On his ninth life and chasing Tweety Bird, Sylvester the Cat makes a fatal leap. Searching for Bugs Bunny in a dark room filled with dynamite, Yosemite Sam lights a match. Thinking he hears the Road Runner speeding around a curve, Wile E. Coyote leaps directly into the path of a bus. BAM!
The scene switches to a sky filled with harmless fluffy clouds. We encounter Sylvester, or Sam, or Wile E., rising softly into the sky, halo around their head, a harp in their hands, and an exasperated expression on their face. From the adventures of chasing and fighting to a life defined by puffy clouds and soft music – one gets the impression that life in heaven is some kind of a demotion.
That’s how it goes with popular conceptions of the beyond.
No wonder, in the old movie Heaven Can Wait Warren Beatty wants to leave heaven to play quarterback for the Rams. You know it’s an old movie because who wants to play for the Rams? Apparently, even that gig is better than heaven.
The same, unfortunately, goes for popular conceptions of worship. Just think of The Simpsons’ First Church of Springfield. If something spiritually significant were to happen, people wouldn’t know what to do. Staid formality. Droning sermons. Tired people, tired liturgy, tired music. Why would someone go through all that monotony when she could be cultivating a lovely vegetable garden? Does worship matter?
I
Could the church be part of the problem?
Time was, you’d find a nice emerging neighborhood, call a pastor, build a church, open the door and have a few hundred members before you know it. People would move to a city like Lancaster and immediately start looking for a Lutheran church, and they’d quickly find Holy Trinity.
Could it be, the church had it just a little too easy for awhile?
Could it be, the church became a little too ordinary?
Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Movement confronted us with the question of race. The sexual revolution emerged, and suddenly making love looked a lot more compelling than making felt boards for Sunday School classrooms. Vietnam, Watergate, and the Cold War, and let’s face it, 9/11 and health care reform. Oh, people came back to the church for a little while after 9/11, but what has the church had to say?
We’re not asking about whether churches provide meaningful worship. We’re not asking about quality. Holy Trinity has a long heritage of strong preaching and outstanding music with leaders who are talented, creative, and dedicated. So do other churches in our community. We’re asking about the broader church and how our worship interfaces with the world.
How did the message of the church reach the point where it was tame? How did the church become a safe place? How did the church lose its ability to command the attention of people facing radical changes in the economy, in technology, in family structures? In an age without a standard family structure, why do churches keep making pictures of mom, dad, and their two children?
I’m asking a hard question. But how did it come to be that Yosemite Sam with halo and harp came to represent our afterlife hope? How does it make sense to represent the First Church of Springfield as boring and irrelevant? How did the church become tame?
II
So heaven can wait. And worship can wait. But this morning a biblical text confronts us with both. Worship. In heaven.
There is something splendid, something glorious about this scene in Revelation. At a moment of great crisis in Revelation – earthquakes, cosmic portents, kings, merchants, and soldiers hiding from catastrophe – “Who can stand before the wrath of God?” they cry -- at this portentous moment things
slow
down.
And the focus shifts. From chaos to celebration. John sees a great crowd, countless even to Google, people from every nation, every tribe and people, speaking every language, a countless throng. They’re not playing harps, nor are they humming familiar hymns, they are shouting! “Salvation! Salvation belongs to God! Salvation comes from the Lamb!”
Glorious, but real. For this worshiping throng consists of people who have lived through the worst. They have lived their faith openly, they have risked family and reputation, body and life, they have followed the Lamb and now they serve him day and night.
Glory sometimes arrives smeared in the muck of conflict and injustice. Glory sometimes passes through ugliness. In 1963 Fannie Lou Hamer was helping organize people for voting rights in Mississippi. Pulled from a bus in the small town of Winona, she was taken to jail. Under state police supervision, she was beaten with a blackjack until her whole body swelled up hard. Vision impairment and kidney trouble from that beating would trouble her for the rest of her life. Dragged back to her cell, Fannie Lou Hamer began to worship. She sang out.
Paul and Silas was bound in jail – let my people go.
Had no money for to go their bail – let my people go.
Paul and Silas began to shout – let my people go.
Jail doors open and they walked out – let my people go.
Glorious worship in a small town jail cell. How does Revelation put it? These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Not clean, not trouble-free but real, glorious worship. There’s something splendid about that.
III
Now imagine. Imagine Revelation’s first audience sitting in a room as this scene is read aloud. Little churches in major cities: Ephesus, and Smyrna, Pergamum and Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Lacodicea. Small, vulnerable communities of faith in the major cities of their day. These people huddled in their dozens, worshiping in houses among their neighbors.
