March 23, 2003 - Third Sunday of Lent
Exodus 20; 1-17
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John 2:13-22
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“The Way of True Worship”

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no others gods before me.”

There’s a part of me that simply wants to say, “Amen,” sit down, and give us time to meditate on the truth of that statement.  The whole of the Judeo-Christian experience is locked up in that sentence.  The truth of that commandment is why Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem and cleansed the Temple.  The truth of that commandment is why we’re here this morning.  The reason we worship is because there is a God who calls us to relationship and our response to God’s invitation is worship.

So, the way of true worship, I should say at the outset, is not about us.  The way of true worship is about God.  Why we often get distracted or run into problems and end up in what some commentators have referred to as “worship wars,” over styles or approaches to worship, is because we forget the true focus of worship – God.

A contemporary scholar, Marva Dawn, has done some wonderful work on worship that seeks to refocus or re-center us on God.  Two of her books have the most delightful titles and each of them carry a powerful wallop: Reaching Out Without Dumbing-Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century Culture and A Royal “Waste” of Time: The Splendor of Worshipping God and Being Church for the World.  In her first book, Dr. Dawn reminds us of the origins of the word ‘worship’:

The word worship comes from the Old English roots weorth, meaning “honor” and “worthiness,” and scipe, signifying “to create.”  Of course, we cannot “create” God’s honor because it is inherently God’s, but we do devise ways to honor God that bespeak his worthiness, all the while recognizing that our attempts are inadequate, that we will never duly laud the Trinity until we join the saints and angels in perfectly glorifying God forever. [p.76-7]

What we hear there is that even our worship of God is enabled by God.  It is not something that we do; rather it is God at work within us.  As one prayer has it, “even our desire to thank you is itself your gift.”

God, then, is both the source and the object of Christian worship.  C. Welton Gaddy has summarized this reality in his The Gift of Worship, “The opportunity (privilege) to worship God is itself a gift from God and specific acts of worship are prompted by other gifts from God – spiritual and material.  Conversely, the worship of God consists of offering gifts to God” [p. xv].  But what sort of gifts can we offer to the God who not only “has everything,” but also is the One who made everything?  The Scriptures have it pretty clearly that God isn’t looking for sacrifices because, as the Prophets remind us, everything we could bring already belongs to God. So, what can we bring?

The Biblical Scholar William Temple offers a definition of worship that seems to answer the question and pull things together fairly well.  He defines worship as:

…the submission of all our nature to God.  It is the quickening of the conscience by His Holiness; the nourishment of the mind with His truth; the purifying of the imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to His purpose – and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable.  [Readings in St. John’s Gospel, p. 68 in Dawn, p. 80]

As God is the only true and worthy focus of worship, so the only proper gift that we can offer is that which God has made – ourselves.

The radical claim of God on human loyalty that we read in Exodus compels that kind of full response.  In those words from Exodus we hear that God alone is the highest good.  We are challenged to acknowledge that God alone is worthy of the heart’s singular devotion.  God alone is to be the center and the focus of one’s life.  That is why it has been said that there is really only one commandment, have no other gods, and all the rest are simply illustrations of how one goes about the business of putting that commandment into practice.

Quite frankly, I think that Jesus “cleansed” the Temple precisely because his contemporaries were missing the whole point of their faith.  Jesus goes in and tosses out everyone and everything that is getting in the way of what the real business of the Temple is supposed to be – GOD.  Later, through Christ’s death and resurrection, God transforms and restores the true Temple, the human person.  Now, it is not so much about a building but about the gathered community.  The living body of Christ, the church isn’t about structures, but about people.  We become the Temple of the living God and when we are joined together in the act of worship, as we are this morning, then we are church and Temple par excellence.

Our Congregational forebears understood this and, in some ways, the story of the cleansing of the Temple could become the metaphor for the whole of the Puritan movement.  The goal of the Puritans was ‘purity of worship.’  They wanted to give God what was God’s alone to have and they saw the church, where in good Reformed fashion the Word is rightly preached, the Sacraments are rightly administered and discipline is rightly applied, as the place where it happened.  However, they understood ‘church’ as the people, not the building.  Puritan preacher George Gillespie said, “unto us Christians no land is strange, no ground unholy; every coast is Jewry, every house is Sion; and every faithful company, yes, every faithful body a Temple to serve God in.”  This sentiment echoed the early reformer William Tyndale, who wrote:

God is a spirit and will be worshipped in spirit; that is, though He is present everywhere, yet He dwelleth lively and gloriously in the minds, , , and hearts of men that love His laws and trust in His promises.  And wheresoever God findeth such a heart, there he heareth prayer in all places indifferently.  So that outward place neither helpeth or hindreth…. [in Worldly Saints, p. 116]

In the mind of the Puritans all the world is rendered sacred space and we offer true worship by living in it in an appropriate manner.  That’s why we call our church building a meeting house, because it is here that the church meets to worship.

To the Puritans/Congregationalists the church is always people gathered by a covenant into a community of faith.  As Harry Stout so beautifully puts it in The New England Soul:

The meetinghouse’s position at the center of the community signified submission to God’s power, the power that came to a people who subordinated all human authorities and institutions to the infallible rule of Sola Scriptura.  The supernatural power represented by the meetinghouse was deliberately veiled to the external eye and became manifest only in those moments when, in a room filled to capacity, the community assembled to worship God and hear him speak through his Word.  In those moments the meetinghouse ceased to be merely a building and became a church where God made his power and presence felt among the assembled.  The buildings meant nothing because the church – the gathered body of believers – meant everything. [The New England Soul, p. ]

In that expression they restored the church to its original purity and recovered a key concept that we too often lose the holiness of the ordinary.  The manner in which we worship, the buildings we build for that purpose, and the way in which we live our lives in the everyday should all work together to continue and to promote that rediscovery.  God’s presence makes everything holy and we are to seek to have the eyes to see, the minds to understand, and the hearts to hold that truth.

Worship, then, isn’t about us.  It’s not about what we come to “get out of” the hour we give to God on a Sunday morning.  Nor is it about the style of worship that we follow, the music we use, or the liturgical, symbolic things we pick up or that we drop.  What worship is about is God.  What is important about our worship is that we understand that God is to be at the center, God is the focus, God is the reason we’re here, and that God is the only One who matters.  When we begin to understand that, then we begin to understand the way of true worship.

No one has more powerfully spoken to my heart about the way of true worship than the writer-contemplative, and self-described “lapsed Congregationalist,” Annie Dillard.  In Holy the Firm she contrasts the power and wonder of the mystery of nature with the often anemic assembling of those who come for worship in churchly buildings.  She describes worship thus, “set pieces of liturgy . . .  certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without getting killed.”  Why?  Because we simply don’t understand that we’re in the presence of the living God, the Author of all life, the source of all being, and too often we come out of a sense of dreary obligation rather than out of the love and wonder of encounter in a relationship.  There are people who go with more joy to pick up the paper or to play golf than they do to come to worship the God who gave them their very selves.  Dillard challenges us and holds up the mirror to us when she writes:

On the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible, aware, of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blindly invoke?  Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children, playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. [Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 40]

Beloved, the living God, the Creator is here – right now.  God is here, because we’ve asked God to come here.  We’ve ‘invoked’ God’s presence among us and God has listened to our requests and is here.  Have you ever wondered how you’d react if you prayed, “O Lord” and heard in response, “Yes, my child”?  Yet, God is there each time we pray and God is here right now as we worship.  Do we believe it?  If we do, then we should reflect it in our attitudes, on our faces, in the way we approach one another, and in the reverence we show God’s gathered people and the whole of God’s creation.