A Friday We Call "Good"
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series II, Cycle A
Object:
After our last trip to Israel, a number in our group met to share photos and memories. Several of us said that we didn't respond favorably to the elaborate Byzantine and medieval church buildings. They made none of us feel particularly worshipful. We'd rather be outside and see the place something like it was when the folk of the Bible were there.
Yet, our visiting Jerusalem and seeing the places was sufficient for us because we already have our times and places that make us feel worshipful. The tragedy greater than being put off by a 1,000-year-old church building is that some people attend worship every week in their own community and experience there the barrenness that we felt in those huge, empty, old structures. Some people in worship have no more communion with God than they could by contemplating cold stones in a Jerusalem sidewalk.
Maybe once they looked forward to worship. Maybe they even hold pleasant memories of times with God and God's people, but today no verve or zest, no vigor or vitality penetrates their lives through worship. Worship has deflated in value until it's something to be endured. It's empty motions, mere ritual, trivial repetition, a habit that used to be significant but now is as dry as Israel's Negev wilderness.
Christian worship has become, for many, a fruitless repetition like that of a priest in Jerusalem's ancient temple who, as Hebrews says, "stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins." Worship becomes so meaningless that on Sundays many people choose the stuffing of dollars into slot machines. At least with a slot machine there's a payout sometime, though in the end it empties your whole wallet.
Maybe worship withers for people because they haven't known or have forgotten that Jesus didn't suffer on the cross just for the worst of people and problems, or even for the best of people and their potential. He hung on the cross for all of us, even for us who have the average, even the predictable, problem of our worship drying up. What Jesus accomplished has to do even with us and with our difficulties in experiencing God afresh in worship. Jesus died so that even we could rekindle our expectancy for a burning, passionate experience with God. We're not the first to feel that worship isn't even as exciting as going for our yearly physical. At least going to the doctor can strike a little fear in you.
No matter how much people enjoy criticizing worship on the drive home from church or dining at Sunday's dinner of roast pastor, the book of Hebrews points us toward a problem that's deeper than craving for novelty or yearning for the good old days in worship. Our problem with worship isn't because we're bored with old songs or hate new ones. Our problem isn't that the preacher is too intellectual or too ignorant, too liberal or too conservative, that the sanctuary is too bright or too dark, that the choir is too formal or too folksy. Our dullness comes from a deeper source. The problem is within us, and that's where God promises to make the real changes in worship.
Often the deeper reason for boredom in worship is that we've chosen not to face God. That's how some people choose a church. They want a quiet, dignified, religious place to come and hide from the almighty God of the scriptures. They seek a religious lodge, club, or museum to visit, but not to be challenged in, and certainly in which they don't want any of their life, let alone their inner self, to be invaded. People have sought such churches asking for short rations of religion, because they fear what would happen if they were filled with God. No, let's just go to worship and sing the songs -- then complain about them -- sit in our straight rows and look at the back of peoples' heads -- then mention how unfriendly everyone is, and endure the sermon -- sifting out the majority and grasping the small fraction that agrees with the people we already are and twisting what we can't ignore until it confirms the distance at which we hold God.
"This is the covenant that I will make with them.... I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds" (Hebrews 10:16). Here's where God aims to meet us, right at the center of our being that the Bible calls our heart. The problem isn't hanging loosely on the fringe of our outward habits but deep within where God waits to grab our attention as only loving us sacrificially can do. In worship, God offers more than a twinge of peace, a spurt of inspiration, or an interesting new thought. The cool spring water of God's love gushes up from a deeper source. When it truly springs up within you, you can't stop it: water everywhere, the Spirit washing us of our sins and refreshing us into eternal life. Worship flows from God to us, not the other way around; it floods us with the presence of a God who will suffer for us. Thus, worship can be painful, even life threatening; yet it's infinitely hopeful.
Since God is the one with whom we deal in worship, sometimes our problem is that we've jettisoned the biblical God. Instead we've fabricated our own God. Each of us is formally guaranteed this freedom by the US Constitution -- freedom from religion it could also be called. We're protected in our right to have a domesticated god, or a god we form by gluing the crumbs of Western religions upon the wishes of Eastern philosophies.
