Pastor Pat's Cafe

Welcome to my corner of the website! I invite you to think of it as kind of a cafe, a place where you can bring your coffee or tea, get comfortable, and have a conversation with me. You can listen to a sermon, read other posts and share a prayer request or other comments with me. So thanks for stopping by. And if you can, join us for worship sometime. At BRPC we love to follow the Lord and welcome you to help us experience more fully God's grace and call. Peace and grace, Pastor Pat

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

3. Being Presbyterian -- Presbyterians and the Bible

When’s the last time that you played a game of hide and seek? Have you ever played with a child and they had difficulty finding you? When they can’t find you on their own -- what do you do? You cough. You whistle. If you’re standing behind the drapes, you move the fabric, stick out your foot or a hand. You do something to give them clues. And through these clues, they find you.

God operates in a similar way, if you will. On our own, we won’t find God. But God acts to make God’s-self known to us. As in all things, God takes the initiative. God wants to be found.

As Christians, we understand that God is revealed three ways. First, as Larry read in the opening of the gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Jesus Christ is the ultimate form of God’s revelation.

God’s second way of revealing God’s-self to us is through Scripture. As we heard in Second Timothy, “All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, ¹⁷so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.” The Holy Scriptures show us God as God acts in the lives of the people of Israel and then in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The third way that God reveals God’s self to us is through the proclamation of the church.

Because the incarnation of Jesus Christ is made known to us in the pages of scripture, and the proclamation of the church is rooted in scripture, scripture plays a vital role in God’s self-disclosure to us.

If you have a Bible with you today, I want to invite you to open it up. Feel the pages. You are dipping into the Holy Scriptures. The prayers, the stories, the songs, the commands, the laments. Scriptures that God has given us dating back more than 2,500 years.

The Bible Society of the United Kingdom estimates that between 1816 and 2007 approximately 7.5 billion Bibles were printed in 450 languages. But along with this popularity of the Bible are three challenges. First, for many, much of the Bible may be unfamiliar to us. In a national survey in 1997 12% of those surveyed said that they believed Joan of Ark was Noah’s wife. Then you may have heard a few weeks ago about the recent Pew Center Religion Survey in which they found that many people weren’t familiar with some of the key stories of the Bibles. Agnostics and atheists scored higher than Presbyterians and other Christians in terms of their knowledge.

Calvin calls us to dedicate ourselves to scripture. “It is impossible,” Calvin writes, “for anyone to gain an atom of sound doctrine without being a disciple of scripture. We take the first step towards true knowledge when we reverently take hold of the testimony God has graciously given about himself.”

A second challenge or question is what authority, as Presbyterians, do we give to scripture? How much weight do we give it? You’re reminded of the Presbyterian view of scripture every time we ordain a deacon, elder or minister of Word and sacrament. They are asked:

“Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word to you?”

So to turn that question into a statement:

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word to you.”

Notice two things about our view of authority of Scripture – it is dependent upon the Holy Spirit and it centers on Christ. This helps us with another question that you may be asked from time to time: Do we, as Presbyterians, believe in the Bible? In a word, No.

As Stephen Plunkett, a Presbyterian pastor in Texas remarked, “We don’t worship the words that are printed on the page; we worship the God who is revealed by the power of the Holy Spirit through the words on the page.”

Theologian Shirley Guthrie notes that “We would completely miss the point of what the disciples and Paul want to tell us, and do them no honor, if we believe in them. They ask us to place our hope and confidence not in them but in the God to whose speaking and acting they point, the God made known above all in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

This brings us to perhaps the most controversial question regarding the authority of scripture – are the scriptures the inerrant Word of God? Are we meant to follow each word literally? And is the Bible solely the product of God, or did humans have a hand in it?

There is a diversity of viewpoints on this in the Presbyterian Church. From the 1700s up to 1920s, the Presbyterian Church generally accepted that the Bible was the inerrant word of God. One could understand the Bible by reading it literally. This view was the dominant one until the 1920s.

