4 EASTER 07 C

I’m going to talk to you today about the subject of worship. There are many different ideas of what worship is. There was a little lady kneeling in a Roman Catholic church, saying the rosary. A painter was working high up near the ceiling, just out of her sight. He thought he would have some fun, so he said, “Little lady, this is Jesus.” No response. He repeated the statement a little louder. Still no response. Finally, he almost shouted, “Little lady, this is Jesus.” She looked up to where the voice was coming from and said, “Hush up a minute – I’m talking to your momma!”

When we speak of worshipping God, we as Christians recognize that Jesus is central to our worship. In our lesson from Revelation today, we see a glorious sight of the great multitude of people which no man could number, from every nation, from all tribes, peoples and tongues standing before the throne and before Jesus, the Lamb of God, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb! And all the angels stood round the throne and round the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces, before the throne and worshipped God, saying ‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!’”

The song we will be singing at the end of our service will reflect this idea of falling on our faces before the Holy God in worship. We will bow our hearts before God as we sing this song. As we sing this song we may not even realize the magnitude of what we will be singing.

Can you begin to imagine what worship in heaven is like? It isn’t like we worship here on earth where we kind of whisper our responses or casually read through our praises to God. These gathered around the throne cried with a loud voice.

Most people don’t really understand what true worship is. Dr. James Kennedy says this of normal church worship, “Most people think of church as a drama, with the minister as the chief actor, God as the prompter, and the laity as the critic. What is actually the case is that the congregation is the chief actor, the minister is the prompter and God is the critic.”

People who are new to the Episcopal Church really don’t understand how we can worship when we read our prayers and when our whole service is contained in a booklet or prayer book.

Quite often folks come from denominations like Baptist, Church of Christ or other churches where the main focus of the service is on the altar call. Everything in the service seems to be leading up to that moment of bringing people to Christ through the altar call. Worship seems not so much to be the focus as bringing people to Jesus. The sermon is the main part of the service and often ends with the altar call.

Sometimes people come to the Episcopal Church because they are looking for something a little different.

We also get a lot of people who are familiar with our type of worship because they come from a Roman Catholic, Orthodox or other type of liturgically worshipping church. Just because a person has come from that tradition does not necessarily mean that they understand worship.

So, what is worship? Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary describes it this way: “Worship is reverent devotion and allegiance pledged to God; the rituals or ceremonies by which this reverence is expressed. The English word worship comes from the Old English word worth-ship, a word which denotes the worthiness of the one receiving the special honor or devotion”

As we look at worship in the Early Church and the type of worship that the Anglican tradition seeks to model, we see that worship is directed toward God. It seeks to avoid the narcissism characteristic in so much of modern worship. Our worship does not center around me, my feelings, and my experience; rather it is centered around God, his person, and his work in Jesus Christ.

Hippolytus, one of the Early Church Fathers in the third century says this about worship as he prays, “Having in memory, therefore, his death and resurrection, we offer to thee the bread and the cup, yielding thee thanks, because thou has counted us worthy to stand before thee and to minister to thee.”

The idea that worship is a ministry to God, that he loves to be worshiped, and that he made us to worship him, dominates the worship of the ancient church.

Worship in the Anglican tradition is also Christ-centered. We celebrate Jesus as the central cosmic figure of the universe. The prayer of thanksgiving at the Eucharist or Holy Communion, for example, is modeled after the vision of the world set forth in Scriptures and summarized by Paul in Colossians 1.

For the early Christians, worship must have been an event of great joy and festivity. They were celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ and feasting in anticipation of his return. In the context of this meal they read the Scripture, related stories about Jesus, interpreted him and his work on the cross in the light of Old Testament prophecy, urged fellow Christians to live lives that were exemplary, and brought food to be distributed to the poor in the community. They also spent time in prayer for their needs, for the needs of others, and like the prayer in the synagogue, they gave thanks to God for his provision. After they had prayed, they took bread and wine, the symbols Christ had given of his broken body and his shed blood, and as Jesus had taught, they remembered him through the celebration of the Eucharist.

As you look at the Anglican model of worship you see the worship of the Early Church reflected.

We have an ordered experience of Christ as we go throughout the church year so that in the course of the year we are exposed to the whole life of Christ from his birth to his ascension. Since Christ is the center of our worship and not the preacher, a person can be blessed through their worship of God whether the preacher preaches a good sermon or not.

And yet, this church places great emphasis on the proclaiming of God’s word through the readings AND the sermon. We can’t worship as effectively as we should unless we understand more about God and Christ and who we are in relation to God.

Why do we worship from a book? As a handout I share with my newcomers’ class says, our worship from a prayer book, or in our case a booklet, contains the wisdom of the ages. Some of the prayers are thousands of years of age. Some of them were familiar to the lips of Jesus. When we pray the prayers that we do, we know we all believe them. We all believe them so therefore we can pray them. That is not always the case with extemporaneous prayers.

