W

hen I first went to off seminary, now almost twenty-five years ago, I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to be a pastor or, but if I did become one, I always assumed I would work in a church like my home church in Ann Arbor: a large, multi-staff church in a mid-size city. Instead, I have spent the past twenty years serving small, urban congregations. I interned in an inner-city church on the south side of Chicago, and I’ve never turned back. Now I can’t imagine living and working in the suburbs. That is not the only assumption of mine that was turned upside down by seminary. When I arrived my first year, I thought the Old Testament was boring, and that worship was somewhat irrelevant. For all its strengths, we didn’t do much Bible study in the church I grew up in, and while I attended worship regularly, it paled in comparison with the often vital discussions about contemporary issues we used to have in my Sunday evening Youth Group– Civil Rights, South Africa, poverty and peacemaking. Not surprisingly, I was drawn to the activist model of the church. I wanted to change the world (I guess I still do!), and I couldn’t see how either worship or the Old Testament would be of any help.

      By the time I graduated seminary, I learned to love the Old Testament as much as the New, and came to regard worship as the central most important activity of the church’s life. That was not because I grew to care more about worship than social justice, but because I came to the realization that the struggle for justice depends upon and grows out of the congregation’s worship life, which must be grounded not only in the stories of Jesus but in the prophetic vision of the Old Testament from which Jesus’ own ministry arose.

      Which makes Isaiah’s words to us this morning all the more difficult to hear. Isaiah comes much closer to my earlier dismissal of worship than the more positive role I learned in seminary. Isaiah is resolute in his condemnation of Israel’s worship. It is not just that worship has become distorted. The prophet seems to have given up on worship altogether. Speaking as the voice of God, Isaiah writes:

“I cannot endure your solemn assemblies...

      Bringing offerings is futile...

      Even though you make many prayers,

             I will not listen.”

      The prophet is enraged because the Israelites continue to worship in good form while committing atrocities upon their fellow citizens. Their worship had ceased to be a time of devotion to God, but had degenerated into a ritual attempt at manipulating God for their own purposes. We might be tempted to hear Isaiah’s words as merely a condemnation of Israel’s sacrificial system and therefore not addressed to us, since we no longer perform sacrifices in worship, but that would be to miss the biting edge of Isaiah’s words. The effect of his critique is to condemn any worship that centers on our own needs instead of centering on God. All the prophets are uniform in saying that worship which does not bring about a changed heart in the worshiper is an idle exercise. Bringing the best offerings and observing all the proper holy days means nothing unless the worshiper lives a life of justice and compassion.

Y et Isaiah seems to go beyond even that basic critique. It is one thing to say that worship finds its ultimate meaning in the changed lives of worshipers. It is another to conclude with Isaiah that formal worship, instead of encouraging transformation, actually gets in the way. Isaiah seems to conclude that in the struggle for justice, not only is worship of no help, it actually hurts.

      When we look back on the history of the church, including the history of our own country, there is much truth to Isaiah’s accusations. Especially now, churches feel enormous pressure to appeal to the masses, to respond to the “felt-needs” of the first-time worshiper, to give people what they want to hear, to carefully craft the service so as not to offend or startle or overwhelm with the power of the Gospel. In such a setting, transformation is not only not possible, it is not even desired. Some churches do that with contemporary music. Others by offering only traditional fare. Either way, worship is designed to make people comfortable, to make us feel good, rather than to expose our hearts to the power and righteousness of God.

      At issue is, what do we worship when we come to church? To what or to whom do we give our ultimate allegiance? In our Gospel lesson for today, Jesus said to his disciples, “Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” What Jesus knew is what we all know: it is easier to place our trust in what we can have and hold than in God whom we must trust but cannot see. At the heart of worship is the question of trust. Jesus invites us, as he invites his disciples, to place our trust in God and not ourselves. To truly worship is to place our trust in God.

A ll of which means worship has the capacity to be deeply subversive. I am reminded of a story Bishop Tutu tells from the height of the struggle against Apartheid. While Nelson Mandela was still in prison, he tells of celebrating the Eucharist with Winnie Mandela in the back seat of his car. For in South Africa, the most worship-going nation of the world, Winnie Mandela was prohibited by her government from attending public worship. You see, that is the basic issue all debates about worship seem to miss. It’s not the form of our worship that ultimately matters. It is the context of our lives! Surely that rudimentary liturgy on the hot vinyl seats of Bishop Tutu’s station wagon rang more true than all the clanging pageantry of all the national churches of South Africa combined.

      We do not live in South Africa. Nor do we live in the same world as Isaiah. At the time of Isaiah, all people worshiped. The only question was the nature of the God they praised. Today, especially in places like Washington, D.C., most people don’t worship at all. And so, to come to church week after week in this most deeply materialistic age, and to acknowledge in our worship that it is God who made us, and not we ourselves, that all we have and all we are is a gift from God and not merely a product of our own labor, that “the earth is the Lord’s, the world and all those who dwell therein,” as the psalmist puts it, is to make assertions about who we are that the world around us does not acknowledge and ultimately to undermine the very foundation of the values that make our society tick. For if the world belongs to God and all of life is a gift, then surely it follows that it is not ours to use for ourselves alone. That acknowledgment is the beginning of justice.

      Which might even give Isaiah some hope. At the end of our passage, even he concludes on a note of optimism. “Come now,” he says, “let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. If you are willing and obedient...”

      In the end, Isaiah backs off from his outright condemnation of worship, holding out the hope of transformation. But he reminds us of the urgency of right worship, and gives us the proper benchmark. For no matter how good the preacher, how grand the choir, how decently and in order, whether we shake the rafters with an organ or an electric guitar, it is all to no avail, unless worship helps us, as Isaiah puts it, to

      cease to do evil, learn to do good;

      seek justice,rescue the oppressed,

      defend the orphan,

      plead for the widow. (vs. 16-17)          ✞

© 2006 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel