Holy Moments

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

John 4:19-24; Exodus 8:1-15

July 7/8, 2012 • Portage First UMC

In a garden, in the middle of the bustling city of Jerusalem, in between an alley and a city bus station, groups like ours gathered under the shade of the tall trees. Quietly, we sang, we prayed, we listened to the reading of the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and we shared in the bread and the wine of communion. Outdoors, in the middle of the city, near an empty tomb, with a group of twenty-six tourists from America…is that passionate worship?

In another location in the same city, below the current street level, we sat around a stone called the Lithostratus—a word that literally means “stone pavement.” Once, a Roman fortress stood right by that place, and it was somewhere along this ancient Roman street that Jesus was beaten and mocked, just outside the Antonia Fortress, where Pilate stayed when he was in town. We talked about the excavation, and the meaning of this place, and then we sat in silence for many minutes. Silence and personal reflection, underneath the city…is that passionate worship?

Out in the desert, near the place where Jesus would have been baptized by John the Baptist, we gathered along the shores of the Jordan River, literally with the country of Jordan only a few feet away on the other side of the river. Many in our group had asked to have a reaffirmation of their baptismal vows at this place, and as each one stepped into the water to be immersed, there were tears and laughter, applause and smiles…is that passionate worship?

In Bethlehem, we stood in a hot, humid line to be able to touch the spot where, tradition holds, Jesus was born, but we had ended up in the Church of the Nativity on a day when many others also wanted to be in that same spot, and though we were out of the sun, we were inside a building that held the heat very well. On top of that, the line was stopped a couple of times by processions, a line of worshippers with incense and candles, making their way to the altar of the church. Processions and incense, touching a silver star that marks the place of Jesus’ birth…is that passionate worship?

Underneath the traditional rock of Calvary there is a small cave, not visited as often as the chapel on the top. Few know the cave is there, but it can, sometimes, give you an uninterrupted chance to touch the mountain where Jesus was crucified. It can be a place of quiet prayer, or it can be a place of loud tour guides and picture-happy tourists. Pastor Chris Nunley told me that, the last time he had been in that cave, he was struck by that contrast as, in the midst of those tour guides, he spied a woman laying prostrate on the ground, weeping as she thought about and prayed about what Jesus had done for her in that place. Tears and desperation…is that passionate worship?

Well, as you can tell, during our journey in the Holy Land last month, we experienced different forms of worship in many different settings. We smelled incense, sat in ornate churches and simple chapels, used candles, processions, even singing on a tour bus. Different forms, different settings—about the only thing we didn’t do was sit in a pew and have a formal order of worship. So which of these are passionate worship? Well, they all are because worship is not defined by the style or the setting or the liturgy. Worship is a matter of the heart finding its way into holy moments with God. And that we did, in more ways than I can count, during our pilgrimage through the places Jesus walked.

This evening/morning, we are continuing our series of sermons for the month of July on the “Five Practices of Fruitful Living.” We’ve talked these five practices as our church’s values for a number of years now, and we’ve tended to think about them and talk about them in terms of how they define us as a church, as a group. But these same five practices can also enable us to grow more deeply in our own faith and our relationship with Jesus. Last week, Pastor Deb got us started thinking about radical hospitality not just as reaching out to others and making them feel welcome (which is certainly a huge part of who we must be as a church) but also of being open to God, of accepting the truth that we are accepted, that God wants to live and work in our lives. So radical hospitality is our first practice—making room for God and making room for others. Once we’ve allowed God to be active in our lives, our response to that action, that movement is to worship. Passionate worship is our chance to love God with our whole hearts, souls, minds, and strength (cf. Mark 12:30). Passionate worship is an act of gratitude for all God has done for us. It’s meant to connect us to God in every area of life (cf. Schnase, Five Practices of Fruitful Living, pg. 45).

Jesus once talked with a woman about worship. In fact, there by a water well, Jesus shared what has been called “the most important teaching on worship in the entire New Testament” (Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, pg. 210). Yet, the conversation didn’t start out focusing on worship. Jesus met this woman while waiting on his disciples to come back from town. Actually, many commentators think Jesus took this journey through Samaria just to meet this woman. Normally, a good Jew didn’t walk through Samaria; you would walk around it so you wouldn’t have to interact with these half-breeds, these unclean low-class people. But Jesus, the text says, is sitting on the well, on top of the stone that kept the well clean, so when this woman comes to get water, if she’s going to be successful, she’s going to have to get him to move (Bailey 201-202). When she approaches, he engages her, challenges her, provokes her to the point where, when he begins to probe her personal life, to ask questions about her moral choices, she does what we would do: she changes the subject. What’s the best way to get away from talking about the morality of your choices in life? Start talking about religion (cf. Wright, John for Everyone, Part One, pg. 45). Start a religious argument. And that’s just what she does in the passage we read this evening/morning.