Then in the 1930s to the 1960s, under the influence of Karl Barth and Emile Brunner, a new era of biblical interpretation arrived in which the Bible was seen as the witness to Christ as the Word of God. Jack Rogers describes it this way: “Because the Bible, like John the Baptist, points away from itself to Christ, the issue of possible mistakes in the Bible is irrelevant. By actions of the Holy Spirit, through preaching, the Bible becomes the word of God to persons of faith.”

In the 70s and 80s we entered a third era of Biblical interpretation which stressed the importance of the ancient context of the texts and the contemporary context of the persons reading the text. So matters of injustice and equality affected interpretation of scripture.

Presbyterians have continued to interpret the Bible from these different perspectives. And from my perspective, this diversity in interpretation can be a strength of the church.

For myself, I don’t follow a purely literal reading of scripture. I believe we need to interpret the text. Otherwise, as sinners, we would all need to follow through with Jesus’ directions in Matt. 5:29-30 literally “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away . . . and if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away . .”

Rather, I believe we’re called to interpret scripture as Jesus did for those he met on the road to Emmaus, and whenever he re-interpreted texts from the Hebrew Bible when he said “You have heard it said . . . but I say . . .”

But interpreting is a challenge. To guide the church, in 1982, selected the following seven guides drawn from the concensus of our Confessions. In using these guidelines require that all 7 be held together so that they provide a balanced approach to interpretation. As I read them, you’ll hear each of the three interpretation schools in these guidelines – the more literal approach, the focus on Christ, and the focus on the context of the scripture and the reader.

“1. Recognize that Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, is the center of Scripture.

2. Let the focus be on the plain text of scripture, on the grammatical and historical context, rather than on allegory or subjective fantasy.

3. Depend upon the guidance of the Holy Spirit in interpreting and applying God’s message.

4. Be guided by the doctrinal consensus of the church, which is the rule of the faith.

5. Let all interpretations be in accord with the rule of love, the twofold commandment to love God and to love our neighbor.

6. Remember that interpretation of the Bible requires earnest study in order to establish the best text and to interpret the influence of the historical and cultural context in which the divine message has come.

7. Seek to interpret a particular passage of the Bible in light of the whole Bible.”

If we engage scripture, it will change our life. In our reading from 2^nd Kings, King Josiah is in the temple, and in a remarkable story, Holy Scriptures that had been lost are found in the temple. And it is from this scroll that he launches reforms that have a great impact on society. “The king stood by the pillar and made a covenant before the Lord, to follow the Lord, keeping his commandments, his decrees, and his statutes, with all his heart and all his soul, to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book. All the people joined in the covenant.

How place does scripture have in your life today?

Last night I was putting my daughter to bed. We didn’t play hide and seek. But as she was getting ready, I realized that she was singing a song under her breath. It’s a familiar song – maybe you’ll join me.

“Jesus loves me yes I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little to ones to him belong. They are weak but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.” 4. Being Presbyterian --

I Have a Confession

I took our dog Biscuit to the Bark Park yesterday and it reminded me of the day I saw the whole thing. It was a beautiful day, just like yesterday, and I was at a bark park in Topeka with our dog Biscuit. I was talking with this guy Dwayne while Biscuit and Dwayne’s dog were playing. Another guy had come into the bark park with his pitbull. After a few minutes, the pit took off after Dwayne’s dog, clamped its jaws down on the dogs ear, and wouldn’t let go. The pitbull’s owner ran over, apologizing effusively and yelling at his dog. It took him about 10 minutes to release the dog.

I saw Dwayne a week later back at the bark park and in a weird twist, he told me how the owner of the pitbull had filed a civil complaint against him, alleging that Dwayne’s dog had attacked his pitbull. I couldn’t believe it. I was the only other person there so I told Dwayne that I’d be happy to attend his hearing. Two months later, I went to court. Without my testimony, it would be just be one dog owner’s word against another.

Have you ever been in the situation where you needed to stand up and say what you believed? Maybe you’ve had your own courtroom experience. Maybe you faced a situation at work and needed to speak up about something. Perhaps you’ve been present when someone was being picked on unfairly. So you may remember times when you stepped forward and spoke out. Or you may think of times when something needed to be said, but you remained silent. I can think of times like that in my life.

