You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!
Our
God is a God of transformation, a God of change. Really!
Don’t believe it? Look at the
story of Moses that we have been reading together these past six weeks.
At
the outset, Moses is a helpless Hebrew infant doomed to death by drowning in
the Nile River. Rescued by the daughter
of the Pharaoh, he is transformed into – tah dah - an Egyptian prince.
However,
when he embraces his Jewish heritage and flees his adopted homeland, he is
changed into one who voluntarily exiled himself to Midian for most of his adult
life.
Then
he encounters that burning bush high up on Mt. Sinai with the voice of
Yahweh/God/The Great I Am booming from its midst, and he is altered into one
who – albeit tentatively– answers a call from the Almighty. And so he emerges as a reluctant ambassador
of the Holy One.
Not
longer after that experience on the hillside, Moses stands in Pharaoh’s court
demanding the release of the Hebrew slaves, who had been, of course, the
foundation of the Egyptian economy for over 400 years. Moses, even with his propensity for
stuttering, speaks with a power that he did not seem to have previously. Before our very eyes, he has morphed into a
prophet, a mouthpiece for God/Yahweh/The Great I Am.
And
then we find him standing on the shore of the Red Sea –endless water before him
and his motley crew of fleeing Hebrews, the mighty Egyptian army closing in
behind them. Surely they are between a
rock and hard place – nowhere to go.
However,
it is there that Moses emerges as the true leader of the Israelites. He raises his staff, the wind gusting furiously
about his head and whipping his robe in all directions. With such faith, and in such great high hope,
he looks to God/Yahweh/The Great I Am and, as if by magic, parts the waters and
triumphantly walks the Israelites to safety on the far shore.
Once
in the wilderness, Moses sees to it that the Israelites are fed and that they
have water to drink. He listens to their
complaints and when that grumbling becomes even too much for him to bear, he is
re-created once again – this time as the perceptive theologian, the one who
realizes that, beneath all the complaining is a deep, profound – even
existential - question: Is God with us
on this difficult journey, or has the Holy One left us in the lurch?
Moses: His whole life is a constant
permutation. In these stories in the
Book of Exodus, we see him go from doomed and helpless Hebrew infant to voluntary
exile to prophet to leader to theologian.
Our God is a God of transformation, a God of change.
Moses
has come a long way. That is for
sure! And as we end this cycle of his stories
today, we find ourselves once again with him on the heights of Mount
Sinai. He has left the Israelites at the
base of the mountain as God had commanded him to do.
And
there in the midst of trumpet blasts and thunder and lighting and smoke (smoke
as might come from a furnace, we are told), all these dramatic conventions unfolding
so that the Israelites would know that when they heard what Moses had to say
upon his return, they would believe beyond the shadow of a doubt that the words
Moses spoke were the words of God/Yahweh/The Great I Am and not a bunch of
stuff he had made up himself.
We
often think that Moses obtained just the Ten Commandments up there on Mt. Sinai
and that they were carefully written in King James English with Roman numerals
to highlight each one. However,
according to our Biblical tradition, God presented Moses with way more than the
Big Ten.
Moses
received a whole system of laws that were the basis of the covenant or
relationship between God/Yahweh/The Great I Am and the Israelites. These laws are all described in a couple of
chapters in the Book of Exodus as well as in the Biblical Book of Deuteronomy. There are laws governing the treatment of
slaves and laws about violence and justice and fairness. There are laws about what festivals to
celebrate and laws dictating the Jubilee year when the fields were to lie
fallow.
Today,
however, our Scripture reading does focus on the Ten Commandments – or, at
least, on two of those commandments.
I am God, your God,
who brought you out of the land of
Egypt,
out of a life of slavery. No other gods, only me.
No carved gods of any size, shape, or form
of anything whatever, whether of things that fly or walk or swim. No using the name of God, your God, in curses
or silly banter; God won’t put up with the irreverent use of his name.
and
Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
This
particular combination of Sacred Law sounds like the basis of worship to me – a
recognition of who God is and a call to observe a regular holy time, a sacred hour
of praise and listening and remembrance and thanksgiving.
