The Church is not Enough: What kind of worship does God desire? ~ Psalm 100

“Zombies.” Can you believe it? I’m starting another sermon with that word. I did so not long ago and actually never thought I would do it again but zombies, O and Michael Jackson, have been bouncing around in my head. You see a couple of weeks ago I went with my family to watch the world-wide Thriller dance on the lawn of the court house. It was amazing. Hundreds of people, dressed like zombies, who at the appointed hour began to dance to Michael Jackson’s song Thriller around the world. This has been happening since 2005 and has set numerous world records. The purpose, according to its creators is to create “a global community project that is inspiring others to break down barriers, connect with people of all religions, race, political and economic persuasions, contribute to helping humanity, encourage environmental stewardship and encourage people to step up as leaders, visionaries, and creators.” Now, that’s a tall order for such a song and dance – even one by Michael Jackson and while I don’t wish to critique or disparage the event. I had a great time. It reminded me that such a global, public, transforming vision is what we are to be about every day as Christians – a global phenomenon, meant to inspire, to transform, to break down barriers, and change the world. Today, I would like to offer Scripture’s own Thriller Dance and the way it challenges us about where worship should happen, what worship should be, and who it is we worship.

Psalm 100 begins, ¹Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!

The Psalmist begins our Thriller dance with a challenge, an invitation: who is invited to this praise of the living God? Where is the space for our worship? “All the earth,” we are told. That means . . .

1.    First of all the challenge is that the church is not enough.

Friends, Psalm 100 should remind us that the church is too small for God. Sunday worship is good and wonderful but it’s not extravagant enough, not large enough, not all encompassing enough. It’s a summons for the whole earth.

The earth is simply short-hand for all of created existence – it means the one world that God has made. That the planet earth is the very theater of God where we worship. And it should be of no surprise to us that I once again wish to challenge us by the very way that we speak. Don’t worship at church! We don’t do that because the church was never meant to be a place but a people – a people throughout every nation, language and walk of life . The next time someone ask you where you worship say, “Planet earth!”

But make no mistake – “all the earth” isn’t simply meant to broaden your horizons. Psalm 100 isn’t trying to be some NASA rocket which aims to give you a far-away vantage point for seeing the entire world. “All the earth,” in other words, may be smaller than you think. It means that you are to worship and shout for joy where you live, where you work, when you play. It means that worship is meant for your neighborhood, your local park, your home, and even your office. It’s an invitation and orientation to see every place as “holy ground.”

In the documentary film Godspeed, an American living in St. Andrews, Scotland, arrives at his new job as a Parish Assistant and asks his boss (the priest), “Where is my office?” The priest responds, “Your office?” And the new assistant says, “Right, sorry, I mean your office.” And the priest asks, “My office?” And then with a flicker of recognition takes him to the sign of the church which has his home telephone number on it and says, “That’s my office.” The now puzzled American asks, “Where do I work?” and the priest points down the street and says, “The parish. Start walking.” And he begins to move down the street, knocking on doors, visiting with people, getting to know “all the earth” one door and one cup of tea at a time.

As I watched the film, I began to realize that the challenge of making a joyful noise throughout all the earth is not about too much space or an overwhelming amount of real estate. It’s actually a problem of time. We move too fast to see all that we need to see in the earth that we actually live. We are too quick and touristy to see and give thanks for all that exists around us. So the invitation this morning is to invite you to a 3 mile an hour worship where you live. Why 3 miles an hour? Well, because that’s the average walking speed of a person. We will never be able to summon “all the earth” to worship unless we can slow down to catch up with the God who is everywhere in it. So where is your parish? Start walking.

²     Serve the Lord with gladness!
    Come into his presence with singing!

³ Know that the Lord, he is God!
    It is he who made us, and we are his;^[a]
    we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

2.    The second way that Psalm 100 challenges and invites us is to the reality that for worship singing is not good enough.

BUT singing is good. It gets us going in the right direction. It helps us connect to what it means to be human, it opens our hearts as well as our heads.  There’s a reason that we are commanded to sing so often in the scriptures. I once asked my daughter Emma why she thought that Christians were so often admonished to sing. She said, “singing is the most joyful full-bodied response we can give to a God we cannot hug.” I think she’s right.