No wonder there's no joy in worship. How can you get excited about worshiping a God gathered at an intellectual delicatessen? The folks in the Old Testament, be they ever so bloody or shortsighted, shouted for joy in the presence of the God they worshiped. The early Christians, no matter how wrong they were about Jesus' returning soon, risked death to worship. They did so because they didn't just know about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, they'd been met by that God, loved and forgiven by that God, and had surrendered to that God. One can have congenial thoughts about a God accumulated dab by dab from our American religious buffet or fused together from the scraps of psychology's latest fashions, but it's pretty hard to love such a concoction or to surrender to such an entity.
The book of Hebrews takes us to the deepest problem that God promises to solve. "I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more" (Hebrews 10:17). This cuts toward the center of the whole stinking problem. It's not the place where we choose to look but where scripture forces us to face -- the cross of Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of our sins.
We're not all such terrible people. It's just that we've chosen to go our own ways, to form our own opinions, and to clutch our own values. Until pretty soon, it's "mine, mine, mine" that I'm worried about. We slowly push God out of our daily decisions. We've chosen not to pray about daily, mundane matters. We pretend we don't want to bother God with such trivialities, and all the while we actually neglect God's summons. Finally, like sheep that nibble themselves away from the flock, we find ourselves with the sun setting, the flock and shepherd out of sight and sound, and here we are caught on a hillside. We can't go up, and we dare not go down. The big decision time has come, yet our hundreds of little decisions have taken us farther and farther away from the source of help.
We need forgiveness, need it like we need our life's breath. We need God's renewing grace to surge through us like a hurricane across the Florida Keys, because there's so much that needs to be blown out and refreshed, so much -- like a moth-balled ship -- that needs to be ripped out, scraped clean, polished, and recommissioned, because our character and relationships suffer terribly without God, until our inner lives look like No Man's Land during World War I. You can't get across it, but you fear what might come from it.
How can we truly return to God? How can we face God again, when we've consistently slipped so far away? How could we trust that after our flirting with everything less than God that God would want us back?
For Israel, their guarantee of God's forgiveness was seen in their twice-daily worship services. Morning and evening in the Jerusalem temple they offered sacrifice to God. By an animal's life dedicated to God the ritual helped people understand the seriousness of sin and the costliness of forgiveness. Most people felt satisfied with such worship. Some did not. How could a ritual with an animal assure us of God's acceptance? Our Lord Jesus, just a few blocks to the west of the temple, suffered on a cross for six hours on a Friday we call "Good," which means good for us anyway. Jesus is now the way that we understand our forgiveness. On this Friday, we remember how serious sin is and to what lengths God goes to demonstrate love and forgiveness to us.
Our text says that Jesus has opened for us a new and living way for us into God's presence. We have confidence to come back to God because of what Jesus has done -- not because of what we've done, thought, or said, not because of what we've intended or promised; thus our confidence in approaching God can't be erased by the promises we've broken or the resolutions we haven't kept. Christ gets us through to God. What we've done and what we've become don't affect our being invited to God in worship. Through Christ God invites everyone, no entrance tests administered, no diploma needed, no strong family tree or full resume necessary.
God's eternal intention has been to hand this invitation to each of us through Christ. God reaches to us through Christ and delivers God's inscribed and embossed invitation through Jesus' scarred hands. The invitation reads: "Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water."
Our text proclaims, "He who has promised is faithful." We accept God's invitation and attend worship expecting to meet God here because God is faithful -- faithful to Abraham and faithful over all the painful centuries with the Hebrew people, right up to Christ, and faithful finally to us -- faithful no matter the pain we cause God. Such is the reason to attend worship expecting to encounter God, expecting something to happen between us and God, and expecting to regain our passion in faith. God has promised to meet us here, and "He who has promised is faithful."
In response to God's love and faithfulness, the book of Hebrews says we need to do three things: Continue to gather with one another for worship, cling tightly to our hope in God, and encourage one another in the ways of Jesus Christ. After we've met the great and good God, the faithful God who keeps promises and grants us unlimited access through Christ, and after we encourage one another in the faith, then remaining hopeful and continuing to gather regularly for worship isn't that hard to do. In fact, going to worship expectantly now is natural for us, because we experience again that worship has become supernatural. Amen.
