The Pastor’s Words

Text:  John 2:1-11
17 January 2010
Topic:  We GATHER to worship           
 
We have Gathered for worship today to confess our sins, to sing the praises of God, to hear  God’s Word for today, to feast on Christ’s presence in the Meal and hopefully look forward to being Sent back in to the world from which we have come to be a manifestation of God’s physical and spiritual presence in the world.
As I said last week, I have begun a series of sermons on what we do in our liturgy, why it matters, and how we can see our liturgy as part of our faith formation.  The liturgy is what we do here on a Sunday morning, liturgy is our worship, liturgy is our gathering, liturgy is our singing, our praying, and our praising the One in whom we believe.
This morning I am going to talk specifically about the very first part of our liturgy.  In the Order of Worship as you see it printed on your bulletin, it is the portion under the section that reads In Worship We Gather.  It includes everything from the confession of sins to the prayer of the day.
You might think that our GATHERING begins when we confess our sins, but in fact it begins long before that.  What do I mean?  Well, as soon as we get up in the morning, make the decision to come to worship, get into our cars and begin the drive to church, our gathering has begun.  When we enter the parking lot, we are in the process of gathering.  When we enter the door of the church, and are greeted, or not greeted, we are gathering.  When we sit in our pew and the people around us are talking – which is a good thing – unless it excludes those who are not known to us – we are in the gathering portion of our worship. 
Long before we ever begin with the confession of sins, we are gathering, we are preparing, we are getting our minds and hearts and spiritual selves ready for an encounter with God that day.
When we gather, we do not gather alone.  We gather not only for ourselves, we gather on behalf of those who are not here, on behalf of those who cannot be here.  We have over 30 shut-in members who used to sit in these very pews and your worship becomes their worship.  We have members who are working this morning, people who are at home caring for sick members of their family, we gather on behalf of them as well.  We do not gather alone.
When we gather, we gather with our Christian brothers and sisters who live in far off lands.  We gather in solidarity and with prayer for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.  Their churches, their schools, their hospitals, their homes are all broken.  We gather on THEIR behalf.  We gather with THEIR prayers and THEIR hopes and THEIR dreams forefront in our minds and hearts.
We do not gather alone.  We gather with all the saints and angels in heaven and on earth, with all who desire to worship God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  With everyone, we lift our voices in praise and thanksgiving for all we have been given and ask God how we might be best used to be God’s loving servants in the world.
The gathering part of our service is designed to help us focus our attention on the purpose for which we have come.  And so, when we come into this room on a Sunday morning, it would be good for each of us to kneel or sit in our pew, bow our heads and say a prayer that God’s Spirit will guide our worship for the day, to help us calm our troubled spirit, to open our hearts to God’s Holy Word, and to prepare our lives for Christ’s living presence given to us in the meal.  If it would help you, come up and dip your hand in the font, to remind you of how close you are to God.
As we begin the service, Al Spotts and other musicians help us focus with a quiet meditation.  And then, we confess our sins.  We confess our sins because, as Christians, we know we are sinners.  We know there are things we have done and things we have NOT done that have caused separation between us and God, and tension between us and others. 
We begin our worship to “come clean” with God and “clean” with others.  We acknowledge we have not been all that we want or need to be.  And that’s why we begin our liturgy, our worship, with the confession of sins.   Sometimes we begin with a Thanksgiving for Baptism but I’ll save that explanation for another day.
Our confession doesn’t have to be worded in the way it is our hymnal.  Here’s an example of a prayer of confession from a church in Brooklyn, New York:
Congregation:            “Merciful God, 
We confess we have sinned against you and our neighbor.
                        We have not done right by you. 
We have not done right by other people.
We are sorry.
We want to change.
Remember us Jesus.
Have mercy and forgive us.
From now on, may we try to do what you want
To the glory of your name.  Amen. 
Presider:
                        It’s cool!  God forgives you.
                        It’s a done deal.
                                                            (From the Hip Hop Prayer Book,  [citation?])
 
            Now, some of us today would like to use a confession like this.  Many others would not.  With whatever words we choose, the important thing is to confess our sin and to receive the absolution, the actual forgiveness at the end.
            The absolution are the words I say at the end of the confession, “In the mercy of almighty God, Jesus Christ was given to die for us, and for his sake God forgives us all our sins.  As a called and ordained minister of the church of Christ, and by his authority, I therefore declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins.” 
            Absolution is what bridges the gap between us and God.  Absolution is what re-connects us with others.  Absolution makes reconciliation possible once again.
And then we sing.  We sing a Kyrie and a Hymn of Praise.  The songs we sing during the GATHERING change according to the season, and in fact, can be changed even more often than that.  In our GATHERING, we could sing a whole lot of songs, as long as they help us focus our attention on what’s coming later.  In some congregations they spend a lot of time singing what is called PRAISE MUSIC.  We could do that, or, we could sing lots of quiet, reflective songs.  Whatever we do in the GATHERING, the purpose of our Gathering is to get us ready for receiving the Word and the Meal.
            We conclude the Gathering portion with a prayer, a prayer that seeks to sum up the day’s theme and, yes, give us the focus we need to go farther into the service.
One final comment:  What we bring to worship is what we’ll leave with.  If we bring an open heart, we will leave with a warmed heart.  If we come with an attitude, we will leave with more of an attitude.  Because underneath an attitude we bring to worship is the expectation that someone else needs to change when, in fact, it is ourselves that needs to be open to God’s Spirit.
We GATHER to worship God with people of every tribe and race, with rich and poor, with young and old alike.  We gather to focus on worshipping our Lord and Savior and await God’s Holy Word and Sacred Meal.   AMEN
 

