Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 12, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Every Sunday we and countless other Christians of nearly every variety gather together to do something called worship. The roots of that spiritual practice go way, way back in the Judeo-Christian tradition. They go back so far that when you get back to the beginning, worship looks very, very different from our worship today, so different in fact that we hardly recognize it as worship at all. Imagine if you will me coming up here some Sunday morning leading a big bull up into the chancel. Now imagine me taking out a big knife, saying some prayers, slitting the animal’s throat so that it bleeds to death, then hacking the carcass up and throwing the pieces onto a big fire I had going up here. So far from recognizing that killing of a bull as worship, you’d probably have me arrested—or committed. And you’d certainly immediately form a search committee to start looking for my successor. But that’s what worship in ancient Israel was. It’s what all those priests you read about in both Testaments of the Bible did. They slaughtered animals as an act of the worship of God. Ancient people in Israel and throughout the ancient world saw animal sacrifice as an act of offering something of value to God. They understood that that was what God wanted. It was how they worshipped.

Which must have made the lines we heard this morning from Isaiah sound very strange to them. In those lines Isaiah reports to them a revelation he has received straight from Yahweh, the LORD, the only God the Hebrew people worshipped. That’s what it means when Isaiah says “Hear the words of the LORD,” as he does in this morning’s passage. Isaiah is saying: This isn’t just me talking. This is God talking. And what does God say? God says I don’t want your worship. Specifically God says I don’t want your animal sacrifices, but we must not misunderstand. God’s “I don’t want your animal sacrifices” doesn’t mean you’re doing the wrong kind of worship. As far as the people Isaiah was talking to knew, and indeed as far as Isaiah knew, they doing the only kind of worship there was. So God here is using Isaiah to say something far more radical than I don’t want this kind of worship. Isaiah’s God is saying nothing less than “I reject your worship altogether.”

The people must have been puzzled and perplexed. When in verse 12 of Isaiah 1 God says “when you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand,” that is, who asked you to offer me animal sacrifices, their immediate answer would be: You did. For hundreds of years before the time of Isaiah the Hebrew people believed that their god Yahweh, like ancient gods everywhere, had commanded that they make sacrifices to him. That’s what the great Temple in Jerusalem and all those priests were all about, and the people honestly believed that in offering their sacrifices they were doing something God had commanded them to do, something that was pleasing to God. And then along comes Isaiah and says No. Wrong. Not only does Yahweh not want your sacrifices, he finds them to be an abomination and a burden. Isaiah tells them that God finds their worship to be an abomination and a burden. Isaiah has Yahweh say that all of their worship is “futile,” something God wants no part of.

And Isaiah has more to say too. He not only tells them that God doesn’t want their worship, he tells them what God does want. Here’s God’s real demand on you, he says: “Remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Isaiah 1:16b-17 NRSV What had God so upset with the people was not that they were doing the wrong kind of worship. Rather, God was upset because they were doing the right kind of worship but were not living the right kind of lives. The point of this passage is that God doesn’t need or want our worship. God needs and wants us to do justice in the world. And you don’t get off that hook, that demand that you do justice, by doing worship. Worship does not excuse injustice. You can’t pray on Sunday and go oppress your employees, or anyone else, on Monday. God simply will have none of it.

And that message, my friends, is not only for Isaiah’s time and place, Judah in the 8th century BCE. That message is for us and for our time as well. I can’t tell you how often I have heard the charge leveled against Christians that they pray nicely on Sunday and do all variety of sinful things the rest of the week. That voice of people who reject the faith because they don’t see its adherents living it out in everyday life is the voice of God speaking to us today every bit as much as Isaiah’s voice was the voice of God speaking to the people of his time and place. Our worship of prayer, proclamation, and psalm is no more pleasing to God when we then go out and oppress the poor and the vulnerable, when we do not, in Isaiah’s words, “rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow,” than it was when the people of Isaiah’s time did it. When we silently acquiesce in systems of war and oppression and reap their benefits without complaint our worship is as futile as were all the burnt offerings of bulls and rams of ancient Israel. God doesn’t need or want our worship today any more than God did 2,800 years ago when we, like the people of that time, worship, then fail to be instruments of God’s peace and God’s justice in the world.

So we have to ask: If that’s true, if God doesn’t need or want our worship, why worship? I believe that the answer is this: We worship not because God needs to receive our worship but because we need to offer it. God doesn’t need our worship, but we do. We need to worship because we need, more than we need anything else in life, to be connected with God. We need God in our lives. We need the peace, strength, hope, joy, courage, and inspiration that only God can give us. We come to worship not because God needs our praise but because we need to reconnect with God. We need to reconnect with God regularly and often. Without that regular, frequent reconnection with God our spirits wither, our courage fails, our hope dies.

And here’s one more thing: Without that regular and frequent reconnection with God we can’t possibly become and remain the instruments of God’s peace and God’s justice in the world that God wants and needs us to be. Isaiah had Yahweh say (or Yahweh had Isaiah say, depending on how you look at it) “When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen.” Isaiah 1:15 NRSV But that doesn’t mean that God rejects all worship. It means that God rejects our worship when, as the next line says, our hands are full of blood. But when, strengthened and renewed by the worship that we need, we go into the world and empty our hands of blood, that is, when we become instruments of God’s peace and justice in the world, then our worship not only restores us, it itself becomes pleasing to God. It isn’t pleasing to God because God needs our praise and adoration. God is way beyond that. Rather, our worship is pleasing to God because it is having the effect God intends it to have, not idle words but transformed lives, not prayer that makes us self-righteous but prayer that sends us into the world to do God’s work of saving souls and saving lives.

So why worship? Because we need God in our lives. Or better, because we need to know that God is in our lives. God doesn’t need God’s connection with us restored because as far as God is concerned that connection is never broken. Isaiah may have had Yahweh say I won’t hear your prayers, but that’s just a way of expressing God’s displeasure with people who think their worship excuses whatever it is that they then go our and do. It doesn’t mean that God’s connection with us is ever really broken and in need of restoration from God’s side. But it is constantly in need of restoration from our side. We need our connection with God restored because we so often and so easily lose, forget it, or ignore it.

So let us worship boldly and joyfully, but let us never forget that our worship is never an end in itself. The end toward which our worship is a means is service to God through service to God’s people and God’s world. If when we leave this place each week we go out not congratulating ourselves for how righteous we are but seeking new ways that we can further God’s justice and God’s peace in the world, then our worship will truly restore us and truly please God. And that is something it certainly is worth getting up on Sunday morning to come do. Amen.