Sermoms

October 2, 2005

"Why We Worship"

A Sermon by Ari Mattson, Vicar

Reformation Lutheran Church

Soli Deo Gloria

I heard of a church in California once that was offering a money back guarantee. I kid you not. They had a money back guarantee and they said, "If you come and worship at our church and God doesn't answer your prayers within three months, we will refund all of your offerings to you." Now that attitude is just backwards. We don't worship so that God will do stuff for us. We don't give offerings in order to buy off God. God's not a politician or a mafia boss. We offer these things as thanksgiving for what God has done for us.

I tell you this story because today is two things. First of all, today we’re celebrating First Fruits Sunday, when we offer the first part of our possessions to God. And today we are also looking at worship as one of our purposes in the 40 days campaign. And this works out well because they’re both closely related. First, both are done out of gratitude, out of thanks to God. And offering is really one form of worship. But even more than that, beyond just giving thanks, Rick Warren says we are created to worship God, it is one of our life’s purposes

Rick Warren says that it should be a lifestyle, that it should be a part of everything that we do. The memory verse for this week is Mark 12:30 and it says "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." Now if you can really love God with everything you are, then it’s pretty easy to have worship be a constant part of our lives, but that’s a pretty tall order. I heard a youth director speaking on this verse before and he said if you think of yourself as a pie graph, when we try to love God with everything we have, we run into a problem. Before long, we start saying, well I really love you God, but I also love my wife and I need 5 percent for her. And I really love my kids and they need another 5 percent. And I need 2 percent for my dog, and I know that it’s silly, but I love football and I need 1 percent for football. Now before long, we’ve given a lot of ourselves to other people. We may still be giving 75 percent to God, but it’s not all is it?

Well, this guy said, the trick is that God isn’t a part of the pie. When God asks us to love him with all our heart and soul, God wants to be at the center of who we are. So God wants to be in the middle of the pie. And he drew another circle inside the big circle and said, “If God is at the heart of who we are and what we do, then when we divide up the pie, God is a part of every piece. That way, God is part of everything we do.” So the key to worship, to giving of ourselves, is to make God a part of everything we do, put God at the heart of who we are.

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Now there’s just one problem with that. How do we worship when our heart is broken? How do we worship when things go wrong? We generally think of worship as being something that we do as thanksgiving for what is going well, but if worship is a lifestyle, then it's a part of the good times and the bad times.

When I think about this, there are two stories that really stick in my mind. I heard a story once about the experience of a Lutheran church during the Soviet crackdown in Budapest in 1956. As you may recall, Budapest had an uprising against Communist control and as a response, Russian tanks rolled into the city and began arresting and shooting people that opposed them. One Sunday the tanks rolled in front of this Lutheran church that was worshipping in spite of the communists. The soldiers rushed in and ordered the entire congregation out onto the church steps. As the people hurried out to the front of the church, the army commander grabbed a small girl from the crowd and pulled her to the front where everyone could see her. And pointing his pistol at her head, he said, "You are all breaking the law. You cannot be in church. If you do not disperse immediately, I will kill this girl and arrest you all."

Nobody moved for several moments, not quite sure what to do, but then one voice broke through the silence and began singing. "A mighty fortress is our God, a sword and shield victorious…" Still nobody moved, but slowly other voices joined in and sang with the first. "He breaks the cruel oppressor's rod, and wins salvation glorious…" Before long the entire congregation was defiantly singing to God in the face of the soldiers. "You ask who this may be? The Lord of hosts is he. Christ Jesus mighty Lord. God's only Son adored. He holds the field victorious." By the end of the song, it was the soldiers who were stunned, and without a word, the commander lowered his pistol and the army climbed into their vehicles and drove away. Left behind were the astonished Christians and standing before them was the young girl who had been the first voice to sing the hymn.

The second story that was sticking in my mind was the images I saw on the news a week after Katrina swept through the Gulf Coast. The report I was watching was in Biloxi, Mississippi and they were saying that every church in Biloxi had been severely damaged or destroyed. Every one of them. But instead of canceling services, many of the churches put out hand painted signs that said things like "Worship 10AM Sunday. Bring your own chair." And the report went on to show images of people sitting on lawns or sometimes on the concrete slab that used to be their church gathered around a makeshift cross and a kitchen table singing hymns and sharing communion even though they were surrounded by destroyed buildings and debris, even though some of those houses were their own.

And when I think about these images, I really start to wonder what worship is really all about. What is it that drives us to worship in the face of death, destruction, and loss? To worship God when things are going right is one thing, but worshipping God with a gun to your head or when you've lost everything is another. And this thought is troubling because there just doesn’t seem to be a reason for why this would be. I mean, we know we should worship God in these situations, but why do we? What motivates us to sing praises in the face of utter heartbreak?

To answer that question, let’s take a look at one of the texts from this morning. Look with me now at the Philippians text. It's on page 175 of your pew Bibles. Chapter 3 beginning in the middle of verse four. Paul says, “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.” What Paul is saying here is that before meeting Jesus, he was the man. He did all the right things, knew all the right people... Paul was set for life. He was the guy that everyone else wanted to be someday.

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But now read this. Verse seven: “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things...” Paul is saying he lost everything in following Christ -- his house, his job, his possessions, probably even disowned by his family -- but now get this. “And I regard them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him.” I regard them as rubbish. Did you hear that? He thinks of everything he has lost as rubbish in comparison to Jesus. Why is that?

Let's look at verse 12. “ Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. (Get that?) Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” And there it is. “I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” How is Paul able to worship God when he has lost so much? Because of the promise of God in Christ Jesus.

I want you now to open up your hymnals to hymn number 133. Here's that great hymn that the brave young girl found the will to sing, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” And I want us to look at the fourth verse. “God's word forever shall abide, not thank to foes, who fear it.” People don't like God's promises, but they cannot conquer them. “For God himself fights by our side, with weapons of the spirit.” In the midst of our struggles and suffering, God is right there with us, through it all. Now here it is. Listen to this. “Were they to take our house, goods, honor, child or spouse, though life be wrenched away, they cannot win the day.” They can take everything away from us, everything, but they can't win. Why? “The kingdom's ours forever.”

We worship because of a promise. It's the promise that we are bathed with in Holy Baptism, when the Holy Spirit comes down, marks us with a cross and says, "You're mine, and I will never leave you." It's the promise that is renewed each week when we come to this table and we hear the words, "The body of Christ, broken for YOU; the blood of Christ, shed for YOU." And we are reminded that because that body was broken, because that blood was poured, we are able to live without fear or worry. Because of the suffering that was endured on that cross behind me, we know that there will be an end to our suffering. It may not come today, it may not come tomorrow, it may not even come in our lifetime, but there will be an end to our suffering because we have been promised a spot in the Kingdom of Heaven. And because we know there will be an end to suffering, that frees us to worship in the midst of our own troubles because we know that they are only temporary. Like Paul, because we have seen the prize at the end of the race, we can regard everything else as rubbish.

Now that's a promise. You see? We love the Lord with all our hearts and souls and minds and strength because God first did it for us. We put God at the heart of who we are because we were at the heart of what happened on the cross, and the cross reminds us that yes, there will be suffering, there will be troubles, because even Jesus couldn’t escape them, but we cannot lose because God has already won. In the words of Luther's hymn, "God's word forever shall abide. The Kingdom's ours forever." Hallelujah. Let's worship the Lord. Amen.

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