Text:  Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
10 January 2010
Topic:  Worship as Spiritual Formation
 
A blessed new year to one and all!  We have begun a new year, a new decade, and a new way of baptizing in this congregation.   I am standing closer to you, at a lectern next to the baptismal font which has been moved from its original location, because the Word of God and our baptismal promises need to be close to each of us, because the Word of God and our baptismal promises should be foremost and paramount in our hearts and in our daily lives.
In November of last year our synod had visitors from our companion synod in Tanzania.  One of those visitors, Pastor Jonathan Mwamboza, dean and assistant to the bishop for the North Eastern Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania, told of their mission to the Massai people, a semi-nomadic group of herdsman and their families.
He said, “The Maasai have responded to the gospel from Lutherans better than from other groups of missionaries because we have the Lutheran liturgy.  After we share the gospel with them, our liturgy provides the faith formation they need to grow in their Christian faith.”
I was literally stunned by his pronouncement, “The liturgy provides faith formation.”  And yet, when I thought about it, he was absolutely right.  Lutherans, and others who use the forms of the ancient liturgies of the church, have a marvelous resource for not only understanding the Christian faith but a resource for living out of our faith as well.
For the next five weeks, my sermons will be commentaries on our liturgy and reflections on how using the liturgical forms of the Lutheran tradition not only engage us with God’s Holy Word but help shape our spiritual journey.
To assist me in this task, I want you to first look at the extension of your bulletin, the part that says, Order of Worship at the top.  The list you see shows the entire worship as we proceed from the confession of sins to the dismissal.  Look at the underlined portions of that list and see that together, those underlined words make up one entire sentence, “In worship, we gather to hear God’s Word, receive God’s meal, and are sent to share God’s Word.” 
In that one sentence you can see the purpose of our worship.  We gather here and there, in beautiful churches like this one, in store fronts, in cathedrals, and in God’s great outdoors to hear God’s Word, feast on God’s presence in the meal and return to the world from which we have come to share what we have received.   
We come here to listen to God’s Word, to hear it proclaimed and explained in a sermon.  We affirm that Word in our creed and in our prayers with and for one another. 
We come here to eat and drink of God’s holy presence in, with, and under the forms of bread and wine.  In the Lutheran Church, in the meal we call Holy Communion, we believe we receive Christ, the resurrected and powerful presence of Christ.  When we eat and drink of Christ’s body and blood, He enters us and we become Christ’s body in the world.
            After we have heard God’s Word and share in God’s meal, we are sent back home, back to our work place, back to school, back into the world to share what God has given to us, namely, His Holy Presence and the Power of the Holy Spirit.  We are sent from this place to share the challenging and comforting words of the Gospel.
Now, turn with me to the red hymnal, the Evangelical Lutheran Worship book, to page 1154 in the very back of the book.  There you will find a page entitled, Scripture and Worship.  And there you will read in the very first paragraph, “Worship in the Christian assembly is biblical.  From ancient times the church has read publicly from the Old and New Testaments and has drawn upon the scriptures to shape the whole of worship.” 
To illustrate how the Bible is the backbone of our liturgy, following this page, you will find five more pages that detail the biblical references of each part of the service you see printed on your bulletin’s Order of Worship. 
What we do on a Sunday morning in worship is not some random order of events.  It is something that has grown up over thousands of years and has been inspired by the Holy Word of God.
 
We begin our worship with the words, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”  We begin each and every service identifying under whose name and authority we are gathering. 
We gather using the name under which we are baptized.  For it is in baptism that we begin our relationship with God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.  There is no other name under which we gather.  Indeed, for Christians, there is no other name under which we live.
Young children will often ask the question, “Where was God born?”  or “Where does God live?”   or, “Who made God?”  All of these are perfectly good questions and sometime or another, we as parents and grandparents have to give some kind of answer. 
Ultimately, the answer is God is God.  God existed before all of us ever existed.  God lives wherever God wants to live.  And God is everywhere where God wants to be.  But mostly, God lives in us and wants to share our every breathing moment. 
And so, we begin each and every service naming the God in whose name we are gathering and under whose name we live each and every day of our Christian lives.
Someone has asked me what the little red cross stands for in the Confession of Sins on page 94.  It is placed there to remind us that it was on the cross Jesus died and it is by the cross that we live.  Whenever we see that little red cross in the hymnal, we are free to simply remember what the cross of Christ means to each of us, or, we may choose to make the sign of the cross as many of us already do.  There is nothing that says we MUST make the sign of the cross, it is simply indicated to let us know this would be an appropriate time to do so.
When John baptized Jesus, it marked the beginning of his ministry on this earth.  So, too, when we are baptized, as Jameson was today, it marks the beginning of our ministry on earth as well. 
We begin our worship in the name of the Triune God, the name under which we are baptized.  In fact, you are welcome to come up to the font each week and run your hands through the water, to remind you of your baptism, to give you the focus you need to begin your worship. 
Liturgy gives shape and meaning to our faith and life.  Liturgy gives us the focus and the purpose we need in life as we Gather to hear God’s Word, receive God’s Meal, and are then Sent into the world to share what God has given to us.  
Next week, I will be talking about the purpose of our gathering, and what some of our options are  for that portion of our service.  If you want to comment on this sermon, please feel free to talk to me or make suggestions.  AMEN