A Worshipping People

First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
19^th Sunday after Pentecost – September 25, 2005
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.
[Texts: Isaiah 6:1-5/John 4:7-26]

“You know, Reverend, I really don’t need to go to church to worship God. I can worship God better over a cup of coffee and my paper on a Sunday morning. I need my quiet-time.” I hear that and similar arguments from a lot of folks and have heard it and its variations for years. Obviously many feel that way or this church, which numbers a membership of over eight hundred, would have both services packed and, sad to say, we don’t. So, why do we worship? Why do we keep this up if, indeed, we could just as effectively praise God while kneeling weeding in our gardens or appreciating the wonder of nature on an immaculately manicured green with a putter in our hands?

Well, first let me offer a little story I found from the Jewish writer Elie Wiesel. He tells the story of one of the great Hasidic rabbis, when the great man was but a young boy studying in the local yeshiva.  The teacher noticed that the lad was occasionally absent from the classroom where he was studying Torah.  Finally, one day, he followed the boy into the surrounding woods where he discovered the rabbi-to-be praying.  “What are you doing?" he asked.  The boy replied, "Praying."  "But why do you come all the way out here to pray," the teacher pressed.  "Don't you know that everywhere God is the same?"  "Oh, yes," the lad replied, "God is everywhere the same . . . but I am not." Sometimes we need an opportunity to focus and respond to God, in a place and among a people where we are different. Why? Because we were made for worship, let me explain.

Human beings are rational animals or, as Kenneth Burke the great rhetorical critic and theorist of the last century said, we are the symbol-using animal. We have the ability to think, to reason, to consider and, even more, we have the ability to be reflective. That ability to reflect, to be self-aware, is one of the great signs that we are, as the Bible says, “made in the image and likeness of God.” We also possess a longing for more, a deep-seated sense that there is more to us than what we see. Thus, we begin to look outside ourselves for the transcendent, that which is beyond the limits of our experience or even of our comprehension.

Back at the turn of the last century Rudolf Otto wrote a fascinating, and still standard work, called The Idea of the Holy. Otto says that the holy is a nonrational and ineffable part of the human experience. He describes the encounter with the Holy as mysterium tremendum et fascinans – a mystery at once tremendous/overwhelming and yet fascinating. ‘Mystery’ is something that lies beyond our power to comprehend or to conceptualize rationally. It is something extraordinary and unfamiliar. When we come in contact with it we are immediately put off-guard because it is outside of our ordinary experience and then to find ourselves in such a presence frightens us because we are forced to acknowledge that we are less than that in whose presence we stand.

“In the year King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple.” Isaiah’s vision is one the classic examples of the experience of the ‘holy.’ Isaiah comes into the temple and through the clouds of incense and the smoke of the burning sacrifices he has an encounter with the transcendent. In this vision of God Isaiah is made to realize just how small and how different, ‘unclean,’ he is in the face of God’s ‘otherness’ or ‘holiness.’ Still, he is fascinated by what he sees, so much so that after he cries “Woe is me!” he offers himself in service to God saying, “Here am I! Send me!” What we see in that story is, or at least should be, why we’re here this morning, why we come to church at all. Because we may be awestruck, overwhelmed in the presence of that which is wholly other than ourselves, but still we’re compelled to stand outside ourselves because we’ve been touched, we’ve seen the Lord. Part of being human is responding to the Other, because while it is so different we see a glimpse of ourselves there, too. As Augustine said, so beautifully, “You have made us for yourselves and our hearts are restless, until they rest in You, O Lord.”

So, we worship because it is a part of who we are as human beings. We also worship because God reaches to us, offering relationship to us. The essence of the covenant relationship, remember, is when God says, “I will be with you.” What we see in Scripture again and again is God taking individuals and little groups and drawing them into relationship, first with God’s self and then with one another. God takes us where we are and forms community. Worship is response to God. Thus, God’s continued assurance of presence is made visible through the lives of those who have responded to God’s gracious self-disclosure and, in the process, have become “visible saints.” Recall that the definition of a Congregational church is “a company of saints by calling” or “visible saints.”

