“Like a Praising Stone”                                                                                Vance L. Toivonen

READING                   Luke 19:28-40

After he had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.  When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples,  saying, "Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, 'Why are you untying it?' just say this, 'The Lord needs it.'" So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, "Why are you untying the colt?" They said, "The Lord needs it." Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it. As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!" Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, order your disciples to stop." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out."

READING                   Marva J. Dawn, A Royal “Waste” of Time:

                         The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the World

To worship the Lord is – in the world’s eyes – a waste of time. It is, indeed, a royal waste of time, but waste nonetheless. By engaging in it, we don’t accomplish anything useful in our society’s terms. Worship ought not to be construed in a utilitarian way. Its purpose is not to gain numbers nor for our churches to be seen as successful. Rather, the entire reason for our worship is that God deserves it. Moreover, it isn’t even useful for earning points with God, for what we do in worship won’t change one whit how God feels about us…God will always still be merciful, compassionate, and gracious, abounding in steadfast love…Worship is a royal waste of time, but it is indeed royal, for it immerses us in the regal splendor of the King of the cosmos.

SERMON

Praise is not a word we use often in our vocabulary. If Steve has done a good job of repairing my car, I do not say, “I praise you, Steve!” Or when a great actor or director takes the stage at the Oscars to receive his or her award, the crowd does not say, “We praise you, O great creator of films!” No, what we usually do is thank Steve for a job well done, and at the Oscars the crowd applauds. If they are particularly grateful they might stand and applaud.

So in some way we praise all of the time. We just do not call it praise. And our praise is usually attached to what others have done. We rarely praise another human being just for being a human being. Which brings me to another word associated with praise – worship.

Worship has, at its semantic roots, the literal meaning of worth or value. Worship is a means by which we ascribe value to someone. We do this when we erect statuary to honor a human being who has made a significant contribution to society. The memorial being erected in front of Sturgeon Bay’s city hall is a form of worship, a kind of hero worship. We are honoring the veterans of wars, ascribing value and worth to them, and to their service.

So we praise and worship more often than we realize; it’s just that we do not usually call these activities praise or worship. In fact, in my experience, the words praise and worship have pretty much been reserved for activities related to my religious experience. I praise God. I worship God. I tend to thank, appreciate, honor, respect, admire, and celebrate my fellow humanity.

Since this morning’s central theme is the praise and worship of the crowd that gathered to welcome Jesus into the city of Jerusalem, I thought this would be as good a time as any to reflect on just what this hour of every week is actually about. The crowds on that day in Jerusalem worshiped Jesus as the coming Messiah King. They worshiped him because they perceived him to be their savior, the one who would deliver them from the oppression of Roman tyranny. They praised him because they perceived him to be their hope. By the time Luke writes his gospel the Christian community had established this messianic role for Jesus to the extent that even Jesus plays along, suggesting that if the crowds did not praise him, the stones themselves would do so. This is definitely a post-Easter Jesus who rides triumphant into Jerusalem. Mark makes no mention of praising stones in his gospel.

We call this a worship service, and we call the activity we engage in on Sunday mornings worship. To worship is, at its core, the process of applying worth or value to something or someone, literally worth-ship. Praise is the accompanying activity of worship. We sing praise. We laud and honor with our mouths. We can also, I suppose, praise with our silence, with our reverence as we perceive ourselves to be in the presence of God. We reason that we are in God’s presence all of the time, but somehow the tradition of this hour once a week carries with it the mythos that we are extra-specially in God’s presence at this time and in this place.

The roots of this mythology go back to the ancient days of temple worship. Ancient Israel carried God’s presence around in a box they called the Ark of the Covenant, until they built the temple, which then housed the Ark. This is the box the Nazis sought out in the film Raiders of the Lost Ark. And, if you have seen and remember the film, you know what happened when the bad, bad Nazis opened the Ark. The world often understands God, or the gods, as sources of power and wrath. The 29^th Psalm is a praise Psalm that also expresses this power. Here I read it from Peterson’s translation called The Message:

Bravo, God, bravo!

            Gods and all angels shout, “Encore!”

In awe before the glory,

            In awe before God’s visible power.

Stand at attention!

            Dress your best to honor him!

God thunders across the waters,

Brilliant, his voice and his face, streaming brightness –

God, across the flood waters.

God’s thunder tympanic,

God’s thunder symphonic.

God’s thunder smashes cedars,

God topples the northern cedars.

The mountain ranges skip like spring colts,

The high ridges jump like wild kid goats.

God’s thunder spits fire.

God thunders, the wilderness quakes;

He makes the desert of Kadesh shake.

God’s thunder sets the oak trees dancing

A wild dance, whirling; the pelting rain strips their branches.

We fall to our knees – we call out, “Glory!”

