Glad in God’s House

        Eugene Peterson, a Presbyterian Pastor and author of The Message writes that “One of the afflictions of pastoral work has been to listen, with a straight face, to all the reasons people give for not going to church: ‘My mother made me go when I was little.’  ‘There are too many hypocrites in the church.’  ‘It’s the only day I have to sleep in.’

       “There was a time,” Peterson writes, “when I responded to such statements with simple arguments that exposed them as flimsy excuses.  Then I noticed that it didn’t make any difference. If I showed the inadequacy of one excuse, three more would pop up in its place. So I don’t respond anymore.  I listen (with a straight face) and go home and pray that that person will find the one sufficient reason for going to church, which is God. I go about my work hoping that what I do and say will be usable by the Holy Spirit to create in that person a determination to worship God in a Christian community.”

       Many people have that determination.  They worship God, faithfully and devoutly.  And the reasons they do this are much more compelling and true than the excuses people give for not worshiping.  Psalm 122 is an example of what people of faith do.  They gather to an assigned place and worship their God.

       The first line of the psalm catches many people by surprise or they think it sounds fake.  “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’ But that shouldn’t surprise us.. Almost everyone who worships does so because he or she wants to.

       Now, there are, to be sure, a few temporary coercions – children and even spouses who attend church because another has decided that they must – or who desire to keep peace in the home. But these coercions are short-lived, a few years at most. I know several men who first came here as self-described  “husbands on a leash” who are now joyful and vital parts of the church body.  Most Christian worship is voluntary.

       An excellent way to test our true values is to see what we do when we don’t have to do anything – how we spend our leisure time and how we spend our discretionary money. The test results for worship are impressive. There are more people at worship on any given Sunday than at all the football games or on the golf links or fishing or taking walks in the woods. Worship is the single most popular act in this country next to work –and people have to work. 

       So when we hear the Psalmist say, “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go the house of the Lord,’ we are not listening to the faked enthusiasm of a salesman drumming up attendance at church. We are being reminded of what is typical of most believers in most places at most time.

       Why do we do it? Why is there so much voluntary and faithful worship?

       Well the Psalm singles out three items which were true for ancient Israel and which are true for us today.

       First, worship gives us a workable structure for life. The Psalm says, “ Jerusalem , built as a city which is bound firmly together, to which the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord.”

       When you went to Jerusalem , you encountered the great basics: God created you, God redeems you, God provides for you. In Jerusalem the Jewish believer saw in ritual and heard proclaimed in preaching the powerful truth that God forgives our sins and makes it possible to live without guilt and with purpose. In Jerusalem all the scattered fragments of human experience were brought together in a single whole.

       In Jewish worship all the different tribes came together as a single people. In much the same way, we come this morning from different places. But we are after the same things, saying the same things, doing the same things. With all our differing levels of intelligence and wealth, background and race – in worship we are gathered as one people – the people of the Lord.

       That’s the idea. But how does it live? If your house is like many others, it almost seems that there is a satanic opposition that would keep us from getting to worship at all – or, if we make it, to keep us from showing up in the right frame of mind. It can be hard to come into the Lord’s house with gladness and thanksgiving ten minutes after getting the children ready. In one cartoon a woman says to her husband, “Let’s switch roles today. You get the kids dressed and I’ll sit outside and honk the horn.”

       A woman named Nancy Parsons wrote some words that I’m going to quote at unusual length because she captures many things well.  Parsons writes: “There is nothing glamorous about Sunday morning in our house. The living room is smeared with half read Sunday papers, the kitchen is cluttered with half-empty cereal bowls, and I often feel a twinge of envy toward my unchurched neighbors.

       “Theirs is a Sunday morning of leisurely coffee and the editorial page. Most of my neighbors are non-churchgoing. It is easier to be that. Why, then, is our family different?

