4/21/68

Scripture: read John 4: 3-24.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; it gathers to a greatness.” So runs a few line from a poet’s pen -- that of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

And Theodore Ferris, discussing the same theme, has written: “Certainly, some time during the week, you saw or heard things that were incredibly beautiful. They are like the dividends of life. I never cease to wonder at them, and nothing in my case makes me more conscious of the presence of God than they do. The necessities of life in themselves are wonderful and an indication of God’s provident care, but the extravagances of God are the things that come over you like waves of feeling and make you realize his presence. The sun is a necessity, but the splendor of the sunset is just thrown in for the joy and beauty of it! It is like banners that barely hide the presence of God.”

Yesterday, a delegation of us from this church joined others from churches of the Northwest Wisconsin Association of the United Church of Christ at Eau Claire for a session of business, inspiration and discussion. The morning meeting was a single assembly. The afternoon was given over to separate discussion groups in a Lay Council Assembly. Moderators and deacons met in one group; Women’s Group officers in another, Treasurers and trustees in a third; Christian Education Committee people in a fourth group, and ministers in yet another.

The day began and ended with brief acts of worship. Presiding at the organ was a young man who obviously loved the instrument and knew what it could do at lifting the hearts of people. The singing of a couple of hymns was sheer inspiration. The staff ministers of the host church led us into the presence of God where we dwelt for those moments in trust and confidence.

But worship is not always just beauty and joyous inspiration. Sometimes the awareness of God’s presence comes in the tough experiences. Perhaps, during the past week, you had something to do that you thought, quite honestly and frankly, you could not do. You shrank from it; you thought it was beyond your power. When the time came, you met the challenge and did what you must. What is the source of that extra energy that comes when we need it? It is the presence of God in man’s life.

The things you have enjoyed this week, the zest with which you have done what you loved to do; the resources with which to meet hard testings --- are not these signs of the presence of God? We have come to church here today to worship God. This is the time, this is the place, where we choose, by purpose or design, to meet God. And it constitutes a witness to God and to others, as well as to ourselves, that we place great emphasis on our awareness of the Creator-Father.

Worship is something to experience. It is something to think about as well. In hundreds of thousands of churches today in this land alone, and in many more in other countries, men and women and children lift hearts and voices in praise and petition and dedication to the Eternal.

In plain meeting-houses, Quakers meet for worship in silence. And no one speaks, until someone is moved by a real concern to share an understanding, an observation, a problem, a dedication with the others in the room.

In lovely cathedrals, people with a desire for liturgical color and pageantry worship in pomp and ceremony. In poor and isolated villages, in rich and favored suburbs, in industrial centers, in open-country rural meeting homes, people assemble to worship God, as their training, preference and conscience leads them to do.

In some lands it is illegal for people to worship God as their conscience leads them. Yet even there some gather in secret defiance of their law, and in danger of persecution and suffering.

Everywhere, men turn aside from ordinary pursuits in a quest for something more than their ordinary living brings to them. They come into the assembly of worship for an experience that can not be fully achieved in solitude; for an enrichment that is found beyond the common life.

When we come into the house of worship, we expect to find God. The architecture, the arrangements, the appointments are planned to help in bringing us to the presence of God. Our own attitude brings us into the Holy Presence, and helps others to come into the Presence. Or, perhaps, some of those things are perverse or poor enough to hinder us and others in the approach.

We worship God who is, and who has always been, and will be forever, unchanged and unchanging. We worship “in spirit and in truth.” Our understanding of God changes with our growth and experience. But He exists, and existed, and will exist, perfect and unchanging. He is not made of our words or imaginings. He is not formed by muted words or holy acts, nor by skilled or artistic hands. Before the Scriptures, which point toward him, were written, He was Creator of the heavens and the earth. He inspired the singers and psalm writers. He stirred the souls of prophets.

Above all else, he is the giver of our Lord, Jesus Christ -- father of this His Son and father of each one of us.

It is written in the book of Ephesians: “God who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you are saved) and raised us up with him and made us sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God -- not because of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship.” [Ephesians 2: 4-10a].

We worship our Creator and Sustainer, and this road of worship is the road to reality.

What, then, is worship? Essentially, worship is courtesy or reverence paid toward merit, to excellence of character; it is praise and honor given to that which is eminently deserving of reverence. The word “worship” comes from two words, or parts of words -- “worth” and “ship”, “worthship” -- the reverence due to worth.

Worship celebrates that which is desirable, valuable, useful in the most excellent sense. It elevates that which is excellent, virtuous, of high repute, of the noblest dignity and worth.

Worship has been going on for a long time. In the church, forms of praise and prayer have been used, refined, passed on by devoted souls through many centuries. Some ceremonies may be a sort of poetry of devotion, a harmony of words and deeds done together to express esteem for God, who is highest and best. And these ceremonies, if they are to be used, in honest understanding and sincerity, can be a means of grace, even if crudely done. If they are not understood, or if they are mere rote repetitions, they become nothing more than superstitious attempts at magic.

The object of worship is God. God is He whom we know in numerous ways; but best-illumined in Jesus Christ who lived in history, in our earth of hope and sorrow, bore the infirmities of the body and testings of spirit that we must bear; who was done to death on a cross by sinful folk like ourselves; whom God has raised in eternal life just as He promises eternal life to all whose faith fails not. God is the object of our worship.

