Sabbath Day Worship

Worship is so much more than a weekly activity that we "go to."  In class, we have been exploring how we might experience Worship as "loving God with all our hearts, and with all our souls, and with all our minds, and with all our strength!"  That's not something that is happening everywhere in town!
In our faith practice, Sabbath Day Worship is a core activity (maybe the core activity) of communal life, where we gather together weekly to love God and one another with everything we have.
The practice of "sabbath" is more than just coming to worship.  For us, worship is an essential part of sabbath, something that God includes as one of the Ten Commandments.  Here are some things you may not know, or haven't thought so much about recently.

(1)  Sabbath is a radical practice.  It honors God breaking into weekly life on our behalf, rescuing us from busyness and exhaustion and activities that do not satisfy our spirits.  It is a time of renewal, refreshment, communion with God, and celebration of life as God has always intended it to be.  Sabbath is a real-life experience of being delivered by the God who loves and saves us.  In the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:8; Deuteronomy 5:12-14), Sabbath is to be "remembered" and kept holy, a gift from God.  Re-membrance is putting all broken pieces (members) of our lives back together and experiencing wholeness. In Exodus, God is described as resting on the seventh day of creation, the sabbath.  When we rest after six days of creative work we are sharing in God's wholeness.  In Deuteronomy, God's people are to remember on the sabbath that God is a God who delivers God's people from slavery to freedom.    I have called sabbath a "radical" practice.  Radical means rooted; in this case, our lives are rooted in God!!!

(2) Our Worship liturgy is a daring act of imagination.  Our worship service at St. Andrew's begins with us  declaring the peace of Christ among us and sharing it with one another.  Jesus is the one who comes to free us from anxiety, offering us a peace far beyond our present understandings!  Our Call to Worship draws us into intentional communion with God, putting God at the center of our attention rather than the million other things that dominate our attention.  Already we have an opportunity to break free, and we haven't even sung yet!  The first hymn, and those that follow, allow us to offer our voices and hearts to God in soulful praise, to "lose ourselves in order to be found!"  God's for-giveness frees us in God's eternal love for honesty, for expression, for healing, for repentance, for new starts.  The Time of Confession and Hope is an opportunity for honest expression and speech to God about our needs, our hopes, our pains, our struggles.  Liberation is realized in such honest encounter with God.  The Scriptures open up the rich story of God and God's people; the Gospels declare and show us God's astounding love for all people without exception--a loving power that never ends!!  The sermon(s) proclaims this good news and identifies where it hits ground in our lives.  We respond to the invitation to recognize ourselves as part of the holy story, and are equipped to follow Jesus in our own lives today.  This is transforming!  There are many places where we are given opportunity to offer ourselves, our gifts, our investment in these values and the new life that is embodied when we do this together.  We pray to God; very importantly, we share prayer concerns and people in need and lift them up.  We identify blessings and joys and thank God for them together, freed in our thanksgiving.  We celebrate God's abundance, rather than what the world defines as scarcity.  It is a different way of seeing!  Each month, we gather together at the Lord's Table. We leave as people whose lives and priorities have been reordered and replenished in the love of our Creator.  That's what worship is about!

(3) Our Worship expresses belief in God who is doing hands-on work to make new human futures.
When we worship we are engaging the God who is committed to our well-being and to the deliverance of all God's people.

(4) Worship is resistance to the dominant, life-flattening order.  God did not make any of us merely to "fit in" to the world's order.

(5) We explore the experience of covenant community. The real practice of community is a revolutionary practice and a sign in the world of God's new order for the world.  We are precious as individuals who are God's children, beloved, created for God's pleasure.  But we are more together than we can ever be just by ourselves.  We love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and we love our neighbor as ourselves.

(6) Worship is celebration of a world that is fruitful and generative.  Ours is a liturgy of God's abundance, not the world's myth of scarcity.

(7)  God's themes of wholeness and completion break into a world that is often half-baked and distorted. Everything about us matters to God!

(8) Our worship is rooted in the peace of Christ (an antidote to anxiety).  God is delivering us from anxious lives!

(9)  The fabric of our lives depends on fidelity, not "productivity."  The measure of our value in God's eyes is never in how "useful" we are!!  even though it can be good to be productive in life, especially when it benefits others, God did not put us in the world merely to be "useful!"  Faithfulness to God, and loving solidarity with one another, are what we are made for. We celebrate this in worship.

(10) Liturgy is an act of imagining the world differently and acting according to that inspired imagination.



(Thanks to Walter Brueggemann and all the participants in our mid-90's Kirkridge retreat!)

