Chris Taylor’s Sermon –3/8/09
Living Well
Psalm 119:1-8
Luke 3:7-14
Years ago Bonnie and I visited one of the fastest growing churches in Colorado. The sanctuary was packed, and there was a kind of excited buzz filling the space; people were clearly glad to be there, and glad to be seeing each other. There was also a sense of anticipation; a sense that something special was about to happen.
This was a new church, and the music was contemporary. That was no great surprise to us. What did surprise us was the quality. These weren’t professionals up there. They had clearly rehearsed, but their leadership came nowhere near the level of a performance. What they did bring was their enthusiasm and dedication.
I would say the same of the sermon. From a technical perspective it wasn’t all that great – drawing maybe a B in a seminary classroom. There were grammatical errors. The delivery was off; too strident and too loud. And the content wasn’t all that deep, although there were a couple of nice illustrations.
So why was the church growing? Why was it that almost everyone who came through those doors was so excited to be there?
The answer is important. So many services in so many churches today feel flat and lifeless, anything but exciting. What’s missing? Where have we gone wrong? It should be obvious that the way we answer that question is going to have an enormous impact on our life together because few things so shape our ministry and witness as the kind of worship we offer. Our second lesson this morning points us in the right direction.
“In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee. . . “ Luke wants us to understand up front that the ministries of both John the Baptist and Jesus are part of history. They really happened; every bit as real as the Battle of Gettysburg or day we landed a man upon the moon. Tiberius succeeded Augustus as Emperor in 14 CE. That would place the Baptist’s ministry right around the year 28.
In 28 CE John the Baptist began proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. This was the fulfillment, as Luke points out, of Isaiah’s prophecy hundreds of years before: “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” John’s baptism wasn’t an end in itself, but a way for people to prepare for the coming Messiah. And he makes it clear that real repentance involves far more than simply a verbal acknowledgement. Real repentance involves change: tangible, physical change that will be reflected in our behavior. “Bear fruits” he says, “worthy of repentance.”
But it is the response to John’s message that captures our attention, this morning. That’s where we want to focus. We find two very difference responses in this third chapter. On the one hand there is the response of the crowd, “What then should be do?” These people heard John’s message, and they embraced it. “We want to be prepared,” they are saying in effect. “We want to bear this fruit you’re talking about. What should we do?”
On the other hand we find Herod. Herod, too, heard John’s message, but unlike the crowd he didn’t embrace it. He wanted nothing to do with it. In fact, he used his power to have the Baptist silenced. He had John arrested and imprisoned and ultimately beheaded.
Two very different ways to respond to God’s Word. The crowd submitted. Herod did just the opposite. Which of the two do you think was blessed? Which one opened themselves to the joy and light of God’s presence?
My point this morning is that every time we come into this space we are confronted with a choice; a choice that looks a lot like the one that faced Herod and the crowd. We can make the decision consciously or unconsciously, but every week we are going to stand with either Herod or the Word. It all comes down to this: are we here to please God in worship, or does worship exist in order to please us?
Our Session and staff have been working through Robert Schnase’s book, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations. Schnase, a bishop in the United Methodist Church, believes that there are five practices that separate healthy, vital congregations from all the rest. They are: Radical Hospitality, Passionate Worship, Intentional Faith Development, Risk-Taking Mission and Service, and Extravagant Generosity.
Passionate worship seems like a no-brainer. After all, we don’t come on a Sunday morning looking to be bored. What we are looking for, rather, is something that is authentic and alive; a worship experience that in Schnase’s words “God uses . . . to transform lives, heal wounded souls, renew hope, shape decisions, provoke change, inspire compassion, and bind people to one another.”
The question is how we find it. The first place that most of us look is to the leadership – we simply assume that the key lies with the preaching and the music. Certainly, they are part of the answer. Nothing will undermine worship more quickly than a sloppy sermon or music that is ill-prepared, or a poor match to a congregation’s culture.
But leadership is only part of the answer. The other part lies with the congregation itself. This is the part we tend to forget. This is the lesson that Herod and that crowd have to offer. Today when we take our seat at the beginning of worship, what happens? We tend to lean back and wait. Without even thinking about it, we enter into a certain mindset – the same mindset we bring to a movie theater or a television show. It is almost as if we’ve been conditioned: sit down and boom; “Entertain me.” The surest sign? We begin to evaluate. As Schnase puts it,
We rate the sermon, the time for children, the prayers, and the music according to some internal scale. “How was the service?” Well, the sermon was too long, the piano too loud, the children too noisy, and the room too cold.” Our attention turns to the imperfections, mispronunciations, missed cues, discordant sounds, personal discomforts, and the weaknesses of the leaders and the flaws of fellow worshipers.
This is exactly what Herod did. It is why he missed God’s blessing and became instead a model for all the ages of what not to do. He wasn’t there to hear what God might have to say to him. He wanted to be appeased, affirmed, entertained. He thought the message should conform to him; that it should match his standards of what was right and good and acceptable.
It wasn’t that John’s message was somehow more palatable to the crowds. He calls them a “brood of vipers.” And it wasn’t as if he preached condemnation to one and blessing to the other. “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees;” he says, “every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” No, he was an equal opportunity insulter; equally obnoxious in both settings.
The difference wasn’t in John. The difference was in those who heard. The crowd heard the words and opened their lives to it. Herod turned away. The crowds were willing to be challenged. Herod was looking for what he already believed.
What are we looking for when we gather on a Sunday morning? What exactly is it that constitutes a great service or a great sermon in our minds? The message of Herod and of that crowd is that real worship has nothing to do with a performance. Real worship, rather, has everything to do with us. We aren’t here to be entertained. We are here to offer our lives as a living sacrifice of adoration and of praise.
An amazing thing happened in that service back in Colorado so many years ago. You may have connected the dots by now and realized that my own attitude was all wrong as I sat there. I wasn’t there to worship. I was there to evaluate and to learn: a professional liability for just about any pastor. But in spite of that I realized very quickly that there was something special going on; an almost palpable sense of God’s presence and of lives that were being touched and changed. People left that service feeling uplifted and encouraged.
Did the leadership have a part in all that? Absolutely. It never would have happened without them. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t about great sermons or great music in the sense of a performance. What they did was draw the congregation forward through their own sense of worship. Great worship, in other words, isn’t just about the leadership. That’s what Herod and what that crowd have to reach us. Great worship, rather, begins with us.
Why did Herod miss the blessing? He missed it because in all his power he had this crazy idea that worship should conform to him instead of the other way around. Well, God has given us that very same power. There is nothing to prevent us from coming in here Sunday after Sunday and assuming that worship is all about us. We can assume the right of Kings and sit in judgment on all that happens here. . .
Or we can make the choice to let that power go – the choice, as that crowd did to long ago, to focus instead on God and to submit to God, and to offer ourselves in adoration and in praise to God. It will come as no surprise that there is only one way to the blessings that God offers here. The surprise, rather, is that it lies not with the power of a King, but in the adoration of a child.