The subject of worship is yourself, and myself. We worship God by the exercise of our own free will and intention. We could choose never to worship; never to assemble ourselves with others of like faith and hope, never to give reverence or honor to Him who is our creator and redeemer. We could decide never to recognize noblest virtue, highest excellence, most eminent dignity and worth. We are aware that we have this sort of “freedom of neglect,” and (to our loss) we sometimes exercise it.

We are aware that nearly half the people of this land in which we live never really open their hearts to him who said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” They never join with others joyfully declaring: “O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good; for his mercy endureth forever.”

Worship is a positive act of service to God. It is well to pause and emphasize this point in our thinking; for there are some theologies which hold that God is so perfect and so remote from our mundane existence that He needs nothing that we can do for Him. Worship is something that we can give, or withhold. Christian assembly, on the Lord’s day, and at some other times as well, is called a “service of worship” because it represents something done for God. The Lord of the universe is greater, and His kingdom is wider and richer, because we worship here.

Does not each father and mother among our families have some satisfying share in the accomplishments, the achievements, the honors and the service, of the sons and daughters of the family? And are parents not similarly burdened by the perversities, the neglects, and the wrongs of their children? Surely it must be so with God the Father. We do serve Him, to His greater glory and in His greater kingdom, when we worship him in heart and hand, in attitude and achievement, in spirit and in truth.

And each of us has his own contribution to make. Each individual is unique. In all history there has never been another “you”; in all the future there will never be another precise you, with exactly the same personality, the same memories, the same identical judgments, the same thoughts, needs, hopes, and dreams and visions which each of you possesses.

You alone can decide whether to engage your whole unique personality in service to God; in the service of worship; in the dedication of a life; in a steward’s share of time and talent and treasure.

You can determine, and you alone, whether to make God richer in His world, or poorer in the earth, by giving the worship which is properly His to receive and properly yours to give. This does not mean that you nor I are master of our own fate. I may be a kind of corporal or sergeant to my soul, but I am not the captain! I can not save myself ultimately, nor can you save yourself ultimately. But surely we can give God’s grace an opportunity to save us in our need, to create in us the excellence which we adore in worship. You must choose; I must choose; no one else can do it for any one of us, but himself. You choose each Sunday.

Of course, we have a never-ceasing need to give ourselves most wholeheartedly in worship. Not only does God need it. We need it. Our values; our concepts of the good, the true and beautiful; our ideas of excellence, of virtue, dignity and honor suffer a constant corrupting bombardment. Cynicism, vulgarity, ignoble opportunities, temptations toward compromise with wrong, resurgence of ignorance --- these, and much more, drag down and degrade. We deplore, and sometimes decry the cheap, the vulgar, the sordid, the ignoble as we become aware of it, or have it thrust at our unawareness by printed page, radio amplifier, television screen, or cheap society.

But, after all, it is not alone the fault of the operators of radio, television, the press, if we have an overdose of ball games, western yarns, stories of violence and even souped up revivals rather than thought-provoking and understanding-kindling presentations of meetings, of government debates, or church assemblies, or lectures on science, or discussions of great books, or presentations of really artistic art and drama. Is it not the fault of all of us who “take in” what comes; who whet our appetites on the cheap or vulgar, or shallow, or the out-of-balance emphasis without letting our better wants be known? And if we are satisfied or complacent about the cheap and the raucous, isn’t it because we have not really learned to worship God in the “beauty of holiness?”

God is in history and it is our self-directed duty to stand regularly before the judgment of his holy majesty, to be measured by Him who is high and lifted up, to repent of our vulgarity and sin and cheapness, to be cleansed by His forgiveness.

(1) Worship is praise, deference, adoration, homage given to the ultimate object of our respect. (2) It is confession of unworthiness as seen in Isaiah’s utterance: “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.” [Isaiah 6: 5]. (3) Worship is offering repentance for sin, repentance before God for alienation from that which is the most high. (4) Worship is also the experience of forgiveness. In the “picture-language” of Isaiah it is the angel with the searing, live coal from the altar fire, with which he touches the unclean mouth and says: “Lo this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away and thy sin is forgiven.” [Isaiah 6: 7].

(5) Worship is witness; it answers the question, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for me?” by saying, “Here am I, send me.” It may even send us forth to prophesy in places and times of wickedness. For worship may issue in a deepening stewardship of time and talent and treasure -- of all the abilities we have or of which we may become possessed. (6) And worship is triumph: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” [Isaiah 9: 2].

A whole world that now dwells in the constantly-threatening shadow of moral and physical death by nuclear fission needs to rediscover the searching, frightening, comforting discipline of worship. We need the constant rediscovery of God as the vital experience of living faith.

This need not sound formidable, nor be formidable, if we can discern that worship is fundamentally a meeting of person with person; your person with the person of God. You and I encountering the ultimate person; the congregation earnestly bowing in the presence of the Most High.

We find God in the weekly service of worship. We may find ourselves closest in the service of communion as we take the Lord’s Supper to our comfort in holy joy. And we go out, satisfied, corrected in direction, renewed in dedication, with willing ability to serve God in serving His purposes and His people.

Each week we find that this is our place -- a house architecturally planned for worship; and this is the time -- a day set aside for worship; and this is the attitude -- the expectation of His presence.

And even the sorely troubled soul on a sorrowful Emmaus Road, finds that God, in Christ, is with him bringing hope and peace and renewal.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, April 21, 1968

Also in Wisconsin Rapids, November 2, 1958.