1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14
Psalm 111
Ephesians 5:15-20
John 6:51-58
“Worship—Beginning of Wisdom”
What is worship about? That was the first question one of my professors asked. So, I ask you, what is worship about?
We walk into worship, not to receive, but to give. We come to give God praise for the world and creation in which we live. We come to sing of God’s wondrous acts of redemption, salvation, and resurrection. We come to pray and thank God for each breath that we take and each beat of our hearts. We come to worship, I hope, to give rather than receive.
Over the last several decades, beginning almost a century ago now, there was a sense of entitlement in worship. When people walked into the doors of a church, each was looking to receive a word that would bolster his or her soul, a moment that would lift the sorrow from their heart or a time when the hand of God would take the pain away. About a century ago, a trend of preaching for healing made its way into the mainstream of Christian thought. One prominent preacher whose name eludes me said that each sermon he preached should solve some problem for his church members—if not all then some. He preached a kind of counseling sermon, designed to apply biblical truth to psychological, social or even physical problems. There’s nothing wrong with that—on occasion.
What he brought to the tradition of worship was a way of teaching and learning within a worship setting. He may not have been the first, but he certainly wasn’t the last. I think that’s where the danger may begin. If you go home and turn on your TV you could probably find several preachers who are speaking that kind of sermon this week. “You have this problem? Well, then, this scripture tells you that God will fix it in this way.” That kind of expectation has become common, I think.
There have been many trends in preaching over the years, but whatever the sermon purports to do or not do, the purpose in gathering together is not to serve ourselves, but to bring glory to God.
So, if worship is about giving glory, praise and thanks to God—how are we entitled to anything as we worship? Why are we disappointed if the preacher didn’t make us feel good or the songs weren’t uplifting? Or were we upset because we weren’t made brought to tears out of contrition? Is it about me? Did we praise God for simply being God? Did we thank God for the abundant blessings we have received? Do our hearts burst with the joy we feel in God’s presence?
Each of today’s texts conveys a relationship between the worship of God and the experience of God’s wisdom. So, each one reveals the truth we experience—that without the experience of God in our lives, truth or wisdom is hollow and empty. We also know that with God in our lives, truth isn’t a static, unmoving, nonliving thing—it is a dynamic movement. Just as our relationships with one another—as parents, spouses, friends, offspring—change as we move into and out of different contexts and situations. When someone we love hurts us, for example, we may not quit loving them, but our love and trust shifts and moves as that relationship changes. And when someone we love pleases us beyond our expectation, we also may be opened up to love even more. And that love may abound beyond that particular person into other people who may be in our lives. The truth and wisdom of those relationships develop and so does our relationship with God.
Times when we gather as a community for the purpose of worshiping God often have times of teaching, too, where we are encouraged to grow closer to God in some way. We can come to a service of worship intending to learn as well as experience God’s glory—that’s what sermons and other teaching times are intended to do. Yet the focus in those times, too, is building our relationship with God as well as learning how to reveal that relationship to others.
The text this morning from 1 Kings tells the story of how the wise king Solomon, the warrior David’s heir, became wise. In this text, we are told that King Solomon was in the habit of worshiping God in places other than in Jerusalem where his father, King David, had moved the tent of meeting (or the tabernacle). And there is no condemnation for this, though his actions are explained. He liked to go to the different altars, or high places, to worship and it was at one of these that God decided to come to him and talk. After his sacrificial offering, he heard God ask, “What do you want?”
He seemed to have come to worship with the expectation that this was a possibility, so Solomon answered God very clearly and with certainty. I wonder sometimes if we ever come to worship with that clarity and certainty. I wonder sometimes if we come to worship expecting an encounter with God. I don’t have to wonder about myself—honestly, I sometimes forget why I have come.
