"Spirited Worship"

As some of you know, Matt is doing some continuing education at Columbia seminary last week and next week. Matt knew that he would be here today, but wouldn’t have time to prepare a sermon, so he asked me to do it. Though not a trained preacher, I have been to church enough to know that you can’t have a sermon without a biblical text. The scriptures include several texts that would be obvious choices for a sermon by a musician. These passages provide direction for committed Christian church musicians, and many musicians probably know them by heart, if only because they’ve received for Christmas dozens of mugs, bookmarks, and t-shirts bearing these words. One that sprang to mind as I began to prepare is the section of Ephesians 5 that says “be filled with the Spirit as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, singing and making melody to the Lord in your hearts.” But preaching that seemed sort of unnecessary; I think we already do that pretty well here at Norcross. We gather weekly for worship, during which we sing hymns and songs of all kinds. We already sing more than most churches and have a large and committed music program for a church our size. Norcross Presbyterian seems to be faithfully living out Paul’s instruction.

Another important text is Psalm 150. I’m not going to read the whole thing to you, but one section reads “Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with timbrel and dance; Praise him with sounding cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals! Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!” Unnecessary again. We also do that pretty well here at Norcross. We regularly have piano, organ, choirs, handbells, guitars, drums, electric keyboards, drama, acolytes, videos, and all kinds of things in worship. We seem to have that one down.

The text that I have selected is less obvious, but I think provides us more of a challenge. In Colossians 3, Paul is giving the church in Colossus a long list of suggestions, first on how not to live, and then on how to live and to be the Church in this world.

Colossians 3:12-17

12 As God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. 13 Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. 14 Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. 15 And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Quite a laundry list. Most of these commands are pretty mundane; the stuff of everyday life. But what I find interesting is that Paul includes in his list, “Sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God.” Isn’t that just the stuff for Sunday? Just like the others, this command is subject to Paul’s summation,

23 Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, 24 since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.

A few weeks ago at Montreat, we heard a sermon in which the preacher compared the bread of the communion table to the food we eat every day, and compared physical and spiritual hunger. After I heard that sermon, for several days I thought about the types of hunger in our lives. In a society where many of us have to worry that our health is being destroyed be being OVER-nourished and where many of us have beautiful, lavish homes and fancy cars, do we even know what hunger is? Do we ever hunger, I mean really hunger, for anything? I think many of us do hunger. We hunger to find a deeper meaning to our lives. We hunger to connect to God and one another. We hunger to gather with others and pray for others, and have others pray for us.

Our common worship is intended to satisfy these hungers. As I thought about Norcross, I initially felt a sense of pride. We are already doing our part. We worship faithfully. We pray and sing, proclaim the Word, share in the sacraments. We try imperfectly to be inviting and welcoming to our community. I thought maybe we should just check worship off the list and worry about more pressing problems like hiring a youth director or funding the church budget.

As I thought more about the end of the Colossians passage, I came to be concerned that maybe there’s more to do; that we are called to something deeper than simply planning and attending worship services. Is worship work? Isn’t Sunday our day off, our Sabbath for rest and spiritual renewal. Well, yes and no.

The word “worship” literally means the work of the people. In the early church, before the days of seminaries, ordination tracks, and paid musicians, the people planned and carried out their liturgy themselves. Whatever form their worship took, it was the work of the people. No one could just show up planning to sit and listen the way we would to a movie or a concert today. From the beginning worship was from the people, by the people, for the people. In worship, the community and the community’s spiritual life was of primary importance, not the individual.

But we all know that times have changed. I am a professional church musician and I have read plenty of articles about what it takes to be a “growing church.” Today people expect more. We expect to show up five minutes before the beginning of the service, or five minutes after, and be able to find a comfortable seat in an attractive, climate controlled sanctuary. We expect a nursery to be provided for our children, and we expect other people to put their children in that nursery, if they don’t want to receive our scornful looks. We want to be greeted by professionally executed music, which is of a style remarkably similar to what we have in our CD player, whatever style that is. We expect to hear the word preached from a likable, but also brilliant preacher who is at least decent-looking, married, hasn’t been divorced, and shares our politics. We want to hear a scholarly, yet accessible sermon that contains a great deal of substance, but is expressed in less than 10 or 15 minutes. We expect to be able to find our way through the bulletin and hymnal easily, and not have to participate any more than we want to. We don’t want to be forced into contact with anyone we don’t know, or with anyone we know but don’t like. We want to be inspired by the music, fascinated by the sermon, get the church gossip, and get out in an hour or less. If we don’t get all of this pretty much every Sunday, we know there are a lot of churches out there.

Is that what Paul is talking about? If not, what exactly is the difference?

Though I have decried our lack of focus on community in worship, I think the difference lies in the way we as individuals engage and participate in worship.

