Call to Worship: Hope for Years to Come
A sermon
delivered by Rev. Peter T. Atkinson
October 12, 2014
at Gordonsville
Presbyterian Church, Gordonsville, Virginia
Deuteronomy 4: 32-40
Colossians 1: 15-20
Let
us pray, for a welcome mind and a loving heart
Help us to see despite our eyes
Help us to think outside of our minds
Help us to be more than our lives
For
your eyes show the way
Your
mind knows the truth
Your
being is the life.
Amen.
15
He is the image of the invisible
God, the firstborn of all creation; 16 for in him all things in
heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones
or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and
for him. 17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things
hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the
beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first
place in everything. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was
pleased to dwell, 20 and through him God was pleased to reconcile to
himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the
blood of his cross. [1]
So last week as a part of our
eight week extended worship service, looking at how we worship and where we are
as a church, we had the prayer of preparation, and we took a look, by way of
introduction, cultivating the soil within our minds, at the external factors
that we face as a particular church. And came to the conclusion that we
shouldn't make it. We shouldn't survive as a church. There is way too much
standing in our way, there is no business model we could follow, there aren't
any prospects, and logically speaking we should just give up, or resign
ourselves to the fact that we will fizzle out soon, that we may persevere for the
short term, but the tides are against us, and if we are honest with ourselves
there just isn't anything we can do. Now, Pete, I thought you said this was part of a Stewardship
Campaign, something inspiring, something that is going to motivate us, sustain
us, build us up for what we are going to do together here in this place. Maybe.
. .
It's interesting, on Friday
in class I was teaching my students a lesson about rhetoric, a lesson about how
to persuade someone to do what you want them to do. We are studying the Iliad,
and in the final chapter Priam, the king of the Trojans, risks his life, into
and behind enemy lines, into the camp of Achilles, the man who just slaughtered
his son Hector, and his mission is to get Achilles to relent and give him Hector's
body, so they can perform the proper funeral rites for him. It was a look at
what the strategy was. . . so as a way of getting at the subject I showed them
clips of two movies where someone was attempting to persuade someone to action.
. . one was A Few Good Men, where Tom Cruise is baiting Jack Nicholson into admitting
his crime. . . you know the famous, I want the truth. . . You can't handle the
truth scene. . . and the other one is what I want to mention today because it
got me thinking about today. . . the
other one was Return of the Jedi. . . the Emperor is trying to turn Luke to the
Darkside. . . trying to get him to act. . . to sacrifice his belief, his
training, the good in him, his belief in the power of love. . . and seek to
control the uncontrollable, seek to fight. . . to fight out of fear, out of
emotion, out of a need to control. . . so the emperor paints the bleak picture
for him. He shows him how in control of it all he is, he takes away all of
Luke's hope, he tries to make him believe, that his friends will die, that the
rebellion is in vain, he is appealing to the hero in Luke, the fighter in Luke,
knowing that everything within Luke screams out to fight, but that fighting is
not the path, not the right path, not the way of the Jedi. . . and somehow Luke
resists, and his selfless resistance inspires Darth Vader to betray the
emperor. . . thus making Luke victorious, the completion of his training, an
act of faith rather than an act of action. . . and it results in the only
success possible.
Now I bring this up because
our situation is bleak too, the world is against us, there seems to be no hope,
and just like Luke everything within us screams out to take things into our own
hands, to act, to do something, to try to control the situation, to take the
situation over, but no matter how noble that fight is, no matter how heroic the
stand might be, no matter how valiant. . . it is an act prompted by despair and
not hope, an act founded in control and not love, an act prompted by fear and
not faith, and thus an act that though it may seem like the only thing to do,
the right thing to do, the wise thing to do, the practical thing to do, will
never work, and like Luke fighting against the dark side, the real danger is
not the failure, but the fact that you have become what you are fighting
against, for Luke it's the darkside of the force, for a church it is the world.
. . in an effort to defeat the world, you end up becoming just like the world
and so rendered worthless, living a message rendered powerless, hypocritically
raising up an idol and calling it church.
Instead, though, in church we
worship the Living God. And every week the Call to Worship seeks to remind us
just who that living God is. Usually in the service it is a responsive reading of
a Psalm. . . or some other Biblical Hymn, and the Psalms stand as testimonies
to just who God is, what God has done, and in that vein what God continues to
do, and it's good to be reminded, and it's good to be called, to be called from
the world, from our daily lives, our daily grind, our daily worries and fears,
and doubts, into a place, into a moment, into a sacred time, where we Worship
God. This is what we do here, and there is a great Biblical mandate to be
reminded of God, and what God has done. . . as proof, as faith building, life
edifying infusion of God also in our very present in our very midst.
There was a great call
throughout the Old Testament to remember who you are, and remember what God has
done, for God's mighty acts have given meaning and identity to the people of
Israel, for God parted the waters and led them by hand out of slavery, out of
bondage in Egypt. It was crucial, and maybe the most important piece of the
culture, perhaps even more important than the Law itself, for it is what gives
Law its meaning and context. God has acted in the life of the people, and it is
in response that we give worship in humble, grateful Thanksgiving. It seemed
that God knows, and the Bible testifies to the case as well, that people tend
to grow comfortable and then forget, and so grow weary while forgetting, and finally
to grow fearful because they have forgotten. . . and because they have no
memory they have no hope, for what is forgotten is that fact that we have been
here before, we have been trapped between the Pharaoh's army and the sea,
completely hopeless, and God came, God acted, God was there, and the world and
what seemed true, shook, trembled, changed, and paled in comparison to the
miracles of God.
