How do I Worship?

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 14:22-33:

In 1940, philosopher and educator Mortimer J. Adler wrote a book entitled How to Read a Book. Now how we read books seems to be sort of self-explanatory. Other then the mechanics of learning to read, and sentence structure, and looking for main themes, and things like that, I’m willing to bet that few, if any of us, where ever taught how to read a book. And yet if you’ve ever read Adler’s book then you will probably came to realize that perhaps you didn’t actually know how to read a book after all. And the purpose of that is to say that there are some things that we do just because we’ve always done them, and we may never have been formally taught how to do them. And this definitely includes some things that we do in the church. And so, for the next four weeks, our worship series is going to be addressing some of these ideas and asking the questions that perhaps you may have asked, or maybe even never even thought to ask, of how do I do x, and we start with the question How do I Worship?

Now just like with learning how to read a book, you might think you don’t need to know the mechanics of worshipping, after all you’ve been doing this worship thing for a very long time. But I’m again willing to guess that no one ever set you down and taught you how to worship, or talked about the mechanics of worship, or how to prepare for worship, or what to do after worship. Now, I’m sure there were some things you were taught when you were a child, like to be quiet and not to squirm in your seat. And other things you picked up, like when to sit and when to stand, and how to pretend like you’re singing when you’re not, things like that. But even though worship is this extremely important thing we do, few were taught what it takes to worship, or what we should do to worship. So, what are we called to do in worship, and are there things to help us give more to worship and get more out of worship? And the answer is a most definitive yes.

Spiritual Disciplines: Worship

Here is my message from Sunday. The texts were Hebrews 5:5-10  and John 12:20-33:

For the past two weeks, our gospel passages have come immediately after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, an event that we will celebrate in two weeks for Palm Sunday. The crowd’s reaction to Jesus in that moment is a form of worship, something we continue in our understanding of Jesus as our high priest. But, the entire reason why Jesus is going to Jerusalem to begin with is for the Passover celebration, which is itself a worship event. We see Jesus participating in worship activities throughout scripture, in the Temple and in the synagogue. Even when he is tempted in the wilderness, one of the temptations is Satan asking him to fall down and worship him, and in return Jesus is promised the kingdoms of the world, to which Jesus responds, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” To worship literally means to bow down, to prostrate yourself, which is not just an act of worship, but it’s a sign of loyalty. And so as we talk about worship as act of bowing down, as an act of obedience, it is something that puts boundaries on our lives, because, as Jesus said, if you are worshipping God you cannot be worshipping other things. And since one of the things that spiritual disciplines do is to set boundaries, to govern conduct or activity or operation, or things that mold, correct or perfect, it turns out that worship itself then is a spiritual discipline.

It’s sort of seems obvious if you think about it, but I’m willing to bet that most of us have never really thought about worship that way, because it’s just something we do. It’s not like prayer or fasting or scripture reading, which are the things people tend to think of when we talk about spiritual disciplines. And yet, as we have talked about, spiritual disciplines are things we do, that are found in scripture, that help us to deepen our faith and our relationship with God. Things that structure our spiritual lives, and therefore our everyday lives, in order to put God front and center and to help transform our lives and our faith. And so by that standard, worship is clearly a spiritual discipline, and so for those who were wondering if you do any of the disciplines, or if you can, you can be assured that you are already doing one, just by being here, and of course we also practice many of the other disciplines within the service of worship.

Spirit and Truth

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 4:3:26:

Today’s gospel passage isn’t the one normally assigned for today, although it could be, because people coming to worship the Christ child is an important element of the Christmas story, as we will hear about next week when we talk about the arrival of the magi, or the wise men from the east. Worship of Jesus also plays an important part after the resurrection. But, we are talking about the woman at the well, or Jesus encounter with a Samaritan woman, because way back in February, which seems like a decade ago, when the Ark held their Mardi Gras fundraiser, my donation was to allow the winning bidder to pick any piece of scripture for me to preach on. Now, I was supposed to have given this message way back in the summer, but with all the changes this year, that didn’t happen, and as I said, I thought talking about worship after Christmas was appropriate. And so that is why we are looking at this passage for today.