I think there is something inherent in Christianity about speaking up for what you believe. We are called by God to testify, to witness to our belief in Christ and our commitment to God. We can do that through our actions, by where and with whom we stand. But at some point, we need to do that through spoken profession. Jesus asks Peter: “But who do you say that I am?”

What’s true for us as individuals is equally, if not more true, for us collecetively. But who do we say Jesus is?

As a Presbyterian, I have a confession. Actually, I – or we -- have nine Confessions. These are statements included in our Book of Confessions of what the church has affirmed at different times and places. Presbyterians didn’t write all of those statements, but we affirm them and believe they have something to say for us and the church universal.

Two of the confessions, the Nicene Creed and the Apostle’s Creed, come from the ancient church. Four are from the 15^th and 16^th centuries – the Scots Confession (Scotland), the Heidelberg Catechism (portion of Germany), the Second Helvetic Confession (present day Switzerland) and the Westminster Confession (England).

Three are from the 20^th Century – the Barmen Declaration (Germany), the Confession of 1967 and the Brief Statement of Faith from 1983 (both U.S.). That gives us nine Confessions that we recognize. The Westminster Confession is also presented in two catechisms – or question and answer forms. One is short and one is long. They are creatively called “The Shorter Catechism” and “The Longer Catechism.” When we add them, our total confessional statements rises to 11.

Confessions don’t pop out of thin air. Churches don’t write them just because they feel like it. Just like I didn’t go the courthouse to testify for Dwayne because I didn’t have anything better to do. Instead, churches, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, write confessions at times of danger to the church, at times of confusion, or at times of opportunity. In making these confessions, the church typically seeks to declare 1. Who they are. 2. What they believe. And 3. What they resolve to do.

The very first confession in our Book of Confessions, the Nicene Creed, is the only confession that is accepted by all three branches of Christendom – Protestant, Catholic and Easternn Orthodox. It was written in the 4^th century because there was confusion in the church about the nature of Christ and the role of the Holy Spirit. Was Jesus only human, only divine or both? The Creed affirms that Christ is fully human and fully divine and also affirms the Holy Spirit as part of the triune God. We will read a portion of this confession as our affirmation of faith today.

The Heidelberg Confession was written in 1562. It was spurred in part by the disagreement between Lutherans and Reformed Christians about what REALLY is going on in the Lord’s Supper. We’ll talk about that in two weeks. Like the short and long Catechisms from the Westminster Confession, the Heidelberg Confession is in the teaching format of questions and answers.

I could have used this two weeks ago when we talked about how we are saved by God’s grace alone and not works. Question 86 asks: Since we are redeemed from our sin … by grace through Christ without any merit of our own, why must we do good works?

According to the Catechism, we do good works QUOTE so that with our whole life we may (1) show ourselves grateful to God for his goodness, (2) that he may be glorified through us; (3) that we ourselves may be assured of our faith by its fruits, and (4) by our reverent behavior we may win our neighbors to Christ.

What a wonderful expression of our faith. For me, this is an example of how our confessions can help us explore further the meaning of scripture and how to live the Christian life.

The Barmen Declaration was written in Germany in 1934 as Hitler and the Nazis swept into power and co-opted the church. The Declaration in part says: “In view of the errors of the “German Christians” of the present Reich Church government which are devastating the church . . . we confess the following evangelical truths . . . Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.”

In the midst of that darkening crisis, the German Evangelical church professed that we owe our allegiance to Christ, not Hitler. The church took a stand.

In the 1960s the United States faced a great deal of upheaval around issues of racism, sexuality, poverty and war. Beginning in 1958, the United Presbyterian Church in the United States, began seven years of work on a confession whose overarching theme was reconciliation. The confession was anchored on the passage from 2 Corinthians 5:19 – “In Christ God was reconciling the world to God’s self.”

Our last confessional statement is the Brief Statement of Faith which was written on the occasion of the reunion of the Northern and Southern Presbyterian churches which had split at the beginning of the Civil War. While this short confession touches on a number of our reformed beliefs, it’s the first to affirm the equal role of women in ministry.

