Sermon: Practice of Worship

Texts: Exodus 31:12, 13, 17; Psalm 66; John 4:7-26

Date: February 24, 2008

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, EagleHarbor Congregational Church

            It was a visual image of people coming to kiss the feet of a fiberglass statue of Marilyn Monroe that briefly ruined the practice of worship for me years ago.  I had gone as a teenager to see the movie version of the rock opera “Tommy.”  I don’t remember much about it except that the sight of people paying obeisance to the figure of Marilyn Monroe really unnerved me.  Not because it was idol worship per se, but because the devoted worshipers looked so foolish.  I found myself wondering two things: Is my worship practice as foolish and pointless as their practice appeared?  And, does God really want people to worship, to metaphorically kiss God’s feet in praise and adoration?  The images in the movie seemed demeaning to both the worshipers and the worshiped. 

            The practice of worship didn’t stay ruined for long for me.  The truth is, as dweebish as it may be, I absolutely love going to worship services.  I’ve long since made peace with the awareness that my practice does, in fact, look foolish to all kinds of people.  Oh, well.  Worship is just my idea of a good time, and it has been for almost as long as I can remember.  I did a little calculation and I estimate I have been to at least 2000 services of worship in my lifetime.  At least.  I don’t do it out of a sense of duty or obligation, although that may enter into my motivation occasionally.  I do it out of love.  So I am in no way an unbiased commentator on the practice of worship—I can’t speak about it as an anthropologist might, with scientific precision.  I can only speak about it as a lover might speak about her beloved. 

            The short-lived shock of seeing “Tommy” was good in that it made me reflect critically on my life-long practice of worship.  And that’s what I want to do with you this morning, reflect critically on this practice and why we do it. 

            Let’s start with a basic question: Is worship an obligation for Christians?  Are we required to attend services of worship?  You know as well as I do that people of faith answer that question differently, depending on their traditions.  I am so committed to the practice of worship that I am tempted to say yes, it is an obligation, a requirement in the field of religious practice as opposed to an elective.  But I don’t really believe it is.  God’s not going to vote you off the island of the faithful if you don’t attend worship; it’s a human practice of a human institution.  God does not need our admiration, adoration and demonstrations of devotion like some kind of swollen-egoed, affection-starved movie star.  We reviewed what God requires a couple of Sundays ago, do you remember?  In the words of the prophet Micah, what does the Lord require of you?  To do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with God.  Not to attend the 9:30 service.

So, worship is not a requirement.  I believe it is more accurate to say, as Harry Emerson Fosdick said about prayer, that worship is not an obligation but a privilege.   It is a privilege that we would be extremely unwise to neglect.  Why?  Because so much happens in worship that forms us as Christians, that makes us into Christians.  Worship has an important part to play in the kind of people we are becoming, our character development.   It’s a rather complex event, this hour or so we spend together.  Let’s unfold it a bit and see what’s happening as we worship.

Preaching professor David Buttrick writes, “The word ‘worship’ derives from the idea of worth, God’s worth.  In other words, ascribing worth to God.”[1]  When you make the decision to shed your comfy jammies and haul yourself off to worship, you are already ascribing worth to God.  You are saying with the devotion of your time and energy that God is worth something to you, worth at the very least forsaking your comfortable bed and saying no to all the other choices you could have made to spend that time.  It’s a symbolic action that speaks of what you value.

The ancient practice of keeping the Sabbath, which encompasses worship, is partly about setting aside time to pay attention to God.  Time is one of our resources; the way we spend our time says something about what we value.  Keeping the Sabbath meant for our ancestors in faith setting aside fully one-seventh of their time to pay attention to God.  Part of that 24-hour Sabbath was spent in worship, and we still retain some of the worship practices they began thousands of years ago.  You heard hints of some of them in the Psalm: praising God, singing, testifying to God’s deeds, praying, making offerings, celebrating God’s love.  The Sabbath for the Jewish community would include more than worship; it would consist of eating, making love, resting, talking, playing—anything but work.  Setting aside the Sabbath to enjoy God and God’s gifts both formed the value of paying attention to God and verified that value.

God invited people to enjoy the Sabbath as a sign of the covenant relationship between God and people.  God invites us to worship as a sign of our covenant relationship.  David Buttrick says in an interview on the topic of worship that the first thing that should be noted is that it’s real.  “There really is God, a God who in some mysterious way is present, and to whom we are present.  The second thing may be to say that it is a responsive act.  We worship because we are responding to God’s initiative.”  The Call to Worship in a typical service symbolizes God’s call to pay attention to God’s very real presence for a time, to set aside all other distractions and be present to the God who is present to us. 

            If God has called us into worship, how do we respond?  In most Christian worship services, we respond first with thanks and praise.  We might move on, then, to a prayer of confession, as we take notice of the way we have failed to be God’s people.  Then there are instructions.  In Buttrick’s words, we try to hear what God tells us to do and be, paying attention to the ancient scriptures and the interpretation of what those old words are saying to us now.  The heart of the worship affirms that God is still speaking; we do our best to listen.  In our particular worship services, in addition to listening to a preacher, we set aside some time for what Emily preached about last week, the practice of testimony.  We hear from our companions something about how God is active in their lives as we articulate our thoughts, and reveal our burdens and our joys to each other.

            We hope that after the Word is read and proclaimed that we have a little better notion of what God wants us to do.  We respond with prayer, and with offerings, aiming to be and do what God has asked us to be and do.  Buttrick suggests that communion is also an action that responds to what God wants us to be and do; it is a celebration of “a kind of future hope where God is leading us, as we gather together as an image of a great feast which God hopes the world will become.”  Communion is a feast in memory of Jesus; it is also an “acting out” of the welcome table that God wants to see in the whole wide world, where everyone is invited, everyone is equal, everyone tastes the goodness of God’s creation and shares in God’s gifts.  It is a ritual that looks backward with gratitude and forward with hope simultaneously. 

