Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost – Year C Proper 16 (RCL) 2010
Isaiah 58: 9b – 14; Psalm 103: 1 – 8; Hebrews 12: 18 – 29; Luke 13: 10 – 17
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Parish, Portland, OR
Sunday, August 22, 2010

AN ACCEPTABLE WORSHIP

Let us pray: Holy and loving God we are gathered this day to bring before your presence the prayers and praises of your people. We look to offer in our worship the glory and honor; the might and power of your Word and Sacrament as a means of maintaining our relationship with you through your Holy One, our Savior Jesus the Christ. In the words that we pray and the actions that we offer we ask that you receive our feeble attempts at pleasing your mighty presence in the holy places where we have found our connection with you. Be among us this day, O God – and every day as we seek to serve you in all the holy places of our loves and lives. Amen.

(SUNG) O BLESS THE LORD MY SOUL, HIS GRACE TO THEE PROCLAIM
AND ALL THAT IS WITHIN ME JOIN TO BLESS HIS HOLY NAME.
O YEAH.

We are coming to the end of the summer season – and I know that I always approach that reality with a mix of sadness and joy. Sadness to witness the shortening length of daylight as it ever so slowly slips from our western skies; sadness to loose the fullness of bloom and blossom in the earth and sadness to hear the fading of the children’s excitement as the carefree boredom of summer days marches toward the structure and discipline of the return to classrooms and soccer practices. In this mix of sadness comes the joy of remembering the glory of a crisp fall morning; the excitement of potential new friends and adventures to be had in the starting of a new school year and in the comfort of returning faces in the routines of our ordinary lives. All of this mixture of joy and sadness is reflected in the stories from our sacred scriptures that we encounter on this thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost.

We start with a writing from Third Isaiah – this is the prophet as we love and remember; giving us the hope and promise of renewed relationship with God if we but turn our hearts and forsake our rebellion against God’s mercy and grace. If we remove the pointing of the finger (he did it not me; look at what they did), the speaking of evil (gossip and betrayal of confidences) – if we offer our food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted as this Parish family has faithfully done for many years on Tuesday afternoons, Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings – and yet God would ask us to do more; to stretch ourselves into an understanding of making this commitment part of the very nature of our relationships with God and with each other; then our light shall rise in the darkness and our gloom be like the noonday. What good news is that to carry with us into the lengthening dark of our Pacific Northwest autumn. The poetry of the writer is magnificent in description of the relationship between God and God’s people. “The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your need in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.” Think of what those words must have envisioned to a desert people – to a nation that longed for its land of Milk and Honey as it had been promised of old! All that Yahweh would ask is that God’s people honor the Sabbath covenant – that on God’s Holy day we refrain from our own interests and that we call the Sabbath a delight and the Holy Day of the Lord honorable. That is, if our worship on God’s Holy Day might give delight to God and to us as we gather to hear God’s word and share God’s Sacrament with all who seek nourishment at God’s Holy Table.

(SUNG) O BLESS THE LORD MY SOUL, HIS MERCIES BEAR IN MIND
FORGET NOT ALL HIS BENEFITS – THE LORD TO THEE IS KIND.

This particular version of the musical setting of the hundred and third Psalm is taken from Stephen Schwartz setting for the Off Broadway Musical Godspell. In my early twenties this musical was a major part of my life – I was in a long running production at a regional theater and this adaptation of the author of Matthew’s Gospel that established a pop culture Iconic Christ who sang and danced his way into the hearts of young people was my worship at an age where I was rebelling against the structures of my parents Church as was my entire generation. I can remember few more profound or deeply personal connections with God in Worship than I experienced on the stage as we joined in the distribution of communion with a Dixie cup for chalice; or as we gently lifted the symbolically crucified body of the actor portraying Jesus and carried him in sorrowful procession and chanted:

(SUNG) LONG LIVE GOD – LONG LIVE GOD. LONG LIVE GOD, LONG
LIVE GOD.

