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Worship: What about Preaching?

Acts 2:14, 17, 21, 36-38, 41-42, 43-47

Colossians 3:16-17

September 21, 2003

¹⁴But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say…

¹⁷    ‘In the last days it will be, God declares,

            that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh…

²¹            Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

³⁶Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

The First Converts

³⁷Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” ³⁸Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. ^…

⁴¹So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. ⁴²They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

            Life among the Believers

⁴⁶Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, ⁴⁷praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

It hasn’t been too long since we here at the Ararat church started the custom of Coffee Time after church.

Well, there was once another church like ours that loved good fellowship and always served coffee after worship.  The pastor once asked a little boy if he knew why they served the coffee.

“I think,” said the boy, “its to wake people up before they drive home.”[1]

Another little boy returned from his first time in church, apparently his church didn’t have a children’s time during the weekly service.  His folks asked him how it went, what he thought about church after his first time.  He said, “The music was nice but the commercial was too long.”[2]

Worship can sometimes put folks to sleep.  One poet once wrote:

Now I lay me down to sleep:

the sermon’s long and the subject deep;

If he gets through before I wake,

Someone give me a gentle shake.[3]

And it can be particularly difficult to sit through worship if the preaching isn’t any good…

A minister was hoping to get a discount on the price of a suit.  “I’m just a poor preacher!” he said to the shopkeeper.  “Yes, I know,” the shopkeeper replied.  “I’ve heard you preach.”[4]

OK, ready for one last one?  Here goes:

A particular pastor always prayed out loud, in the pulpit, just before he began to preach.  A little girl finally asked her mom, “Mommy, why does the pastor pray before his sermon?”  She replied, “He’s asking God to help him preach a good sermon.”  To which the little girl replied, “Mommy, why doesn’t God answer his prayer?”[5]

When I was in seminary, my closest friend there had majored in religion and minored in statistics before he had come enrolled in seminary himself. 

His senior thesis was to study why people attended the church they attended.  After months of passing out questionnaires and surveys, collecting them and analyzing their results, my friend found what he was convinced was the single most important factor that determined why people had chosen the church they attended.

That factor was the pastor and the preaching in a particular church.

Now I don’t know if that is true for us.  I don’t know if it is true for our congregation or for you or the people in Armenian communities or even in small churches like ours.  I suspect that family affiliations, traditions and histories also tend to play a large role as do things like distance from home, Sunday School programs and other factors.

Yet when it comes to worship.  I know we can all probably agree, that it is often a positive or negative experience at least as much because of the preaching as the music and singing, the fellowship and the atmosphere in the church building.

However, does a good communicator in the pulpit make or guarantee a good worship service?  Does Christian worship completely and totally rely upon a good preacher that will captivate and enthrall a gathered congregation?  What if the preacher is awful?  What kind of worship happens in that church?  What role does preaching play in worship?

Let’s turn once again to our working definition of worship.  According to my dictionary, as I’ve repeated now several times in the past few weeks, worship is defined as “to revere, pay homage to and adore God?”[6]  As we began to speak about worship two weeks ago, I said that “In Worship, two major things happen.  1. We remember and notice how God acts and has acted and has promised to act.  2. We respond with praise and thanksgiving.[7]

Last week we spent time talking about the praise and thanksgiving, that prayer, confessions and expressions of our faith and especially music and singing are the most important elements of doing that second part of worship; that response section of worship.

But how do we do the first part?  How do we “remember and notice how God acts and has acted and has promised to act.” 

Well there are several ways we can remember.

First and most personal for each of us, is our prayer time and the words of thanksgiving and joy we share with our friends when we remember someone who has recovered from an illness or when a new baby is born into the church family.  Think of the notes of thanks that folks write because of the care they have experience from this congregation.  That may have nothing to do with God, some may say, but truly it does.  God calls us to reach out to one another, and except for family and close friends, if it wasn’t for the fact that God had called us here be together, and had called us to love one another, would we all even have known each other to send get-well notes or flowers or fruit baskets or make phone calls.  The fact that we do so, and others experience healing and caring and nurture through our actions is a testimony that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, and that God so loved the world that he sent us into the world to love each other.

How else do we “remember and notice how God acts and has acted and has promised to act.”  The songs we sing themselves act as amazing testimonies of God’s goodness, written by faithful, God-loving people who want to emphasize God’s love.

For instance, the song we opened up with this morning, “Morning has Broken” says:

Sweet the rain's new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dewfall, on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where his feet pass

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God's recreation of the new day

In these verses, we hear both the faithful belief of the author Cat Stevens that God has created the sunlight, the morning, the new day, the dewfall and the rainfall, for his personal enjoyment, and his joyful expression of “praise with elation” for the sweetness of it all.

Think also of hymns like “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” which describes God’s protection and loving care and of course “Amazing Grace” which says

Personal testimony and songs of praise and thanks recount the grace of God, but the central way where that happens in worship is through the word of God.

