they then worship him. This has been a common theme of the post resurrection Christ, and then they return to Jerusalem with great joy and end up in the temple blessing, or worshipping God. Luke’s gospel both begins and ends in the Temple, but there is a distinct difference between the beginning and the ending, of course because of Jesus. In the first temple, or under the old covenant, sacrifice is made at the temple with animals, but under the new covenant, under the covenant of Christ, in which we are called to make sacrifices of praise of adoration to God in acknowledgment for what God has done for us. Joy in celebration of love and forgiveness. Jesus has already given a preview of this change when he encounters a Samaritan woman in the gospel of John, also sometimes called the story of the woman at the well. She says to Jesus that her people have worshipped God on their mountain, but that he says that people should worship on the mountain in Jerusalem, meaning the Temple. But Jesus says, the time is coming when people will no longer worship on either mountain, but they will worship the Father in Spirit and truth, and that’s where we are, no longer in the temple, but worshipping in spirit in truth, making worship the heart of the matter. But what does that look like?

Heart of Righteousness

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 14:15-21  and 1 Peter 3:13-22:

In our series looking at the heart of the matter, so far we have looked at having a heart of peace, based on Jesus’ post resurrection greeting of Peace be with you, and the heart of love, with the example of the travelers on the road to Emmaus offering hospitality to the stranger, who turns out to be the risen Christ. And we looked at a heart of generosity, with the early church sharing things in common so that those who were in need would be provided for, and the heart of comfort, where God comforts us like a mother comforts her child, and we are to do the same, and today we turn to a heart of righteousness. 

Now righteousness is almost exclusively a church word. Besides for Crush in the movie Finding Nemo and 80’s surfer dudes who wanted you to know about righteous waves, it’s not really a word that gets used in normal conversation. We do talk about people being self-righteous, which is thinking themselves morally superior over others, but that doesn’t really match what righteousness is about. And it turns out that we don’t really even talk all that much about righteousness in church, even though it’s an incredibly important theme in scripture, both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. The word righteous, or righteousness, appears in the Bible 630 times, and to give you a comparison, love appears 872 times, so it’s there a lot. And those are the times in which the Greek and Hebrew words are translated as righteous, rather than something else. So, at the cross, after Jesus dies, the Roman Centurion, played by John Wayne in the Greatest Story Ever Told, says “surely this man was innocent.” The Greek word translated as innocent, could also be translated, and perhaps might be better translated, as righteous. That is someone who followed the law, or did the right thing, someone who lived a righteous life.

Heart of Comfort

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10 and John 14:1-14.

Mother’s Day is always a difficult service to plan and prepare for, because there are so many pieces that have to be remembered and taken into account. Of course we celebrate our mothers, but there are those whose mothers are gone, and they mourn, and there are those who never had a mother, or lost their mother early, or those whose mothers were unable to be a mother or to love as we expect mothers to. And then there are those who desperately wanted to be mothers, but who were unable to, and others who feel judged and thought of as less than a woman because they didn’t have children, and there are the mothers who have known the pain of a child dying, or that have lost a child in other ways. Although worship attendance tends to be higher on Mother’s Day, because mom’s say “I want you to come to church with me today”, and the family does, I also know many women who choose not to come to church because it’s just easier not to try and be in church an deal with some or all of the emotions and feelings that come with just some of the situations I just named. And so wherever you are today, as we’ve been saying, whether you are experiencing joy and celebration on this day, or sadness and pain, or something in between, it’s okay, and it fits into our next issue of getting to the heart of the matter, and that is the heart of comfort.

Each Sunday, we’ve begun by holding our worry stones, or perhaps our pocket crosses, and rubbing them as a reminder of the steadfastness of God, and that God is with us always. We hear that is the Psalm that was read, in the Psalmist’s plea for deliverance from whatever it is that they are facing, that they are seeking refuge in God. Twice the Psalmist talks about God being their rock and fortress, first in asking for God to be that, and then in recognizing that God is their rock and their fortress. That God’s faithful and steadfast love will redeem them and protect them. In that imagery, in that call, and in that assurance and knowledge of God’s steadfast love, the Psalmist finds comfort. That God is rocksolid in God’s promises and in not going anywhere, and all the other things that the idea of God as rock means for us. And yet when we say that God is our rock, or even God is our fortress, we of course don’t literally mean that God is a rock. We understand that this is a metaphor that’s being used to give some attributed about what God is like. It’s to say that God is like this, but also to know that God is not like this. And there is certainly some comfort in understanding God to be our rock, solid, true, holding us and protecting us. But as we think of God’s comfort there are other metaphors that also need to come into play, especially as we celebrate our mothers and other significant women in our lives.

