Sermon notes for sunday redux...

NOTE: Ok, sometimes (no always) a good edit is in order, yes?  Usually I have these notes done by Tuesday so I can walk around with them a la Ray Brown's advice. But this week we celebrated our anniversary and I found myself having to do on Saturday what is usually accomplished much earlier.  At any rate, here's my sermon notes redux...

 

Introduction

Here’s a question for you that just aches to asked on Ascension Sunday:  How do we present Christ to a consumer-oriented, sex-crazed, self-preoccupied, success-focused, technologically sophisticated, light-hearted, entertainment-centered culture?  I think Douglas Webster – a sociologist in the Protestant tradition – cuts to the chase with this question wondering if the American church of the 21^st century even knows how to distinguish between authenticity and attractiveness – integrity or excitement – the way of discipleship and paths of perpetual distraction?

In his study of American popular culture and religious habits, Eyes Wide Open, William Romanowski notes that when it comes to movies, television, music, pornography, video games and all the rest researchers were unable to distinguish any discernible difference between those who follow Christ as Lord and those who do not. What’s more, as the largest evangelical church in the United States – Willow Creek outside of Chicago – discovered, there appear to be no significant differences between the cultural habits and practices of so-called conservative Christians and their more liberal cousins. 

Romanowski concludes that “the attitudes, desires and values of materialism are a powerful force in North American life (for the religious and non-religious alike.)  After all, while 40% of Americans say they attend church every week, 70% visit a mall.” (p. 178) Cut to my presenting question: How do we present Christ to a consumer-oriented, sex-crazed, self-preoccupied, success-focused, technologically sophisticated, light-hearted, entertainment-centered culture?

Another way of asking that question that isn’t so provocative might be:  how can we live into the wisdom of our worship in our generation?  How can we embody the counter-cultural values of Jesus?  How can we pass on our faith to our children and loved ones? How can we share the good news of God’s grace?

Well, a growing consensus suggests that worship is the best way to both present the upside-down grace of God in Jesus Christ to the world and pass on and train others in an authentic faith.  Worship – where we practice gathering together as God’s people – learning how to be centered in prayer and praise and engaging in God’s grace; worship – where we reflect upon the Word of God made flesh within and among us and then open our hearts and minds to all of the costs and joys of discipleship.

Worship is where we are trained in God’s ways – not the addictions of our atavistic culture – but rather a sacred alternative wherein the last shall come first, the wounded made whole and all sinners given a taste of God’s forgiveness.  That’s what today’s psalm is telling us:  when we are together as God’s people – clapping, singing, praising, praying, lamenting, listening and sharing – we are touched and nourished by joy.  Worship is essential to forming authentic faith…

Insights

But that’s not a popular thing to say these days: we are so captivated by the idol of consumption and the lure of self-fulfillment that many can no longer differentiate between their feelings about God and actually picking up the Cross to follow Christ as Lord.  Many believe that if we think and feel that we are being faithful, well then it must be true, right?

Small wonder that our Protestant Reformers “maintained a deep reserve about the self, about the reliability of human reasoning and… about human feelings and perceptions… The Reformers held that human beings should be loved but, because they are sinners, they ought not to be blindly trusted.  They granted that personal experience is powerful because it is intense, but they insisted that we should not allow this power to delude us into thinking that experience is always right.”  (Marva Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down, p. 71)

Did you hear that:  we insist that we should not allow the powerfully intense feelings we know delude us into thinking that they are always right?  That’s why we’ve started this series concerning worship – with a clear emphasis on how to live into the wisdom of our worship – because worship offers an alternative we can practice if we are paying attention.  And with the risk of offending someone – which is not my goal - I’ve found over the years that sometimes we don’t fully know how to pay attention to the very different parts of worship.  We DO them – we sing the hymns of praise, we say the prayers of confession and pass the peace – but we don’t really know WHY we are doing them.

And if we don’t know why these practices are important in worship, it is unlikely that we’ll know how to live into their wisdom once worship is over.  So last week we considered the wisdom of the first part of worship:  gathering.  It is all about being centered and quiet, open to God’s grace and then proclaiming with joy that we are the Lord’s beloved.  Remember when we practiced using water to keep us aware that “We are the beloved of God and our lives have meaning?”  Well, that’s part one of worship in our tradition.

Part two – engaging – is equally important but in a very different way.  If you have been paying attention to our worship bulletin, you’ll know that under the second heading – ENGAGE – there is another brief invitation that tells us this is a time to share our prayers – spoken and silent – with God and one another. 

