Psalm 95:1-7
March 10, 2019
First Presbyterian Church, Sterling IL
Christina Berry
This Lenten season, our theme is “Wholehearted Worship.” For these weeks leading to Easter, we are taking a deeper look at worship. After that first Easter, Christians began to worship together on Sundays. They did so because it was the first day of the week, and they were commemorating the day that Jesus rose from the grave. So it was that every Sunday began to be considered a “little Easter.” In fact, when counting the forty days of Lent, Sundays, little Easters, don’t count.
This Lenten series will highlight the Biblical basis of our acts of worship, and remind us of the meaning of our Sunday morning rituals and symbols. In my newsletter article I mentioned that I hope that this Lenten series can help each of us make our daily life an act of worship.
So we begin at the beginning – the call to worship. A call to worship, is God’s invitation to gather as Christ’s body. It is an invitation to be open to an encounter with the Holy One who calls all things into being. We gather with the expectation of meeting the Risen Lord, and drawing closer to God and to one another.
Our scripture reading today is from Psalm 95, one of the Psalms that scholars believe was used in worship, a Psalm of ascent – that’s a-s-c-e-n-t, like climbing, not a-s-s-e-n-t like agreeing – because they went up – ascended – to the temple. The temple replaced the high places of the past – the shrines and altars where people worshiped. You’ll notice that this Psalm speaks to the assembly, in the plural. It is not about an individual, but about the gathered people. Let’s listen for God’s word to us in Psalm 95:1-7
1 O come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
3 For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and the dry land, which his hands have formed.
6 O come, let us worship and bow down,
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
7 For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Apparently, worship in the churches of the United States is a mess. You don’t have to Google for very long to discover that there is something very wrong with the way people worship:
it is all just entertainment and show, and it is boring;
it is overly long and it crams too much into one hour;
preaching is devoid of Biblical truth and it is too dogmatic;
songs are meaningless and go on too long, and are too short and repetitive;
we sing the same old songs every week and we don’t know any of them;
prayers are nonexistent and too regimented;
there is too much emphasis on giving and not enough on tithing;
the sermons are too abstract, and the ideas are too concrete;
the music is too loud and the silence is too long;
it is too hierarchical and controlled, and they let just anybody speak.
In other words, for those who go to worship services at a church, worship is all wrong – at everyone else’s church! This is just the list from people who actually ATTEND worship services. I could talk for hours about the critiques of worship services from those who are rarely or never in one!
Truth be told, those are annoying. It’s like a film critic went to one movie one time in 1986, and now reviews all movies based on that one long-ago experience. I get a little weary of bad reviews from people who never saw the show. Even Amazon now has a process for book reviewers that verifies whether they actually bought the book!
There are really thousands of reasons why people don’t go to church from the obvious reason that they simply don’t believe to the more complex theological ideas that I frankly find doubtful. It’s like saying “I don’t go to church because in 1908, they adopted the Conclusions of Utrecht 1905, which insisted on adhering to the doctrine of presumptive regeneration,” when the real reason is that somebody once made an offhand comment that offended or angered you.
All this is to say that this Psalm, and this sermon, are not about worship services on Sunday morning, but we are going to start with Sunday morning worship, because here we all are!
Like most Christians, Presbyterians place some importance on worship. Worship services are so important to us that we devote an entire section of our Constitution to worship. The Directory for Worship is our guidebook for worship, particularly worship services on Sunday, the Lord’s Day. Here’s what our Directory for Worship says about worship:
“We gather to worship God on the Lord’s Day (Sunday) because the gospels testify that Jesus rose from the dead early on the first day of the week. The Lord’s Day is also called the “eighth day” of creation, a sign of the new creation that has begun with Christ’s resurrection. While we may worship God on any day and at any time, the Sunday service in particular is a celebration of Christ’s resurrection and an anticipation of the fullness of God’s coming reign.”
Isn’t that lovely?
Worship as celebration and anticipation!
Maybe its worth taking a minute to think about the word worship. In Hebrew, the language in which the Psalms were written, the word means to bow down, or prostrate oneself. The Greek word is similar – it is to adore, or to kneel. One Greek word, “proskuneo,” means to kiss, like a dog licking his master’s hand. The English word means to ascribe worthiness to something or someone.
Notice that all of them are verbs –
worship isn’t an event we attend, it is something we do.
There’s a common misunderstanding about worship services
that the people come into the church building to GET something.
You’ve heard people say it, I know,
“Well, I didn’t get anything out of that service.”
It’s not wrong to get something out of worship services –
in fact I hope you do! – but that’s not the purpose of the service.
I read a story last week about a family that decided one day to attend a church service. They found a beautiful church with a service time that worked for them, and they got up on Sunday morning and went. And oh my, it was lovely! The choir sang beautifully, the sermon was profound, the prayers were meaningful, and all the people were welcoming. On the way home, the parents asked the kids what they thought, and the youngest son said, “Dad, I can’t believe they put on that whole show for only a dollar!”