       “For one thing my husband and I both grew up in churchgoing families. But even in those days, it would have been easier to stay home. The Sunday mornings of my husband’s and my childhood were no easier that our present pattern. I associate childhood churchgoing with the pain I always got in my side as I ran with my mother and sister from the church office toward the sound of singing.

       “Even then churchgoing wasn’t easy. But regardless of inconvenience – burdened with our audio visual aids and our church school texts, our music, and sometimes cake plates and bean pots – our families went to church.

       “So churchgoing is a habit,” Parsons writes, “brought to our adulthood and our shared life.

       A habit. Yes. But that word can’t bear the responsibility for our present church attendance. We could easily exchange the churchgoing habit for the habit of Sunday-morning self-indulgence.

       “We go to church so we won’t feel guilty? Hardly. We aren’t paying off a heavy conscience. What we feel when we don’t go is an absence.

       “Our relatives are available only on planned-for occasions. Our friends tend to be reflections of ourselves – with similar ages, educations, and interests.

       “Our church, on the other hand, is more diverse -- at its best it is a cross section of people all mixed together and functioning as a Christian community. Our local church, like its individual families, has homely concerns of kitchen and budget. It needs the work and time of those involved – and we sometimes must admit that our church work is a frustrating and tiresome as the chores we are called on to assume at home. But we are bound to that work by the same things that bind families—concern with each other’s welfare.”

       “Now if we valued just the sense of community, a country club or Kiwanis just might adequately serve us. But we view the church – at least most of the time – as an example of functioning Christianity whose values we affirm.

       Parsons writes:  “My husband and I expect the church to reinforce what we try to teach and live at home. If the morals of society seem nebulous, the church at least offers a setting larger than the family where the Christian ethic is practiced and if the church falls short of the mark we share the responsibility to right the balance.

       “The church family reinforces within itself a concern for the spiritual, emotional, and material welfare of its members. Infant baptism is a case in point. I enter very seriously, yet joyfully, into that moment when the minister asks the congregation to share the responsibility for the Christian nurture of a baby.

       “Sometimes in the fellowship hall after a service I will catch sight of a child running, giggling, set free finally from his church-school class, and it will seem just last month that the child was an infant and I was promising to share in the child’s Christian upbringing.

       “I observe the youngster’s happiness with pleasure and am moved to remember the times my husband and I stood at the baptismal and heard at our backs the congregation affirming their responsibility for our children.

       “We moved recently,” Parsons concludes, “and in a new state, in a new town, have started to find our way into another church family. We miss our old one – familiar faces and friends with whom our lives were involved.

       “After the services, some people stop to grip our hands, ask our names, and offer theirs. Strange faces and names blur, but that doesn’t matter.  The important thing is we are being made welcome. Even in a new place, we have a sense of being home.”

       The second reason the Psalm holds up for why people keep returning to worship is that worship nurtures our need to be in relationship with God. Worship is the place where we obey the command to praise God: “As was decreed for Israel , to give thanks to the name of the Lord.” That command runs right down the center of all Christian worship. A decree -- a word telling us what we ought to do.  And what we ought to do is praise.  When we praise we function at the center.  We are in touch with the basic, core reality of our being.

       But sometimes we don’t feel like it.  So we say, “It would be dishonest for me to go to worship and praise God when I don’t feel it. I would be a hypocrite.”

       But the Psalm says, “I don’t care whether you feel it or not: as was decreed, ‘Give thanks to the name of the Lord.’”

       Christians worship because they want to, not because they are forced to. But, get this, this does not mean that we always worship because we feel like it. Feelings are great liars.  If Christians only worshiped when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas, but are often unreliable in matters of faith.

       We live in what one writer has called the “age of sensation.”  We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different.  God says that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting.  We can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act which develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God which is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured.’

       John White writes: “The first thing you must learn is that God wants fellowship with you and that He is drawing you to Himself. He is pursuing you. He is waiting to entrap you into an encounter with Himself. He does not do so because He needs you but because you need Him. His is the tenderness of a mother over a fretful infant. To worship is to enter into the tabernacle where He waits and let him speak with you. For He is there. And He is speaking.”

