Day 126 - Worthy Worship

A sermon delivered April 14, 2013 at First Presbyterian Church, Soddy-Daisy, TN

texts: Joel 2:23-29 and Rev. 5:1-14.

What is “Worthy Worship” of a God who is greater than anything imaginable? 

The fancy word for God is transcendent, a God that exceeds all characterization and therefore defies objective description.  We can only do it symbolically and metaphorically.

Fundamentally, worthy Christian worship ascribes all praise and honor, glory and power to our creator, incarnate in Jesus Christ and is present with us as the Holy Spirit. Such worship is both a thanksgiving for life, resurrection and redemption and our testimony to the world of it.

The PC(USA) Book of Order says succinctly, “God cannot be reduced to anything in the created order.” So how can we speak meaningfully of a God who exceeds all that can be defined? Even the carefully crafted Reformed creeds only say what we believe and make no effort to explain the reality of belief. We are still left with the same problem of description. 

Have you ever had an experience that you just have to say was “indescribable” so you had to describe it something like this, “ I just do not know how I can explain it to you, it was like….” That is what we are left with to convey our experience of God to our friends, “It is kind of like this…” That is what worship is about.

We call that experience, revelation. When you read the Revelation of Jesus Christ to John of Patmos, you read his struggle to convey his experience of God  in a worthy manner. He used hymn, symbol and metaphor to describe a transcendent God and the magnitude of God’s redeeming act, to describe his mental image of Jesus Christ and the nature of the experiential relationship between created order and God Incarnate. He thought it important enough to understand and to have it read aloud, most likely as the message of a worship service.

The universe and The Sense of a Transcendent God. Cosmos literally means the entire created order, not the infinite universe, but if you define everything that is, then perforce, you define all that is not definable(!).  God created the entire cosmos, the order of the universe, every atom of it. If so, then God must exist “outside” the order of the universe and not be reducible to meaningful, logical words and mathematical formulas. To know the cosmos is to know God. The last 50 years of scientific observation give us the flavor of this revelation.

When I was a young boy in a small north Georgia town there was not much city light at night.  In my backyard on a clear night about midnight in the late summer when the moon was new, I could look up into the sky and see the Milky Way, literally looking edge-on into the heart of our dish-shaped galaxy. It looked like milk poured across the sky. What a shame it is so hard to see now with city light pollution for many children and adults.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains millions of stars. As astronomers gaze further into the night sky with powerful telescopes more little stars appear. More powerful telescopes reveal they are not little stars but galaxies, each filled with millions of stars. Further and further, deeper into the sky in every direction telescopes reveal more and more galaxies into the millions and all contain millions and millions of stars.

The other important thing is that the further in distance we look into the sky, the further we look back into time. For example, the sun is 92 million miles away. When we see something like a solar flare, it actually happened 8 1/4 minutes into the past. That is how long it takes light to reach us form the sun. Science discovered methods to allow us to figure out how far away an object is and knowing the speed of light allows us to know when in time the star light we observe actually happened. The deeper into the sky we look the further into history we look.  When we look as far as we can see today, we discover a pervasive blinding light, like a camera flash. We can’t see beyond it because it is so bright. Scientists realized this flash happened about 18.8 billion years ago about a trillion, billion miles away. (The distance covered by light traveling 186,000 miles per second for 18.7 billion years.) That is as far as we can see in distance and time. That flash is our veil of the temple. 

 The trillion or so billion miles of our universe is unimaginably large and contains every star, planet and invisible matter and it came into being. That bright flash (and our mathematical equations) also tells us that before that flash, all that “stuff of the universe” existed as a single point of energy billions and trillions of times smaller and hotter than anything that has ever been, an unimaginably boiling inferno of energy smaller than a pin point. Then it exploded in a “Big Bang.”

No scientist can pierce the veil of time before the universe came into being to explain why it happened. Equations and math are useless to describe the why but remarkably, clearly and cleanly describe the how of its happening. That flash of light humbled science. Only the most obstinate scientists fearing the uncertainty of the unknown seek alternative explanations.

What all this means to you and me is this transcendental God is larger than that that universe and its Big Bang. That first flash signifies what cannot be seen or described except by the evidence left behind, the “Holy of Holies.”  Psalm 8 captures this idea of God and his handiwork, Here is my paraphrase:

All Good Gifts Are The Glory of The Lord

Copyright H. Paris 10/15/05

God of Heaven, you grace the earth.