As was said in the introduction, after Jesus encounters Nicodemus, a named man, a prominent official, and a Jew, and that will become important in a moment, we are told that Jesus is then going back to Galilee, which is in the north, but to get there, John says, he “had to go through Samaria.” Now it could be that he had to do this because that was the easiest way to get back to Galilee. But, in John, when something has to be done, it normally implies that it is task that God is requiring. So, it’s possible that Jesus has to go through Samaria in order for this encounter to take place. Now when we hear the word Samaritan today, most of us probably think about the parable of the Good Samaritan. In that story the Samaritan comes off as the moral hero, as Jesus says he is the neighbor to the man who was beaten and left on the side of the road. And so we have then this association with Samaritans as being a good thing. They are positioned high in the moral order. They have virtue. But that was certainly not how they were seen by Jews of the time, and to understand that story, and this story, we have to understand how despised the Samaritans were. To be a Samaritan was to be impure otherness.

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?

Here I Am To Worship

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The texts were Revelation 7:9-17 and John 4:19-26:

There is a Baptist church on Louisiana, and their sign says, “Church like it used to be,” and I’ve always wondered by what they really mean by that.One of the 12 different churches that I attended over the past month was the Greek Orthodox Church here in Albuquerque. As we were listening to what is known as the Divine Liturgy, which, other than now being sung in English, although there was also some Greek, that liturgy has been used nearly every week for the past 1500 years or so. But, I don’t really think that is what that Baptist church is referring to when they talk about the way church the way it used to But, even within the Orthodox church, let alone the western tradition, one of the constants about worship is change. The chair arrangement this morning is one of the oldest ways we know that people gathered for worship. Pews as we think of them didn’t arrive in churches until the 14^th and 15^th centuries. But seeing people across from you is very different, and creates a different worship experience, then everyone facing forward.

In the 12 churches I saw, there were a large range of worship styles and patterns, although some of them were remarkably similar, I think there must be some magazine that gets published that says what to do, especially when it comes to the sound of the band. I don’t know what I was expecting or maybe even hoping to find in other churches, besides just seeing what others were doing. The only thing I was disappointed about was that I’ve always thought it would be cool to have a walk-up song for when I come up to do the sermon, like baseball players do, and if another church was doing it then I could start it here. But, you can all be relieved that no one was doing that, and so I’ll continue to live without walk-up music. The better news is that in seeing what other people are doing, I came away with an even better feeling about the worship services we do every week, especially when compared against the churches immediately around us. But, I also came away with some ways that I think we can make worship better and connect it better to who we are and what we do, and much of that has to do with the very nature of worship itself.

Proverbs: Wisdom

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Proverbs 1:1-9:

Today we begin a new sermon series looking at the book of Proverbs, which is part of the wisdom literature of the Hebrew scriptures, and I’ll explain exactly what that means in a moment. We are undertaking this series for several reasons. The first is that I track what scripture readings I preach on, and there were some glaring holes in areas of scripture that we had not covered in my four years here. We obviously do fine on the gospels, and other areas of the New Testament, although I’ve been a little light on what are known as the general epistles, or the letters not written by Paul, which we’ll cover at some point, but there were clearly large gaps in the Hebrew scriptures. One of those was in the prophets, which we made some dents in by looking at the 12 minor prophets in the spring, but then there is a lack in the histories, cover books like Kings, Chronicles and Samuel, and then the wisdom literature.

Wisdom literature as we find it in the Bible, is “an umbrella term that encompasses humanity’s quest to understand and organize reality, to find answers to basic existential questions, and to pass that information along from one generation to another.” It seeks to provide both instruction for how we are to live our lives, but also exploration or explanation about the way the world works, especially around the problem of suffering. The books of the wisdom literature include the book of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, which is also sometimes known as Quoheleth, as the name Ecclesiastes comes from the Latin name of the book, whereas in Hebrew it’s called Quoheleth, and then Song of Songs, also known as the Song of Solomon, a series of love poems that the rabbis said no one should be allowed to read until they were adults, with the age of 35 sometimes thrown around. Sometimes the Psalms are included with the wisdom literature as well, but while there are some Psalms that have the marks of wisdom literature, scholars are not in agreement on which those are, but do say they are not the majority of Psalms, and so are more often not listed as wisdom literature. There are some other books in the apocrypha which are also counted as wisdom literature, but since they are not part of the Protestant cannon of scripture, that is the accepted books, we’re not going to address them now.