Specifically, she brings up an ages-old question: what’s the right place to worship? The bitter division between Jews and Samaritans went back centuries, to the time even when the Jewish nation was divided in two after Solomon was king. Solomon’s descendants ruled in the south, and another kingdom was set up in the north. The traditional place of worship, the Temple, was in the south, so to keep the northerners from going south to worship, the northern king set up two other altars at which, he said, worship could be done. When we were in Israel, we saw the remains of one of those altars, in the area of Dan, in the far northern part of the country. After the northern kingdom was destroyed and the survivors began to intermarry, they still chose their own place of worship. In Jesus’ day, there were two competing altars: the Temple in Jerusalem (Mount Zion) and the altar in Samaria (Mount Gerazim). So this woman asks Jesus: which one is right? Where should we worship? And Jesus tells her she’s missed the point. Worship isn’t about a place; worship is about our attitude, our heart. Worship is about how we approach God.

That’s even indicated in the word Jesus uses. The word translated as “worship” means “to bow down,” to show reverence, respect, to bow in honor of someone or something. The same word was used of a dog licking its master’s hand—think about that one for a moment! Worship, then, means to “give worth to, to place something over us.” That’s the image Jesus has in mind here, and behind that image is what the Jewish people had understood about worship for centuries. Way back in Exodus, when the Hebrew people were in slavery in Egypt, the call went out from God for the people to come to the wilderness to worship him. That’s the request Moses makes over and over again to the Pharaoh when he asks for the slaves to be set free. “Let my people go,” God said, “that they may worship me” (8:1). Now the word there is actually a word that means “serve.” “Let my people go that they may serve me” is actually one way this verse is translated in some Bibles. In the Hebrew understanding, there’s a connection between service and worship. Worship is service; service is worship. The two are intertwined. When we serve others, we are worshipping God. When we worship, we’re orienting our lives toward serving God, doing what God asks us to do. Worship is service. Worship is reverence. Worship is not dependent on a place, then. That’s what Jesus says. Nor is worship dependent on a certain order or style or location. “Holy buildings, and holy mountains, are at best signposts to the real thing. If they become substitutes for it, you’re in trouble. That way lies idolatry, the worship of something that isn’t God as if it were” (Wright 46). True worship is a matter of the heart. “The true worshipers,” Jesus says, “will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth” (4:23-24).

If we want to discover the fruitful life, we must learn the practice of holy moments. We must find a place for worship in our lives because there are significant and important things that happen in the life of a Christian when we worship. First of all, worship enables us to “orient” ourselves toward God (Schnase 47). Jesus is trying to help the woman see that. She’s taking the topic of worship and wanting to debate about it. She’s getting caught up in peripherals, unimportant matters. Jesus takes this moment and orients her back toward what is important, what is vital: worship turns us toward God the Father, not toward a specific mountain or building. So we do that in our corporate worship times in a couple of ways. We always have something that calls us to worship; it may be a portion of Scripture or it may be an opening song, or it may be simply someone saying, “It’s time to worship.” A call to worship takes us out of our daily lives and turns us toward something new. And, of course, the times for prayer in our worship are also holy moments when we turn our thoughts, our being toward God. I was reminded, as we sat beneath the city streets of Jerusalem in silence, of what a great need we have for silence in our times of worship. We talk too much, especially when we pray. Jesus warned us against that. He told us, “When you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words” (Matthew 6:22). He also said lengthy prayers by the teachers of the law were made for show, and that such folks would be “punished most severely” (Mark 12:38-40). Don’t be like them, Jesus said. God doesn’t hear us better if we use more words. Silence and prayers orient us toward God and prepare us for worship.

Second, worship opens us up to the spiritual part of life. During the week, we often get distracted, too focused on our to-do list, our finances, our errands, our jobs, our daily living. It’s easy to forget that there is more to life. We miss so much. Think about it this way: when we were in the middle east, we did not speak the native language, or languages. By not knowing Hebrew, or Arabic, we missed out on some of what was said. There were some places we couldn’t communicate because we didn’t know the language. If we were going to fully engage in the culture and fully interact with the people there, we would have needed to take a class or do something to learn the language. In the same way, engaging in the spiritual world is like learning a new language, and we need particular acts of worship to open us toward that new way of thinking and being (cf. Schnase 48). So we have practices like baptism and communion, sacraments which are things we do that represent things happening inside of us. There’s nothing magical that happens to the water or to the bread and juice; they are symbols, part of a new language that helps us, in some mysterious way, to connect to God and to what God is doing in our lives. It’s not the sort of thing you do in your daily life. It’s different Music, too, opens us up in ways that the spoken word cannot. Music connects to us on a deeper level, and I know you remember the songs a lot longer than you remember the sermon! So we sing and we have other types of music that get in our head and often come back to us during the week. I know I’ll wake up a lot of mornings with a song in my head, and that calls me to worship, to prayer, to connect with God. Worship opens us up to a deeper life.