One may become a “saint” through profession of belief, but this profession implies more than an intellectual assent to a series of theological propositions. William Ellery Channing revealed the Congregational roots of his Unitarian faith when he delivered his discourse on “The Church” in 1841. He told the people of the First Congregational Unitarian Church in Philadelphia:

God heeds not what we say, but what we are, and what we do. The subjection of our wills to the divine, the mortification of sensual and selfish propensities, the cultivation of supreme love to God and of universal justice and charity toward our neighbor – this, this is the very essence of religion . . .[1]

What Channing identifies is the essence of spirituality. Our spirituality is genuine when it brings our faith into lived experience, providing the means for visible sainthood if you will. The end is, as William Ames described the practice of theology, “living toward God,” which implies living toward others in the process. Thus, Channing also describes the practical nature and purpose of the church, in other words that it is to put into practice that which it preaches.

So sainthood in its Congregationally understood way is ultimately communal and is to be the practical fruit of the church’s preaching. Marva Dawn, who is doing wonderful work in the area of worship, points out that one of the grave problems facing churches now is the loss of a sense of community. In fact, she identifies the lack of genuine community as the root problem of the churches.[2] The gift of Congregational churches to the church universal, I believe, should be the emphasis upon the life “in common” that rests at the heart of the Congregational ideal and made possible through our emphasis upon the response to relationship expressed in the church covenant which identifies our chief purpose as the “publick worship of God.” The community comes as the result of individuals responding to God’s call to relationship. This community gathered in response to God’s call then becomes the means of communication of the Divine presence. The heart of God speaks to the human heart and those in dialogue constantly seek new partners; intentional and mutual acts of communication and commitment. We worship because it is why the church exists.

We worship because it is how we serve God and reminds us of how we are to serve others. We can say that the service of worship leads to worship through service. Our gathering for worship allows the individual to serve others through the exercise of the gifts that God has given to each of us. All of us have gifts, as Paul reminds us in First Corinthians, and while they will vary, the end result is the same: the community is drawn together and individual hearts join to commune with the loving heart of God. This understanding of “churchbeing,” to use a term coined by Marva Dawn, stands over against how many would solve the problems confronting the churches today. Dawn speaks to this point when she writes:

Churches think they’re a “community” because that is what the word church suggests, without realizing how much the technological milieu hinders us from really caring for each other with gutsy, sacrificial love of genuine community. Moreover, when we find out how much effort it takes truly to be the kind of community the Bible describes, we are often not willing to involve ourselves in that much struggle and suffering. In our overly entertained and blatantly consumerism-oriented culture, with little concern for serving the common good, many “churches” have become, in George Hunsberger’s masterful phrases, “vendors of religious services and goods,” instead of “a body of people sent on a mission.”[3]

The essence of the church as the place of the heart-to-heart exchange stands in sharp contrast to worship as consumption. Worship is service to God and to the community gathered in response to God gracious invitation to relationship. Church is not where I come to have my needs met, but where I come to offer myself to God and to others and in the process I find myself and am made whole.

Worship is when the church is most truly itself and expresses its nature as the people, the body, and building made up of living stones. This is made so clear in Channing’s description of the church as it meets for worship and testifies to the idea of the relationship or communion of human hearts with the heart of God in Christ revealed in “warm hearts . . . beating on every side.”

We come together in our places of worship that heart may act on heart; that in the midst of the devout a more fervent flame of piety may be kindled in our own breasts; that we may hear God’s word more eagerly knowing that it is drunk in by thirsty spirits around us . . . . I see the signs of Christian affection in those around me, in which warm hearts are beating on every side, in which a deep stillness speaks of the absorbed soul, in which I recognize fellow-beings who in common life have impressed me with their piety.[4]

What we hear in Channing’s words is what we heard in the Cambridge Platform’s description of a Congregational church gathered “for the publick worship of God and the mutual edification one of another, in the fellowship of the Lord Jesus.”[5] We are called to   live out the covenant of grace, not in some abstract way, but in our service to God through those “warm hearts” on every side. We gather to worship because out of that experience we go forth to serve.