Hosea

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Hosea 1:1, 2:14-23:

This past Monday, on January 9, happens to be the day on which more people commit marital infidelity than any other day of the year. I don’t know how they figured that out, but it was what I heard this past week, and I thought it was rather appropriate for today because what Hosea, the first of the 12 Minor Prophets that we encounter, deals with is infidelity, the breaking of relationship, and in particular the breaking of covenantal relationships. Of course, when we think of breaking of vows, it is the breaking of marriage vows that tends to come first.  But there are lots of other vows, sometimes merely implied, that we can also break, which can lead us to break relationship. Several years ago, I showed a video of from the Jimmy Kimmel show where he asked parents to give their kids terrible Christmas presents, but this week I came across a similar video in which he asked parents to tell their children that they had eaten all of their children’s Halloween candy. Take a look…  I am pretty sure that Jimmy Kimmel is going to hell for that, and perhaps I am for showing it, and you for laughing. But that breaking of relationship between these parents and their children, and the responses the children have, I believe are appropriate for the message we see in the prophet Hosea.

We know very little about Hosea. We are told in that opening passage of the book that he is the son of Beeri, a typical introduction in prophetic writings, about whom we know nothing, and then the kings who were ruling in Israel and in Judah.  His prophetic career lasts from the year 750 to 724 BCE, which is a fairly tumultuous time for Israel, or the northern Kingdom. And as a reminder, after the death of King Solomon, the united monarchy, as it is called, is divided into two kingdoms. The northern kingdom, known as Israel, and the southern kingdom, known as Judah. The northern kingdom is larger and contains 10 of the tribes of Israel, while Judah is smaller and contains 2 tribes but also contains Jerusalem. While there are several prophets who make prophecies about and for the northern kingdom, Hosea is the only prophet that we know of who is from the northern kingdom, not from Judah. Outside of the book of Job, Hosea is the hardest book for Biblical translators. Not only is the text obscure and difficult in the Hebrew, the Greek version of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, is also difficult. Since it is then believed that the difficulty of the text comes not from mistakes in transmission through the millennia, they believe that what we have in the book of Hosea is evidence of a different dialect in ancient Hebrew. I think that’s totally cool  because that means there were much larger divides between Israel and Judah than we might otherwise not be aware of besides for a political boundary. I think that’s totally cool. It’s like George Bernard Shaw’s quote that Britain and America are a people “divided by a common language.”

Manure Happens

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 13:6-9:

There was a little boy, and all he wanted in the world was to have a horse.  Every day he would ask his parents if he could get a horse and every day his parents told him no. When he would ask why, he was told that horses took a lot of work and he was just not old enough to handle the responsibility.  But he kept asking every single day.  Finally his father got tired of it and decided he could end it if he could show his son just how much work a horse required, and so while the boy was at school, he had a large pile of horse manure dropped off in the back yard.  When the boy came home from school, as he approached the house, he smelled the distinct odor, and began to whoop and holler and ran through the house into the backyard.  When he saw what awaited him, he started screaming and shaking with joy, and then ran into the garage and came running back with a shovel.  While still singing and dancing and whooping and hollering, he started shoveling the manure.  Finally, his father came out and said, “What are you doing? Why are you so happy to be shoveling all this manure?  Don’t you realize how much work it’s going to take to get this all cleaned up?”  and the boy said “yes, but with all this manure there’s gotta be a horse in here somewhere.”

For the past few weeks, we have been looking at lessons we can learn from life on the farm that can teach us about how to grow in our faith.  The first week we talked about being stuck in the mud, and the fact that when you get stuck, that our natural inclination is to step harder on the gas, and spin our wheels, which of course just gets us deeper and deeper into the much.  Instead, to get out of the mud of our lives, we first need to accept that we are stuck in the mud, accept that reality, surrender and begin following following Christ.  Then we looked at how if we are neglectful of our spiritual lives, that we can allow weeds to grow up that will choke out our faith.  There are lots of things we can do to keep the weeds from growing, but we talked about some recommended by John Wesley the founder of Methodism, which included daily scripture reading and prayer.  Last week we were going to hear about the need for community in building up our faith, but since I didn’t get to deliver that message, we’ll come back to that next week.

Five Practices: Passionate Worship

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Matthew 22:34-40:

Most of us are aware of the importance of words, and how one word can make a huge difference in our perspective or in the story we tell.  When I was growing up my brother loved madlibs, in which you add random words to a story to create something funny.  Many of you are probably familiar with the idea, but we are going to do one here today, and to warn you this is going to be a much more interactive sermon than normal, and interactive, so you are all aware, means that you are active in it along with me.

An Unforgettable Church Service

We arrived at the Church of the Holy _________ (noun). We were dressed in our __________ (day of week) best. Today was special because it was ___________ (holiday) and the kids looked forward to receiving _________ (noun) as part of the celebration.

Pastor John welcomed us and the service started with invigorating ___________ (action verb). It was so __________ (emotion), people were ___________ (verb ending in ing).