Third, in worship we learn to listen for God with greater intentionality. Bishop Robert Schnase calls worship “a regular appointment with the sacred” (Schnase 49). We could choose, Bishop Schnase says, to spend our Saturdays/Sundays in any number of ways. Many people take this day to work, or to sleep in, or to play sports, or to shop, or to do any number of things. And yet, we choose to come to this place at this time because our relationship with God is important. And just as in any relationship, communication is vital, so in worship, we seek to better be able to hear from God. For Protestants, the primary way that happens in worship is through the Scriptures, both when we hear the Word of God read and when we hear it interpreted. Being people of the book goes back to the very roots of our faith. The Jews were always people of the book. Jesus would have had his early life centered on reading and hearing the Scriptures. We know in his adult life it was his custom to attend worship at the synagogue, where the reading of the word was and is absolutely central. And here in John 4, when he engages the woman at the well, in many ways he’s using images found in the Scriptures to speak with her, guide her, challenge her. In worship, we learn to listen to God through the Scriptures and we find the places where our lives need to grow, to change, to become more like Jesus.

Fourth, worship brings us back to ourselves (Schnase 49-51). Worship reminds us who we are and gives us a vision of who we can be. In the midst of our hurried and harried world, worship grounds us, roots us. I remember, very early in my ministry, visiting a lady in the nursing home, bringing her communion. She didn’t remember much of anything, to be honest. She certainly didn’t know me, because I was new on the staff of the church, working primarily with youth. So I went, and I found her room, and she didn’t seem to be paying any attention during our visit. So, being an impatient person, I decided to just do the communion and get it over with. I asked her if it would be okay to have communion, and she nodded, so I opened up my Book of Worship and began to read the words of the liturgy. At one point, I glanced up at her, and she was reciting the liturgy along with me, every word. We sang a hymn, and she knew every word. And when the time came to receive the bread and the juice, she had a smile on her face that could only be described as radiant. Worship reminded her who she was, even in the midst of a terrible disease that had robbed her of herself. Worship grounds us. It brings us back to ourselves, and allows us a chance to respond to what God is doing in our lives and saying to us. And so we respond in a couple of ways. Sometimes we respond by giving of what we have through the offering. We give back to God a portion of what God has given us. And we respond by acting on something we’ve heard in the sermon. We go to live it out. This Samaritan woman, after her encounter with Jesus, runs back to her village and invites others to come see him. “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did,” she cries out. “Could this be the Messiah?” (4:29). Worship brings us back to ourselves, grounds us, and calls us to be more who God meant us to be.

So that’s a picture of what worship does in and for us, but what do we mean by “passionate” worship? Passionate is sometimes interpreted as having goosebumps, all the warm feelings that go along with being emotionally affected. But that’s not passion. That might be the dinner you had the night before. To be passionate about something means you’ve put your whole self into it. Jesus described it as loving God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength (Mark 12:30). Being passionate means we enter worship with everything we have; we don’t leave anything sitting out in the hallway. We come with eagerness, anticipation, expectation and a yearning for God (Schanse 51). Does that describe you? Or do you come with dread, feelings of obligation, and a sense that you’d rather be most anywhere else? Passionate worship is something we look forward to, something we want to do, a place we want to be. I saw this happen in, of all places, the Cairo airport in the middle of the night. Egypt is a country that is 90% Muslim and 10% Christian. And so we learned, by observation, some things about Islam, and our guide filled in some of our gaps. One thing he told is that the first call to prayer for every faithful Muslim happens at 3:15 a.m. Now, I don’t know about you, but most days at 3:15 a.m., I’m sound asleep. Not so at the Cairo airport. We were about an hour from boarding our plane then, sort of sitting there in a dazed state, half-awake, when a man got up and stood in the corner (presumably facing Mecca) and began a chant, a call to prayer. It was 3:15 a.m. Soon, other men joined him in lines and for the next fifteen minutes, these devout Muslim men prayed as they had been taught. There were other men in the terminal that didn’t join in, but these few were passionate about what they believed. Now, I’m not suggesting we have to pray at 3:15 a.m. in order to be considered passionate. But what did strike me as I sat there and watched is that these men didn’t care whether there were other people around. They were going to be faithful. They were determined to be passionate. And I wondered how many times we are afraid or ashamed of being passionate worshippers. We don’t want people to think we’re crazy, and so we hold back or we hide. Passionate worship is about heart, soul, mind and strength being given over to God, not just in this time of corporate worship, but in every moment of every day.