If I were to call on you to offer an extemporaneous prayer, you might offer in your prayer sentiments with which I would not necessarily agree. In fact, you might offer sentiments that no one else would agree with. More often than not what you might offer would be a sermon preached with our eyes shut. Our written down prayers can protect us from one another’s creativity or more probably lack thereof. It protects us from one another’s bad theology, and it protects us from another’s current passion.

The majority of the Prayer Book is Scripture; it is the Bible put into prayer. We are in many respects praying the Word.

On the other hand, we don’t just believe in written down prayers. You will notice during our service that there is an opportunity for extemporaneous prayers during the prayers of the people.

Why do we have all the rituals we use and does God really like it?

There was an inebriated man who happened into the Episcopal Church one Sunday morning. He had never before been to an Episcopal church so he was somewhat taken aback by the building itself. Soon the great procession began. In came the acolytes carrying the cross and torches, followed by a large choir wearing robes. The inebriated man looked askance at that. He’d never seen anything like that before in his life. A few seconds later, along came another cross and more torches. Then came all the Lay Eucharistic Ministers wearing their robes. Well, this was almost too much for him. Then came yet another cross and the clergy dressed in all their various an sundry gowns and vestments. The inebriated man was sure he was in the wrong place. He almost had all he could handle. Just then the Bishop entered. The Bishop was wearing his big hat, his mitre. He had on his gold cope and was carrying an incense pot. He was swinging the incense pot as he went along. The inebriated man had now had his fill. He reached out and grabbed the Bishop by his robe and said, “I like your dress, sweetie, but your purse is on fire.”

As I mentioned at the beginning of my sermon, one of the definitions of worship is worth-ship – giving God his worth. Another definition of worship as it might apply to the Anglican or Episcopal tradition, is that worship is the attempt to create an atmosphere in which we can know God’s love and make God’s love known.

In order to help us understand this definition of worship let me offer the following illustration. A certain young man had been dating a special young woman for some time. He was in love with her. He decided it was time for him to propose to her. He wanted to pop the question. He invited her to his apartment so that he might propose to her, but before she arrived he wanted to set the atmosphere. So of course he thoroughly cleaned his apartment and dressed in his best suit for the occasion. He got out his finest dinnerware and prepared the finest meal he knew how to prepare. He chose an excellent wine. In order to prove to her that he was in fact a new male, a very sensitive sort of man, he put flowers on the table, lit candles, and went about his apartment spraying aromatic spray. He put some music on. When she arrived, they had some conversation. They talked about their life together, their journey together, if you will. Then at the appointed time he popped the question. He offered her a gold ring with a diamond in it. That ring was an outward and visible sign of his love for the girl.

In much the same way, Anglican worship creates an atmosphere for the experience of God’s love.

Now if you can understand what goes into creating a romantic atmosphere for a man and woman then you can understand the role that ritual, symbolism and ceremony play in creating an atmosphere for the experience of God’s love. Here these all work together in an effort to create an atmosphere which will appeal to all five senses to one degree or another – sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

Worship in the Episcopal Church is not a spectator sport. It is an aerobic activity. The liturgy is what we all do together. Priests are not entertainers, though sometimes when I mess something up in the service it is entertaining. The choir is not here to entertain us. There is a critical distinction between worship in a liturgical church (of which the Episcopal Church is one) and a non-liturgical church. The Episcopal worship service makes lousy television. You can’t watch it. You have to participate in it and be a part of it.

It is not just a matter of all of us coming together to sing a hymn or two and have the scripture reading, some prayers, a sermon and then tacking on communion on the end. The Holy Eucharist, the Liturgy, is a great drama. It’s a pageant. It’s a play in which we are all participants. There’s direction. There’s movement. There’s purpose. These all are designed to inspire and uplift us. But we are not the audience. God is the audience.

In the Eucharist we pray that Christ might be known to us in the breaking of the bread. In that sense the Lord’s Supper is not a memorial meal. It is not a matter of getting together and remembering what a wonderful fellow Jesus was and thinking on all the fine things he did for us. The Holy Eucharist is the celebration of Christ’s resurrected presence with us here and now.

Finally, let me suggest that we come to worship to lose ourselves in adoration and praise of God. Occasionally, someone will say to me, “You know, I came to church but I didn’t get anything out of it.” I understand what they are saying. But let me suggest an alternative approach to worship. Let me suggest that we come to worship to lose ourselves. We come to empty ourselves so that God might make us full. If we find the various elements of worship distracting or ends in themselves, then we are going to miss out on true worship. If we let something distract us, take our attention away from what we are doing, then we have missed out on true worship. As someone once put it, “If I have to count the steps then I’m not dancing.” That may be true of worship as well. If we have to concentrate on the very elements of worship, then we aren’t worshiping. Worship is when we focus our attention on God.

I would never suggest to you that God needs our rituals, ceremonies, and symbols. What I will suggest to you is this: If we are to express to God and to one another our inner feelings, our inner thoughts, then we need ritual, ceremony, and symbol. God doesn’t need them. But we do.