We need to remember that we
shouldn't be here but we are. . . the children of Abraham should have been
crushed by Pharaoh's army, the children of Abraham should have died in the
desert, should have been destroyed by the Philistines, should not have survived
as a remnant, a light, an idea through the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian
Empires, should not have retained an identity when the Greeks came, or when the
Romans came. . . and certainly when God himself came to Earth, should not have
been able to stand against the Romans, when they crucified Him, that should
have been the end of it, when they rolled the stone in front of the tomb that
should have been the end, but it wasn't. This is the lesson, this is our
inheritance as people of God, and this is what we are reminded of each week,
what in our minds we remember, the truth that Calls us to Worship, for there is
no other response to the story. To remember it, to acknowledge it, to allow it
into your world, your composition, is to be awed, amazed, and gratitude shown
through worship, the beginning of the pledge of our lives to his service, the
service of that truth, according to His amazing power and will.
Paula read it for us today:
32 For ask now about former ages, long before your own, ever
since the day that God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of
heaven to the other: has anything so great as this ever happened or has its
like ever been heard of? 33 Has any people ever heard the voice of a
god speaking out of a fire, as you have heard, and lived? 34 Or has
any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of
another nation, by trials, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and
an outstretched arm, and by terrifying displays of power, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt
before your very eyes? 35 To you it was shown so that you would
acknowledge that the Lord is God;
there is no other besides him.[2]
And the Call to Worship isn't
about apologetics. . . it isn't about proving God's existence. It is simply about acknowledging it, it is
about remembering God's mighty acts, and so believe that they do continue into
today. That God's will is infact being done, and will be done. And if such is
the case what need we fear? What need we do other than align ourselves to that
Holy Will?
I started this sermon
painting a very bleak picture. I brought up Luke Skywalker and the Emperor. . .
the bleak picture he was painting. . . the way that he was trying to bait him
to action, but fearful, anger filled, hopeless action. And I said we face a
very similar predicament. . . one where we may feel that we need to act in fear
rather than in faith, for that is a difficult place, a hard place, a place of
challenge, many would probably prefer to live in simpler times, in easier times
where faith is easy and life is not filled with challenges, prefer to live in
that day of jubilee, when Pharaoh, said "I'll let your people go, and
everyone was celebrating, packing, and moving. . . that we would prefer that
day to this, prefer that moment to the moment up against the sea with those
chariots reigning down. We might pine for the 1950's when church attendance was
high faith was strong, the nation was strong, but we don't. We live in these
times. We face the challenge of a generation desperately in need of direction
and not knowing it, adrift and lost, too lost to even to know it's lost, and so
is not even seeking a way out, not even seeking that deliverer, preferring the
golden calfs, and easy paths. But we are seeking, and we are looking, and we
are challenged by the slowness of time, and doubt of worry. We'd rather live in
simpler times.
In another amazing Testament
to God’s hand even in the little things. . . we have been putting this service
together for a few weeks now, and I was working in parallel with Dorian and
with Erick, basically just giving them the idea that today we would be
worshiping God, celebrating our Call to Worship, the very call to worship God.
And they had great ideas, so many great and inspiring ideas for music. . . and
what kept coming up was the Battle of Agincourt, from the Hymn tune of the
prelude to the benediction response they will be singing, written for the movie
version of Shakespeare’s Henry V. What
they didn’t know was that this battle, and that play are so close to my own
heart, that I wrote my college honors thesis, being a double major in history
and English, on this battle and its many literary and artistic representations.
. . making the point that the meaning of history is so much more important than
the events themselves, that what the event shows, what the event tells us about
life, and God, and truth are what is central. This battle is one very much like
the Israelites pressed against the Sea, it is very much like David and Goliath,
it is very much like Jesus and Pilate, for it is, at least in its legend, about
the faithful few triumphing over the haughty many, the overconfident unbeatable
enemy, and it is a time in history that has given people faith, that even
against insurmountable odds, with faith, we can know that God’s will, will be
done, and that is certainly a place of faith.
Shakespeare immortalizes the
moment with two speeches, “Once more unto the breach,” and “We few, we happy
few, we band of brothers.” In that, especially the second one, King Harry,
through Shakespeare’s flare for the poetic moment, captures what inspiration
is, even in the midst of hopelessness. . . and in that speech he evokes God’s
hand, and the amazing potential that they have, the amazing memory that they
will have, and the amazing testament for all people in the future that they get
to be a part of because they, themselves were chosen to live in those
challenging times. We live in challenging times, and it is a blessing to us. We
get to serve God, not because it is easy or simple, but because we were chosen
for these times, that we may find more out about ourselves, our potential, what
God made us for, and out of that, how much more than we can ever image can our
lives be, all in worship to God? We are called to worship in every aspect of
our lives because God has done marvelous things, and is only our hope for all
of our years to come. Oh to live in a time where that very truth is all that
matters. . . let that church fill you with a grateful heart, that you and I,
that we were born for challenging times because God knows more about us than we
may have thought. . . Amen
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