Epiphany 5
2 February 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
- Gregory Pope
WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE?
THE COVENANT PRACTICE OF INTENTIONAL WORSHIP
Series: Life Together in Covenant Community
Isaiah 6:1-8. Romans 12:1-8
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”And he said, “Go.” (Isaiah 6.1-8)
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness. (Romans 12.1-8)
Why are you here in this place at this hour?
We call this gathering by various names. Some refer to it as “church.” We will ask one another in Sunday School: “Are you staying for ‘church’?” Others a bit older might ask: “Are you staying for ‘preaching’?” And while there is truth in both labels they can be misleading because: “preaching” is only one thing that happens in this hour, and “church” is who we are every time we gather and every time we leave.
It matters what we call this hour because it changes our expectations of what will happen and what we are to be doing. I think it is most helpful to call this particular hour “worship.”
Isaiah’s encounter with God in the temple has become the primary pattern for biblical worship.
In true worship, God is encountered as Holy Other, and we learn to see the whole earth and everything in it abounding with the radiance of God’s glorious presence. God is acknowledged and praised for who God is and what God has done. We encounter the holy grandeur of God in worship, and discover that we are being caught up in something much larger than ourselves, a transcendent love that draws us out of ourselves and into the world for love’s sake.
We encounter the Holy Other and are reminded of the ways in which we have become something other than God created us to be. We recognize how we have often traded in our identity as beloved children of God and accepted the identity of self-seeking conformists. When we make this recognition in worship, like Isaiah, we are moved to confess our sins as diminished individuals in a fallen human family, acknowledging the ways we have been mis-shaped by the world around us. We share in the confessional words of Isaiah: I am lost. I am a person of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.
The purpose of confession in worship is not to evoke shame or self-hatred. The purpose of confession is honesty and healing. Confession bridges the lonely chasm between what God already knows about what we have done and what we are willing to acknowledge about ourselves.
And our honest confession is always met by God’s forgiving grace: “grace that will pardon and cleanse within” (as the hymn writer puts it), grace that will empower us to lives of truth and beauty, goodness and love.
Then as the free and forgiven people of God transformed by the gracious love of our Maker, God extends an invitation our way to be covenant partners with God in the restoration of the world.
Isaiah heard God ask: Who will go into the world for me? Who will speak and serve in my name?
And we are invited to respond with Isaiah, offering our lives to God: Here am I, send me.
So what are we doing here in this place at this hour? We are here to bow our hearts in reverence to a holy God. We are here to center our wayward lives in the presence of a gracious God. We are here to offer ourselves completely to the One Who Made Us.
According to Paul, we do so in the hopes that we will “be transformed” by the renewing of our minds and present all that we are – body and soul – as a living sacrifice to God. Week after week,
year after year, worship has the power to transform us into the person and the people God created us to be, shaping us into Christlikeness.
The degree to which transformation happens in worship depends in large part upon what we bring to worship. As you enter this space each week: Do you bring an open mind and willing heart? Is there an eager longing for communion with a holy God of grace? Is it your prayer to be changed in ways you perhaps cannot even imagine?
We are often tempted to enter worship as a movie critic assessing the actors and the musical score. But a mindset of observation and evaluation is not worship and will not lead to transformation. Sometimes a service of worship may fail to meet our expectations because it was not designed to meet our expectations.
Upon entering the sanctuary for worship it might be helpful to ask ourselves: Am I here to evaluate the quality of entertainment? Am I here for a little “pick-me-up” to get me through the week? Or: Am I here to be changed? Am I here to participate in an encounter with the living God, to receive what God offers, and to offer my life in response to the grace of a Holy God?
Upon leaving worship we might do well to ask not: What did I get out of that? but rather: What did I give to it? What offering of my life did I make? What part of myself did I give to God? What part of myself did I withhold?
Though worship may at times bring joy and peace, worship is not designed for our enjoyment or even our blessing. Worship is designed to open our hearts to the grace that keeps this world and to offer our lives to the One Who Made Us with the prayer that our lives will be transformed.
Not every service of worship will feel transforming. But the hope of worship is that week by week the Spirit of God will in gradual, subtle, perhaps even unnoticed ways, enable us to examine our lives more honestly, listen to God more clearly, and follow Christ more courageously. And sometimes, as with the apostle Paul, something might just happen that knocks you to the ground – an encounter with the living God so overwhelming that your life dramatically changes.
There is, however, a danger in worship that we will seek an experience of God rather than God Himself. If we focus on having an experience, we will continue to find ourselves in need of more experiences to sustain our spiritual life, when God is who we need most. God is the focus and theme in every service of Intentional Worship.
Encounters with God can be healing, but they can also be unsettling. According to biblical encounters with God, worship is not “a sweet hour of prayer that calls us from a world of care.” Worship is a dangerous and surprising hour of prayer that calls us into the world to care for the most vulnerable and boldly strive to make the world a more just and compassionate place: doing what God needs done, saying what God needs said. So every service of worship calls for a moment of decision.
I want to ask you to take your worship bulletin and look down the page to everyone’s favorite part – the moment the sermon ends. (Well, that may be the second favorite part, next to the postlude, which many worshipers mistakenly take for the dinner bell.)
Following the sermon in our Baptist worship tradition, there is a time of response, an invitation to discipleship and community. At such a time you may hear the call of Christ to follow him and be his disciple, to walk in his way and be baptized, to trust Christ for the forgiveness of sin and the power to walk in new life. Or you may decide to enter into community with a congregation. For discipleship is lived with others. We do not walk with Jesus alone. We serve with one another as the Body of Christ.
There is also an invitation to respond that often occurs before the sermon to make on offering of ourselves and our possessions.
But every service of worship, in some way, should include for each of us a rededication of our lives to walk more faithfully together in the way of Jesus. Worship is not complete without our response.
We are then sent out of this sanctuary space with a benediction as the blessed and beloved people of God to live the commitments we have made. Because if our worship does not extend beyond the sanctuary, then all we have done is play church.
The heart of worship is not a presentation or performance by others. Worship is an encounter with the God who transcends us, yet graciously meets us with divine presence, words of guidance, the purifying flame of forgiveness, the medicine to gradually heal old wounds, and the power to be transformed.
We respond to these gifts by giving ourselves to God, lifting our hearts to God in praise and confession, thanksgiving and commitment. And over time we may discover that we have indeed been transformed into our true selves, our best selves, the self God created us to be, embodied for us in the person of Jesus.
Sometimes this transformation happens in ways that cannot be fully explained.
Anne Lamott describes how worship sometimes takes hold of her. Anne did not attend church growing up. But her crumbling adult life of addiction sent her in search of God. She began attending a small church in her northern California town. She says of all the things I loved about that church it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open. (Has singing ever done that to you?) . . . The singing enveloped me, she writes. It was furry and resonant, coming from everyone’s very heart. . . . The music was breath and food. Something inside me that was stiff and rotting would feel soft and tender. Somehow the singing wore down all the boundaries and distinctions that kept me so isolated. Sitting there, standing with them to sing, sometimes so shaky and sick that I felt like I might tip over, I felt bigger than myself, like I was being taken care of, tricked into coming back to life . . . It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – and it washed over me.1
Worship may at times seem ordinary: singing, praying, listening. But from time to time, something happens that we cannot explain, something that holds us and rocks us like a scared child in God’s bosom, and leaves us forever changed, washed clean, set free, made new, unconditionally accepted by the mercies of God.
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- Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies, Pantheon, 1999, 47-50