As the band U2 was starting out many years ago, Bono, himself a Christian, wrote the following letter to his father:

“[God] gives us our strength and a joy that does not depend on drink or drugs. This strength will, I believe, be the quality that will take us to the top of the music business. I hope our lives will be a testament to the people who will follow us, and to the music business where never before have so many lost and sorrowful people gathered in one place pretending they’re having a good time. It is our ambition to make more than good music.”

Bono’s words echo the Psalmists. God, too, wants more than good music. For full, joyful worship to take place he also wants our service – “to serve the Lord with gladness,” is our worship! So once again we are challenged to enlarge our vision of what worship is. How often have we been lead to believe that it’s like this? (Individuals with arms raised high in nature)

Have you ever thought what it means to “serve the Lord”? How do you serve the First Cause of all creation? The mighty One who holds all things together? The creator of all that is. This God isn’t one like the Greek gods who have human appetites and run amuck like teenagers with superhuman powers. This God needs nothing – has everything – and he isn’t lonely or needy or grumpy – but makes us a people to worship and serve him – which means “all of creation,” all that is “His.”

And yet one of the common complaints that God will make against Israel is that there worship focuses on the wrong things – like our passage from Amos – festivals, assemblies, burnt offerings, noisy songs, nice melodies, while neglecting mercy and justice for the poor and the outcast.

Friends, God wants full human flourishing on the earth and worshipping Him was meant to secure that. A worshipping community of the One True God is out joyfully singing in the streets and working for the peace of God. So true worship of God, the psalmist declares is not simply about a proper place but it’s also a project of service. Worship, in other words, is what should get you dirty.

Worship is about God creating a community - a community of service centered on God to bless “all the earth.” There’s an interesting tension about all that is God’s – all that is “his” in our text. On the one hand, there is a notion that it is God who made everyone – “we are his.” On the other hand, there is a notion that there are some who recognize him more fully, who are “his people, and the sheep of his pasture.”  – what’s the point of that? There is an irony here. Many people imagine that that they are God’s sheep which means somehow that He cares less for others. But if we are worshippers of this God – we are called to a life of joyful service to others because of God’s love of all creation. We are to be servant sheep!

At this point, I shared a story that I had heard that very morning about one of my parishioners who “served others.” To hear the story go to MCC’s website and listen to the sermon.

⁴ Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
    and his courts with praise!
    Give thanks to him; bless his name!

⁵ For the Lord is good;
    his steadfast love endures forever,
    and his faithfulness to all generations.

3.    Thankfully, God is enough!

The heart of worship is not first and foremost a question about us - of space (where we worship?) or community (whom do we serve?) but focuses on the God who is actively at work redeeming all of creation. Ignatius Loyola spoke about the task of worship as marinating in the “God who is always greater” and that means greater than our songs, our creeds, our sermons, our buildings, our politics, our failures, even our hopes for the future!

The secret of the ministry of Jesus was that God was at the center of it. Jesus chose to marinate in the God who is always greater than our tiny image, the God who loves without measure and without regret, whose love endures forever.

How do we unlock a Biblical perspective of worship orientated to global change and service? How do we not become overwhelmed? What’s the password to a realistic but inspiring vision in a world that feels so dark at times?

Eugene Peterson’s translation of vs. 4 is helpful and will open us to a hope necessary for the church to continue worshipping God around the world. He translates vs. 4. “Enter with the password: ‘Thank you!’ Make yourselves at home, talking praise. Thank him. Worship him.”

The password is “thank you” because when we practice our “thank yous” to God we are placing ourselves in the proper place. We are reminding ourselves that this whole project rest upon him. We say “thank you” because God is the only one powerful enough to ultimately reach all the earth and bring it justice. We say “thank you” because worship is God’s project and not our own. We say “thank you” to remind us that we are joining with God rather than doing something for God.

Pay attention – the church is not enough. Be watchful of the God who is active in all the earth.

Be joyful and not afraid – singing is not good enough. God desires our worship to transform the communities where we live. He wants our worship to get us dirty.

Be thankful – God – well, God is good and steadfast and forever. Marinate in the God who is simply enough.

"This is the text that will break your neck!": the Reformation and its Biblical Legacy

I began the sermon with a joke [To hear the joke and listen to the full sermon go to  MCC's website at  http://www.mcchurch.org/sermons/?sermon_id=24. 