I think that the point which our generation looked to make with the language of the stage and movie musical versions of Godspell and say, Jesus Christ Superstar, was that Worship needed to be a profound and deeply personal connection between God and those who gather to worship that God. That same longing to make our worship reflect the reality of our lives is continued in this generation’s adaptation of the music of Bono incorporated in many places as an “U2charist”. In the Christian tradition, especially of the more “liturgical” churches our tendency is sometimes to worship our worship rather than to worship our God. I do not mean to imply that the deep and ancient rituals and rites of the Church which form our style of liturgical expression and therefore a major piece of our Sunday worship can simply be dismissed as irrelevant to a modern culture. In our pericope from the sermonic text addressed to the Hebrews the author speaks to that most fundamental of our connections with the worship of God and our history of how that has been lived out. The author uses the contrasting images of the Mountain of mystery and danger (that of Mount Sinai and its ancient connection with the people of Israel) verses the mountain of calm and peace which is Mount Zion and represents God’s connection with an availability and approachability that is called a heavenly Jerusalem where humanity might dwell with divinity as a result of the presence and ministry of the Christ who reconciled us to be once again God’s chosen people. This is how the author expresses God’s Kindom that cannot be shaken and so we give thanks, by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe.

In these longer and quieter days of summer our Worship as community has been focused in what some of us call Rite III or what the Church calls the “Supplemental Liturgical Materials” which are found in the texts of our prayers and responses and often call us up short when we look to pray from our memories rather than reading the revised texts with their changes. Would you take your bulletin that provides those prayers and responses out for me right now? If you take the time to peruse the prayers and responses in these liturgical materials you might notice subtle differences from our more traditional “contemporary” prayers in Rite II from the Book of Common Prayer. Depending on one’s “liturgical purity level” these differences may not seem all that “subtle” and can often seem “jarring” to our ears which are used to the more “formal” language of our Tudor English forebears who crafted the original language of our Common Prayer in the 16th Century. These “supplemental liturgical materials”, including three alternate Eucharistic Prayers (of which we are using prayers 1 and 3 this summer) which further “contemporize” the language and imagery of God’s saving work in humanity have been part of our formal “approved” worship since 1991. In this reworking of the liturgical materials approved by General Convention, there is also some “reworking” of the more traditional language of the Nicene Creed which we use each Sunday to make our profession of faith as a gathered community. Look at the text of that Creed found on page six. In the third Paragraph beginning with the statement “We believe in the Holy Spirit” you might notice in the next sentence something which has been “tripping” people up all summer – the text reads “who proceeds from the Father,” and most of us, because of years of conditioned response in prayer will continue that sentence with “and the Son.” Now at this point I could launch into a 45-minute presentation on the wars and schisms that have been fought around the “filioque” clause. This is an obscure and historic disagreement in Trinitarian theology, which threatened and actually contributed to the brake in the unity of God’s Church between its Roman or Latin branch and its Eastern or “Orthodox” branch in the year 1054. The papal legate acting on behalf of Pope Leo III excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople (Michael Cerularius), who in response excommunicated the Pope’s legate sent to negotiate a settlement between the two leaders. The decision by our Standing Liturgical Committee to drop the clause from this version of the Creed was an attempt to offer a gesture of reconciliation to our Orthodox sisters and brothers – and as I’m sure most of you would agree probably matters little to the God who hears our prayers. All of this “history” is merely to point out that how we “structure” and craft a language around our Worship of God is of profound importance in our tradition and “liturgical” heritage – and actually of little importance to an “acceptable worship” which reverently reflects our desire to offer praise and thanksgiving (or Eucharist from the Greek) to our God and the God of our Ancestors, both Hebrew and Greek.

The author of Luke’s Gospel carries the theme of the day into the synagogue worship of Jesus’ time. The focus is placed in this story on the hypocrisy of the legalistic interpretations of the laws surrounding what it means to honor the Sabbath. The leader of the synagogue challenges Jesus’ healing ministry by complaining that the healing act itself is a violation of the Sabbath. Jesus, who in typical fashion is able to dismiss the argument of the opponents and shame them into silence, decries this small minded and narrow interpretation of the day of the Lord. Then we are told by the author that the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that Jesus was doing. This adulation, as we well know, will not last forever and the synagogue leaders will only lie in wait for their moment to strike back at this radical rabbi and exact their revenge; but that story will come later in our liturgical cycle. For now it is perhaps best for us to reflect on what our worship is and what our worship isn’t. In the traditions of our founders in the faith a great effort was struck to balance those portions of our worship experience that might maintain the mystery present in the very act of approaching God’s Holy presence – with a genuine need to make that encounter genuine and personal by hearing the words in the language which was spoken by the faithful. That language, so beautifully crafted and poetic as it is – must continually be adapted so that we speak to God and allow God to speak us in ways that communicate where the divine mystery can lead us as faithful followers of the Word – made flesh who dwells among us.

Amen.