Above the floodwaters is God’s throne

            from which his power flows,

            from which he rules the world.

God makes his people strong.

God gives his people peace.

I remember being told as a child by my mother and grandmother that when it thundered the angels were bowling in heaven. Its kind of silly when I think about it now, and kind of fun to imagine angels engaging in a recreational activity like bowling. But at its core, this mythology placed thunder and power in the court of the heavenly king, in God’s heavenly kingdom, up there, in the sky somewhere. This is an ancient understanding of God’s presence as being “up there” somewhere. Thus, the psalm, one of many pieces of scripture that ascribe the activity of storms to God. After all, don’t our insurance policies still refer to storm damage as “acts of God?”

How we understand or perceive God will directly influence our worship and how we express ourselves in worship. As my view of God adjusts and changes, so my worship and praise language changes. But at the end of the day I believe Marva Dawn is right. The most important thing about worship is that it is a worship of God. It is not a worship of what we are doing. It is not a worship of our music, or our thoughtful sermonizing, or our clever turns of phrase. It is not a worship of this community or this church. It is solely an hour to focus on God, and on God alone. It is an hour to reflect on how God enters our lives, and how God desires to bring to this world all of the hopefulness, goodness, mercy, compassion, and steadfast love that we have come to associate with God. It is an hour to reflect on the God of justice announced by the prophets of old, as well as modern day prophets who still call us to such a vision of God. Worship is about the intersection of God and all of life.

Worship takes place in a house of God. I know we don’t necessarily refer to this room as a house of God here at Hope, but we have this reference to places of worship in our religious dossiers. I once spent a week at Collegeville, a monastery and seminary in Minnesota. When we arrived at the door of the chapel for worship, we were instructed to be quiet. The house of God was a place of contemplation and peace. The words uttered in this place pointed in one direction. All of the music and spoken word turned our attention to God. We were at worship.

Marva Dawn’s book is primarily a reaction to what has been referred to as worship wars. This is the technique of creating more and more compelling and entertaining means of worship for the masses in an effort to attract people to ones particular house of worship. These worship wars have helped to create some of the largest worship structures ever, some of them being quite theater-like. Marva suggests that placing the focus of worship on God also involves a willingness to be formed by God into a living community of God, a community that lives out its call to be Church in the world, an alternate community, if you will, to the power structures so often associated with church. She writes,

It is crucial at this time that our churches ask fundamental questions about who we are as Church and how we practice being Church in our worship life. Above all, we must resist any inroads of the consumer culture into our life as a colony of the kingdom offering alternatives. We dare not let worship be just another consumer item for which people shop. Marva J. Dawn, A Royal “Waste” of Time: The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the World

It is my conviction that this hour, whatever form or shape it might take, is an opportunity to experience and reflect upon what it means to live in God’s presence. It is my conviction that this is not to be primarily an entertainment. It is my conviction that we can use all of the communication tools available to us as long as the result is that we leave this hour more conscious of God’s presence, and more courageous in living out the kingdom of God in our daily lives. When worship becomes a distraction from this emphasis, or when worship becomes a tyranny of power and oppression over people, or when worship becomes anything other than a vehicle for focusing on God, then worship is no longer worship, and the praising is left to the stones.

In the chapter on Worship in her book Amazing Grace, Kathleen Norris shares her frustration with what she calls, borrowing a term from Emily Dickinson, “relentlessly educational worship.” She is far more interested in the experience of worship than in the didactic quality of worship. When one is in worship, does one feel as if one is in God’s presence? Worship need not be perfect or well-scripted. Worship simply needs to take us out of ourselves and point us toward that greater reality that we call, for lack of a better word, God. It will be enough for us to let go of ourselves and simply praise God awhile. What this does for the soul will likely far outweigh any cognitive exercises we might engage in. I close, then, with the end of Norris’ story which comes after her frustration with less than satisfying worship experiences. She writes,

I needed the restorative of good liturgy and was relieved to find it in the parish staffed by Dominicans. To judge from the people in the pews, and those we were asked to pray for, the congregation consisted of elderly Italian and German women, and young families – Anglo, Hispanic, black. A pleasingly motley crew, and not particularly “enabled.” A woman and her teenaged son were the lectors; they had evidently practiced, and read well. The choir was large, lively, enthusiastic, and blessedly ragged. The homily was forgettable. I was not seeking an aesthetic experience and had endured enough perfectionism in worship over the past week to last a lifetime. I wanted worship with room for the Holy Spirit, worship hospitable enough to welcome a confused soul such as myself. And there, among strangers, I found it: living worship, slightly out of control, and not terribly educational. Orthodox in the ancient sense, as “right worship,” joyful enough to briefly house a living God. (Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith).

I can only hope that our worship too is joyful enough, broad enough, deep enough, and yes, ragged enough to house a living God.