Our Confessional history is rich and central to our faith. But while most pastors have studied all of these confessions, I would guess that most members in the church have not. Some folks have told me that they struggle with these confessions because they speak out of bygone eras, in out-moded language, express at times pretty severe judgments, and may contradict each other.

And yet, as I mentioned the other week, all our deacons and elders are asked: “Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church as authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do, and will you be instructed and led by those confessions as you lead the people of God?” (G-14.0405)

How can we answer that question with integrity? And even if we’re not being ordained as a deacon or elder, how do we make sense of these confessions?

A few thoughts.

First, the session and I have the responsibility for the spiritual nurture of the congregation. We will do more to educate newly nominated officers, sitting officers, and the entire congregation on what our confessions say. So if you’re considering serving as an elder or deacon – and I hope you will – don’t start sweating. Know that you will receive support in learning a bit about the confessions. And I expect that it will be a blessing for your faith.

Second, while there are differences among the confessions, there is also a core of agreement – such as to the nature of Christ, the Trinity, the sovereignty of God, the central role of scripture, our understanding of the sacraments and preaching and more.

Where there are differences, we are to give more weight to the more contemporary confessions – and we can always look to the Bible for guidance. Live with tension.

Do we have to follow the Confessions? Yes and no. Yes, because we believe that the confessions, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, are the witness of the church to God – which need need to hear. Even though the Confessions are from another time and place, they still have something to say to us.

But we’re not locked into the confessions. That’s because the Confessions, while important witnesses to our faith, are fallible and secondary to scripture. As the Westminster confession says outright: “All synods or councils since the apostles’ times . . . may err, and many have erred; therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith or practice, but to be used as a help in both.”

And further, we’re not locked into any one Confession because our God is a living God who continues to speak through the church. So it’s said that our Book of Confessions doesn’t have a back cover – we are open to God’s fresh word for today.

An example of this openness to a new word is the present proposal before our denomination to add the Belhar Confession to our Book of Confessions. The Belhar Confession was written by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church or the QUOTE UNQUOTE “colored church” in South Africa during the very height of apartheid in the 1980s. If adopted, this will be the first confession in our book of Confessions originating from a non-western country, and the first from the southern hemisphere.

In the accompanying letter with the original Confession, the colored church said: “We are aware that such an act of confession is not lightly undertaken, but only if it is considered that the heart of the gospel is so threatened as to be at stake. In our judgment, the present church and political situation in our country and particularly within the Dutch Reformed Church family calls for such a decision. Accordingly, we make this confession not as a contribution to a theological debate nor as a new summary of our beliefs, but as a cry from the heart.”

I close this sermon with an excerpt from the Belhar Confession.

We believe that this unity of the people of God must be manifested and be active in a variety of ways: in that we love one another; that we experience, practice and pursue community with one another; that we are obligated to give ourselves willingly and joyfully to be of benefit and blessing to one another; that we share one faith, have one calling, are of one soul and one mind; have one God and Father, are filled with one Spirit, are baptized with one baptism, eat of one bread and drink of one cup, confess one name, are obedient to one Lord, work for one cause, and share one hope; together come to know the height and the breadth and the depth of the love of Christ; together are built up to the stature of Christ, to the new humanity; together know and bear one another's burdens, thereby fulfilling the law of Christ that we need one another and upbuild one another, admonishing and comforting one another; that we suffer with one another for the sake of righteousness; pray together; together serve God in this world; and together fight against all which may threaten or hinder this unity.” Amen

4. Being Presbyterian -- I Have a Confession

What’s true for us as individuals is equally, if not more true, for us collecetively. But who do we say Jesus is?

What a wonderful expression of our faith. For me, this is an example of how our confessions can help us explore further the meaning of scripture and how to live the Christian life.

In the midst of that darkening crisis, the German Evangelical church professed that we owe our allegiance to Christ, not Hitler. The church took a stand.

How can we answer that question with integrity? And even if we’re not being ordained as a deacon or elder, how do we make sense of these confessions?

A few thoughts.

Where there are differences, we are to give more weight to the more contemporary confessions – and we can always look to the Bible for guidance. Live with tension.

