Sermons

"Keeping Covenant: Worship on the Move"

Delivered from the Pulpit of First Congregational Church

of Anchorage by The Reverend Mark E. Long

on January 17, 2010

Lections:  Jer. 7.1-11

                  Hos. 6.4-6

                  Js. 1.22-27

                 Mk. 12.28-34

This is the third sermon in my "covenant" series.  In the first sermon, I defined 'covenant' and tried to give you a sense of what it feels like to stand before a god who calls you to covenant.  In the second sermon, I "broke down" our Church Covenant to consider what it means to be a Congregationalist in the N.A. and the expectation of us that flows out of it.  Today, I close the series with an appeal to keep covenant not only because it is good for others but in your best interest as well.

If you were here last week, then you may come with an expectation of your own.  I promised to give a rationale for "why we should worship" if, as I argued, God is more process than a super-person.  If you were not here last week or have not read the sermon on the website, shame on you!  Just kidding, I will try to minimize the confusion that this shift in perception brings with a couple comments.

Last week, I suggested that the "black box placeholder" for God may be filled best by God as process not person.  God really is love or the process of loving actually, and that the best way to love God as opposed to the way you love your wife, child, or dog is to love God by loving others.  We may be better served to scrap the idea of loving God as we would a person and love God by loving through God.  There is more but for my purposes this morning that should be enough.

If not a super-person, why in the world are we coming in here to worship in all the ways that we do?  If God is the process of loving, what is the purpose of worship?

You may be bowed in your seat tensely anticipating me to say that I don't see much point in it, but nothing could be further from the truth.  We should worship; we should come in here and worship a lot.  I am, in fact, a proponent of weekly communion and not because I am a former Episcopalian.

Repetition of the forms of worship, particularly communion, creates (consciously or not) a habit of being in a frame of mind which promotes a life for us well lived.  If you want to blame someone for my affection for weekly communion blame Confucius not the Episcopalians.

Confucius' idea is that through 'li', (ritual or liturgical observance) the 'jen' (goodness) of a person arises.  Good character flows out of ritual observance, says Confucius.  From this I began to understand the value of "saying" the rosary, or Thomas Hooker's (yes, he was an Anglican) odd statement about when his mind was occupied then his soul could "fly up to heaven."

Worship is about far more than what appears to be the case.  "If the service of the Church is for edification, the motive for attending to "get something," as Alan Watts says disapprovingly in his spiritual classic Behold the Spirit, then we are missing the point of worship.[1]          

This is the reason Jeremiah is told by the Lord to go tell the people of Judah that their worship does not save them from their self-centered lives.  If they believe that "[they] are safe" by virtue of their worship from the fall-out of their "abominable" ways, they are very mistaken.  The Lord doesn't care about the people's holy ways as a means to 'get something" for themselves but as a means to be people of holy ways outside of it.  It is what they do, what they say, and how they live outside the temple that proves their fidelity to the covenant with the Lord or so says Jeremiah. 

A couple centuries later another prophet of the Lord sounds much the same in calling the tribes of Ephraim and Judah to keep covenant with God. "What am I going to do with you?"  "Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes away early. . . .  I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings."

Knowledge of God - what knowledge of God?  What happened to the God of Leviticus that wants "burnt offerings" of rams, bulls, goats, and birds?  What happened to the God that desires meticulous preparations of sacrifices in the temple?

I suspect if that God ever existed, it existed only in the minds of the Israelite priests.  You can imagine the Israelites, living among others that send up their "burnt offerings" to their gods, thinking, of course, this is the way any self-respecting god is worshipped.  But even then more than the sacrifices, the point of all the mind numbing details was for the people to show through attentiveness to worship that they intended to be God's people, faithful to the god who returns faith for faith.

You see the knowledge of God is really not about "head" knowledge at all but "heart" knowledge; it is the awareness of union; which we might call connection.  Worship gets our hearts pointed in the right direction, as Confucius' seemed to know, then transforms our character as we become living, loving expressions of the process to which we connect, as Confucius' seemed to know.  We find ourselves, the best of ourselves, as we live in the path of connection that compels us to love others.

Paul's fruit of the Spirit, which we just spent nine weeks considering, belongs to James' doers' of the Word not those hearers' of the Word who make the Word only a pew memory.  Only through acts of love inspired by worship is the Word fulfilled.  The Word is a living reality - not a dead memory.  The Word ends in doing and is not to be confined to pious utterances and observances of worship.  The Word puts its doers in motion, on the move to live God knowingly in a world that does not have the knowledge that worship brings.

Keeping the Church Covenant that we confess to follow every Sunday morning requires more from us than worship as a holy gift of our faithfulness to a super-person.  It requires more from us than worship to "bind ourselves" to God and each other in recognition of union.  It requires us to understand that worship is more than awareness of union; it is action, it is to "walk in all God's ways" not just hear of them.

Our best worship is not in here looking for assurance that "we are safe" but rather it is out there "on the move" using what we know of God to make this world a safer, more peaceful, more loving place to live for everyone.  I just can't get riled up about preaching about an afterlife, a leap of faith at best, when there is so much life here to hold our attention and that needs our attention.

Our challenge going forward in our liturgy, for each of us and as a Church, is to listen for how worship in the temple calls us to worship outside of it.  Obviously we are called to care for the widows and orphans but who are they for our day and how are we called to serve them so that the best of the light that shines through us reflects back into our lives?

Jeremiah to now, some things never change, but what we understand of them does as more light of God's truth continues to break through the process of love in creatures at times more intent on self-destruction than awakening through their worship.  Let us be bold and loving in this world and the next one will take care of itself.

This is how I see keeping the covenant, a commitment to worship outside the temple as well as within.  Amen.