Sermon: "Why Church? Part 2: "Stand," January 19, 2020
Part of our series "Why Church?" The series is loosely based on Scott W. Sunquist’s book, Why Church: A Basic Introduction. Each week looks at a movement in worship to answer this question, in worship we:
come together
stand to praise God
kneel to confess
sit to listen to the Word of God
go out into the world
“A Psalm of thanksgiving.
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.
Worship the Lord with gladness;
come into his presence with singing.
Know that the Lord is God.
It is he that made us, and we are his;
we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
and his courts with praise.
Give thanks to him, bless his name.
For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures for ever,
and his faithfulness to all generations. ”
Today we continue our sermon series, “Why Church?” Here we’re hoping to have a few good reasons we can share when people ask. A few reasons for our own, sake, too. To help us figure it out for ourselves.
Each week we’re using the pattern of worship as our guide. Last week, the answer to the question “why church?” was based on the very first thing we do: we “come” to church. We come, because we are invited to come as we are to the God of love. And in doing so, we come to community, where we are able to become more than we are.
This week is the second movement. After the prelude, the greeting, the call to worship, we all literally stood together to sing the first couple of hymns. The second movement, therefore, is to “Stand.” We stand.
In worship we stand to sing. We sing, but we don’t just sing any old songs. We stand first to sing doxologies, we sing “praise” to God. This morning we sang “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God almighty… early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.” And “heaven is singing with joy to God, hallelujah.” The word hallelujah itself meaning “praise the Lord.” Every Sunday in worship we sing songs to God, and they’re songs about God. About who God is, and what God’s up to in the world.
Now, to the outsider, this can all sound silly. I have a friend who I used to work with. Good friend, great guy, but flat out atheist. His girlfriend, though, was real churchy, and insisted on taking him. It was a church with flashing lights, praise band, and all that stuff.
He told me that they stood, and they sang for, like, forty-five minutes at the beginning of the service, all praise music. It was all the same—“God this, God, that.” “We love you, Lord,” “we thank you Jesus.” “I will honour your name.” “You are the only One for me, etc. etc.”
The singing was fine, music good. But he couldn’t figure out the point. Cuz for a transcendent, infinite being, God sure sounded insecure, he said. Why does the Creator of the Universe need us to say nice things to him constantly? If he were a person, we’d have a word for that: needy. Narcissistic perhaps. Even ego-maniacal, maybe. If God is perfect, as they say, why would a perfect being need us to strum guitars, raise our hands, belting out “how great thou art?” To him, it made little sense.
It didn’t make much sense to him. And kinda he had a point. It’s actually a point that Christian theology's wrestled with since its earliest days.
In classical Christian theology, this is called the doctrine of divine impassibility. That God’s fundamental nature can not be changed by God’s creatures or anything else. God is impassible, God can’t be altered from the outside. So the moment that God needs an ego boost is the moment that we’re dealing with something other than God. So God doesn’t need our preaching, doesn’t need our prayers, worship. God doesn’t need our births, our deaths, doesn’t need our hands, our feet, our good deeds or our good works to change God’s attitude toward us. God is impassible. God doesn’t need our anything. Otherwise we’d be talking about someone—or something—other than God.
So on that point my friend was right. God doesn’t need our praise. Or anything else for that matter.
He had a point. But he was also coming at praise from the wrong direction. The problem is that we often get these things backwards. We don’t praise God because God needs praise. We praise God because we need to. God doesn’t need our praise. We do. We do.
Now, for today’s scripture passage, we have the 100th Psalm. The Psalms are the songbook of the Bible. In English, we’ve sort of lost this. But Jesus himself would have been raised on all of them, and would know them by heart like the top-forty radio that comes out of the grocery store speakers. And just like any variety of music there’s a variety of themes.
The purpose of today’s Psalm is—you guessed it—praise. It’s very short, but it is the Bible’s praise song-par excellence, because not only does it offer praise, it shows us the purpose of praise. The meaning, the importance of praise is baked right in. It piles right into praise from the get-go.
“May a joyful noise to the LORD,” it says. “Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth. Worship the LORD with gladness; come into his presence with singing.”
I mean, I love the beginning of this song just for the fact that it calls for a “joyful noise.” That’s my singing at its best—the noise may not be pleasant to the ear, but hey—it’s joyful. And that’s all that’s needed. Everybody, everything in fact—rocks, bees, trees, stars in their orbits. Everything can praise... Even if you belt everything out off-key. Like me.
But then the Psalm moves into the meat of the meaning part. First we have this call to joyful praise, and then in verse three we’re given the reasons why we praise in the first place.
