Worship

Pentecost 2A, 6/22/14
Bring A Friend to Church Sunday, Baptism
Matthew 10:24-39; Jeremiah 20:7-13; Romans 6:1b-11

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our heart be acceptable in your sight, O God, you are our rock and our redeemer. Amen.

Well, I’ve learned a very important lesson this week. Next time I schedule “bring a friend to church Sunday” I should read the assigned lessons first.

People like to hear nice stories about Jesus healing people or walking on water, or being raised from the dead.

No one likes to hear abut Jesus bringing a sword to the earth and pitting family members against one another.

Yet here we are.

Welcome, guests!

You get to jump right in to the meaty, complicated parts of faith with us.

I’m not going to apologize to you about the readings, though.

Sure, I didn’t intend that today we’d be hearing Jesus promise that one’s foes would be members of one’s own household.

But no one likes false advertising.

And Jesus did say these things.

And it’s too easy in today’s culture to hear the message that God blesses everyone who is faithful and if you just believe strongly enough, you’ll be healthy and wealthy and never struggle with anything ever again.

That’s not how Christianity works, folks.

Life is hard sometimes. There is conflict sometimes. We don’t always get along with other people, we are not always healthy, and personal wealth has absolutely nothing to do with being faithful to God.

I don’t think that Jesus means for us all to start hating our family members. That’s not the point of today’s Gospel reading.

I do think that Jesus was speaking to people who had already been estranged from their families because of their faith.

Early Christians, the first followers of Jesus, were adherents of a minority religion in a culture where people could be put to death for their faith. Most of Jesus’ 12 disciples died martyrs’ deaths because of what they believed.

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus says, some of you might already be pitted against your own family members for my sake.

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.

Do not be afraid; God cares for even the sparrows, and you are much more valuable than them.

You have an identity that is more important than family, more important than your job, more important than even life or death.

And that identity is, child of God.

What you do and who you are as a person of faith is much more meaningful than anything you do as a member of a household or any other group.

Your faith – choosing to follow Jesus – living as one of his disciples – is the most important thing you could ever do.

Faith, to Jesus and his followers, was a life-and-death thing. It was serious business. That’s why the Gospel lesson sounds so harsh. Jesus was talking to people who were putting everything on the line to follow him.

Today, in this part of the world, Christians are not persecuted for their faith.

We can gather for worship without fear of execution.

Christians are elected to public office and are allowed to be landowners.

You can’t be put in prison for professing faith in Jesus.

The stakes aren’t as high for us. That is to say, living as a disciple of Jesus is still the most important thing we’ll ever do, but doing so is not a life-or-death matter for us.

So, the point of Jesus’ diatribe today doesn’t need to be quite as extreme for us as it was for the first Christians.

Our identity isn’t shaped by our persecution.

Our identity is shaped by other things.

One of those things that defines us as Christians, is gathering in community for worship. Worship is the primary function of this congregation.

The word “congregation” actually means “assembly.” So we only really exist as a congregation when people are gathered together.

Church is different – church refers to the entire identity and all the functions of all the followers of Jesus in every time and place – but that’s a different sermon. For now, let’s focus on what it means to be a congregation gathered in worship.

The Sunday School students just finished a year-long curriculum on the parts of worship. There are some things that we do every time we gather, and some things that we do only occasionally in worship. There are meanings behind all of it.

Take the Greeting, for instance. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

These words are from Scripture, from the end of Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth. When we use these words in worship, we remember that we are connected to the ancient church, and to other congregations who have used this greeting throughout history and around the world.

By opening worship with this Greeting, we are also declaring faith in a triune God – did you notice that there are three parts to the greeting? Not only that, but we are welcoming God into our midst, declaring ourselves ready to experience what God has to show us today in our gathering.

         Even parts of worship that seem simple have deep significance.

We don’t have time today to go through the meaning of each individual part of worship, but if you’re interested, please come talk to me later, or to one of the Sunday School kids or teachers.

Usually our worship can be divided into four major sections. For today, we’ll just go over those. The headings are listed in bold in your bulletin:

Gathering, Word, Meal, Sending

Gathering is how we begin our time of worship together. It’s a specific part of worship because it takes constant reminding that, in this place, we are not primarily individuals. In this place, in worship, we are primarily children of God.