I close this sermon with an excerpt from the Belhar Confession.

5. Being Presbyterian -- Humanity, Sin and Freedom

It was an afternoon when I watched sin in action – if from afar. I was sitting in the driver’s seat of our car, waiting in the parking lot outside of a supermarket. Janet had gone inside to do some shopping and I was waiting in the car, listening to the radio. And then I saw across the parking lot how one car was driving around the corner of the pharmacy and I could see another car coming in the opposite direction. They came to a stop facing each other, bumper to bumper. I just watched. After a minute in which neither car moved, I could feel the tension mounting. Two minutes, three minutes. Neither car would move. I couldn’t see the faces of the drivers. I don’t know what hand gestures were being made, if one was shouting at the other, or what. They squared off for a full five minutes. Finally, one car violently whipped around the other car and sped away. I guess the other car “won.”

What was it that created this standoff? Why the hostility? Why the complete unwillingness to yield to another? Whatever it was, I have to think that sin was in the middle of it.

What’s your view of sin, I wonder?

I think there’s a tendency in the church today to want to avoid the topic of sin. Life is tough. We come to church to get recharged, picked up. Do we really need to talk about sin? Do we need to say that prayer of confession? Some churches have dropped the prayer of confession from their liturgy so that their service is more upbeat.

So what do presbyterians think about sin? I think people believe that Presbyterians take a pretty severe view of sin. John Calvin spoke of people being in the grip of sin and in Geneva, he had a court which sought to enforce norms of behavior in society. So we have a history of taking sin seriously.

As Presbyterians, we lift up three truths about the human condition and sin. And it’s essential that we hold these three truths together.

Truth #1 is that we are all made in the image of God. As Alex read in the Scripture this morning, when God created the world and humanity, God said that it was good. And on the sixth day, when God created humanity, God said that the creation was ‘very good.’ So that’s our starting point. John Calvin referred to this good creation as our “original righteousness.”

Theologian Shirley Guthrie put it this way: “We must talk with dead seriousness about ourselves as sinners, but we must not suggest that our sinfulness is the basic truth about what we are . . . We are human beings created in God’s image. Sin distorts, twists, corrupts . . . but it does not change us into something other than what God created us to be. Sin is not stronger than God . . . even sinful people are still recognized as people in the image of God.”

Truth #2 is that we are all sinners. That is what the story of Adam and Eve conveys. “Adam” in Hebrew is the word simply for man. So the sin of Adam and Eve is the sin of every person. As Paul says in Romans 3:23 – “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

Theologians have long distinguished between the state of sin and individual sinful acts. As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it, “Sin, with a capital S if you will, is the state of our distance from God while sins, with a little s, are the willful human choices we make that maintain that distance.”

This distance between people was evident when a little girl was talking to her teacher about whales. The teacher said it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because even though it was a very large mammal its throat was very small. The little girl stated that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Irritated, the teacher reiterated that a whale could not swallow a human; it was physically impossible.

The little girl said, 'When I get to heaven I will ask Jonah'. The teacher asked, 'What if Jonah went to hell?' The little girl replied, 'Then you ask him!’

Sinfulness separates us.

Perhaps the largest manifestation of sin is the sin of idolatry – putting something ahead of God. What do we place before God in our own lives? Money, possessions, our country, physical obsessions. What’s on your list?

Sin can be manifested as a lack of trust. Remember the people of Israel who got nervous when Moses went up Mt. Sinai. When Moses was gone too long, they lost their trust and created the golden calf.

Remembering those Israelites helps us recall that sin isn’t just an individual thing – there’s a corporate dimension to sin. The theologian Augustine reflected on the fact that on his own, he wouldn’t steal apples from a neighbor’s yard, but he stole them readily when he had the company of friends. A 20^th century theologian Reinhold Neibuhr captured this dynamic for us in our contemporary world when he wrote the book, Moral Man, Immoral Society.

So sin is real in our world – that’s obvious isn’t it from just looking around. As Presbyterians we recognize the influence of sin in our lives and in our world.