            Frederick Buechner puts the practice of worship into the context of serving God, saying that to worship God means to serve God.  He suggests there are two ways to do it.  “One way is to do things for him that he needs to have done—run errands for him, carry messages for him, fight on his side, feed his lambs, and so on.  The other ways is to do things for him that you need to do—sings songs for him, create beautiful things for him, give things up for him, tell him what’s on your mind and in your heart, in general rejoice in him and make a fool of yourself for him the way lovers have always made fools of themselves for the one they love.”[2]  Buechner concludes that no matter what kind of church it is, unless there is an element of joy and foolishness in the proceedings, the time would be better spent doing something useful.  I appreciate his perspective on this.  I have been in services of worship—I was in one last weekend, in fact—which are nearly perfect in their execution but lack that element of joy and foolishness.  They seem a little hollow to me.  While we aim for excellence in what we prepare for worship, heart is more important than perfection.  I imagine the worship we offer God is a bit like the valentine I received this year from Eva Tanis-Likkel, a penciled picture of lopsided heart with a smiley face and spindly legs and arms.  It is not perfect but it is precious. 

            We often borrow forms of prayers and music and liturgy from preceding generations of Christians.  I would compare this to hand-copying one of Shakespeare’s sonnets onto a homemade Valentine.  For instance, we used a confession this morning that has been prayed in a similar form for many generations of Christians, which I find profound because of the way it characterizes sin both as things we have done and things we have left undone.  The wisdom of the ages is available to us in these old, old words; they not only help form us as Christians but they also link us to the larger community of faith, both living and dead. 

            Church scholars would say that God should always be the subject of our worship and the object of our worship.  I agree with that.  But there is another essential element of worship: the building up of the community.  We gather together not only to meet God but also to meet each other, to help each other, teach each other, support each other, bear one another’s burdens and share one another’s joys.  The Congregational tradition believes deeply that the congregation as well as the individual believer is a vessel of the Holy Spirit.  We meet God more fully in community than we can alone.  We don’t worship the congregation in the same way we worship God, but I believe we are rendering service to God when we gather together and try to love one another in the sanctuary through our greetings, our hugs and handshakes, our shared testimony and prayers.  Our presence here makes a real difference to each other.  And although the Spirit is present wherever two or three are gathered in God’s name, anyone who has been here when there is ample room for everyone to lie down in their own pew and compared it to a standing-room only Sunday knows that in worship, the more, the merrier.  Generally speaking, the spiritual temperature in the room goes up as more of God’s beloved get together and the vessel of the Holy Spirit expands.

            Worship altogether is a practice that helps shrink our magnificent egos so that there is more room for the Holy Spirit to work in our souls.  The setting aside of time, paying attention to the real presence of God, opening ourselves to instruction, offering love to God through praise, prayer, music, and gifts, being there for each other in all our vulnerability—these elements of what happens in worship all add up to paying a little less attention to ourselves and paying a little more attention to the Holy Other and others.  I believe there is great potential in regular worship attendance for faith to take a deeper hold on us and convert us more fully to the way of love. 

            This is why I continue to be committed to having one Sunday a month for all of us, young and old, to worship together.  I have found a lifetime of regular worship to be such a rich experience that I want to pass it on to the next generation of Christians.  I think one has to learn the somewhat odd rhythms of worship; they have to be practiced like a complicated dance before they take hold and begin to feel natural.  One of the experiences I had after first coming here nine years ago made a deep impression on me.  Several college students had come home and were in church with their families.  These young adults left the service when the children did for Sunday school; and I believe it was because what we did in here was still foreign to them.  They only seemed to feel comfortable in the Sunday school.  I yearn for our children to feel at home in the worshiping community.  I am not convinced it will just happen automatically when they reach a certain age.  It honestly breaks my heart to see so many families absent on Communion Sunday. 

            I know it’s a hard struggle for many families whose children resist coming to church.  It’s a very difficult decision for parents to make whether or not to require their children to attend either worship or Sunday school.  I get that.  I just want to put a word in for encouraging youngsters to be here in spite of their resistance.  Anne Lamott has a great essay on this topic, “Why I Make Sam Go to Church,” published in Traveling Mercies.  I want to share a few lines with you.  She begins by describing her son’s reluctance to go with her.  She writes, “You might think, noting the bitterness, the  resignation, that he was being made to sit through a six-hour Latin mass.  Or you might wonder why I make this strapping, exuberant boy come with me most weeks, and if you were to ask, this is what I would say.  I make him because I can.  I outweigh him by nearly seventy-five pounds.

            “But that is only part of it.  The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by.  Most of the people who have what I want—which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy—are people with a deep sense of spirituality….They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful.”[3]

            I believe with all my heart that to be part of a worshiping community is to be part of something beautiful.  To worship with people I love in spirit and truth is, for me, so sit at the well of Living Water that Jesus spoke about and take a long, thirst-quenching drink of that which springs up to eternal life.  There is nowhere else I would rather be on a Sunday morning than with all of you, paying attention to the God who loves us and wants to shed a little light on our path.  Among the sweetest words I might possibly hear during any given week (besides “I love you”) are these: “See you on Sunday.”

[1] Buttrick, David  “A Conversation with David Buttrick”  Alive Now, July/August 2001, p. 22

[2] Buechner, Frederick  Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC  New York: Harper & Row, 1973, p. 97-98

[3] Lamott, Anne  Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith  New York: Pantheon, 1999, p. 99-100