"Acceptable Worship"

Jer. 1:4-10; Ps. 71:1-6; Heb. 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

Dr. George R. Sinclair, Jr.
Pastor

August 26, 2007

            “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”  The congregation in Hebrews, as Tom Long suggests, is not in a yellow wood but in a “heat-baked and exhausting spiritual desert,” one marked by neglect, apathy, absenteeism, retreat; and, in some cases, apostasy.  The congregation has indeed come to a place where roads diverge; one leads to Mount Sinai and the other to Mount Zion.  Like the traveler in Frost’s poem, the road they choose will make “all the difference.” 

The road in the yellow wood that leads to Sinai is a warmed-over, second-hand religion grounded in childish suspicion of a revenged-filled God expressed in dues-paying morality.  The diverging road, the road to Zion, on the other hand, is a mature faith nurtured by reverence and awe before a holy and yet loving God, expressed in lifelong, thankful service.  The road we choose, the path we take, indeed makes “all the difference.” 

            Last week six students from Alma Bryant High School, accompanied by their history teacher, toured our church.  I happened to be available so I got the pleasure.  They showed up in typical high school attire—blue jeans and T-shirts.  They were polite and well-mannered and asked interested questions.  Since they had been studying Civil War history, we started our tour in the parlor where I showed them Dr. Burgett’s “pepper box” pistol. They were amused that a preacher would be given a pistol, but then it’s not every day that preachers are suspected of being “Yankee spies.”  As we were leaving the Library, one student, pointing to a figurine on a back shelf asked if we owned a statue of the Buddha.  Suspecting a Baptist spy I professed ignorance.

            The students were very impressed with our church.  They came into our sanctuary wide-eyed and they were particularly interested in the organ.  Terry happened by while I was explaining our Greek key molding and Corinthian columns and so I asked him to give us a three-minute organ synopsis.  Ten minutes later after hearing about 32 foot pipes and the European this and the European that I ushered the kids down the aisle and up the stairs to the balcony.  On the way out, I overheard one student say to another, “He sure is passionate about that organ.”

            “Yeah, he is,” said the other.

            After our walk upstairs we peeked at the stained glass through the back wall, took a quick dive downstairs to the “Prayer Room,” emerging where we had started at the Jackson Street entrance. Before the students left I asked if they’d like some additional information.  They said they would. So I asked them to wait while I stepped away to retrieve some of our 175^th Anniversary books.  When I got back they were gone.  Through the doors I could hear the organ and it was going full blast.  I followed the sound and found the kids standing slack-jawed listening to an all stops out rendition of the Doxology.  I had the distinct feeling that they had never heard anything like it and my guess is they hadn’t.  When the mini-recital concluded one of them said, “You have a really neat church. I’d like to come back sometime.”

            It wasn’t worship but it was reminder enough to suggest that we all need and desire inspiration. I don’t know—call it soul if you like—but we need to be moved. We need to be inspired.  We need the breath of God. And you cannot help but draw the breath of God when you hear a beautiful instrument like this instrument playing the music of God.   

            Someone has said that you can no more command worship than you can command the appreciation of beauty.  And I think that’s right. Think about David and Treneé when their son Tom is baptized here in a few minutes.  Can you imagine them telling Tom’s grandparents, “Now when you see him I want you to get tears in your eyes and draw a deep breath”?  Worship doesn’t work that way either.  You can’t command worship.  And it’s a good thing.  It would not be awe and reverence, at least not the kind that produces true thanksgiving, if we could command it. 

I don’t have grandchildren, not yet, but I have had children and I can still remember that feeling you get when they’re first put into your arms.  It never leaves.  You can remember that, those first few moments when you held your own flesh and blood, this precious gift, mysteriously and wonderfully made?  There’s nothing like it.  And it’s not like someone has to tell you it’s a miracle. You know it’s a miracle—this precious thing called life, wrapped in mystery, in wonder, in pure joy.

We get a glimpse of the holy when our children are born.  I’ve heard parents say that time and time again and it’s something you never get used to—“I never knew how precious life was but the moment I saw my child I knew.” 

            I think the same kind of thing happens at the moment of death.  Bud Robinson was, I guess, in his mid 70s when I went to Lenoir, N.C.  Bud had been a carpenter, and knowing his passion for people in need I asked him if he could help me add a room to a food and clothing closet ministry there in Lenoir. He agreed. 

I don’t know if you’ve ever hung sheet rock, but it’s no easy thing. It comes in four by twelve foot sheets.  Hanging the walls is no big deal, but ceilings are different.  Bud showed me how to make a knee-brace so that just the two of us could hang the ceiling together.  Bud was an amazing 75-year-old. I can still see him balancing on a ladder hanging that rock.