Imagine how this scene would strike them. A multitude around the throne and around the Lamb. Not dozens, but countless. Every nation, every tribe, every people, every language – a community so vast and rich that none of us have ever seen such.
Imagine these quiet little communities, how this sounds to them. Big worship. No soft church music; they’re raising the roof, lifting their voices: Salvation is God’s! Salvation belongs to the Lamb!
Imagine these people. They live with worship all around them. They walk down the streets and – literally – temples tower around them. Temples to Rome, temples to the emperors. Their cities petition the Roman Senate for the opportunity – the opportunity – to worship the emperor! Festivals and temples. Their leading citizens sponsor choirs – choirs in uniform to sing praise to the emperor. Praise to the emperor, who calls himself savior.
Imagine these Christians who risk treason. The one they name as Savior does not live in Rome. The choir they want to join does not sing praise to Caesar. Imagine these little communities, hearing this scene from Revelation read aloud – imagine worship as an act of loyalty and commitment. Imagine worship where worship is counter-cultural. Imagine.
IV
There it is. Our passage reveals two things about worship, and I’d like to reflect on them for awhile. There’s so much more to say about worship, but let’s stay with these two.
Our worship confesses our loyalty. Like our faith ancestors in Pergamum and Sardis, we confess our loyalty in worship. There is only one who merits our allegiance, the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, and only to God do we offer our worship.
The church has confessed its loyalty in dramatic moments, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. Back in 1960s Mississippi, a white seminarian named Ed King got the bright idea of taking mixed-race groups to worship at white churches. They were routinely turned away by cross-armed deacons– sorry, Deacon Mauro – at the church steps, determined to keep their communion tables all white. King asked one deacon, “Would Jesus turn people away from worship?” The deacon replied, “Leave Jesus out of this.” We don’t always get our loyalty just right.
Let us not be confused. Followers of Jesus have gathered to worship when governments have forbidden it. Roman Christians would go underground into the catacombs. Slaves in North America would “steal away” to secret brush arbor meetings. During the Nazi era, Christians held clandestine meetings in churches and homes. It goes on still, in the face of official and unofficial suppression.
It happens today, right here, in this moment. We love our country, but we do not pledge our allegiance to the flag in church. We may be proud of our jobs, but they do not bind our conscience. Neither nation, nor ideology, nor profession is worthy of our ultimate allegiance – for that, only God. Only God. Worship reminds us to keep everything else in its place. Worship voices our loyalty.
V
Worship shapes our identity. It reminds us – no, it makes us – who we are.
Back in 1986 or so one of my college professors invited me to lead worship with her. We went to Memphis’ First Congregational Church. The church was clearly dying; only a dozen or so people, all eligible for Medicare, were scattered around the old sanctuary. Quite the depressing scene
Ten years later my alma mater had invited me to join the faculty, and my family and I were seeking a church home in Memphis. Surprisingly, we were referred to First Congregational as a vibrant, thriving congregation. We visited, and we just fell in love with the place. About three hundred people, clearly in love with God and with one another, vibrant worship, music, and preaching. Not only a full-time pastor but a full-time associate pastor as well. The atmosphere was just celebratory.
What happened? Well, worship makes us who were are. Those courageous final members had called a new seminary graduate to pastor them, and they’d negotiated one deal. “Whatever it takes.” So this pastor said, “We’re gonna welcome everyone.” The church opened itself to gays, lesbians, and other sexual minorties – the only mainline congregation in a city of a million people to do so – and they came by the dozens, then the hundreds. Told all their lives that they were not worthy of the church, these people found themselves in worship as people God loves. And that church, about half gay, half straight, is still growing and flourishing.
Worship tells us who we are.
- Our neighbors know us as the family with the perfect lawn – well, my neighbors don’t, but yours may. Worship names us as people chosen and loved by God.
- At work, we’re the reliable employee. Here at Holy Trinity we begin worship by confessing our sins and rehearsing God’s saving love.
- Our society divides us into liberal and conservative, white, black, Latino, or Asian; worship reminds us that we are all one in Christ Jesus.
- Our culture values us as consumers, voters, demographics; our worship calls us to get out and bring mercy to our world: “Go forth and serve the Lord.” And we answer, say it with me, “Thanks be to God.”
HOME
Perhaps the worst thing someone could say about worship is that it is harmless. That it is tame. Worship matters. In a world where powerful forces turn us into commodities – bodies to work, consumers to purchase, demographics to research – worship names us as followers of the risen Christ. In a society committed to dividing us – liberals from conservatives, women from men, old from young, white people from people of color – worship identifies our true loyalty. Worship calls us beyond false identities and fading loyalties to the fierce, loving God – the fiercely loving God – revealed in Jesus Christ. “Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!” Amen? “Amen."
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