Taking intentional time for Gathering allows us to realize that we come from different places in life – physically, emotionally, spiritually – but as children of God, we have common ground upon which to build.

Some congregations have a procession at the beginning of worship to emphasize the importance of Gathering. Those congregations might include the cross in the procession, as a symbolic reminder that what unites us is Jesus’ death on the cross – just like the reading from Romans told us today. 

The Service of the Word comes next in worship. This is when we hear words from the Bible, spoken and sung. Christians are people of the book – we believe in the authority of Scripture for teaching us about God. So every time we gather, we hear from God’s Word. The sermon goes in the Word section of worship because it is interpretation of Scripture, applied to the lives of the people who are gathered.

Today’s reading from Jeremiah is a kind of sermon, actually – it’s Jeremiah saying that he’s been told by God to preach to the people, but no one is listening to what he has to say. Why would God call him to such a futile task? Jeremiah is a preacher who is about to give up, because the task of preaching to unresponsive people is so draining that he doesn’t feel he’s doing God’s work anymore.

Jeremiah did keep spreading God’s message, thankfully, so we don’t have to dwell there – we can move on to the next part of worship, the Service of the Meal.

Jesus commanded his disciples to share bread and wine in memory of him, and so we share the meal of Communion together. Communion is the holy meal, it’s spiritual sustenance, that feeds both our bodies and our souls.

In our congregation, we celebrate Communion every week. Some congregations share this meal together every other week, once a month, or a few times a year.

Regardless of how often it’s celebrated, the point of Communion – of the Meal – is to follow Jesus’ command, and to provide a tangible way of interacting with God. You can’t get much more tangible than eating and drinking. The Meal in worship provides an opportunity for the theoretical to become practical – we take the ideas we’ve heard from the Word and physically experience them as a community, in the way that Jesus instructed.

Clear as mud?

If you’re confused, again, come talk to me later. We could spend all morning talking about the meaning of all the parts of worship, but none of us want to be here for that long. For now, let’s move on to Sending.

The church does not exist for the sake of itself. The purpose of worship isn’t just to make people feel good. We don’t gather here every week simply because we want to be fed – literally and spiritually. We do gather here because we need tools to take with us when we go back into the world.

So at the end of worship, we don’t simply close – we don’t conclude like a concert does, with a rousing number that makes everyone want to ask for an encore so they can stay just a little bit longer.

We send. The people of God are sent into the world, with a mission, with a charge to spread God’s Word to other people and invite them to follow Jesus.

Every single week the congregation is commissioned with the words Go in peace and serve the Lord. And every single week the congregation accepts that commission with enthusiasm: Thanks be to God!

Not only do we accept the charge to spread God’s Word, but we praise God for it! Thank you, God, for entrusting us with this important task!

Today in worship we get one extra section. In just a little while there will be a Baptism, thanks to Luke and his parents, Beth and Tom.

In Baptism, we remember first our own humanity and our own sinfulness. We realize that we do bad things in life, and we’re going to die someday, and our bad decisions could make life after death be pretty unpleasant.

But in our baptism, we are united with Christ, like Paul says in today’s Romans reading. And when Christ died, he didn’t stay dead. So we celebrate in baptism that we won’t suffer eternal damnation, but we’ll instead get to experience eternal life, through the grace of God and the resurrection of Jesus.

There’s a lot more that could be said on the meaning of baptism, but those are the main points.

As a congregation, our primary function is worship. Even when the Word is difficult, as with Jeremiah or today’s Gospel lesson, we remember that our identity as children of God trumps any of the other things going on in our lives.

Our congregation doesn’t exist for its own sake, however.

We may focus much of our energy around Sunday morning worship, because it centers us and helps us grow close to God. But if we spend all our time looking inward, we are not truly being disciples. We are not honoring our ancestors in the faith who literally put their lives on the line for what they believed, when all we do is worry about what we want to do as individuals.

Church isn’t about that.

Church is about being part of something bigger than ourselves.

Church is about living for others. Everything that we do as followers of Jesus is for the sake of God and for other people. True faith is selfless.  

Welcome to the deep side of faith.

Guests and members alike: today’s themes are for you.

Faith is not always easy. History tells us that.

But it’s the most important thing in the universe.

May God help us all to be faithful in following Jesus. 

Amen.