Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Pentecost 18
September 30, 2007
Dr. H. Stephen Shoemaker*
THE GLORY, MEASURE AND ECSTASY OF WORSHIP
Isaiah 58:3-9; Colossians 3:12-17; John 4:19-24
Cherrie and I are so grateful to be back with you for this centennial year celebration. I am thankful to you, Greg, for this invitation and for your extraordinary leadership of this congregation. One of you wrote me and said of Greg: “He has a great heart and we are so thankful he is here.” He’s a wonderful and gifted pastor. And I am thankful for you, Crescent Hill. You have graced and shaped me more than any congregation in my life.
Wayne Ward, I’m so grateful to you and the faculty next door and in the congregation who taught me and supported me - - and who taught and supported so many young ministers.
David and Ann would love to see you. David is a writer and editor and lives in New York City. Ann is a professional bassoonist who teaches and plays in North Carolina and South Carolina and has just begun a doctoral program in bassoon performance.
Greg asked me to preach on worship. So my title: The Glory, Measure and Ecstasy of Worship.
My mind and heart are flooded with memories of worship here:
- My first Sunday as your pastor hearing you sing for the first time the Crescent Hill hymn.
- Children ringing their Alleluia bells on Easter Sunday.
- The Easter the sanctuary was filled with cut flowers, and we gave them to you at the end of worship to take to others. I watched you from the front porch bearing flowers in your arms, north, east, south, west, delivering the beauty of the Resurrection to others.
- The procession of the seasons of the Christian year, Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, each bearing their sacred colors and holy awe like the procession of flowering trees and flowers through spring.
- The artistry of Dwight Cobb, who was a “visual liturgist” of the highest order.
- Grady Nutt’s memorial service and Darrell singing In the Sweet Bye and Bye (I remember every time Darrell sang).
- The Service of Welcome Home and Gratitude for Vietnam Veterans twenty-five years after the war. I’ll never forget decorated soldiers in uniform embraced by you. And David Smith, bless his rest in God, wearing his uniform and medals for the first time since the war. Before the service as he and I passed by the communion table with the open Bible, he pointed me to Psalm 31. I do not know whether the Bible was already open there or whether he had turned to it. Here are the words he showed me that day:
Look at this, he said!
I am the scorn of all my adversaries,
a horror to my neighbors,
an object of dread to my acquaintances;
those who see me in the street flee from me.
I have passed out of mind like one who is dead;
I have become like a broken vessel.
- I remember Paula’s elegant playing and Louie’s skillful and faithful musical leadership.
- I remember the sacred musical theatre we put on in this place as a form of public witness and worship: Noah’s Fludde, Godspell, Cotton Patch Gospel, Amahl and the Night Visitors.
- I remember you week in week out seeking to love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and seeking to embody the words of Camus, who said: “There is beauty, and there are the humiliated, and we must try, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful to one or the other.”
- I remember when Eiko Kanamaru preached, and I asked her to preach in her native tongue so we could hear her in the beauty and music of her first language. She gave me a translation which I repeated sentence by sentence after her. Someone after the service suggested to Bill Johnson that he do the same with my sermons: After each sentence he would translate into plain English what I’d just said.
- I remember the day Sam Weakley stole my sermon. He as Deacon had delivered the offertory prayer, and as he left the pulpit he picked up my sermon along with his prayer. When I got there it was nowhere to be found. “Where is my sermon?” I asked aloud, trying to hide my panic. Then I looked out at Sam and asked, “Sam, do you have my sermon?” He shook his head, no, then looked down in his hands and nodded yes and sheepishly hurried it back up to me.
You invited me for eleven years as pastor into a place of holy, searching, beautiful worship, and I am grateful to God and to you.
I
What is the “glory” of worship? It is no less than the presence of God, the glory of God come graciously near.
It comes near in our praise. “Expressive” praise: “O Clap Your Hands, All Ye Peoples.” It comes near in “contemplative” praise, as we whisper, “Why do I love thee, O God? Let me number the ways.”
It comes near in our thankfulness. Always in our thankfulness.
The presence of the Holy One wrenches from our hearts honest confession, not the confession we’re told to make but the one that comes straight from the depths of our agony and shame and bewilderment.
Like Isaiah in the temple who in the presence of the Lord said, “Woe is me...for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.” Like Moses when he drew near the burning bush and heard the Voice say: “Take off your shoes; this is holy ground.” When have you taken off your shoes?
Like Peter when he saw the miracle catch of fish and experienced it as the presence of the Holy One and said to Jesus: “Go away from me, for I am a sinful man.” And Jesus who would not let him go said these two miraculous words. First, “Be not afraid.” How often does fear itself hobble us in our spiritual life! And then he said, “From now on you’ll be catching people!” It was the grace of call. As a character in a Jan Karon “Mitford” novel put it: “Every saint has a ‘past’ and every sinner has a future!” This grace now calls us, makes us catchers of people, people who are falling, people who are drowning, people bruised by injustice, people lost without love, without God.
So the glory of worship: The presence of the Holy God and the Risen Christ come near to bless and to call.
II
What is the measure of worship? A people seeking that which is impossible with us but possible with God, to be a holy people, a people who do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with their God. This was and is the great prophetic critique of worship. We who worship God are also called to imitate God. We created in the image of God are called no less than to represent and resemble God in the world. Worship cannot be disconnected from the passionate pursuit of personal and social righteousness. So God, through Amos, said these words to Israel, who loved high worship but disregarded the plight of the poor: Your sacrifices and songs mean nothing to me, “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”
In our text for today from Isaiah God’s people, whining and blaming, say to God: Why do we fast and you do not see it?