But rather than this being a depressing thing, this understanding of sin can actually be a point of hope. But please don’t misunderstand me. Sin is awful. It’s the devastation of a population in Darfur. It’s millions of people living in shanty towns around the world. It’s the hidden epidemic of domestic violence in this country. It causes pain, hurt, rejection, despair, hopelessness.

But coming to terms with sin can be a point of hope because doing so leads us not to rest confident in our own abilities but to instead turn to God. To escape sin, we turn to God. And this leads us to truth #3.

We are forgiven by God through Jesus Christ. This, friends, is the heart of the Biblical witness. It’s the Good News. As John the Baptist exclaimed like a paper boy on the corner: “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” God acts to close that distance between God and us and among us. God acts to heal our brokenness. Or as Paul writes in Romans 5:8, “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.”

In the gospel of John, Jesus speaks of a woman who had been charged with adultery. She is on the verge of being stoned to death when Jesus confronts the crowd by saying what? “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”

After all the stones drop to the ground, do you remember the two things Jesus says to the woman? First, he asks where her accusers are. “Has no one condemned you?” When the woman says no, Jesus says, “Neither do I condemn you.” There is the grace. Just as Jesus says earlier in the gospel of John: “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

But Jesus says one more thing to the woman. Jesus instructs the woman: Do not sin again. As recipients of grace, we are called to repent, to turn around.

Now if we have a shallow view of sin, then this forgiveness in Christ isn’t such a big deal. If we’re unconvinced that we’re sinners, then I’m not sure what we’re celebrating at Easter. But if we recognize the full extent of our sinfulness, if we see the distance between ourselves and God, and if we recognize the distance that is between one another, then we can see that in God’s forgiving grace we receive new life that draws us closer to God and to one another.

Talking about sin often leads us to talk about freedom. Generally speaking, as Presbyterians, we believe in free will. What I do from moment to moment is my choice. But there is a paradox about our freedom that might seem strange:

We are less free than we think we are because of sin. Sin, under the guise of greed, envy, or any other vice, channels, shapes, molds our choices. Paul expressed this enslavement when he said in Romans 7:15 “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” We’re not as free as we think.

Here’s the other side of that paradox. It is only when we respond to God’s grace with full obedience that we experience complete freedom – freedom to love God and freedom to love one another.

God willingly grants us this new life through Jesus Christ. It’s new life that we celebrate with the sprinkling of water at baptism, and it’s new life we celebrate in the eating of bread and wine.

6. Being Presbyterian -- The Lifeblood of Worship

What is the most boring experience you’ve ever had in your life? Perhaps it’s a bit oxymoronic to ask you to try to REMEMBER your most boring experience. I remember as a young kid, may around the age of 8, that we would visit my grandparents on my mom’s side. Often during a visit, we’d go downstairs into the basement where my grandfather would give a slide show of my grandparent’s trips around the old country of Hungary. Cartridge after cartridge of slides. At the age of 8, it was pulverizingly boring.

I’m not going to beat around the bush. What I really want to know is whether you have EVER fallen asleep in worship. Of course we’re not talking about any time in the last 13 months. But BEFORE that, has there ever been a time, during an anthem, perhaps during an extended prayer, during the offertory, or yes, during the sermon, when your eye lids got the best of you and you suddenly nodded off?

While that may have happened to you – and I confess it HAS happened to me – I STILL will make the claim this morning that the hour or so that we spend in worship each week is the most extraordinary, life-giving hour of our week. It is the hour when together we meet our creator God and through the gift of the Holy Spirit Christ is present among us. As Psalm 95 exclaims,

¹O come, let us sing to the Lord; let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!

²Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving; let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!

⁶O come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!

As we draw near the end of our series on what it means to be a Presbyterian, I want to spend one sermon exploring what our worship means to us and why we worship the way we do.

A first surprise to get out of the way is the idea that we worship on the sabbath. We were in Genesis chapter one last week and you’ll remember that God created on days one thru six and then RESTED on the seventh days. So the people of Israel were commanded to “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” Our Jewish friends observe the sabbath beginning at sundown on Friday and then carry it into Saturday, the LAST day of the week.