Here’s the first reason. “Know,” it says. “Know that the LORD is God.” I mean, we usually think of “the Lord” and “God” as synonyms. As interchangeable meanings for the same word. But it says “know the Lord is God.” When ever you see the LORD in your Bible in all-caps, it’s standing in for another Hebrew word—“Yahweh.” Yahweh, the name for the God of Israel, the God of the universe, the God who brought Israel out of slavery and Egypt. The God who Christians believe raised Jesus from the dead. It says to stand and praise because YAHWEH is God. This implies that this particular God occupies the center of the universe. But it also implies that there are many other rival gods jockeying for that same position. Here praise is counseled as a way to avoid idolatry. To steer clear of putting a false god in the place of the true god in our lives. Which—according to the Bible—leads to all sorts of alienation and destruction. Personal, social, global.
It’s a helpful reminder really. Cuz we’re tempted to serve all sorts of gods all the time. The god of money is the most obvious. I mean, money’s useful. No getting around it. But we’ve made making it and pursuing it, generating it , buying stuff with it the highest, the most noble goal in life. The centre of our lives, around which we organize everything else: money, family, whole communities.
We put our personal security above that of others. We put buying stuff, we put our careers, our spouses and families, our brands and identities up on the altar, bowing to their importance above all else. Along with our own happiness and the satisfaction of our own desires. Good ol’ Sex, drugs and rock and roll. The great Reformer John Calvin said that the human heart is a perpetual factory of idols.i It may sound kinda harsh, but it’s kinda true. And this Psalm and scripture tells us that all of these things we look to for purpose, for enough-ness are false gods. Idols leading to nowhere but sadness, destruction. And spiritual death. Really, we all know it’s true because we’ve experienced it first-hand. In one way or another.
So we need to stand and praise… because neither we, not money, nor family, nor nation, nor anything else stands at the center of the universe. God doesn’t need us to praise her. We need to praise God, because we need to be perpetually dissuaded from idolatry. “Know,” sings the Psalm. “Know that the Lord is God.” It’s something we need to be reminded of over and over. And over again.
A depressing diagnosis for the human condition if there ever were one. The first line kinda knocked us out of the center of the universe. All that packed into that one little line.
But in the same verse, though, there’s also another helpful reminder as to why we praise. And it’s the good news.
Verse three says “Know that the Lord is God.” But then it says this. “It is he,” (meaning God) “that made us. God made us, it says. I mean, we’ve become convinced in North America and Europe that everything that exists exists by chance. We’re the latest event in a very long chain of accidents. Which means that there’s no inherent meaning, nor purpose, to any of this. But the Psalmist—and the Bible, and the whole of the Christian tradition—tell us that we come from somewhere. And not just somewhere, Someone. Our lives are the product of a living, personal, relational Source. We’re created. We’re creatures.
And we’re not only creatures of this living Source, it says. It says we’re creatures and that means “we are his.” “We are God’s people,” it says. “We are God’s people, and the sheep of his pasture.” This Psalm is getting at the question of identity. Who are we? It asks. And the answer is that we belong to, we are the possession of, the Creator, the Source of all things.
And what’s it mean to belong to the Source of all things? It means to be a sheep. Of course, in popular culture to be a sheep is to be a bad thing. A blind, dumb follower being led around uncritically. But in the Bible it’s an overwhelmingly positive image. Cuz sheep are fed. Cared for, protected. Sheep aren’t solo, either—they’re part of a flock of other sheep they share life with. Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd. And a good shepherd doesn’t leave the sheep astray. It’s good to be a sheep. Because sheep have a shepherd. And sheep with a good shepherd have purpose and direction. Where idolatry—the pursuit of false gods will inevitably bring us over the cliff of death, the good shepherd brings the sheep into green pastures. Promises life everlasting. Life in the full.
It may not make sense to folks like my friend. But our praise has a purpose to it.
We stand and praise, not because God needs it. But because we need it. We need to praise because we need to see our lives as part of a much bigger story. We need to be reminded day after day not only to give up on the false gods of our world. But we need to be reminded that at the Source and the center of all things is a gracious Creator. One who never gives up on us. One who accompanies, guides, protects and feeds through the good times and the bad, like a shepherd who cares for her sheep.
Why church? We need church because here we stand and we praise. We stand and we praise because we may not stand at the center of the universe, but it says there is a center of the universe. And boy… is that easy to forget. We praise because there is a center! There’s a source that flows, a heart that beats powerfully within all things! One who gives us meaning, a destiny, a purpose. One that promises to lead us out of the self-destructive shadows of death… and into the bright, shining future of unconditional love.
So, friends. Let’s follow the Psalmist’s advice. Every week, let’s
enter God’s gates with thanksgiving,
and courts with praise.
Give thanks to God, and bless her name.
Why church?
Because the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures for ever,
and his faithfulness to all generations.
AMEN.