The cry of the baby is praise of your work.

Our being is your unfettered glory,

your defender against tyranny.

We pale in the expanse of an un-measurable Heaven,

Illumined by stars and moons until time’s end.

How comes such benevolence to us,

The Grace of a parent’s tenderness?

How have we justified the Son of Man?

Can we be only a little less than the God  

Who made us by simple command,

Who crowned us in the cloak of purple

    to rule birds, fish, animals, and fertile flora?

Even though graced with such power,

We are motes blown upon the wind

    humbled by your majesty forever.

Praise the Glory of The Lord, God,
Our Defender!

Can we have a worthy worship without describing the indescribable? To describe the indescribable is an oxymoron.  Yet it is the only way. To put it circularly, we must have an experience with God that conveys the meaning to describe it.  We can’t do it. We can't get to that transcendent God, God has to come to us.  This is to say we understand God by God’s self-revelation to us.

For a simple example try to describe “Love.” You can’t do it objectively.
          Our human nature always resorts to feelings and symbols when objective effort fail us. Joel did it as he described with the imagery the recovery of Judah and Rule of God after a plague that had swept the land (vv28-29), “Then afterward I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves in those days, I will pour out my spirit.”
          John of Patmos did it with fantastic images in Revelation that were powerfully meaningful to the time of his congregation to communicate the imperative to worship the life-giving, transcendent God and the power of the Holy Spirit.  

John’s ancient revelation captures the essence of worthy worship.  John painted a verbal image of the infinite power of a Divine Redeemer of all created order, as a mercilessly slaughtered lamb, sitting on a throne surrounded by terrifying creatures with the Book of Life before him sealed closed with John weeping bitterly because no one could open the great book (vv11-14).  “Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, singing with full voice, “Worthy is the Lamb that was mercilessly slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” Then… I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” And the four living creatures said, “Amen!” And the elders fell down and worshiped.”

          John feels the very pillars of Heaven, its floors and doorposts trembling under the roar of praise of this cosmic choir. Centuries later George Handel read this passage and he created one of the most powerful choruses in the Messiah, “Worthy is The Lamb.” It begins with a deafening crescendo, “Worth is the Lamb that was slain and has delivered us to God by his blood.”

How do we worship in a worthy way today?  The point of the Book of Order, Psalm 8 and John of Patmos, and Handel is:  joyfully ascribes all praise and honor, glory and power to the triune God. At its core, worship is a self-giving, symbolic, celebratory experience of the power of God acknowledging everything we have is a gift from God, on loan. To understand demands a humility that transforms us. 

Worthy worship is collaborative public prayer and song wherein we all strive to communicate and balance our own particular experience of God (revelation) with each other, and in this way we create a space for others to receive the Holy Spirit. Everything about worship is God revealing who is God and how God relates to the world by the created order - the vista of beauty, flowers in the field, lovers walking hand in hand in the park; stars in the sky; murals and beautiful cathedrals and musical cantatas like The Messiah; through the history of God’s covenant with humanity described and reveals in the Scriptures such as the passage in Joel; and ultimately through Jesus Christ by whom the whole of God became one with the world in one person and redeemed the world.  The Holy Spirit reveals that our faith in God’s trustworthiness in these three things is justified.

If we leave worship and do not carry with us the sense that we have experienced the indescribably divine during worship, then not only have we failed to achieve true (worthy) worship of God, we have failed our brothers and sisters, visitors and members.

It is a solemn responsibility to enter worship with our friends in a quiet room in prayer, or with a loudly sung song, even a rap song, honoring God, listening to the scriptures read to us and to its proclamation in preaching, and in the symbolic participation with God in the sacraments we partake. We are listening for God’s voice.   If we say afterwards, “ I just do not know how I can explain to you how I feel about it, it was like….” Then we have had a fruitful worship experience that captures the immensity of God.

I am not sure how else one can capture the essence of an all-powerful God transcending all existence than as a little lamb coming to us and being mercilessly slaughtered by our sin to redeem all of creation – the unimaginable becoming imaginable as outrageous and ultimate love.

Scripture tells us God has redeemed us to life eternal.  Like the “Big Bang,” redemption is completed, signed, sealed and delivered. God’s claim to victory is a present reality… all that is left worthy to do for every living thing in Heaven, on Earth, in the sea and under the Earth is to worship and proclaim, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to deliver us to God. He is risen. Peace be with you, The Lord is with you.”  May your life be worship of God. AMEN.