Do you sense the rhythm in how these two parts fit together?  It is the inward/ outward journey of authentic faith:  we come in from the world to be centered in God’s love and then in the safety of God’s embrace we go out into community with shared prayer.

Are you with me?  Do you have a sense of what I’m talking about here?  There is an ordered movement to our lives and worship when the Spirit leads us that is both inward and outward – almost like your breath – which is actually the same word the Bible uses for the Holy Spirit, too.

Now there are three distinct parts to being engaged to God and one another in this portion of worship:  our prayer of confession, the assurance of God’s forgiveness and the sharing of the concerns of our community.  Each is unique, each requires practice for worship and each has a portion of sacred wisdom that we can carry and apply to our lives beyond worship, too.  So let’s talk about each of these elements and see where the Spirit leads us, ok?

When we pray our prayer of confession early in worship – using the spoken word as well as silence and song – it is a recognition of our sin.  Notice we don’t START with sin in worship – we begin with grace and joy – but because we’re honest sin is never far away.  It can be personal sin, social sin, horrible and unspeakable sin like was discovered this week in Cleveland, hidden and invisible sin as so often happens in war or just plain and simple, ordinary and seemingly inconsequential sin like white lies or bragging.

I rather like the way theologian James Gustafson describes human sin as having to do with "mis-placed trust or confidence, wrongly ordered objects of desire, and corrupt rationality and dis-obedience."  There’s no wiggle room here – and that’s important – and here’s why: All people hate the notion of sin – but we hate being reminded that we are sinners even more – so it is easy for us to play games that go something like this:  We know that WE haven’t done things like Hitler – or Saddam Hussein – or the latest mass murderer – so WE aren’t horrible people.

And if WE aren’t horrible people – and most of us aren’t – then we really have no interest in thinking of ourselves as sinners because sinners are those who do horrible things – and that’s not us.

But that’s just where we get into trouble because, you see, sin is not a moralistic judgment based upon what we do.  And that’s a really tough concept to accept for those of us who have been schooled and trained in American utilitarianism and good old fashion market-based solutions. We tend to ascribe value and worth – as well as guilt and failure – according to what we do.  Take, for example, what happens when you meet a new person at a party:  more often than not, the first question that we usually ask is, “Nice to meet you… so what do you do,” right? 

That’s just how this culture works – we’re either productive in obvious and socially beneficial ways – or we’re not.  We’re either winners or losers – and I don’t know if you’ve been noticing but there has been a huge spike in the number of Americans taking their own lives over the past 10 years.  And the group with the highest suicide rate is no longer teens but middle age Americans between the ages of 30 and 64 – with a 50% jump among men in their 50s.  Think of all our combat vets coming back from the Gulf with PTSD, think of all the assembly line workers who have become obsolete in our so-called techno-culture or the countless middle class families unable to maintain their mortgages.

They’ve all been playing by the rules – and now more and more are taking their own lives – because so much of our sense of value and worth is based on what we do.  Thank God there is an alternative – and it begins with sin.  Yes, of course, it moves quickly into God’s grace, but sin and grace are eternally intertwined and we best not advocate for a separation lest we invite all Hell to break loose. 

Eugene Peterson is helpful here when he writes that sin is not “a word that places humans somewhere along a continuum ranging from angel to ape, assessing them as relatively good or bad.  Rather, sin designates humans in relation to God (and nobody else.)”  That means a sinner has NOTHING to do with being “hypocritical, disgusting or evil… Rather sinner means that some-thing is awry between us and God.”  And this something applies to everyone – Republican and Democrat, women and men, gay and straight, adults and children, rich and poor, good, bad and everybody in-between.

How did St. Paul put it:  all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God – all.  Is that clear? So sin is NOT so much about what we DO, but about who we are in relationship to God, people who willfully wander away from God’s love and plan.  Are you with me here?  Before I go on let me ask are there any questions so far?

Now the reason why we have a prayer of confession every week – one that is said out loud and together – is to remind us that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  Given human nature and the influence of culture, unless we are reminded of our need for God’s grace on a regular basis, we will become masters of lying to ourselves and trying to fool the Lord. So every week we use the spoken word as well as song and silence to help us experience and own this essential spiritual truth:  never put whipped cream on BS!  When one of my spiritual directors told me that, it was crystal clear, yes?

