+ In the Love of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Please turn to our reading from the prophet Isaiah [1:10-18]:
“Hear the word of the Lord you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah! What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation― I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.”
In a word, what is God talking about here? {{Congregational Response}} [Worship]
It sounds like God is against worship, doesn’t it? Perhaps we should all get up and walk quietly out.
Instead, let’s continue with our reading:
“Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; 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 isn’t the only Old Testament prophet God uses to deliver this message; in fact we find similar messages in all the prophets. For example, here’s the prophet Micah [6:6-8]:
“‘With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
So again we have to ask, is God against worship?
And yet the Psalms tell us to “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness [96:9; 29:2], and Jesus tells the woman at the well that “the hour is coming and now is when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him” [John 4:23].
So the problem can’t be worship itself. No, the problem is the disconnect between worship and justice, the disconnect between worship and kindness, and the disconnect between worship and walking humbly with our God.
The word “worship” comes from the word “worth” and so we worth-ship God in order to learn what’s worthwhile, what’s worthy, what really matters, and what our priorities should be.
For example, we know that our God is a just God, a kind God, and a humble God― “who,” as St. Paul tells us, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross” [Philippians 2:6-8].
And so, just taking that example, we worship God so that God may transform our lives to be more just, and kinder, and more humble as we keep company with God.
This worth-ship, or worship, in our Episcopal Church tradition is rich beyond measure. Let’s take a quick tour of some of the key moments in our worth-ship service:
First, we begin with the Opening Acclamation: We praise God who creates, redeems, and sustains the whole universe.
The Holy Gospel: We listen to God’s self-disclosure in Jesus of Nazareth. The God who is beyond our imagining, who creates, redeems, and sustains the whole universe, became one of us so that in Jesus of Nazareth we know who God is and what God is like.
The Nicene Creed: We reaffirm our faith in the God revealed in Jesus.
The Prayers of the People: We pray because the God revealed in Jesus longs to listen to us.
The Confession of Sins: We recognize that sometimes we are agents of destructiveness.
The Peace: We recognize that sometimes we are victims of destructiveness and yet we are also called to be peacemakers.
The Offertory: We offer ourselves, symbolized in bread, wine, and money, to God and for God’s service.
The Great Thanksgiving: We accept God’s invitation to live in gratitude.
And finally, this incredibly profound moment, The Breaking of the Bread:
Notice the rubric, or instruction, in the Book of Common Prayer: The Celebrant breaks the consecrated Bread. A period of silence is kept.
And during that silence We remember that Jesus was broken on the cross, and we recognize our own brokenness, and that sometimes life is tragic― as when Jesus, the Son of God and innocent Son of Man, was crucified and died.
And then, after that period of silence is ended, we remember that by his wounds we are healed, and by his death we are raised to new life, and so we proclaim “Alleluia! Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us; Therefore let us keep the feast. Alleluia!”
The story of Zacchaeus in this morning's Gospel is a story of transforming worth-ship. Zacchaeus is an agent of destructiveness because he has taken advantage of his position as chief tax collector to defraud many people. But Zacchaeus is also a victim of destructiveness, because the community has ostracized him, and called him a sinner.
Our translation tells us that Zacchaeus was “trying to see Jesus,” but the original Greek tells us that Zacchaeus was seeking to see Jesus― because Zacchaeus had recognized something in Jesus that was worthy, worth-ship-full.
So Zacchaeus climbs a sycamore tree to see Jesus― and Jesus sees him! And Jesus sees Zacchaeus because Zacchaeus isn’t the only seeker in Jericho that day― because Jesus is seeking the lost. So the two seekers find each other, and Zacchaeus’ life is transformed. “Look,” Zacchaeus says, “half my possessions I give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” And Jesus responds, “Today salvation has come to this house.”
My sisters and brothers, like Zacchaeus, we are both agents of destructiveness and victims of destructiveness. And also like Zacchaeus, we are seeking to see Jesus. And the good news of the Gospel is precisely this: that Jesus is seeking us as well.
Thanks be to God.
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