September
2nd, 2012 “Gathering in God’s Name”
Rev. Heather Jepsen
Sermon
Series: The Theology of Worship
(Based on A More Profound Alleluia ed. Van Dyk)
Psalm 111
and Matthew 18:15-20
Since
my arrival we have spent most of our Sundays with readings from the
Lectionary. Today we are making a shift
and leaving the lectionary behind for a while to move into a series of sermons
about how we worship. It’s back to
school time so we are going back to class together as we study our worship
service. My goal is to spend a few
months walking us through our traditional worship service.
We
will talk about how we do things and the significance of each part of our
worship and the order of worship including how each part relates to the other. We will be changing the order of worship a
bit and discussing those changes as we go.
We will also discuss why we do the things we do, namely the theological
basis that is the foundation of our worship experience. I am basing this sermon series on the book A More Profound Alleluia: Theology and
Worship in Harmony and I will quote materials from the book throughout the
series.
So, why study our worship
practices? Author John Witvliet tells us
that “Christian corporate (or group) worship is an integrating practice at the
center of the Christian life. It both
reflects and shapes our view of God, the world, and their relations. It grounds, sharpens, and humbles the work
the church does in every sphere of ministry, including education, pastoral
care, evangelism, and justice. And it gathers
up every facet of our lives before God’s face – at work and play; at home and
school, and marketplace; in times of joy and sorrow – and sends us out to live
in obedience and joy.”
In
other words, everything starts here.
Everything from the formation of our faith to the way we live outside
the church walls is influenced by what we do here in the sanctuary. So, it makes good sense to take the time to
study just why we do what we do here on Sundays and what each part of the
worship service is about.
Our
time of worship is powerful. Worship is
the center of our Christian life and is worthy of our thought and study. Worship is where we come to meet God. We bring the whole of our lives to this time
and place and in turn we are shaped from the experience and go out into the
world with a new and different view.
Genuine worship changes us.
Every part of our worship experience
is about God. It is God who calls us to
worship, God who meets us in worship, God who helps us to worship, God who
sends us out into the world, and God who goes out with us to change the
world. Our basic Trinitarian
understanding of God, God relating to Godself through the three persons of the Trinity,
informs our experience of God in worship.
C.S. Lewis describes the Trinitarian
worship experience best when he says, “When an ordinary simple Christian kneels
down to say their prayers, they are trying to get in touch with God. But if a Christian, they know that what is
prompting them to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside them. But they also knows that all their real
knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God – that Christ is
standing beside them, helping them to pray, praying for them. You see what is happening; God is the thing
to which they are praying – the goal that they are trying to reach. God is also the thing inside them which is
pushing them on – the motive power. God
is also the road or bridge along which they are being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the
three-personal being is actually going on where an ordinary Christian is saying
their prayers.”
The three parts of the triune God are
active with and within us whenever we gather to worship. Theologian Thomas Torrance puts it this way,
“In our worship the Holy Spirit comes forth from God, uniting us to the
response and obedience and faith and prayer of Jesus, and returns to God,
raising us up in Jesus to participate in the worship of heaven and in the
eternal communion of the Holy Spirit.”
John Witvliet points out that “The picture here is not of God as a
passive being up in heaven, waiting for us to sing a little louder and pray a
little harder before conferring a blessing.
No, God is active in prompting our worship, in receiving it, and in perfecting
it.” God is both the object and the
actor in our worship experience.
All of the actions of our worship service say something about what we
believe the nature and person of God to be.
The first part of our worship service is not the welcome and
announcements as you may guess, or even the prelude music. Rather, it is the congregating of all of us
together in a certain place at a certain time.
Worship begins the moment we make the decision to join together as a
community for the purpose of meeting God.
Our Sunday worship service begins with
a grand processional. Sometime in the
morning all of us leave the places where we live. We come from the breakfast table and from the
garden, from the shower and from the couch.
We come from town and we come from the country, on foot or bicycle,
motorcycle or car. We come on windy
roads and straight, paved roads and dusty gravel. Every Sunday there is a grand procession of
people coming together to meet God, coming together to call out to the Very One
who created the cosmos.
We find the spirit of this gathering
in our scripture readings for this morning.
In our reading from the Psalms, the psalmist compels us to praise
God. How do we do that? By gathering in
the company of the upright, in the congregation. God is great and worthy of our praise and so
each week we leave behind the comfort of our homes and gather here in community
to praise our God.