So let me ask you, in addition to the spoken words we say, why do you think silence is important during our shared prayer of confession?  The same for the two musical prayers we often use – the Kyrie and the Lamb of God –what are they telling us about sin and grace?  (Any wisdom from the maestro here…?)

Part one of engaging God and one another in prayer in almost every tradition involves confession, but it doesn’t stop there because we could not own our sin if we didn’t also trust that God has promised to bring us forgiveness.  That’s why part two of engaging God involves an assurance of God’s pardon that is spoken by a worship leader and then affirmed by passing the peace and singing the “amen.”  Sin and grace are intertwined. 

So no sooner do we get honest with the Lord in humility then I remind you that by faith God gives us all grace for the forgiveness of sins. And just to make certain we accept this blessing, I invite you to share a physical sign of Christ’s peace with one another.  And the chaos of grace breaks out for a few minutes among other sinners and strangers and loved ones.

Why does passing the peace matter to you?  What do you experience during this time? How about when we sing the amen after the peace:  why is this important?  Do you know what AMEN means?  Truly… we are using the sounds of joy in our bodies to affirm that beyond our sin God’s grace is truly more powerful and real than anything else in all creation.

In our worship, we ENGAGE first with confession, second with an assurance and affirmation of God’s grace – underscored and emphasized by the peace – and third with… sharing the concerns of our community. These are more than mere announcements – this is a time when we give some shape and form to how we are living out our mission of grace and joy in the community – how the Word of the Lord is becoming flesh within and among us.  This is engagement in the most incarnational way – nothing abstract going on here – just reality.

And what do you think about the sacred aspects of sharing our community concerns?  Sharing our concerns about mission and ministry is NEVER the place for mini-sermons or the place to argue about an event: what happens here is a sharing born of the Holy Spirit at work in our church – it is an invitation for you to go deeper into the work of grace in this time and place – and to surround the commitments of others with your prayers.

In this morning’s text Jesus promised his first disciples – and by faith you and me, too – that we will receive power from the Holy Spirit to be faithful if we wait upon the Lord.  Our community concerns are the fruit of this waiting.  And like the scripture continues to say - after Jesus had said this, he was lifted up as if in a cloud in the heavens… and for a time the disciples stood by gazing in confusion until two angels dressed in white robes announced:  Disciples of Christ, why do you stand there with your head in the clouds – let’s get on with the loving.  Our concerns offer you a way to do likewise with concrete, embodied actions born of grace.

Conclusion

When I was a young, hot shot adolescent in church, I hated all our talk about sin:  not only was it depressing but I didn’t believe it really applied to me.  I detested saying the prayer of confession each Sunday in unison and often asked my pastor, “Why can’t we just make our confessions to the Lord in silence?”  And he said, “Because we’re all in this together – all of us – and I mean ALL of us – have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

For a long time I didn’t get what he meant.  But after a whole lot of sin – and a truckload of grace – it began to dawn on me like the Apostle Paul said so well, “when I was a child I thought like a child and spoke like a child and acted like a child; but when I grew up I put childish things away.” That is to say, after I spent way too long trying way too hard trying to ignore and excuse my own sin, I was blessed and forgiven by the grace of God in ways I neither deserved nor expected.  And that’s when I started to comprehend how important it was to be reminded and called into confession every week.  I need to stay grounded in grace – I need to face my wandering nature – I need to sing it and share it and own it.  I need to cry out, “Lord, have mercy.”  And I need to know and trust that the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world.

In a word, I need to know that my sin has been forgiven.  And I suspect that you do, too because another thing I learned along the way is that what is most personal is often also most universal.  And if I need to be reminded about living life on God’s terms, it’s a safe hunch that you do, too.

Do you know the wonderful writer Marilynne Robinson?  She’s a cranky, brilliant, grace-filled Congregationalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Gilead.  In a recent essay she spoke of being engaged in God’s grace and human sin like this:

The Christian narrative tells us that we individually and we as a world turn our back on what is true – essential – wholly to be desired.  And it tells us that we can both know this about our-selves and forgive it in ourselves and one another, within the limits of our mortal capacities. To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault.  Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom.  Nor can religion until it puts aside nonsense and distractions and becomes itself again.

Worship – gathering and engaging, reflecting and blessing – is our time tested and humble way to best meet and present the fullness of God.  In it we learn how to trust the Lord and share grace in ways that are saturated with joy.  Lord, may it be so among us all.