The Book of Worship of the United Church of Christ, the book that contains the services for communion, baptism, marriage and all the other basic worship services of our congregational church tradition, tells us this about how we recollect God’s grace:

“Christian worship, because it is the active response to God’s loving initiative, is rooted in the biblical witness to God’s saving deeds in history.  From the saga of Adam and Eve to St. John’s mystical vision of a new heaven and a new earth [in the Book of Revelation], the Bible tells the story of God’s redeeming love.  Holy Scripture provides the trustworthy and normative record of the history of salvation.  Its pages inspire, inform and instruct the church’s worship through all the centuries.”[8]

The bible, the word of God and its interpretation and its exposition, which is what preaching is, are the primary ways we remember God’s grace during in our worship time.  It is the word of God to which we respond with praise and thanksgiving.

Take another look at that rather long passage from Acts I read excerpts from earlier.  By the end of it, we see unmistakable signs of worship: ^“Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”

But what brings this on?  Remember, Jesus is no longer there.  God in heaven doesn’t boom his voice and cause people to do this.  It has something to do with the Holy Spirit moving.  It’s the apostle Peter standing up in the middle of the crowd and telling them about Jesus.  It’s something about people studying and praying and living together that brings about the miracle of praise and worship to God.

There is something truly fascinating about the Word of God as it is described in Scripture that I noticed for the very first time as I was doing some studying this week. 

What blew me away as I read through the Old and New Testaments this week, was about how the Word of God is communicated throughout the bible.  I think, and I haven’t had the opportunity to consult some real scholars on the matter, biblical people whose vocation is to study scripture and write about it, but I think there is a progression in how the Word of God is communicated in the Bible.

In the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, the Word, is primarily spoken by God, directly to such biblical luminaries as Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Moses, Balaam and others.  One notable divergence from this is when Moses brings the Word of God down from a mountaintop, inscribed on tablets of stone and offers it to the Israelite people.  This is the first time in the bible that God addresses his people as a whole.  The presentation of the Ten Commandments is the formation of the congregation of God, the chosen people of God, called out of slavery are spoken to, through Moses, and the commandments inscribed on two slabs of rock.

As the Old Testament progresses, we find that others, like Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos and Hosea, folks who are called prophets, also speak the Word to the people of Israel.  The word comes to the people of God through the prophet and often the prophet pays the price of truly unpopular pronouncements and messages. 

In the New Testament, there is another change.  God rarely speaks directly to humans, nor does God speak to prophets who transfer the word to the people of God.  In the New Testament, we find that God sends his Son to become and embody and incarnate the word.  Jesus is the word become flesh.

This is what the gospel of John says about the Word,

⁹The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

¹⁰He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. ¹²But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, ¹³who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.[9]

Jesus is the word, if you want to know what God is saying, just look at Jesus, what he teaches, what he does, what he is, is God’s message to the world.

But that’s not where the progression of how the Word is communicated ends!  There’s more!

In the Acts of the Apostles, from where the more extensive of our daily scripture readings comes, tells of the coming of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus says that the Spirit of God becomes the Advocate of God, advocating for humanity before God and also bringing the word to all people.  But how? 

Empowered by the Holy Spirit, now it’s the Apostles and Disciples who go out and spread the word of God and about God.  First twelve are appointed.[10]  Then seventy.[11]  Then something more remarkable happens, the Apostle Paul comes along and insists that ALL followers of Christ, not just those who are appointed by Jesus himself, are to spread the word.  Remember the Apostle Paul’s words, which we read from the book of Colossians?

“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom;”  

Somewhere along the line, the word isn’t just spoken or written or told.  It comes alive!  Jesus is the word made flesh and the Holy Spirit also does much to breath fire into the lives of the people of God, the fire which comes from God and which is the word!  But by the end of the New Testament, the word is Alive, but not only alive in God who speaks to Adam and Eve and Abram and Sara, not only alive in the life of Christ, and not only alive through the movement of the Holy Spirit, but alive in the hearts and souls and minds of ALL the people of God!

In 2 Timothy we hear “But the word of God is not chained.”[12]  Paul tells Timothy that although he is chained the word is not.  The word takes on a life of its own and spreads and grows and brings life!  It transforms people, it reveals the grace of God and inspires praise and thanksgiving and worship!  And worship is real and Christian worship and true, when and only when the Word of God comes alive in that space and time and in the minds and hearts and souls of the people of God!

So how important is the preacher to worship?  How important is good music or true testimony to bear witness to God’s Grace?  Well, a church could have a comedian in a black robe, or the world’s greatest storyteller, or some spectacular tabernacle choir or a great rock band or a stunning Gospel singer all contribute to worship, but if the word does not come alive, it’s not worship, because there is nothing to be thankful for, there is no connection to God and there is no reason for praise.  None of those individual elements alone makes good worship, but many of those elements, a fiery preacher, a magnificent music ministry, a devoted congregation that is in touch with what God has been doing in their individual lives and shares the good news of that experience with brothers and sisters in Christ, all contribute to the word coming alive.

When the word comes alive, its then and only then that worship helps us to “take our bearings, see where we are and find out if we are going in the right direction.”