I received a reminder almost two weeks ago as I attended General Assembly. Though I sometimes get caught up in the leadership of worship while I am here, I was able to be swept away while I was there. I have known myself to get swept away here, too, so, I know it’s not just the almost 6000 others worshiping God with me. As I sang some well known hymn that I can’t even remember the name of, I felt a connection to God that I don’t feel all the time. It wasn’t the choice of hymn or the words—there was simply a heartfelt knowledge in and through me that I was in presence of God and that I always am. Though I love leading worship—that moment reminded me that I need to let go sometimes and let God lead me in worship, too. I needed to ask for and accept the wisdom that is in the worship of God.
That’s not the only wisdom to be gained through the worship of God, but as the psalmist wrote, “10The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding.” Knowing God is God and no one else is God IS the place and time and thought where wisdom begins. Respecting that God is God and no one else can be is the place where we begin to understand our places in this world. The “fear of the Lord” is simply the willingness to let go and let God be God. This is wisdom and truth, it is the basis of worship—the reason we gather and give God praise—and it is a very difficult truth to live in every day.
Wisdom, as described by some, means knowing your limitations and realizing, not that you are worthless, but that your worth depends on acknowledging the boundaries and edges of who you are. It means discerning what you can do to live God’s word in your life and what is beyond your capabilities and letting God do what you can’t.
And in the life of faith that we live as Christians, we cannot simply look at wisdom as a controlling agent that is set upon us sinful humans—like some view the 10 commandments—wisdom and truth are written within us as disciples of Jesus, the embodiment of God’s wisdom and word.
Parker Palmer, a Quaker theologian calls Jesus . . . “a paradigm, a model of this personal truth. In him, truth,[ . . .] takes on a human frame. In Jesus, the disembodied ‘word’ takes flesh and walks among us. Jesus calls us to truth, but not in the form of creeds or theologies or world-views. His call to truth is a call to community – with him, with each other, with creation and its Creator.”[1]
As disciples of Jesus, we are called to imitate Jesus’ embodiment of truth, but not as individuals. We are called to be the imitators of truth and wisdom in the body of Christ, the church—that is the way that we are most faithful. That is the only way we accomplish the will of God—and that is the way that we most faithfully worship God—as a community.
The word in John’s gospel this week is one of the times when we must realize that deep spiritual nature of gospel of John. In the text from this week and last, Jesus refers to his blood as drink and his flesh as the bread we are to eat. As I read and paraphrased it in my studies this week, I wrote it this way, “Those who drink in my life will live; I will give them life again. My body is the true life and my blood is the true life. I will live in them and they in me. The life of God is in me and I live because of God—so my life needs to be in you and you will live because of me. I am the bread of life that God sends to you—not bread to satisfy the body for a day, but bread and life to sustain life for eternity.”
As we gather into a body when we worship, we constitute the body of Christ in this place—and that body changes from week to week—from day to day as we move into and out of a particular worshiping body. Each week this body is slightly different as some member attend and others are absent, yet it is a complete body each time, worshiping God whose truth and wisdom was made flesh in Jesus.
We gather to worship because we know that in and through the community, the body of Christ, our needs are already met—not because we need to feel good. We may gather in the body of Christ and find that we are more clearly able to see our sin and thus more able and willing to ask for forgiveness. We may gather and begin to understand more clearly how it is that we have not listened to the wisdom of God. We may gain from the times when we come together and worship God—but the purpose of the worship of God is to give God glory, anything else is icing on the cake.
For Solomon, his worship of God brought forth the question “What do you need of me?” from God. For the psalmist wisdom of awe was made real in the contemplation of the goodness of creation and the wonder that exists all around. In Ephesians, we understand that the wisdom we gain in that worship and wonder translates into the choices we make and in the behavior that reveals who we are. And when John’s gospel reveals Jesus’ word of flesh and blood, we can realize that God’s mysteries are meant to guide us closer to the one who is the source of all life and wisdom.
Within our worship services, we will learn and gain encouragement and understanding—yet I hope that we allow ourselves to be open to the experience of God, awesome and wondrous beyond any word we might hear and understand. I hope that we are reminded that the delightful power of God accompanies us when we gather as a community of six, sixty or six thousand.
In the name of our God: wisdom, friend and comforter. Amen.
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