The sermon was based on _________ (Book of the Bible). The pastor talked about  ____________________ (biblical character)’s injunction to love God with all of our  ______________________ (body part) _________________ (body part) and   ________________ (human characteristic).   When he finished, I couldn’t believe he had only talked for _________________ (amount of time).  Then we sang a ___________________ (musical style) version of Amazing Grace. 

We wrote a check for $_________ (amount of money) and put it into the __________ (noun). This made us so ________ (emotion) we couldn't contain ourselves.

The _________ (kind of team) team played another song and we filed out to the ___________ (name of a room) to have _____________ (beverage). We stood there waiting to ________ (verb) to someone.

All in all it was a(n) ________ (adjective)  worship service.   _________ (exclamation) God!

Words matter, and descriptive words sometimes make all the difference.

Today we begin a new sermon series based on The Five Practices of Fruitful Living by Bishop Robert Schnase.  It’s been said that once someone becomes bishop that they believe that everything they think has to be written down and published, and Bishop Schnase certainly lives into that belief, but he also has something to say to us.  He says that the five habits are radical hospitality, passionate worship, intentional faith development, risk-taking mission and service and extravagant generosity.  But, while the activites in and of themselves are important, Schnase says it is the adjectives that really make all the difference, and you can move them around, you could have extravagant hospitality and passionate mission and service and risk-taking worship.  The adjectives make a difference because they are describing what it is that we are really doing.  There is a difference between worship and passionate worship.  The adjective matters.  Most of us have probably participated in boring worship or even mediocre worship, maybe even here.  Those are the times in which we don’t feel like we worshipped at all.  And then there are the times in which we have been truly moved, in which we knew that God was present for us in that moment, in which we may have been fundamentally changed.  That is what passionate worship feels like, and yet it is about so much more than that as well.

Here I Am To Worship

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Psalm 145:1-13, 21:

At the end of the book of Genesis we are told that after Joseph’s death, and Joseph of course looked amazingly just like Donny Osmond with his amazing Technicolor dream coat, after his death that the Pharaohs forgot about him and what he had done and as a result what did they do to the Israelites? They got made slaves, which then brings Moses onto the scene, who looks just like Charlton Heston. God then calls Moses and tells him that he is to go to Egypt and to petition the Pharaoh to set the people free. When Moses appears before Yul Brenner, as the Pharaoh, he asks a rather peculiar thing of him. Moses does not simply say, and is commonly thought, let my people go. Instead he asks Pharaoh to allow them to go out into the wilderness, to do a particular thing. What does Moses ask the Pharaoh to let them do? Worship. Let the people go into the wilderness so that they can worship. That is how the exodus story begins, and of course the Pharaoh refuses to allow them to go worship God. Why would the Pharaoh be so concerned about that? Of course there is the possibility that perhaps he thought that if he let them go out into the wilderness that they would never come back.

But I think an even better interpretation, and one presented by Lovett Weems, is that while they are in Egypt the people belong to him, but if they are to go out to worship God, they now belong to God, because that is who they are giving their allegiance to and who they will be listening to. For as it turns out we really belong to whatever it is that we worship. Last month we kept coming back to Jesus’ statement that you cannot serve both God and mammon because you will love one and hate the other, which is really to say that you will worship one and not the other, and you can only ultimately worship one thing, because everything else will subtract or interfere with that worship. The root meaning of the Hebrew word that we translate as worship means to bow down, or to prostrate oneself. When we worship something or someone we enter into a fundamentally different relationship, it’s about much more than just being a follower. In the story of Jesus’ temptation, the devil does not say come follow me and I will give you whatever you desire. Instead what does he say? “worship me.” Worship is important. Two of the Ten Commandments, that would be 20% for those not good at math, deal with worship issues.

Last week I quoted the Rev. Zan Holmes who said that churches are guilty of the sin of low expectations, mainly because we don’t have any expectations, and people will, I believe raise or lower themselves to what is expected. If expectations are high people will rise to meet them, and if there are low expectations people meet them as well. In studies of churches that are growing or are vibrant and healthy, there are lots of commonalities that are found, and one of those is that they have high expectations for their members. I have high expectations for this congregation, and hopefully you also have high expectations for me, and so that is what we are talking about for the month of November. As United Methodists we vow to support this congregation by what? Our prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness. Last week we began by talking about prayer, which is first on the list for the simple reason that prayer creates the foundation upon which we build our faith lives, and it is my expectation that we will be praying every day, and praying for this church and its members every day, and today we talk about the second, which is presence.