Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 15, 2010

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.

There’s an issue I want to talk to you about this morning. It’s a really important issue in the life of the universal Christian church. It came up for me this past week not in anything that happened here in our church. The issue I want to talk about is a bigger problem in the wider church than it is here, but it’s something we all need to pay attention to. The issue came up when I read an op-ed piece by a UCC pastor named G. Jeffrey MacDonald. In that piece he raises the question of creeping consumerism in the churches. He tells of how a few years ago a group in his small congregation in New England directed him to keep his sermons to ten minutes, tell funny stories, and leave the people feeling great about themselves. He heard in that direction the implication that if he didn’t give the people the “amusing fare” they wanted they would get their pastoral leadership somewhere else. MacDonald’s piece raises important questions about the nature of worship in general and of preaching in particular that are worth taking a look at.

Although, as I said, this issue is bigger in the wider church than it is here in our church, I think MacDonald is on to something. He points to the giant projection screens and theater-style seating in so many contemporary churches as evidence that people are looking for entertainment from their churches. If any of you have been to the facility of the Rock Church here in Monroe, you know what he’s talking about. That space is set up exactly like a movie theater, and the church seems to have worked very hard at looking nothing like a church, certainly not from the outside and pretty much not on the inside either. The symbolism of that space speaks volumes. Worship in America is in danger of being reduced to entertainment.

Which leads us to ask: What is worship about, and what is the role of the worship leaders, of the pastor and the other people—musicians, readers, and so on—who lead worship? Is it to entertain? I can well imagine that those directions that MacDonald got from his congregation may sound pretty good to some of you: ten minute sermons, funny stories, and preaching that leaves us feeling great about ourselves. After all, no one likes sermons that drone on and on, we all enjoy a funny story, and we all like receiving affirmations that make us feel good about ourselves. So maybe what this one UCC church told their pastor sounds pretty good to some of you.

Well, here’s my reaction to it: That church of MacDonald’s, and so many other churches today, fail to understand what worship and preaching are all about. Worship and preaching are about proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about a lot more than short messages, funny stories, and making people feel great about themselves. It’s not that worship and preaching need to be long and boring, and it certainly isn’t that a major function of worship is to make people feel bad about themselves; but in addition to preaching words that lift people up and proclaim God’s grace to them, the preacher is sometimes called to preach a word that makes people uncomfortable, that challenges where people are, how they live, and how they think. The Gospel of Jesus Christ does both. It reassures us of God’s grace, and it challenges us to transformed lives, lives lived more in accordance with the Gospel. And people don’t generally find being challenged very entertaining. So there is a tension inherent in the preaching vocation between what the people of the church may want to hear and what the Spirit, sometimes at least, calls the preacher to say.

We see that tension very clearly when we juxtapose those instructions his church gave Pastor MacDonald to be short, entertaining, and affirming to our passage from the Gospel of Luke this morning. There Luke has Jesus say “I came to bring fire to the earth….Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!” Then he says that after him families and households will be divided against themselves, close relatives divided against one another. The parallel passage in Matthew is even more striking than this one in Luke. There Jesus says I came not to bring peace but a sword! Matthew 10:34 Now, I don’t think that Jesus ever actually said that he came for the purpose of bringing division and conflict within families. Rather I think that what we have in these passages is the later Christian community describing the reality they were experiencing. When people converted to the Christian way, conflict sometimes resulted. Their decision to follow Jesus, and their preaching of Jesus’ Gospel of salvation, reconciliation, justice, and peace through nonviolence met with opposition, even opposition within their own families. That’s what I think lies behind this somewhat troubling passage. It’s not about what Jesus intended. It’s about the reception the Gospel often receives in the world.

And the truth is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ can and does divide people. It can be, and is, like a sword cutting through societies and even families. You see, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel sharply at odds with the ways of the world. Jesus preached and lived peace and nonviolence; the world worships at the altars of the gods of war. Jesus preached and lived justice for the poor and inclusion for the outcast. The world worships at the altars of the gods of wealth and privilege. Jesus lived and preached God’s grace and salvation for all people. The world worships at the altars of the gods of exclusion and the claimed superiority of some over others. So there is a built-in tension between the ways of the world in which the church and all the people in it live and the ways of Jesus Christ, the ways that those of us who have discerned a call to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ sometimes feel called to preach.

When the Gospel of Jesus Christ is truly preached and proclaimed, the powers of the world, quite rightly, feel themselves to be under attack. They are under attack, peaceful, nonviolent attack to be sure but attack nonetheless—powerful, spiritual attack. And when the powers of the world feel themselves to be under attack they fight back. They fought back against Jesus. They crucified him and thought they had overcome him. They hadn’t of course, but they thought they had. They have fought back ever since. They fight back today by accusing those who preach of Gospel of Jesus Christ of being dreamers and unrealistic idealists. They fight back by saying that nonviolence doesn’t “work” and that people just are the way they are and there’s nothing you can do about it. They fight back by saying the Gospel of Jesus Christ really isn’t about peace and justice, it’s just about how you get to heaven when you die. They fight back by objecting to preachers who preach peace and justice, accusing them of bringing politics into the church, as if the Gospel of Jesus Christ, that most political of Gospels, weren’t political at all. And today they are fighting back by trying to turn worship into entertainment, an effort in which the church far too often collaborates.

Worship as entertainment is worship that does not divide. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is a Gospel that, at times at least, does divide. It divides those who stand with Jesus Christ, our crucified and risen savior, in his struggle with the forces of injustice and violence in the world from those who are either active allies of those forces or who perpetuate injustice and violence passively by refusing to work against them, by denying that that struggle has anything to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

So: Is worship supposed to be short, funny, and uplifting? Sometimes it’s perfectly OK for worship to be short, funny, and uplifting. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is also about grace, about God’s love for and acceptance of us just the way we are. That’s an important message too, and I trust that you hear it here in our church. And worship certainly doesn’t have to be burdensome. It doesn’t have to be too long and too somber. There’s nothing wrong with having fun in church. But the purpose of worship is not entertainment—which is why, by the way, I at least would prefer it if you didn’t applaud after the choir sings. The choir’s singing isn’t performance; it’s worship. Worship may use entertainment to achieve its goal, but the purpose of Christian worship is to strengthen our connection with God through prayer and through the proclamation of God’s word made known to us in Jesus Christ, not to entertain. That, I’m afraid, is a truth too many churches today are forgetting in their desire to be popular.

So let’s have fun in church. Let’s laugh and sing and enjoy fellowship that enriches our lives. That’s all part of what church is about too. But let us remember, and let us pray that the wider Christian church will remember, that we come to church not to be entertained but to hear and enter into the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We come to church to be comforted, affirmed, and supported to be sure; but we also come to be challenged and transformed, because the Gospel of Jesus Christ does all of those things. Good Christian worship proclaims the entire Gospel of Jesus Christ, the parts that we want to hear and the parts that maybe we don’t want to hear. Jesus knew about those parts we don’t want to hear, but he preached it all anyway. May his church today do no less. Amen.