As a pastor AND historian of the Reformation, I’m like what my wife was to me – too knowledgeable to be duped by easy praise. I know the good as well as the bad, the truth as well as the fiction, the praiseworthy elements as well as the painful parts. So my hope is not so much to celebrate the Reformation with you today but to commemorate it – to remember it well; not so much to lavish praise but “speak the truth in love”; not so much to say “yeah us” but “praise him” and that him is not Martin Luther. It’s Jesus. Today I would like to focus on a Reformation understanding of Scripture – but not so much the idea of Scripture alone, which is easily understandable enough, but the Reformation legacy of “who” reads the Scripture, “how” one should read it, and the one legacy that we must unlearn. Well, let’s begin with Scripture!

Jesus says, “³⁹ You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, ⁴⁰ yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” ~ John 5:39-40

1.    Who reads the Bible? “Sinners read the Bible.” How do you hear that phrase? Do you place a comma – Sinners, read the Bible! - a sort of outward focused “get your life right,” sort of rant? Well, a strategy toward Bible reading anchored in the spirit of the Reformation is that there is no comma. It’s sinners NOT saints who read the Bible, Martin Luther insists.

“You study the scriptures,” Jesus says – but who is the “you”? Martin Luther would argue that the first point to proper Bible reading is to figure that out. Many of us, myself included, imagine ourselves standing with Jesus not the Pharisees. But if we think that we are always comfortably on the side of Jesus we’re probably missing the point. Martin Luther wants you to acknowledge your actual place – standing with sinners. That’s the only place to stand if you wish to read the Bible rightly. You see Pharisees are bad readers of Scripture BECAUSE they never imagine themselves as sinners. They are devoutly religious people who memorized scripture, prayed scripture, debated scripture, and just don’t get it – they still manage to miss God. 

Yet, according to Martin Luther, Christians alway do everything, including Bible reading – “simultaneously righteous and sinful.” He writes:

The saints are always aware of their sin and seek righteousness from God in accordance with God’s mercy. . . In reality they are sinners; but they are righteous by the declaration of a merciful God. They are unknowingly righteous, and knowingly sinners. They are sinners in fact, but righteous in hope.

Luther argued that reading the Bible correctly, getting the Christian life right, wasn’t about some new Biblical tools or study helps or even a high view of inspiration but happened when you acquired a proper orientation – “knowingly” a sinner, he says, “in fact,” a sinner. Luther’s reform set about demoting (not elevating) who a good Bible reader was – a sinner NOT a saint.

Maybe a more modern analogy might help us understand Luther’s point. This is not Martin Luther’s image but my own. In the mid-1800s, the entrepreneur John Tate began making compasses. After his first batch, Tate and his employees realized a terrible mistake that would end up causing the company to become bankrupt. You see, he had failed to mark which way was north making the compass useless. Luther’s vision of Bible reading argued that to understand the Bible rightly required that one understand it much like a compass. A compass, of course, always points in two directions North & South. If you don’t understand this you will read it wrongly no matter how well the compass works. In the same way, Luther argued that correct Bible reading demanded that you understood which way it pointed. He understood these two poles to be law and gospel. He writes, “The distinction between law and gospel is the highest art in Christendom . . . Virtually the whole of the Scriptures and the understanding of the whole of theology depends upon the true understanding of the law and the gospel.” Luther’s Commentary on Galatians (1535)

So, on the one hand, the compass always points south – the law, which aims to convict you of sin and to show you how much you need a savior. For Luther this is because the law tells us what we ought to do but can’t; while the gospel (north on the compass) tells us what God has done for us. The law shows us that we need to be forgiven; the gospel points to the fact that we have been forgiven. 

Friends, if your Bible reading doesn’t expose your lack, doesn’t reveal your brokenness, doesn’t uncover your sin, then you are not reading it as someone connected to the Reformation. You’re not understanding the purpose of the compass you hold in your hand.

So, who should read the Bible? Sinners. And good Bible reading always aims to help us remember that reality – “knowingly,” Luther says. 

But “how” should one read the Bible? Well, Luther says you need to know what the Bible is all about. Joke about the children sermon – “I know the answer is Jesus but it sounds like a squirrel to me.”