       That is the pure motivation for worship – not a grim sense of duty but expecting God Himself to meet us and to enter into relationship with us. That is what worship is all about. It is not based on obligation even though it is an obligation. It is not based on the fact that it works and is practical and helps us live daily life better – even though that’s true.  Our worship is made glorious when we realize that it is a personal audience for you and for me with the creator of the cosmos, the King of kings and the Lord of lords.

       The third reason we engage in regular worship is that in worship our attention is centered on the word of God. Our Psalm describes worship as the place where “thrones for judgment were set, the thrones of the house of David.” The biblical word judgment means “The decisive word by which God straightens things our and puts things right.”

       God wants us to hear His voice.  God wants to show Himself to us. God wants us to reflect His own nature. And it is presumptuous for us to think that that can happen on an occasional basis.

       So the first key to good worship is to attend worship on a regular basis. You cannot possible understand any depth of what God’s word is trying to communicate unless there is continuity. It takes more than a casual catch-as-catch-can attendance to become familiar enough with the service to allow that service to be a vehicle to lead you into a deeper experience of worship.

       Some time ago I read an article about actress Melanie Griffith and her marriage to Don Johnson. It wasn’t in the “Enquirer.”   It was in a real newspaper.

       Among other things, Griffith talked about the religious nurture of her children. She said, “I know we ought to go to church. I lie in bed on Sunday morning and think: ‘we ought to go to church today.’ But we don’t do it. And then, when we do take the children at Christmas and Easter, they don’t get the point anyway.”

       What a surprise – that Griffith ’s children can’t grasp the creator of the universe in two hours a year.

       Entertainers do not need continuity.  But no teacher that I know would condone sporadic attendance in a classroom and expect a student to grasp the subject.  Attend a course in higher mathematics twice a year and see how much you learn – and God is much bigger, much deeper, much more complex than mathematics.

       The rule of thumb for the average pastor is that it takes one hour of desk time for every minute that a pastor stands in the pulpit.  But what about the person who quickly reads the comics and the sports page before church, enters the service of worship in a rush and then seeks to deal with some of life’s most profound questions? It’s real hard to do. It’s hard to shift gears that quickly. We need to get enough rest the night before.  We need to prepare ourselves in prayer before we come to worship if we hope to receive all that God wants us to receive.

       We so desperately need to receive. This week I was talking to some of the men in our church. They described some of the temptations and pressures they face out in the business community – pressures and temptations many of you know very well. And they shared how vital it is to step back, to go aside with God on Sunday morning, and get refocused.

       God wants to speak to you here, in this place.

       The word of God is everywhere in worship. In the call to worship, in the benediction, in the scripture lessons and in the sermon. The hymns and praise songs are all to a greater or lesser extent paraphrases of scripture. Every time we worship our minds are focused and our memories refreshed with the word of God. We learn what God says, what He has decided, the ways He is working out our salvation.

       Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God – it whets our appetite.  Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship – it deepens.  It overflows the hour and touches our whole week. Our everyday needs are changed by worship. We no longer live from hand to mouth – scrambling through the rat race to make the best we can out of a bad situation. We discover instead the dignity of creatures made in the image of God. We hear what God says – what He says to us about our world and our place in it. Worship is the place where our attention is centered on these personal and decisive words of God.

       Two men were talking about worship. One of them said, “I used to go to worship but I stopped when I realized that, over the years, I have heard hundreds of sermons – and that of all those sermons I can only really remember two or three of them.

       His friend said, “I know exactly what you mean. Over the years I have eaten a whole lot of meals – three squares a day. And, you know, I can only remember a few of those meals. I can’t even remember what I ate last Sunday. Still, I have the distinct impression that without those means, I would have starved to death years ago.”