Text: Psalm 92
When I was
almost a teen church wasn't exactly my favourite place to go on Sunday. The minister's name was Dr. Bland Dudley, a
very unfortunate name for a minister. I
liked him though. He taught the
catechism classes that me and a few others took. I don't remember much from them other than
the Apostle's Creed, Psalm 23, and the books of the Bible. But, I do remember that he was likable even
for a minister and for someone a little older than my parents. But Sunday morning worship was a different
story. With all the robes and strange
music and the sermon that fit Dr. Dudley's name, it was just so utterly
different from anything in my real life experience. Worship could be painfully boring, just
something to be endured. And, it seemed
all churches were like that to me. I
sometimes went to my best friend's church which was a small country church and
the same was true there as well. The
minister was a bit of an odd cracker; very educated, a bit of a fundamentalist,
and a self-proclaimed expert on the end-times.
He was charismatic whereas Dr. Dudley was...calming. Yet even though he was a bit more interesting
to watch, worship in that church just didn’t grab me either. The routine there was that we went to Sunday
School and then to church. After Sunday
School, Ronnie and I would either go sleep in the church balcony or say we were
going to the balcony and go sleep in the car.
Though this country church was not as high church as the one I grew up
in, it was also so utterly different than my real life. It too was something to
be endured. Therein lies a
contradiction: Christian faith, church, worship et al is supposed to give us
strength to endure the trials of life, but in reality it seemed the other way
around; the trials of life gave us strength to endure church.
And then
there is Psalm 92. Back then it would
have seemed to me that whoever wrote Psalm 92 must have been some hoity-toity
churchy-fied hypocritical nut getting paid to write positive stuff about church
and God and worship. How could anyone
say “It is good to give thanks to the LORD, to sing praises to your name, O
Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness
by night, to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre.” Church/worship good? No! Church/worship boring…painful! It seemed to me there in my early teens that
church/worship was simply an obligation that good, God-fearing people just had
to do…and why? Did they do it just to
remind themselves that they were good, God-fearing people, the backbone of
society? How could they say that their
lives just wouldn’t be the same if they didn’t go through this routine every
week? Psalm 92 calls itself a Psalm for
the Sabbath. The Jews back then and many
still today read this Psalm every Sabbath, and they do so because it tells of what
worship is supposed to be. It is
supposed to be a good thing to do, a God created everything and called it good
kind of thing to do. Yet, back to me as
a young teen, “good” just wouldn’t have been the way I described worship.
That would
have been the late 70’s. Just fifteen
years from that fateful year of 1965 when all mainline denominations began to
decline. Even then, the fact that I was
a teen who occasionally went to church made me an anomaly. Most of the people I went to school with did
not go to church. Today people my age
are beginning to have grandchildren who will have absolutely no idea what
church is, what worship is, or even believe there is a God. One cannot call our culture Christian anymore
nor assume that good, God-fearing church-goers are the backbone of our society. Those days are gone.
I’m on the
Congregational Life Committee of Presbytery and we’ve been discussing how to
address this problem at an upcoming Elder Training event this coming
October. The older folks wanted J.P.
Smit to come and share about any congregational turn-around success stories he
has seen in the course of his work with Presbyterian churches here in Ontario;
more of the “what-did-they-do-that-worked-so-we-can-do-it-too” stuff. The younger folks on the committee, mid-40’s
and younger, would like him to come and talk about spirituality, about the role
of the Holy Spirit in our churches. Then
discussion went on and uncommon to me, I went on a bit of a rant about how we
as churches need to foster an environment in worship, in whatever, where we are
open to people having a life changing, indeed saving encounter with Jesus
Christ, an encounter in which he acts upon us each to deliver us from our own
fallenness, heal us, and transform us to be more as he is – a saving encounter
where Jesus actually deals with our own sin and brokenness. The Gospels are full of such stories about how
Jesus saved people in the right then and there of their lives.
After my
rant, one of the older members of the committee (and it is amazing how the
breakdown here is along generational lines) insisted we should tell our people
that there are prison ministries and ministries to the poor and destitute in
our Presbytery that they can go to and minister. She wasn’t getting it that she needed Jesus
just as much as a convict does. She
needed the saving transforming work of the Holy Spirit to come to her, the good
church-lady, just a much as to someone whose sin is more obvious. Sunday morning worship needs to be the place
where Jesus the Lord, our resurrected and ascended Lord, comes in the power of
the Holy Spirit to really bring salvation to them with respect to their
fallenness and brokenness in the course of the events of the daily lives.
I think I
have the Psalmist in my corner on this one.
Why does he say that it is “good” to give thanks and to sing praise to
the Lord and declare his steadfast love and faithfulness? The Psalmist answers, “For you, O LORD, have
made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy. How great are your works, O LORD!” The LORD himself did something for the
Psalmist personally to make him glad, to give him joy. The word the Psalmist uses here for works in
Hebrew does not mean look at nature and see the hand of God at work. Rather, he means works where God really acts
in the immediacy of our personal lives in saving ways, doing works which
wondrously show his loving kindness and faithfulness to us in ways personal to
us each. God gets personal with us in
wonderfully kind ways in the darkest corners of our lives.
There
seems to be a prevailing opinion among Mainline Christians that as long as we
are morally good and doing our part for the church that it is well between us
and the LORD and that it is only the down and out destitute who need Jesus to
show up with a work of deliverance provided they repent. What we seem to lack in the Mainline is a
sincere realization of our own need to know personally and experience the
life-giving presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives who brings us to Jesus and
in him and with him we share his relationship with the Father – something which
Paul calls new creation.
Jesus has
risen from the dead and is here in our midst and it is possible in fact
extremely likely that we let what we have come to call a worship service stand
between ourselves and him. It truly is
good to worship the LORD, but that goodness arises not from our doing our duty
on Sunday morning but as the only appropriate expression of his having made us
to be new creation in himself by his wondrously kind and faithful works in our
lives to deliver us from darkness and reconcile us to himself. Amen.