Yet, our visiting Jerusalem and seeing the places was sufficient for us because we already have our times and places that make us feel worshipful. The tragedy greater than being put off by a 1,000-year-old church building is that some people attend worship every week in their own community and experience there the barrenness that we felt in those huge, empty, old structures. Some people in worship have no more communion with God than they could by contemplating cold stones in a Jerusalem sidewalk.
Maybe once they looked forward to worship. Maybe they even hold pleasant memories of times with God and God's people, but today no verve or zest, no vigor or vitality penetrates their lives through worship. Worship has deflated in value until it's something to be endured. It's empty motions, mere ritual, trivial repetition, a habit that used to be significant but now is as dry as Israel's Negev wilderness.
Christian worship has become, for many, a fruitless repetition like that of a priest in Jerusalem's ancient temple who, as Hebrews says, "stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins." Worship becomes so meaningless that on Sundays many people choose the stuffing of dollars into slot machines. At least with a slot machine there's a payout sometime, though in the end it empties your whole wallet.
Maybe worship withers for people because they haven't known or have forgotten that Jesus didn't suffer on the cross just for the worst of people and problems, or even for the best of people and their potential. He hung on the cross for all of us, even for us who have the average, even the predictable, problem of our worship drying up. What Jesus accomplished has to do even with us and with our difficulties in experiencing God afresh in worship. Jesus died so that even we could rekindle our expectancy for a burning, passionate experience with God. We're not the first to feel that worship isn't even as exciting as going for our yearly physical. At least going to the doctor can strike a little fear in you.
No matter how much people enjoy criticizing worship on the drive home from church or dining at Sunday's dinner of roast pastor, the book of Hebrews points us toward a problem that's deeper than craving for novelty or yearning for the good old days in worship. Our problem with worship isn't because we're bored with old songs or hate new ones. Our problem isn't that the preacher is too intellectual or too ignorant, too liberal or too conservative, that the sanctuary is too bright or too dark, that the choir is too formal or too folksy. Our dullness comes from a deeper source. The problem is within us, and that's where God promises to make the real changes in worship.
Often the deeper reason for boredom in worship is that we've chosen not to face God. That's how some people choose a church. They want a quiet, dignified, religious place to come and hide from the almighty God of the scriptures. They seek a religious lodge, club, or museum to visit, but not to be challenged in, and certainly in which they don't want any of their life, let alone their inner self, to be invaded. People have sought such churches asking for short rations of religion, because they fear what would happen if they were filled with God. No, let's just go to worship and sing the songs -- then complain about them -- sit in our straight rows and look at the back of peoples' heads -- then mention how unfriendly everyone is, and endure the sermon -- sifting out the majority and grasping the small fraction that agrees with the people we already are and twisting what we can't ignore until it confirms the distance at which we hold God.
"This is the covenant that I will make with them.... I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds" (Hebrews 10:16). Here's where God aims to meet us, right at the center of our being that the Bible calls our heart. The problem isn't hanging loosely on the fringe of our outward habits but deep within where God waits to grab our attention as only loving us sacrificially can do. In worship, God offers more than a twinge of peace, a spurt of inspiration, or an interesting new thought. The cool spring water of God's love gushes up from a deeper source. When it truly springs up within you, you can't stop it: water everywhere, the Spirit washing us of our sins and refreshing us into eternal life. Worship flows from God to us, not the other way around; it floods us with the presence of a God who will suffer for us. Thus, worship can be painful, even life threatening; yet it's infinitely hopeful.
Since God is the one with whom we deal in worship, sometimes our problem is that we've jettisoned the biblical God. Instead we've fabricated our own God. Each of us is formally guaranteed this freedom by the US Constitution -- freedom from religion it could also be called. We're protected in our right to have a domesticated god, or a god we form by gluing the crumbs of Western religions upon the wishes of Eastern philosophies.