As
a congregation, I hope that we can really carve out some intentional time to
reflect upon worship and upon what makes for a meaningful worship experience –
both this morning and in the weeks and months ahead. To that end, our church is applying for a
Vital Worship Grant through the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, “an
interdisciplinary study and ministry center based in Grand Rapids Michigan that
promotes the scholarly study of the theology, history, and practice of
Christian worship and the renewal of worship in worshiping communities across
North America and beyond.” (Mission
Statement)
A
small group of us here at RVCC have been meeting to talk about worship and to
begin the process of creating a proposal for a year-long experiential study of
worship and how we can make worship a more meaningful part of the life of our
church family and the Raymond community.
In addition to myself, our Worship Grant
Team consists of Lori Lambert, Tom Wiley, Lois Waldron, Brian Walker, Karen
Strange, and Martha Morrison.
However,
before we as a church community can even begin to discern what vital and
meaningful worship might be for us, we need to collectively understand what
worship, in and of itself, really is.
Webster’s
Dictionary says: “Worship is to honor
with extravagant love and extreme submission.”
As worship consultant Delesslyn A. Kennebrew notes, “Worship is
not the slow song that the choir sings. Worship is not the amount you place in
the offering basket. Worship is not volunteering in children's church. Yes,
these may be acts or expressions of worship, but they do not define what true worship
really is….True worship…is defined by the priority we place on who God
is in our lives and where God is on our list of priorities.” To put it a bit more bluntly, for Killebrew
at least, both our choice to come to worship and the care with which we plan
worship says how much we think God is worth in our lives.
Church
of Scotland pastor, worship consultant, and theologian John Bell reflects on
the meaning of worship this way: “I see
worship (he says) as the offering of ourselves to God, and the honoring of God
by intentional time and devotion – which may happen individually, but which
also is expected by God to happen in the company of other people. Worship is a
means by which, corporately, we celebrate our relationship with God.”
He
goes on to say that “in any relationship, there has to be variety… music is
certainly one component; but there are other things that enable the
magnificence of God to be reflected.
Silence
can be as important a part of worship as sound, and symbolic action can be as
important as singing….There’s an arrogance in Protestantism (Bell says) which
believes that the word of God is only open when somebody preaches it. (However, he maintains,) people can be
converted or illuminated or changed as much by what is sung or by what they do
experientially as by what is preached.”
He
goes on to say that worship is a dialogue.
It is not just praising God, but also listening for what God has to say
to us. After all, as Bell points out, God
is not “some kind of sad deity who needs a liturgical
tickling stick to help him to get through the next week.”
Vital and meaningful worship is bigger than that. It demands honesty (a recognition and
affirmation of where people are in their lives) and imagination. After all, if we are striving to enable
people to “envision something beyond themselves then there has to be a use of
symbol and color and movement and song and illustration, which doesn’t just
speak to the intellect but which somehow gets into our very soul.” (Bell)
Because
most of us come from religious traditions where the preacher preached, the
choir performed, and the congregation listened (or at least looked, for the
most part, as if they were listening), the idea of experiencing worship
differently may be a new idea. As we
move forward with our grant process, my hope is that we can embrace the new -
not as an enemy of faith but as a catalyst of faith – thereby affirming that our God is
indeed a God of transformation, a God of change, and knowing in our heart of
hearts that we are called not to seal ourselves in the past but rather to be
agents of this holy transformation and sacred change.
Our
worship grant team wants each one of you to be invested in this congregational discovery
of vital worship. We value your thoughts
and perspectives. We want to be sensitive to your questions and concerns. To
that end, we have set aside some time in worship this morning for you to tell
us about your meaningful worship experiences.
You each have an insert in your bulletin with two questions on it:
1 1. What worship experiences at RVCC (and elsewhere) have you
found especially meaningful – and why?
2. What is needed for you to
effectively worship?
We
are going to take 10 minutes now for you to write down your thoughts about
these questions. There are no right or
wrong answers. We do not want to know
your name. However,
we do want you to be honest (you won’t hurt anyone’s feelings by what you say),
and we want you to be specific. The more
details you can give us, the better. We
want to know the sorts of things that make worship a meaningful experience for you
– and what you need in a worship service to feel that it has, as John Bell
said, touched your very soul.
So
– write away, and after 10 minutes, two people will collect your inserts.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine
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