And God said: Because in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure and oppress all your workers.
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness...
To let the oppressed go free
and to break every yoke.
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked to cover them
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
(There’s a phrase to ponder.)
Then, says the Lord, shall your
light break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up speedily.
Then you shall call and the Lord will answer.
Then you shall cry and God will say,
Here I am!
God comes near as we practice the radical hospitality of the gospel, the welcome of the “least of these,” the shamed, bruised, forgotten, those most easily turned away by others. Those who like us need a home, a home base. As God has come near to you in the Karen people you’ve welcomed. “Here I am!”
America is filled with churches who back war as ferociously, or as blithely, as the rest of our citizens. And all this while we follow a Lord who said, “Love your enemies.” A Baptist historian researched Baptist attitudes on war in American history and what did he find? When most Americans were for a war, so were we. When most Americans opposed a war, so did we.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said that Jesus makes us a people maladjusted to our age and our culture. We are all too well adjusted. King said Jesus calls us to be nonconformists. We are so deeply conformed. (Today, many evangelical leaders talk more about their relationship with the White House than their relationship with Jesus.)
In Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, Jayber is the town barber. As a young man he had once been a ministerial student of a Kentucky Baptist college. But he’d given it up and become the town barber of Port William. Now in the novel he was living through WWII with his friends and neighbors. Jayber says:
I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies. I was glad enough that I had not become a preacher, and so would have to go through a war pretending that Jesus had not told us to love our enemies.[1]
We may not be able to follow Jesus - - many days I cannot - - and if we cannot, let us confess so; but let us not go through a war pretending that Jesus didn’t say, “Love your enemy.”
Another measure of worship is captured in Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman. Where should we worship? she asked. In Jerusalem as you Jews say, or on Mt. Gerizim as we Samaritans say? And Jesus responded with an answer that radically transcends all our religious and sectarian divisions. God is not confined, nor true worship bound, to one holy place. God is interested in the geography of the soul. “God is spirit,” Jesus said, “and all who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”
Worship is where we consent to the presence of the Spirit. Whenever, wherever we consent to the presence of the Spirit. Worship is where we bring to God the best truth we can muster about ourselves and our world. And keep at it until deeper truth comes. Worship is where true intercession happens for ourselves and for our world. It is where we experience, to use the words in T. S. Eliot, “the purification of the motive / In the ground of our beseeching.”[2] Worship happens at the ground of our beseeching.
In this moment we are stripped bare, and we are covered in the mercy of God. In this moment we hide not from our own flesh. In this moment we are at the end of our rope, but as John Claypool reminded us, God lives at the end of our ropes.
At this moment we know we cannot make it without God. In Fort Worth we started a homeless meal every Thursday, a family-style meal where we sat and ate with our homeless friends. Two hundred came every Thursday. Still do. After the meal we worshiped together. It was powerful worship, in spirit and in truth. I figured it out. The difference between Sunday morning worship and Thursday night worship is that on Thursday night we all knew we were sinners. On Sunday morning we thought maybe we’re not. On Thursday night we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that without God we would not make it. On Sunday morning we still believed we had a pretty good chance of making it on our own.
III
One final word: about the ecstasy of worship, those inexpressively sweet moments when we experience oneness with God, when the walls of separation between God and us, between the divine and the human fall away and we are at one with God, with self, with life itself. Here we come into contact with what Merton called “the hidden wholeness.” And this is a grace. It is not our doing.
Sometimes this happens in music as we sing “hymns and psalms and spiritual songs.” Sometimes it happens when we hold each other in humility and love and mutual forgiveness, as Paul described it. When we find, to use the words of Buechner’s character Leo Bebb, that “home is Jesus loves us lost or found or any whichway,” when we “find out home is each other.”[3]
One night at our homeless meal and worship at the prayer time a Hispanic man came to the mike and eyes closed began to sing. I could make out only one word of his Spanish, Senor, or Lord, but I, we knew what he was singing. He was crooning out his love song to the Lord. It was as beautiful as “Jesu Meine Freude,” as Bach’s B-Minor Mass. There it was, and there we were: the ecstasy of worship.
In an Andre Dubus short story the main character Luke Ripley, a stable owner, has an early morning routine. He rises every morning at 4:45, has an hour of contemplation, drinks coffee, goes and feeds the horses, then rides down the road to celebrate the Mass at a small Catholic church with Father Paul and a few friends. He says that he has learned in this daily routine, “the necessity and wonder of ritual.” And this is how he describes it: It “allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.”[4]
So we come week by week, we tongue-tied folk with our worried minds and fugitive hearts wanting above all else our ceremony of love. And God draws near and taps us on the shoulder and says,
May I have this dance?
1 Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 2000), p. 142.
2 T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,,” Four Quartets (New York: A Harvest Book, 1943), p. 57.
3 Frederick Buechner, Love Feast (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 61.
4 Andre Dubus, “A Father’s Story” in The Times Are Never So Bad (Boston: David R. Godive, 1983), p. 165.
*Dr. H. Stephen Shoemaker
Myers Park Baptist Church
Charlotte, North Carolina
September 30, 2007
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CRESCENT HILL BAPTIST CHURCH
2800 Frankfort Avenue
Louisville, Kentucky 40206
(502) 896-4425
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