So how do we live out passionate worship? The first and most obvious answer is that we join together in corporate worship every week. These moments we spend together are holy moments, connecting us with God. It’s something we need every week. It’s something we need for the sake of our soul which gets so beat up the other six days of the week. Bishop Schnase says this: “The path to fruitful living, to discovering the riches of the spiritual life, involves practicing worship seriously and with committed consistency, rather than attending worship haphazardly, infrequently, and without enough consistency to feel at home and confident about worshipping God” (Schnase 52). Now, your pastors are aware that, since Easter, our consistency as a congregation has been off. We’re not attending worship with the same regularity we did just a few months ago, and we’ve been puzzling over that one. What is it that keeps people from worship? When does worship become a lower priority? If you have an answer for your family or for yourself, I’d invite you to e-mail or Facebook private message me or Pastor Deb because we’d like to be able to help if we can. Worship is crucial for our souls, and the first way we express that is in corporate worship.

We also express and experience passionate worship in our daily personal devotions and prayers. It’s countercultural, really, to give up time to read the Bible and pray, and yet I know when I do it, when I set that time aside each day, my spirit is more connected to God and I’m generally better at dealing with the issues that come my way. But it’s not easy. With our family’s schedule, time is at a premium, and so most mornings it’s the first thing I do. I get up, go out to the living room where I have my devotional books and I read and pray there before anyone else is up. For others, that time might be best found at lunch or before bed. It’s really depends on your temperament, but the critical thing is that you find time to connect with God each day. Remember passionate worship is all about giving everything we have and all we are to God—heart, soul, mind and strength. Our own time of personal worship sets the stage, reminds us who we are and connects us to God on a regular basis. Martin Luther and John Wesley, both great men of God, found that they needed that time every morning if they were going to be able to do what they needed to do effectively each day. Jesus himself, the Son of God, often retreated early in the mornings to pray, to spend time in worship of his heavenly Father. If the Son of God, who only had about three years to accomplish what he came to do, needed to do that and found time to do that, don’t you think you can, too?

If this is not something that’s been part of your life, don’t think you have to find three hours every day. Why not start by simply finding a few minutes, maybe over your breakfast coffee. Rather than reading the newspaper or Facebook, spend some time reading a few verses in the Bible and thinking and praying over what those words mean for your day. What should you read? Well, you could start with the Scriptures we print each week in the bulletin or on the YouVersion app on your smartphone (and yes, those will start showing up again tomorrow). Or pick up an Upper Room that our United Methodist Women graciously provide for our congregation and read that day’s devotion. You can also subscribe to those and have each day’s devotion sent to your e-mail inbox for free. Or you can make the commitment to sign up for Disciple Bible Study this fall; those sign-up sheets are at the Connection Center this morning, and the classes will be starting August 19. Part of the discipline of Disciple is daily reading and prayer. You can see myself or Mike King for more information about that. Or you can pick a Gospel—I always suggest people start with book of Mark—and read a few verses or a chapter each day. If you want to read it devotionally, get a book like Michael Card’s The Gospel of Passion, to read along with the Gospel. Couple that reading with prayer, with a favorite song of praise. There are untold numbers of ways to worship personally, and you’ll find that practice, then, prepares you more for Saturdays/Sundays.

Here’s the thing: there are no experts in the field of worship, only learners (Schnase 60). But worship is the one thing we do here on earth that we know we will do in heaven. Why do we resist giving our whole selves? I challenge you in this way: become a passionate worshipper by beginning to practice personal worship at least three days a week, and make a commitment to be here in worship every week unless you’re sick or out of town. We have four opportunities over the weekend for you to worship. Now, we’re halfway through this year, so I want to challenge you to deepen your passion for worship in these two ways for the rest of this calendar year, for the next six months. Personal worship at least three days a week and participation in corporate worship every week unless you’re sick or out of town. And then let’s see what God might do in each of our lives and in the life of this church. What fruit might God bring out of the soil of those holy moments? Let’s be passionate worshippers, people who know it’s not about the place, and it’s not about me, but it’s all about Jesus, the one whom we worship. Let’s pray.