"Spiritual Worth-ship"

Our second reading this morning is from 1 Chronicles chapter 25. It is about worship in ancient Israel, but it’s a much less lively passage than Psalm 150 which we both read and sang a few moments ago. I will read the second passage, Amos 5:21-24, during the brief words I want to share with you this morning.

1 Chronicles 25 is a passage about the organization of worship in ancient Israel. The period is about 925 years or so before the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ at about the time when King David wanted to build the temple for God in Jerusalem, but God said, "You will not build the temple but your son Solomon will build the temple." While David would not construct the physical temple himself, he wanted to make sure that the organization for the temple was well set up and established before his death, and so chapters 24 and 25 about the organization of worship in ancient Israel.

Since today is Pentecost Sunday, a day in which we celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit to the church, I’d like to share with you a short word about the work of the Holy Spirit; and in particular, a word about the work of the Holy Spirit in the realm of worship. Worship in ancient Israel was a highly organized affair. It was a highly organized business. Everyone had their role. The worshiper had his or her role, bringing a sacrifice to God; and the sacrifice was clearly defined – the right kind, at the right time, at the right place. The priests had their role in worship too, in offering sacrifices. They had to be ritually pure, they had to wear the right kinds of garments. They had to do things at the right time in the right way and in the right place. And so too the Levites, who were the choir members, and others who were selected (as in our passage) to lead the congregation gathered there for worship in worship with music and with all kinds of instruments. And all of this was the case because in ancient Israel worship was no small thing. It had to be conducted according to the very jot and tittle of the law. And, in particular, it was no small thing for King David, who himself was a hymn-writer and a musician. This was close to his heart, the worship of the living God, whether in the tabernacle or the temple, or wherever it was being held at that particular time.

You remember his life as a poet, the author of many of our psalms and the inspirer of other writers. Some of the psalms say that they are psalms of "Asaph," whose name appears among the names of those I just read, as one responsible to lead worship in the temple. David was the writer of psalms, poems, hymns and the inspirer of those who would write them after him, and who, in David’s name, would gather the 150 psalms that we have in the Book of Psalms in our Bible.

And not only did he write, he played music as well.

Some of you remember a story of David in his early life when he was a shepherd boy, coming to King Saul at a time when Saul was blue, when he was depressed, when he was down, and he knew that he needed music to soothe him. He couldn’t turn on the stereo, he couldn’t turn to his favorite channel. He sent some servants out to find somebody who could play the lyre for him and David was the one who played and brought peace to Saul’s harried life, and soothed away his worries. David knew the power of music to play to the emotions and to open up the heart of human beings to the living God.

He understood hymns, he understood music, he also understood the need for organization: that if worship was to be more than just one on one, -- David and King Saul -- but a whole group of people coming before the living God to hear music that would stir up their hearts and their minds and lift them up to God, then it would take good organization to do.

I trust that here in our congregation, we have done and we are doing that. Many of you know that our director of music has a gift from God’s Spirit in music, in voice, in song, in conducting. You may or may not know she also has a gift as an organizer: as an organizer par excellence. And without that, none of the music you hear today could happen. The phone calls it takes to each of our musicians, the setting up that it takes, the discussions of logistics -- who is going where so we don’t trip up too often on other people -- are constant issues in our ministry of music; and Vertrelle knows as well as anybody I know, that all of that has to be done in the background for the event itself to take place. The two go hand in hand; and they are both gifts of God’s Spirit.

For the sake of spontaneity, you must have good order. Without that, you have mere chaos. Not one or the other as gifts of the Spirit, but both. Some people pit them against each other as if spontaneity alone were the Spirit’s work — and we know it’s true, a sense of liveliness certainly can be the Spirit at work. But so often the Spirit cannot work in that way without good order established in the background. And the scriptures are full of this truth: the divine nature and necessity of good order – which is good news for Presbyterians! -- as a working of the Spirit of God.

We see it in Genesis 1, in the beginning, when chaos reigned before creation: the Spirit hovered over the face of the deep, and through the Word of God brought order out of chaos.

In the Dead Sea community near Qumran in Israel: if you have nothing else to do and wanted to read those ancient documents down there, you’d find a great deal about ordering the troops of the armies of the Sons of Light warring against the armies of the Sons of Darkness, getting the troops in exactly the right order. And why? So that the Spirit of God would enter into their midst, because only then would they win all their battles.

In ancient Israel, the Spirit’s work was both spontaneous and orderly, side by side. And that’s the first thing I want to say. Some of you who may not feel you have the Spirit’s presence in your life need to know that the Spirit comes both in spontaneity and in longing for good order.

The second thing I want to say stands in contrast with this and comes from our second second reading, which is in the book of prophet Amos. If in 1 Chronicles, we have the establishing of worship, we have in a sense, in the fifth chapter of Amos almost the very opposite. In Amos chapter 5, a passage written just over 200 years after the heyday of the kingdom of Israel under the reign of David and then under Solomon, Amos inveighs against the people of Israel like this:

Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord. Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light. As if someone fled from a lion and was met by a bear or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall and was bitten by a snake, is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, in gloom with no brightness in it? (There’s some bad news coming here!!) --"I hate," says God, "I despise your festivals and take no delight in your solemn assemblies, even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them and the offerings of the well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your psalms. I will not listen to the melody of your harps, but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an overflowing stream."

What God is saying is simply this — Stop. Stop your worship. If it does not also lead to a change in your life, it doesn’t matter what goes on there. Just stop it. It needs to lead you inward to yourself, it needs to lead you upwards to God, it needs to lead you outwards to others; and when the Spirit is there, that will happen. Without that, it doesn’t matter how joyful we are, spontaneous we are, or how correctly, or "orderly" we do the liturgy from week to week, without that second step, Amos says, it doesn’t add up to anything.

Which brings us back to the word "worship" which originally was formed by the conjunction of two words – "worth" and "ship" – which simply means that in our worship are to "give worth and find worth" in God, in ourselves and in others. And if this does not happen in worth-ship, in worship, then it is not worship! We may go through all the ordered rituals, or we may sing our songs with enthusiasm and spontaneity, but it’s not worship unless God does something else. And that something else is to increase our sense of the worth of God; to increase our sense of our own worth as those who have been called to serve God; and to increase our sense of the worth of others – whom we may not know but on whom God looks down morning, noon and night in love, and whose need God sees.

It’s this transforming power that we should look for and which we should expect as we pray for it, Sunday by Sunday. And the music and the liturgy and the preaching and the communion and the baptism are to be channels of God’s grace to this end – as I trust that they will be today.

Let’s put these two together and use that great verse of scripture to sum it all up, which says, "The joy of the Lord is your strength" (from Nehemiah 8). So that the joy of this day, coming from order and spontaneity, is not lost, but translates into new strength in our lives, to see and act on a new sense of worth in the living God, in ourselves and others. And all of this, the power of the Spirit.