A few years later Bud’s health began to decline and he eventually went into a nursing home and finally the hospital.  I think sometimes the Lord gives a sixth sense about these things, so I went to the hospital to see Bud.  We were alone. And he was asleep.  He had been asleep I guess for some days.  So I just sat there in Bud’s hospital room.  And it wasn’t long before Bud just stopped breathing, real quiet-like, with no warning or fanfare.  I was glad Bud died that way.  We don’t get to choose, but if anyone deserved to die quietly it was Bud.  He just stopped breathing and that was that.  It wasn’t sad. It was just the end of a good man’s life.  It was very still in the room, no doctors, no nurses, no machines—just an old man and his young friend. 

Life is sacred.  It is holy.  Birth and death teach us that, but sometime we forget, sometimes we get confused. And sometimes we get afraid.  We get all mixed up about the order of life, about its goodness, its purpose.  Somehow, I think those two roads the Bible talks about, the road to Sinai and the road to Zion, teach us that. 

I’ve been down the road to Sinai and I can tell you, it’s no picnic.  And I suspect like most of you I sometimes get back on it and don’t even mean to.  The road in the yellow wood to Sinai keeps coming back.  It’s the road that makes me think that life can be reduced to a list of do’s and don’ts and that if I would just follow the rules everything will be all right.  The problem is there are not enough rules for everything life hands you. And sometimes the rules clash.  The horns of dilemmas are not only sharp but real. 

You can’t always find a rule for every situation.  Rules are good, but just following the rules won’t get you through life.  There are too many exceptions. That’s the problem with the road to Sinai.  It can even make you think that the rules are more important than the people the rules were intended for.  That beautiful story we read from Luke is powerful testimony to that. 

Jesus healed a woman on the Sabbath.  She had been crippled for eighteen years. She was bent over and couldn’t stand up straight.  So Jesus made her well. And that made some folks mad. There were rules about Sabbath behavior and Jesus clearly violated those rules. When folks pointed that out to Jesus he pointed out to them that they treated their farm animals better than they treated people. 

The Road to Sinai can do that—we can get lost in the rules and fail to see the human need staring us right in the face. The road to Sinai can do that. It can also make you think that people are either good or bad.  We have a lot of that going on in our country right now—you know, putting people into boxes—there are poor people, there are immigrants, there are terrorists, there are Blue States and Red States, Fundamentalists and Liberals, there are people in our club and those not in our club.  Why can’t there just be people?        

The guy who wrote Bowling Alone has just published a new book and he says diversity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that diversity doesn’t necessarily make us better people, or at least that’s how some pundits are choosing to read Robert Putman.  It’s as if they want to prove we’re better off just staying in our boxes, that diversity was never meant to be and will never succeed.  The Road to Sinai can do that. It can make you think God painted the world monochromatically, but look around—the world’s not that way.  It’s just like that song we learned in Sunday school—Jesus loves the little children and they are red and yellow and black and white.

The road to Sinai will not only make you think people are better off staying with their own kind, it will make you think God is off somewhere in heaven hunched down over a thick book keeping score.  And if that is the case then we all have good reason to be afraid and if not afraid then perhaps just plain indifferent, which is I think pretty much the way many people resolve the problem of God. 

It’s not that people today don’t believe in God. Most believe in God all right but God is either indifferent or is else so remote and removed as to be out of the calculus of day to day living. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer rightly observed a long time ago, modern people have managed in all things to get along without recourse to the working hypothesis called God. That’s where the road to Mt. Sinai ends.  It ends bleakly without true worship of the living God.

But what about the Road to Zion, the road with countless, dancing angels in “festal gathering,” the road which leads to the city of the living God and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant?  What about that road? 

Sometimes people confuse the road to Zion with no rules, no discipline, with an easy-come-easy-go religion where worshippers enter and leave church with little more than a shrug.  Call it the Buddy Jesus religion. You know, gentle Jesus, meek and mild, my pal Jesus.  No consuming fire here. No shaking of the foundations. No fear of God, no awe, no reverence.

I read recently something I found hard to believe. It seems a guy did some research about why people found worship inspiring or not inspiring. And he found that it really didn’t matter how they worshipped; that is, whether they used drums and guitars in worship or pipe organs. What really mattered was whether they had fun.  In the researcher’s view, people described worship as inspiring when church was fun.

I’ve never thought that going to church was fun. Going to a concert is fun. Going fishing is fun.  Going on vacation is fun.  Riding a roller coaster is fun.  But going to church is not fun.  But then worship is not a show.  You are hardly an audience and I’m certainly no actor.  The real auditor in worship is God. God is the one listening to our prayers and songs and testimony. God is the one listening and not just listening, but present and speaking, which makes worship something other than fun. 

Worship is not entertainment. It is an act of thanksgiving founded on the kingdom that cannot be shaken.  Worship is not about making us comfortable. Worship is about meeting the living God. And when you meet the living God you are shaken. How can we not be shaken when we meet the One who not only calls into existence the things that do not exist but also gives life to the dead?   How can we not be shaken when we meet the One who for the sins of the world gave his life? And when we are shaken our lives are transformed.  We are never the same. 

The birth of our children and the death of our friends are but faint echoes of the living God.  And it is this God whom we meet in worship.  “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe; for indeed our God is a consuming fire.”  Amen.