That’s worship as a transaction – going to see what you can get.
Of course we hope that the worship service equips and inspires, challenges and provokes, motivates and ministers to you. But if all we ever accomplish on Sunday morning is celebration and anticipation, that is a worship win!
One writer describes worship as a “gift exchange.”
We bring our gifts to share, and we both give and receive.
So that’s Sunday worship. But what has that got to do with Monday, or any other weekday? This Psalm is a call to worship, and it was used for a particular event, but the words can be applied to any time of any day. These verses call us to worship God in heartfelt ways:
coming into God’s presence with joyful singing
and bowing down in prayer
and dancing with thanksgiving.
This kind of worship is all about remembering –
remembering who God is and what God has done for us.
If we were to worship wholeheartedly,
not just here and now, not just today,
but tomorrow and the day after and the day after,
maybe we’d start our day with a call to worship.
Maybe we’d wake up every morning with a song of praise
or a prayer of thanksgiving on our lips.
You could write it on your mirror with a sharpy,
or print it and put it on the bedside table.
Maybe we’d roll over and hit the snooze button on the alarm,
but instead of going back to sleep we’d consider what a joyful thing it is
to awaken, to see the new morning, to have a new day in front of us.
Maybe we’d say,
“This is the day the Lord has made!
I will rejoice and be glad in it!”
At midmorning, or at lunch, we’d recall that our God is a great God,
who holds in loving hands the depths of the earth
and the heights of the mountains and the width of the sea
and all the sheep of all the pastures.
Maybe, pausing for a moment on the way to a meeting,
or in the middle of some dreary task,
we’d remember that that God made the sea and the dry land,
and God made that annoying person who won’t stop talking,
and God made that sneaky kid who always seems to be hiding something,
and they have gifts to share, and God loves them, too.
Maybe we’d take a moment,
even if it is only in our minds and not our bodies,
to worship and bow down,
to kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
Maybe we’d begin to see our lives as a gift exchange –
not a transaction once a week
where some people put on a worship show at church,
and we vote thumbs up or thumbs down,
or toss a dollar in the offering plate,
but a daily gift exchange.
We’d be offering songs and prayer and thanksgiving to God,
wholeheartedly and with celebration and anticipation,
and God will be giving us joy and hope and open hearts,
so that when we turn our eyes away from self
and toward others in the world,
we can offer that joy and hope to them,
welcoming them into that celebration and anticipation that is worship.
O come, let us worship and bow down,
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
Not just on Sunday, but every moment of every day,
open-handed, and wholehearted.
Amen.
So that’s Sunday worship. But what has that got to do with Monday, or any other weekday? This Psalm is a call to worship, and it was used for a particular event, but the words can be applied to any time of any day. These verses call us to worship God in heartfelt ways:
coming into God’s presence with joyful singing
and bowing down in prayer
and dancing with thanksgiving.
This kind of worship is all about remembering –
remembering who God is and what God has done for us.
If we were to worship wholeheartedly,
not just here and now, not just today,
but tomorrow and the day after and the day after,
maybe we’d start our day with a call to worship.
Maybe we’d wake up every morning with a song of praise
or a prayer of thanksgiving on our lips.
You could write it on your mirror with a sharpy,
or print it and put it on the bedside table.
Maybe we’d roll over and hit the snooze button on the alarm,
but instead of going back to sleep we’d consider what a joyful thing it is
to awaken, to see the new morning, to have a new day in front of us.
Maybe we’d say,
“This is the day the Lord has made!
I will rejoice and be glad in it!”
At midmorning, or at lunch, we’d recall that our God is a great God,
who holds in loving hands the depths of the earth
and the heights of the mountains and the width of the sea
and all the sheep of all the pastures.
Maybe, pausing for a moment on the way to a meeting,
or in the middle of some dreary task,
we’d remember that that God made the sea and the dry land,
and God made that annoying person who won’t stop talking,
and God made that sneaky kid who always seems to be hiding something,
and they have gifts to share, and God loves them, too.
Maybe we’d take a moment,
even if it is only in our minds and not our bodies,
to worship and bow down,
to kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
Maybe we’d begin to see our lives as a gift exchange –
not a transaction once a week
where some people put on a worship show at church,
and we vote thumbs up or thumbs down,
or toss a dollar in the offering plate,
but a daily gift exchange.
We’d be offering songs and prayer and thanksgiving to God,
wholeheartedly and with celebration and anticipation,
and God will be giving us joy and hope and open hearts,
so that when we turn our eyes away from self
and toward others in the world,
we can offer that joy and hope to them,
welcoming them into that celebration and anticipation that is worship.
O come, let us worship and bow down,
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
Not just on Sunday, but every moment of every day,
open-handed, and wholehearted.
Amen.
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