2. It’s not about a squirrel! It’s about Jesus.

Jesus clearly states that the Scriptures are God’s story about himself and Luther whole-heartedly agrees. Jesus is the Word of the word. The Bible contains the Word of God – Jesus. In his preface to the Old Testament Luther wrote that the Bible was “the swaddling clothes and the manger in which Christ lies.” He argued, therefore, that readers of the Bible need to understand its “plain sense” which meant understanding the story the Bible wanted to tell – the gospel – the good news of Jesus Christ – which was not a command but a story.

For Luther it’s not trying to find Jesus under every rock of the Old Testament but getting our story straight, a story of what God has been wanting to do from the very beginning which culminates in Jesus of Nazareth – his life, death and resurrection. The Bible, in other words, is not so much a book about being good but God’s goodness.  

In the NT and throughout Christian history there are two themes that relate to Jesus: 1. One stream is that of imitation. It’s text focus on Jesus’ life as a model for the believer – “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5); “For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps” (1 Peter 2:21). As a former monk whose sole purpose was to live a life of imitation Luther discovered only shame, fear and failure. He worried that a singular focus on it turned the gospel into a series of commands that people would inevitably use to justify themselves or to judge others. It promoted both self-righteousness and self-loathing. Imitation, in other words, became one more means of law - believing that it’s the scriptures themselves, rather than Jesus, that give life. 

2. The second stream, however, is participation. For Luther this was the vision of Paul. “³⁰ It is because of God that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. ³¹ Therefore, as it is written: ‘Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.’” (1 Corinthians 1:30-31). It means that we believe whole heartedly in what Christ has done for us rather than what we do ourselves. Luther, like Paul, used marriage to illustrate this notion. That just like marriage, salvation came about not by first imitating but by saying “yes” as one does in a marriage ceremony. When we trust another and offer our “yes” we gain all that was there’s while our spouse takes on all that was ours. So Christ has fulfilled the law for us – we need not do it in order to be saved because he has already done so. We simply need to say, “yes” to him. 

Luther wrote, “The law says, ‘Do this,’ and the it is never done. Grace says, ‘Believe in this,’ and everything is already done.”

And friends, in a day and age of constant surveillance, accusation and shame via Facebook or Twitter, where being right trumps being in relationship, I pray that we can hear this grace anew – that we are sinners saved apart from what we do but because God graciously loves us - and be thankful for Martin in helping us rediscover this great grace. But while grace is something that we should be thankful for learning from Martin. We must also unlearn a dangerous Reformation legacy that also connects to Luther - his struggle to extend grace to others, particularly when reading the Bible differently from himself. Luther got grace right, I believe, but he failed to understand it’s broader implication for Bible reading. 

The great Lutheran theologian Reinhold Niebuhr echoes this warning, “The Church can disturb the security of sinners only if it is not itself too secure in its belief that it has the word of God. The prophet himself stands under the judgment which he preaches.” Luther would have done well if he could have remembered that.

I’d like to close with a story from the Reformation that illustrates what we should unlearn. In 1529, a German prince, Philip of Hesse wished to unify two branches of the Reformation: the Swiss Protestants led by Huldrych Zwingli and the North German Protestants led by Martin Luther. So he invited them to his castle in Marburg.

Their time together, however, did not start out well. Zwingli began by quoting from the book of John and then saying, “This text will break your neck.” Luther responded that he knew well how to give Zwingli “a blow to the face.” 

Not surprisingly, discussions broke down from there and the two sides, who eventually agreed on fourteen points of doctrine save one (concerning the Lord’s Supper), could not unite – Luther, in the end, even refused to call Zwingli and his entourage “brothers.” 

This is the one Protestant legacy that we must remember in order to change; to recall so that we can forget it. It’s the Evangelical idea exemplified by Luther, that reading the Bible correctly allows one to be ungracious, that right belief permits us to be unkind, that proper theology is good reason to use the Bible to “break” another’s neck or “punch” one in the face. We have to confess that many of us have followed in Luther’s footsteps – we’ve received a gospel of grace and then have been most unChristlike in our use of it. We have dismantled the manger of the word of God and bludgeoned others with the pieces. We’ve betrayed the Word – Jesus himself.

And this same Jesus forgave his betrayers, prayed for the unity of the church and, Paul tells us, broke down the wall of hostility between all people. If we submit to that, if we nail that to the doors of our churches, who knows, maybe we will experience another Reformation.