At last year’s Annual Congregational Meeting the Planning Committee of the Session announced the results of a year of work with the congregation, church committees, small groups, and the Session in the formulation of several strategic objectives that are intended to inform our life and ministry over the next five years.

 

Any of us who have ever participated in planning exercises know that too often a good deal of work is put forth, many trees are killed, a lot of paper is generated, and then the reports get buried under the press of the day-to-day emergencies of life.  However, in this case your church leadership is working hard to make sure that does not happen.

 

My sermon series this fall “Where Do We Go From Here?” is an effort to look at those goals from a biblical and theological perspective.  Certainly there is nothing new about a church saying that it wants to pay more attention to worship and spiritual life, to youth and to families, to stewardship and to mission.  But the truth is that we seldom look at those aspects of our life together holistically.  Rather if we are concerned about worship or mission, our style is to create a committee to deal with that area of our life.

 

However, it is much more difficult and far more productive to have every small group, and committee, and board thinking about its work in a way that can involve worship, mission, and youth.  Therefore, in the coming weeks I am going to be lifting up some of these themes which I believe apply not only to our corporate life together but also make for healthy Christians.  And I am going to want you to think about these themes not separately but as threads in a tapestry that need to be woven together in order for the true beauty to emerge.

 

For us it all begins with worship because worship centers us in God.  When we speak of the diversity of the church, we are talking about many things, but clearly one way to describe our life together is that we are a clustering of special interest groups.  When we come to Communion, we are gathered from north, and south, and east, and west.  As we find our place in the life of the church it is not unusual for us to cluster around special interests.  There are those who feel that the church does nothing more important than pass on its faith to its children.  There are those who feel that the church does nothing more important than train leaders for tomorrow and so we are committed to our youth. 

 

There are those who feel that without a priority for mission, we will become like the Dead Sea which is fed by the waters of the Jordan River but because it has no outlet nothing lives within its banks.  Others of us find our special interest in music, or adult education, or family life, or social issues.  And I say God bless you all because Westminster Church will be a more vital place because of your passion.  I learned a long time ago the scriptural truth of the church …there are different gifts.

 

However (and you know what I am going to say don’t you), without a hub the spokes cannot stay connected to the wheel, and our hub is worship -- that is what keeps us connected to God.  If you are used to the verbage of the church, worship is a word that will evoke many memories and feelings.  For some it is all about going to church; for some it is all about listening to preachers who miss a lot of good opportunities to stop; for others it seems all about a ritual that seems disconnected to life.  But our guts tell us that there must be something more than just going through the motions.

 

I have chosen to speak about worship within the context of this passage from the prophet, Jeremiah, because Jeremiah was one of those rugged individualists who had little patience for meaningless ritual and even less for beating around the bush.  His whole life was about keeping people connected to God.

 

I.                 We need to think of worship differently because we are living

in a different context.

 

What we have here is part of a series of correspondence that Jeremiah is having with a group that had been taken from their homeland during a war and were now living in exile in Babylon.  They were not exactly prisoners as we think of it today because they were with their families and they enjoyed a certain freedom of movement and the ability to make a living but they were not permitted to return home.

 

One of our sons has been living and working in Shanghai for the last six months.  He reports that when he first moved there the differences in culture seemed novel and interesting, but when he settled in and it became his home for an extended period of time, the differences started grating on him as he longed for the familiar.

 

Being in exile in Babylon meant that this Jewish Community was living in an alien environment.  That meant that while their customs and practices were tolerated, they were also considered different and weird and certainly not reinforced by the prevailing culture.  To be an exile means that what once seemed so natural because every body did it now is called into question.  Exiles have a tough time maintaining their identity in an alien environment.  Pam and I were certainly not exiles last spring when we traveled to England and Scotland, but it was interesting how a different vocabulary and even pattern of speech crept into our discourse during that sojourn.

 

As normal religious Jews these exiles were used to the props of temple and synagogue that organized their faith for them.  But now they were without all of that and they needed to look within themselves for the center of their faith.

 

Would it surprise you to hear that there are some who believe that American Christians in the year 2005 are living in exile?  How could anyone think that?  Our leaders talk a lot about God.  We think of ourselves as a Christian nation.  The steeples of churches are still abundant over the landscape.

 

For most of the last century it was felt that the Christian church had a kind of alliance with power.  Sure we believed in the separation of church and state but Presbyterians bragged about how many of us were in Congress as did the Episcopalians and Methodists as though somehow this was an extension of real influence.