The church as “a company of saints by calling” in Congregational thought is then a place, a community of the heart. The church is a worshipping people, a community where love lives and expresses itself in a concrete manner through the actions of those gathered, chief of which is the service offered to God in worship and continued through a welcoming spirit and loving service to those in need. This is what the Samaritan woman at the well hears from Jesus, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” True worship isn’t going through the motions or just saying the right things at the right time. True worship comes from deep within and transforms the worshipper and leads from the worship act to a different attitude toward life and relationships. Like the woman at the well we come to understand that we can come with all of our ragged edges, our triumphs and our failures, our sorrows and our joys, our doubts and our certainties, and our questions and our answers. When we come to worship we express the Congregational theology of the church, based on the concept of the called, and thus visible, relationship of the believer to Christ and the gathering of these believers in loving relationship and service by means of a covenant. The church, then, is where heart speaks to heart, where we worship in spirit and in truth.

The early Congregationalists read Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel, searched the Scripture, and sought to express this worship in “spirit and truth.” First and foremost they sought simplicity. They understood that the whole world was holy and that, indeed, one met God everywhere. So they built what was first called “God’s barn,” the meeting house, which was set in “the convenientest place for us all.” When the church was gathered there then that meeting house became sacred space because a holy people was there.

They were determined not to have anything in worship that they couldn’t find in the Bible, which, by the way, doesn’t tell us a great deal about how the early church worshipped. So their service was based on what they could find, prayer, the singing of the Psalms and canticles from Scripture, the sermon and the sacraments. It tended to be a bit sparse and a tad long. It was not uncommon for a pastoral prayer to last as long as the sermon, about an hour each, and for worship to take three hours altogether.

Because they wanted to have pure worship, with all of what they called “papistical fripperies” removed, there was no cross, no candles, no “dumb readings” (that is, each reading was explained line-by-line and often word-by-word), nor were there any “dumb prayers” (the Lord’s Prayer was seen only as a model for prayer and no prayers were repeated or read together). Neither was the “devil’s box of whistles,” the organ, anywhere to be seen. They had nothing against musical instruments, but in worship only that which God made, the voice, should be used, though choirs or anthems were not permitted.

Over time attitudes changed, especially as they, and we, have learned more and more about the worship not only of the early church, but also of the Reformation. The four-fold order of worship (1. the church gathers; 2. the church hears the Word; 3. the church offers prayer and thanksgiving; 4. the church is sent forth to love and serve) is not only reflected in the early church’s worship, but in that of the Reformation. Gradually elements of worship once discarded in the first fervor have come back and many of them we use today – amply witnessed by the presence of cross, candles, organ and choir, to name a few.

We are a worshipping people. Worship is the most important thing, indeed the most human thing, we do. Worship binds us as a community and empowers us for service so that those who come to the well of life, thirsty to know God and to experience the more of their lives, will be welcomed and challenged. Worship is where we come to meet God and God is here – waiting to meet us. We do this Sunday-after-Sunday because it makes us who we are.

Annie Dillard, who has called herself a “lapsed Congregationalist,” takes all Christians to task in Teaching a Stone to Talk. Her point is that we’re “not sufficiently sensible of the power we so blithely invoke” and suspects that we don’t believe what we do when we invite God into our midst. I think she’s on-target. You see, God has called us to be worshipping people and when we call, God comes. God is here. The Lord of time and creation is here and like Isaiah and the Samaritan woman we should just fall down in wonder, awe and amazement. Worship is our acknowledging God’s presence and showing our gratitude for it – it’s not about our being entertained, but about the response we make to God.  We need to be sensible of the power we invoke and be a worshipping people with all that it implies for living everyday. Oh, and my response to those folks I mentioned at the outset? I tell them that it’s simply not the same. And it isn’t, is it?