3/20/24

Why do we do what we do?

I think that’s a dandy question to ask at all points of our lives, and it’s an important one to ask as believers. 

For many people, “church” is just something they do along with everything else. “Church” is like your job; you punch your time card, put your time in, clock out and you’re done for the week! And faith is something you have just enough of to get you through bad times and provide you with some fire insurance at the end.

But is that all there is? 

If you’ve been reading the story of Israel with us, I think it’s clear that God gave Israel the Law (and especially the book of  Deuteronomy) to make sure Israel’s “religion” wouldn’t be something they took for granted and forgot. Their Law made sure that their “religion” wove together their faith and their life (which, by the way, goes back to the original meaning of “religion,” from a Latin word meaning “to bind.” Religion is that thing that unites people). 

In these last chapters of Judges, we’ve seen the horrible examples of what happens when people just go their own way (over and over we’re reminded “there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in their own eyes”) rather than being the faithful people of God.  

The main way they maintained their faithfulness to God was through their common experience of worship – and this goes for New Testament as well as Old Testament as well as Christians today  – a common experience that reshaped the people from being a “we’ll do what we please” sort of people into a people who lived faithfully for God. 

For example, at the Festivals (Passover, Pentecost, Booths) the people of God gathered to remember and relive what God did for them in the past.  By eating unleavened bread at Passover or camping  outdoors during Booths, their memory was refreshed of who they were, and that remembering gave them both the reason and the direction for continuing their lives of praise and obedience and faith. Re-living the great saving events of God reoriented their lives in the words and acts of God.

In other words, they came to worship.

In Christian worship, we assemble to share together in communion, and to hear God’s word spoken in scripture and sermon. The sermon and scriptures (hopefully) inspire the life of faith lived out in praise, obedience, and commitment. And we experience all this together.

I know people who’ll say (someone actually said something like this last week), “I can worship God on the golf course.”

Well. That’s true.

But, it’s only true if you’ve gone  to the golf course to worship God! 

At no time has there ever been a biblical faith, or any kind of continuing life in relation to God, apart from shared worship. 

It’s a shared experience of worship that creates us into the people God wants us to be. It’s a life of faith, a life that begins with belief, but expresses itself in our loyalty, faithfulness and allegiance to God. It’s more than just a Sunday morning, hour-long experience; it’s a lifetime of shaping our lives around the will of the God who created us and who loved us so much that he gave his Son Jesus to die for us. 

And when the world turns against us . . . whether it’s an actual political oppression like in the days of Roman persecutions or oppression experienced in Muslim or communist countries today, or whether it’s a betrayal by someone we love, or the betrayal of our bodies as we get older, the most powerful weapon to stand against it is a life of faithfulness that’s rooted deeply in worship.

Next week is Holy Week. It’s the most important week of the year, and I have high hopes you’ll honor it. It distills everything that happens the rest of the year. 

Our service of prayer and song on Palm Sunday evening bookends our Ash Wednesday service, moving us from repentance to the hope of redemption, 

On  Palm Sunday morning, many of the themes of the Bible come together to create something new. On Maundy Thursday, we’ll see that the “something new” is a new Family, made possible by and held together by the love of God. On Good Friday, we’ll see the ultimate expression of the love of God on the cross. Saturday night, at the Easter Vigil, we’ll reflect on the stories of redemption from the Old Testament and see how they come together in the greatest rescue operation in the history of the Universe: the resurrection of Jesus and the deliverance we can have from the bondage of sin and death. And on Easter Sunday morning, we’ll gather at the empty tomb with Mary Magdalene – a woman who for a brief moment was the only person who knew the Good News that Jesus is alive.