I would like to tell you about my Grandmother. My mother’s mother was born in 1928, just before the dustbowl and great depression, in a drafty two-bedroom farmhouse in scorched, dusty western Oklahoma. My grandmother grew up in a older world that few of us can imagine; a world where people scraped a living off the land and daily lived in fear of fire, famine, and flood, knowing that the smallest disaster could lead to complete financial ruin. My grandma told stories of times when her family had virtually nothing to eat for weeks at a time. She told stories of huddling with her four siblings in a tiny, dark attic waiting for ferocious flood waters to recede and other alarming brushes with nature’s fury. She graduated from a tiny rural school with a very limited curriculum. The house she grew up in did not have electricity or running water. Unlike many women of her time, once she was married, my grandmother worked, and worked hard her entire life at the local school cafeteria.

I learned to worship from my Grandmother. My Grandmother babysat me frequently as a child, and I often spent the summers at her house, and had the opportunity to worship with her many times. She never missed worship. She was there on Sundays, and every holiday, and any other special service the church held. However, it wasn’t her exemplary attendance that impressed me. It was the way she participated.

We always arrived early, and then my Grandmother entered a brief period of intense prayer. I don’t know what she prayed about during that time, but as a child I knew it was important. You could just tell. She entered into her prayer posture, and nothing could distract her. I like to think of it like stretching for an athlete. For my grandmother, worship was a serious exercise and required serious preparation.

Now I am not going to walk you through an entire service with Grandma, but I do want to tell you about a couple of specific points.

The first was her stating of the creed and prayers. My Grandma was no actress. She had certainly never had a theatre class and had rarely been to the theatre. Yet every week her statement of the creed had such meaning and conviction that you would swear she was saying it for the first time to a group of people who had no knowledge of Christianity.

The other thing I want to mention was her singing. My Grandmother was not a great singer, in fact by our standards she was a pretty bad singer. She had no musical training, and had never been in a choir. Yet she sang the hymns with meaning and conviction, old or new. For Grandma, church music wasn’t about entertainment or tradition. Church music was about proclaiming faith, praising God, praying, and learning the word.

As I said, my Grandma had no theological or musical training, yet when you were at worship with Grandma, she proclaimed the faith and proclaimed that worship was important. Not only important, but commanded by God and essential to the life of the Church and the individual Christian.

On Sundays, what do your actions proclaim about worship? What do we as a congregation proclaim to those who visit us?

I suppose that because I’m in my 20’s and work in worship and music, I am asked all the time what it takes to get youth and young adults more interested in worship. I think we can debate all day issues like contemporary music and worship times. But I am convinced that what matters most is showing our youth that worship is important through our actions in worship. If you sing passionately, but a little out of tune, someone may joke about it with you afterward, but they know that worship is important to you. Above all else, I believe that teaching our youth by example to participate actively in the church is the most important factor in leading young people into lives committed to worship and the Church.

Next Sunday is my last Sunday here at Norcross Presbyterian. After that I will go and serve a different church, one of many more that I will probably serve during my career as a church musician. Soon enough someone will take over as your music director, one of several music directors you will likely see during your time here at Norcross. How will we remember each other?

I would like to tell you how I will remember you, and then I would like to tell you how I hope you will remember me, though that is certainly up to each of you individually.

The thing that has impressed me most about Norcross is your collective commitment to God and this congregation. For such a small congregation, we do a lot. We have worship, we serve our community, we serve our sick and dying, we have programs for our youth and children. We do all of these things faithfully and well. Many of you have seen the church go through some hard times, but you have never given up. Many have, but you have not. This commitment has been played out in the music program. I have never had a group of musicians who were so committed to doing the work we need to do. Many church choir members see choir as primarily a social group, and shy away from the real work the church needs the choir to do. Not at Norcross. We always enjoy fellowship together, but we are primarily a group of committed musicians ready to get the job done. I will remember that and hold it as a standard for groups I work with in the future.

As for me, I hope you will remember that I have lived out what I learned from my Grandma. I think worship is very important, and try to show that every Sunday. I hope you remember me as a good musician, but more than that I hope you remember that I tried to apply all of the musical skill that I have every Sunday and tried to make every service inspiring and memorable. If you have been inspired by anything that I have done, I hope you have not been inspired not to go out and take piano lessons or take more interest in classical music, but to show up on Sundays and worship with gusto or maybe join the choir even though you don’t have the greatest voice.

I promise you that when you begin to worship with more commitment and energy, you will reap the rewards. Remember those hungers I talked about earlier? I believe those hungers are satisfied in worship, but only if we are truly engaged and active. For it is here, as we gather around the word and the sacraments, that we are able to focus our time and energy on connecting with God in a way we can’t do elsewhere. Here, as we gather, we connect with one another and pray for each other, and know that we find a community that will gather around us in any situation. When I am gone in a few weeks, we will still gather together. As you gather here in this place, you will continue to gather with me, because when you gather here you gather with the entire Church around the world. Not only that, you will continue to gather with my Grandmother, and you grandparents, and your great-grandparents, and all the saints that have walked before us.

Isn’t that worth staying awake for on Sunday mornings?