Similarly in our gospel reading from
Matthew, Jesus teaches that he is present with us whenever the group gathers in
his name. Before we read the beloved
verse 20, promising the presence of Christ, we must wade through verses 15 on
which remind us that to come into this place we must come in a spirit of
forgiveness and reconciliation. God
meets us here, because we have already done the work of God in seeking
reconciliation and justice inside and outside the church. The presence of God comes to the gathering of
people; the presence of God comes in the spirit of reconciliation.
Of
course God is all about relationship to self and to other. The Trinitarian God is present in our
gathering together. It is the Holy
Spirit which moves each of us to get up and get out the door to church. It is the Spirit which prompts us to gather
together. Jesus Christ is the person we
gather around as we come together around the concrete things of pulpit, font,
table, and cross. These are the elements
that remind us of his person and message.
And of course, we gather together to address God, the one who makes our
worship possible.
Turn back to the beginning of your
bulletin and follow along with me.
Careful readers will note that the language here has changed. What once read, “Our order for the worship of
God” now reads “Gathering in God’s Name”.
This makes clear what we are doing during the first part of the worship
service. At 10:45 worship begins with the
prelude music. This is a time to fully
draw ourselves into this time and place.
Though we may physically be present in the sanctuary, we have a tendency
to lag behind mentally and spiritually.
We are thinking about the Sunday school discussion or where we are going
to lunch after the service and not thinking about gathering together in the
name of God. The Prelude is a time to
sit still, to listen, to meditate, and to bring the whole of yourself into this
worship space.
The
first words of worship are a greeting, from the pulpit each person receives a
welcome to this time of worship and our collective desire for the service is
expressed, that you might find Jesus Christ here. We
share our announcements as a community at this time as well. It is important to get the business of
gathering and church work out of the way so that we can more fully tune our
hearts and minds to the business and spirit of worship.
Right
now you see the passing of the peace and minute for mission after the
announcements but in a few weeks those things will be moving to more
appropriate places in our worship service.
Soon, the announcements will be followed directly by the introit. This too works to calm our minds and bring us
fully into the worship space. After all
the busy details of announcing the church activities, the introit serves not
only to draw us into worship; it calls our hearts to begin the praising of God.
Now
we come to the call to worship and I believe that this is a time when we should
stand. As believers we are called to
come to worship, to stand in the presence of God to offer prayer and praise. In doing this we make clear where the lines
of communication are. At its best the
call to worship “reinforces both the vertical dimension of our worship (that
worship is an encounter between God and the gathered congregation) and the
horizontal dimension of worship (because worship is fundamentally communal).”
(Witvliet) The call to worship is
exactly that, a call to this time of worship together.
Following the call to worship we sing
an opening song of praise to our God.
From the dawn of time, people have praised and worshiped God with music
and singing. Our hymns of praise are not
simply our way of saying “yes” to God, they are the way we say “no” to
everything that is not of God. “Every
act of praise is a strong act of negation as well as affirmation. Every time we sing praise to the triune God,
we are asserting our opposition to anything that would attempt to stand in
God’s place.” (Witvliet)
I
encourage you to pay attention to not only the words of our praise songs but
all of our worship hymns for though the music is lovely and a joy to sing, it
is the words of worship, theology, and praise that are the reason we sing the
songs we do. Each week I don’t randomly
pick songs out of a hat, rather I strive to pick songs that speak to the
message of the day. You will notice that
today’s hymn of praise: “Gather Us In” is all about the gathering of different
folks from different spaces of life to worship God together. “Gathering in God’s Name”.
Our
gathering together for worship is an expression of our beliefs as a
church. The Trinity is the pattern of
our unity and we gather together knowing that God will meet us. We begin our worship with centering music,
with words of welcome, and by calling ourselves to this moment and place,
declaring our intentions, and praising God with singing. It is God who works in and through us
throughout our worship service.
Our hymn of response this morning is
#132 “Come, Great God of All the Ages”. This
is a wonderful hymn that points out the action of the Trinity in our gathering
for worship. Before we sing I want to
invite you to follow along in your hymnal as I read the words of each
verse.
This is nice Pastor Heather. Mind if we share it with our Worship Institute friends on Facebook?
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