Christians, on the other hand, moved the sabbath and our principal day of worship to Sunday which is, of course, the FIRST day of the week. We do this because we are worshipping God on the day of resurrection – the day that Christ was raised.

In our reading from Acts, we hear “On the first day of the week, when we met to break bread, Paul was holding a discussion with them”. This is the first mention in scripture of the Christian practice to meet for a meal and worship on the first day of the week.

Our Presbyterian form of worship, like much else in our denomination, grew out of the Protestant Reformation. If you walked into a cathedral 500 years ago before the Reformation began, as a worshipper, you would encounter a screen in the front of the church which separated the priest from the people. The priest would be facing the cross and would be saying the mass in Latin, a language most people didn’t understand. And while the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, was celebrated at each service, most of the people actually only received the bread once a year. Only the priests ever took the wine.

In Geneva, John Calvin took steps to reform worship so that it centered on the Word in scripture and the Word proclaimed in sermons. The reformers had translated the Bible into local languages so that for the first time the common people could read the Word of God. And when the pastors read from the Bible or preached the word, they did so in German or French or Dutch or English or whatever local language was appropriate. Benches were placed in churches for the first time so that people could sit and listen to the Word. It was revolutionary.

A key idea of the Reformation which we haven’t spoken of is that of the priesthood of all believers – which is the idea that all of us are ministers in God’s service. So the Reformation saw for the first time the involvement of the lay people in worship. The screen separated the chancel from the rest of the church was removed. And Elders and Deacons participated in worship – just as we do now. So imagine. As a medieval worshipper, you NEVER received the wine during commuion. Only the priest did. But in the new Protestant churches, the congregation received both bread AND wine during communion four times a year. And the elements were often distributed by elders, lay people.

Calvin developed an order of worship that we largely follow today. Calvin’s order has four parts: gathering, proclamation of the Word, the Lord’s Supper, and the sending. In our bulletin, if you look at the headings that are centered on the page and have the squigglies on either side, we have five parts of worship: “The Community Gathers” “The Community Worships” – Calvin would fold these first two together.

Then we have “The Word is Proclaimed,” “The People Respond” (which is where we have the Lord’s Supper like Calvin) and then “The Community Departs to Serve.”

I’m not going to talk about every single element of our worship service, but I do want to point out a few key things about what we do and why. Our first heading in our bulletin is actually probably mislabeled. We say: “The Community Gathers.” But it would be more appropriate to say “The Community IS Gathered.” That’s because we don’t believe we come together of our own accord. God calls us to worship. That is the reason why in the Call to Worship I prefer to use actual scripture, and typically a Psalm, rather than just my words – to emphasize that it is God, not a pastor or any other member of the church who calls us together.

We spoke about sin last Sunday and noted how the prayer of confession is an important part of our service. But you will always hear in our CALL to confession, as Carol offered it, not just the call that we confess our sin, but the acknowledgement that we do so before a merciful God who by grace alone forgives our sins. So while sin is serious, it isn’t the last word.

The next main block of worship is the Proclamation of the Word. We first read from the Bible because it is the fullest and most reliable form of God’s self-revelation. In Presbyterian tradition it is appropriate every Sunday to read from a Psalm, a Hebrew Bible or Old Testament reading, a gospel and an epistle. We usually have three out of four, when you include the Call to Worship.

Our habit is then to follow the scripture reading with an anthem. We believe that music itself can be a form of proclamation. One line we walk as Presbyterians is that while we enjoy enormously music when it glorifies God, we seek to avoid cases where we are praising the musician instead of praising God. That’s the reason why in many churches, including ours, the choir is seated in the rear of the church. And it’s also why in part our style of worship is often a bit more reserved and gives us the reputation as being the “frozen chosen.” But I believe that there are many ways to express our devotion to God. And I welcome applause or other outward expressions in church. Can I get an Alleluia from the people?

Now my wife knows that I’m going to say this. There’s a custom in the black church in which people, when they feel particularly convicted by what the pastor is saying or by an anthem or other piece of music, they may suddenly STAND, stand to show their solidarity with that Word and praise of God. Now my wife hasn’t done that yet which, frankly concerns me. But I KNOW she has wanted to on a few occasions, but she wasn’t sure that you were ready for that! So now if you see Janet suddenly stand, you know what’s going on!