Heart of Love

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was 1 Peter 1:17-23 and Luke 24:13-35:

They say that hindsight is always what? 20/20. And of course we say that, or we get accused of that, because it’s about wrong decisions we might have made, or if we had known all the information at the time we might have done something different. It’s one of those phrases that helps us remember that we gain wisdom because of bad decisions and we make bad decisions because we lack wisdom. And yet, what the phrase also reminds us, although used less often this way, is the way we only see things once we have looked back at them, the things we missed noticing along the way. Or it’s the way we change the story and reevaluate everything based on what something led to it. And so we have to understand that that is what the early disciples and the early church did. The gospels are not autobiographies of Jesus, and they were not written at the time, but are stories look backing through the cross, and more importantly through Easter. They look back to the things that had taken place, things they had missed all along, and saw it in a new light, the things that they didn’t realize, the things they had overlooked and didn’t understand and but do now, because of Easter. It reveals how God had been involved, but they didn’t know. Their hindsight made all the difference in understanding and telling the story of Christ.

We see the same thing is true in the story from Luke. Cleopas, who seems to be associated with the disciples in some way, although we don’t know how, because he is never mentioned before, and never mentioned again, and another unnamed man are walking to Emmaus. We’re told that Emmaus is about 7 miles away from Jerusalem, although it actually says its 60 stadia away, but I’m sure none of you know how long a stadia is, and I had to look it up; it’s 600 roman feet, although I have no idea how long a roman foot is. But that’s what our best manuscripts say, but other manuscripts read 160 stadia, which is about 19.5 miles. Now, since they walk both there and back in one day, most scholars are in agreement that the 7 miles is probably the better number, but they are still guessing, because we don’t actually know where Emmaus is, as there was no town of that name in 1st century Palestine. So, we have two ordinary men, going to an ordinary town, of which we know nothing about. My interpretation is that this vagueness for details is so that it is much easier to put ourselves into the story. We could be the unnamed traveler, and the unknown town we are going to could be our own home.

Heart of Peace

Here is my sermon frm Sunday, The texts were  Acts 2:14a, 22-32 and John 20:19-31:

Today is a sort of unusual worship service as I said, Easter is a time of celebration, and when at least in my planning of worship, the season of Easter is full of the sense of celebration that Easter brings. What it also normally brings is me being on vacation the week after Easter, but we are not fully to that sense of celebration, and we’re not gathered together, and I am here, and the person who was supposed to be preaching is still in Albuquerque with his daughters and I even changed what I was planning on preaching on after Easter in order to better reflect our time and space. And so we start with a worship series, entitled the heart of the matter, and I’m thankful to Marcia McFee for creating the idea in a fairly short period of time, and it begins with what is the traditional reading for this Sunday, which is the passage from John and the story of doubting Thomas. And although this message is not about Thomas, let me say that Thomas has gotten an extremely bad rap over the millennia with this particular moniker being given to him. I mean we don’t say denying peter or even betraying Judas, but we always talk about doubting Thomas even though the story does not justify that reality.

First, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, and she eventually sees Jesus and it is in John’s account that she reaches out to touch him, and Jesus doesn’t allow her to I think in order to keep social distancing. But then she says to the disciples “I have seen the Lord.” But do they believe her, it certainly doesn’t appear to be the case, because we then told that that night, where our scripture started this morning, the disciples are locked up in a house full of fear. If they had believed in Mary’s testimony it doesn’t seem that would have been the case, as we’ll see shortly. And the story says they were fearful of the Jews, and in that we have to hear fearful of some leaders, because what were all the disciples? They were Jews, and so we need to be reminded how quickly these things can lead to anti-Semitism that was not intended by the writer. But back to the story, Jesus then appears to the disciples and gives his greeting, “Peace be with you.” And then I think there should be an ellipsis because it appears as if something is missing, as the passage says “After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.” But why would Jesus do this, unless the disciples had asked for it in order to prove that he was really Jesus, not just some random guy walking through a locked door. And I think that because it says after Jesus had done this, “Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” That is they hadn’t believed the testimony of Mary, and they didn’t believe it was the Lord until they had seen the wounds.