 

Loren Mead talks about this as living according to the Christendom paradigm which goes back to the Middle Ages when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire.  At that moment we were delivered from persecution to power and it felt good.  In the churches I have served, I have to confess to a certain pride at the numbers of mayors, and judges, and council people who would be in my pews Sunday-after-Sunday.  Whatever that may have meant to them it certainly did not translate into any direct political influence.

 

To be an exile is to be a stranger in a strange land.  It is to find your spiritual center without relying on external props.  Jeremiah was not a prophet of doom; he was a realist as he cautioned his readers that there would be no speedy return to their homeland.  Seventy years has been understood as a symbolic number -- something like “you will return when I am ready”.  In light of this they would have to learn to worship God without the props they were used to.

 

For us in 2005 this means that we have more in common with those Babylonian exiles than is first apparent.  Because our context has changed, because the culture could care less whether one has a religion or no religion, the words of Jeremiah come to us with a jarring urgency:  “You will seek and you will find me when you seek me with all your heart.”  You see it is not the forms and the rituals that are as important as the condition of the heart as we engage in those forms and rituals.

 

 

II.             We need to think of worship differently because it is not

about us.

 

Even though we say that worship is at the heart of our life together, that we want to be a worship-centered church, more often than not we take it for granted.  One of the reasons we don’t get as much out of worship as we should is that we have assumed that it is all about us.  Frankly that is a mark of our exilic condition.  We have wandered so far away from home that we have forgotten what true worship is all about.

 

Here is the way John Dominic Crossan pictures it:  “Over the next 100 years the ideological war will be between religion and fantasy.  As all things become entertainment, and all entertainment becomes sensation, and all sensation becomes illusion, religion will have to distinguish itself very clearly from fantasy or else become a minor subsidiary of that overwhelming trivialization of the human imagination.”

 

That’s the challenge, isn’t it?  As all things become entertainment, how do we distinguish ourselves and keep from giving in?  Certainly in worship we are fighting the battle of our lives in this regard.  Now I don’t really believe that you are so shallow that you evaluate the worship of the living God in the same way you evaluate a Saturday night sit-com.  But who of us has not walked out of here at one time or another saying, “That sermon didn’t really speak to me today or I just didn’t get much out of church today.”

 

The Danish philosopher-theologian, Soren Kirkegaard, thinks of worship as being like a drama in which God is the audience, and the members of the congregation are the actors.  It takes some mental gymnastics to make that switch but when we do, it means that our job in worship is to please God not God’s to entertain us and make us feel good.

 

I confess that it is a stretch for those of us who live in a culture where all things are entertainment, but true worship is about God not about us.  We have set this goal as a church to be worship-centered and this is what we mean -- not that we will be on our knees all the time, not that we will be singing hymns all the time, but simply that we will start running all of life through what I call a God-filter.

 

It can be a radical notion to entertain the thought that worship is not all about me and how I feel and how I react.  We can all be somewhat sympathetic to the patient who said to his psychiatrist, “I wouldn’t be so paranoid if everyone wasn’t out to get me.”  Our culture teaches us to be narcissistic, that is to love ourselves to death, and in the process to make our happiness the measure of all things.

 

But you see the nature of Christian worship pushes us in a different direction.  It pushes us outside of ourselves.  If worship is like a drama and we are playing to an audience of one, the measure of success will be how well we please our audience.  And this is not as hard as one might think because the whole Bible provides a script for worship.  Try Micah:  “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” or The Great Commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.”

 

Or Jeremiah when he tells these folks in exile that one way to honor God is to “seek the welfare of the city”.  You see, true worship is not the way we separate ourselves from the world but rather the way we engage ourselves in the world.  “This world is not my home; I’m just a passin’ through,” says the old Gospel song.   But that is no excuse not to try to make a difference while we are passing through.

 

What anchors us (and Jeremiah emphasizes this) is to never forget where our true home is, where our true security lies.  The truth is that we are exiles.  So don’t get too comfortable.  Be reminded that the ways of the world are not our ways.  And worship at its best keeps that truth before us.

 

You have to know that even if I made a great case for the nature of true worship this morning, I know that you will buy only so much of what I have said.  If we send you out of here every Sunday morning beaten up and beaten down without feeding your souls and spirits, you won’t be around very long and neither will we.

 

But as we seek to commit ourselves to being a worship centered congregation where we learn to play to that audience of One, looking at our lives in light of God’s purposes for us -- then this kind of worship that starts in the sanctuary will spread to every  part of our lives.  You see, it is not about us.  It is about the God who loves us, and redeems us, and lifts us up, and walks with us.  This is the One we want to please in every part of our lives.

 

Amen.