Worship

What is worship? We said:
--Individuals coming together sharing heart, soul, strength, and mind with each other.
--Gathering as a group: teaching, learning about Jesus.
--"Coming to church"
--Praying
--Active Listening
--Participating
--Praising God
--Teaching others about God
--Being taught
--reading the scriptures
--coming with anticipation
--singing
--fun
--Loving God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, all our strength
The soul (in Greek psuche, from which we get the English word "psyche") is the core of our being.
Perhaps our worship involves:
--praying with everything we have
--singing with everything
--bringing the fullness of ourselves, our gifts, our yearnings, our love
--connecting the stories of the scriptures with the stories of our lives (Jesus' life and our life as one)
 

Times of Decision

"In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan . And when he came up out of the water immediately he saw the heavens torn open and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove.  And a voice came from heaven: "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased . . .Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the good news of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the gospel."  --Mark 1: 9-11, 14-15
What are some of the key decisions that a person makes (or will make) in their lives?
Here are our answers:
--Career (vocation; purpose)
--College
--Clothes
--Driving, car
--Relationships with others
  (a) Who will you spend your life with?
  (b)  Who will you go out with?  Spend significant time with?
--What church do you want to go to?
--Where do you want to live?
--Decisions your parents are nervous about
--Leaving home
--How you will dedicate your time and attention, and the impact that will have on the future
--How you want to spend your money

As we prepared to revisit the story of Jesus' baptism (It is "Baptism of Christ Sunday" this week) we noted how momentous a decision that Jesus was making, leaving Nazareth for the long trek to the Jordan to join the throngs of people being baptized by John.  His life would take a powerful turn; he would return to Galilee but not to resume his old life.His ministry began; life took on new shape and purpose.
We knew that Jesus was around 30 years old when he was baptized and began his ministry.  The most recent story prior to that was the one we recently considered, of Jesus at age 12 in the Jerusalem Temple.
What was Jesus doing for the 18 years in between?
It was noted that the time spanned 6570 days.
--helping Joseph with carpentry
--serving as a carpenter himself, perhaps in the rebuilding of Sepphoris, the nearby city destroyed by the Roman army.
--continuing to learn and grow in the faith, attending a local synagogue and continuing to travel to Jerusalem for the Passover Feast.
--going to school
--Dating?  Did Jesus get married and have a family?  (while we noted that the scriptures don't discuss this specifically)
We wondered what moved Jesus at that particular time.  Did he know that he was going to the Jordan to begin his ministry?  Was he exploring God's path, plan for his life?  We know that he went to the place in the south where John the Baptist (his cousin, according to Luke) was baptizing people and calling them to get washed and ready for the coming of the Messiah.  Jesus came, and entered the water with all of the others there to be baptized.
We read the story from the Gospel of Luke.  In Luke, Jesus does not see the heavens opened and the Spirit coming upon him until after this baptism, when he is praying.
The voice from heaven gives Jesus new names:  Son; Beloved; God's Pleasure.  Exploring the meaning of these names will be to explore more deeply who Jesus is and how his life's purpose will unfold.
Did other people hear God's voice naming Jesus and see the Spirit coming upon him, someone asked?  We are not sure; in Luke it is presented as a more personal experience, the coming of the Spirit a bodily experience.  The narratives in Matthew and Mark are a bit more dramatic.
People wanted to explore further what the coming of the Holy Spirit upon him would mean.  We'll do that!
Did he know that he was the Messiah?  A great question we will also attend to.  I noted that it was more common for Jesus to refer to himself as the "Son of Man," the "Human One."
When Jesus returned home he embraced a new lifestyle, though much of it was lived out in the region and communities that he was familiar with.
Maybe this was a path of discovery, new direction, deeper purpose for Jesus as well as for the people he ministered to, that grew with each decision, with each relationship,
We went back and looked at our original list of decisions.  Which ones did Jesus also make?
--Vocation and purpose
--Relationships with others
--What faith community he wanted to be part of
--Where he wanted to live (among whom?)
--Choices his parents were nervous about
--Leaving home
--How he would dedicate his time and attention and the impact that would have on the future.

Questions From Our Listening

We examined Luke 2:41-52 further, attending to Jesus' style of learning and growing.  As we did so, we formulated some of our own questions that we wanted to explore as our relationships with God deepened and were filled with intention.
--How can God help me in my relationships with others?
--Who am I?
--What does God have planned for me? What are God's plans for the people around me?
--How do the biblical stories relate to me/us?
--How does God heal?
--How do we perceive God working in our world?
--How will God show God's love for to us in  way that will help and encourage us?
--When does God answer our prayers?
--When are the good things going to happen?
--How will our relationship with God inspire meaning in our lives?