No wonder there's no joy in worship. How can you get excited about worshiping a God gathered at an intellectual delicatessen? The folks in the Old Testament, be they ever so bloody or shortsighted, shouted for joy in the presence of the God they worshiped. The early Christians, no matter how wrong they were about Jesus' returning soon, risked death to worship. They did so because they didn't just know about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, they'd been met by that God, loved and forgiven by that God, and had surrendered to that God. One can have congenial thoughts about a God accumulated dab by dab from our American religious buffet or fused together from the scraps of psychology's latest fashions, but it's pretty hard to love such a concoction or to surrender to such an entity.
The book of Hebrews takes us to the deepest problem that God promises to solve. "I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more" (Hebrews 10:17). This cuts toward the center of the whole stinking problem. It's not the place where we choose to look but where scripture forces us to face -- the cross of Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of our sins.
We're not all such terrible people. It's just that we've chosen to go our own ways, to form our own opinions, and to clutch our own values. Until pretty soon, it's "mine, mine, mine" that I'm worried about. We slowly push God out of our daily decisions. We've chosen not to pray about daily, mundane matters. We pretend we don't want to bother God with such trivialities, and all the while we actually neglect God's summons. Finally, like sheep that nibble themselves away from the flock, we find ourselves with the sun setting, the flock and shepherd out of sight and sound, and here we are caught on a hillside. We can't go up, and we dare not go down. The big decision time has come, yet our hundreds of little decisions have taken us farther and farther away from the source of help.
We need forgiveness, need it like we need our life's breath. We need God's renewing grace to surge through us like a hurricane across the Florida Keys, because there's so much that needs to be blown out and refreshed, so much -- like a moth-balled ship -- that needs to be ripped out, scraped clean, polished, and recommissioned, because our character and relationships suffer terribly without God, until our inner lives look like No Man's Land during World War I. You can't get across it, but you fear what might come from it.
How can we truly return to God? How can we face God again, when we've consistently slipped so far away? How could we trust that after our flirting with everything less than God that God would want us back?
For Israel, their guarantee of God's forgiveness was seen in their twice-daily worship services. Morning and evening in the Jerusalem temple they offered sacrifice to God. By an animal's life dedicated to God the ritual helped people understand the seriousness of sin and the costliness of forgiveness. Most people felt satisfied with such worship. Some did not. How could a ritual with an animal assure us of God's acceptance? Our Lord Jesus, just a few blocks to the west of the temple, suffered on a cross for six hours on a Friday we call "Good," which means good for us anyway. Jesus is now the way that we understand our forgiveness. On this Friday, we remember how serious sin is and to what lengths God goes to demonstrate love and forgiveness to us.
Our text says that Jesus has opened for us a new and living way for us into God's presence. We have confidence to come back to God because of what Jesus has done -- not because of what we've done, thought, or said, not because of what we've intended or promised; thus our confidence in approaching God can't be erased by the promises we've broken or the resolutions we haven't kept. Christ gets us through to God. What we've done and what we've become don't affect our being invited to God in worship. Through Christ God invites everyone, no entrance tests administered, no diploma needed, no strong family tree or full resume necessary.
God's eternal intention has been to hand this invitation to each of us through Christ. God reaches to us through Christ and delivers God's inscribed and embossed invitation through Jesus' scarred hands. The invitation reads: "Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water."
Our text proclaims, "He who has promised is faithful." We accept God's invitation and attend worship expecting to meet God here because God is faithful -- faithful to Abraham and faithful over all the painful centuries with the Hebrew people, right up to Christ, and faithful finally to us -- faithful no matter the pain we cause God. Such is the reason to attend worship expecting to encounter God, expecting something to happen between us and God, and expecting to regain our passion in faith. God has promised to meet us here, and "He who has promised is faithful."
In response to God's love and faithfulness, the book of Hebrews says we need to do three things: Continue to gather with one another for worship, cling tightly to our hope in God, and encourage one another in the ways of Jesus Christ. After we've met the great and good God, the faithful God who keeps promises and grants us unlimited access through Christ, and after we encourage one another in the faith, then remaining hopeful and continuing to gather regularly for worship isn't that hard to do. In fact, going to worship expectantly now is natural for us, because we experience again that worship has become supernatural. Amen.