Which brings us to the sermon. We believe that when the pastor diligently studies the scripture and prays, the Word proclaimed IS the Word of God. As a pastor, that’s a very daunting idea. Fred Craddock, who is a tremendous preacher, recounts one of the times he gave a sermon that he thought was downright bad. But at the door, a parishioner said to him that it was the best sermon they had heard and that it really touched them. To which Craddock, who says he just couldn’t help himself, blurted out “You must be joking!” But that just points out that God is able to use the words brought by God’s very fallible servants and use them for God’s purposes. So whether it be the gospel of Acts or some other flaw, God is able to use us all.

After the proclamation of the word, Calvin’s next section was the Lord’s Supper. We term this next section, “The Community Responds” because this section could include the Lord’s Supper, a baptism, a hymn, our offering, and prayers of the people.

When it comes to the sacraments, the Catholic Church in Reformation times and today observe 7 sacraments – the Lord’s Supper, Baptism, penance, marriage, anointing of the sick, confirmation and ordination. Calvin opted to retain the only two that were commanded by Jesus – the Lord’s Supper and baptism.

As Presbyterians, we understand the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as outward and visible signs of an inward and invisible grace. We believe that people can be baptized at any time in life. We do practice the baptism of infants because it reflects the theological view that God is the initiator in all things. Before an infant can do anything, like Brendan Marti last week, God claims Brendan and adopts him into the family of faith. The child’s active choosing of their faith is critical, and we do that in our tradition through confirmation. But if there are any older youth or adults here who have never been baptized, that is a JOY and I’d love to talk with you about that.

The Reformation brought in a dramatically different understanding of the Lord’s Supper. In the Catholic tradition, this is an altar. What do you do on an altar? You make sacrifices. And in a Catholic church, you will always see Christ hanging on the cross. Catholics believe that during the mass, the priest re-enacts the sacrifice of Christ and the bread and wine are LITERALLY transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Christ is believed to be crucified anew during each mass.

For Presbyterians, like other protestants, we don’t have an altar, but instead a Communion Table and an empty cross. We believe that Christ made a one-time sacrifice for all time on the cross which need not be repeated. What we celebrate at communion is God’s act of resurrection – hence the empty cross.

Now within the Reformed family, there’s a range of interpretation of the Lord’s Supper. Our Lutheran friends follow the Catholic understanding that the bread and wine are literally transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Some other Christian bodies believe that Christ is present only symbolically in the supper. Presbyterians are in the middle. We do not believe the bread and wine become literally the body and blood of Christ, but we also don’t believe that it’s all just symbolic. We believe that in the course of communion, by the work of the Holy Spirit, and this is a mystery, Christ is truly present among us and nourishes and sustains us through the sacrament.

The offering is a part of the people responding to the Word of God. People offer themselves to God in many ways, with gifts of time and talent. And that is crucial. But we also believe that an important part of following Jesus is to dedicate a part of our earnings to the ministry of God. We embrace the practice of tithing, giving 10% of our income. Some people in the congregation tithe, others do not. We value tremendously all gifts and recognize the different circumstances that people face. But I also want to encourage everyone in your efforts of putting God at the center of your life. We’ll celebrate that in a few minutes when we bring our offerings and pledges forward.

The final act of worship is the sending. Worship for us as Presbyterians is not just a head and heart thing. It’s also a hands thing as it calls us to respond in service to the world. Worship which has no connection to the outside world isn’t true worship.

Paul taught and preached well into the night. And poor Eutyches just couldn’t stand it any longer. He fell asleep, and then fell three stories. They thought he was dead, but no, he was very much alive.

We have been gathered here. We may at times get a bit drowsy. We may seem a bit frozen at times, but by the grace of God, we are very much alive.

I would argue that we are never MORE alive than when we join together to sing to the Lord, to worship, to hear the Word proclaimed – and then to leave and carry this precious Holy Word out into the World.

Amen