A Holy Calling

This Saturday at 2 pm Alison Harrington will be ordained to the ministry of word and sacrament at Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church, i.e. she will become a Presbyterian pastor. I hope I can go, not because I know Allison very well, but because I know her parents, who are both Presbyterian pastors.

The dangerous thing that can happen at an ordination service like that is the temptation for everybody in the congregation to think that Allison is the only one who is being called into ministry and not them!

That is a lie. At your baptism, you are called into ministry, just as much as Allison and her parents and your pastors.

As we read about Isaiah's call into ministry; we can think that this is all about him. No! Isaiah's calling is our calling, just like Jesus' calling is our calling.

Isaiah 6:1-13

Years ago I was taught "the chalice prayer." It is a body prayer that has three movements: opening your arms straight up to the greatness of God, wrapping your arms around yourself and taking that experience into your being, and holding your arms out, letting that experience send you out into the world.

It's the three movements of Isaiah's call, which are very visceral for him: experiencing the holiness of God's greatness, letting God's holiness touch and cleanse his life, and then becoming God's messenger in the world.

Several weeks ago five of us went over to Walnut Creek to attend a two-day conference called "From Worship to Witness." The conference started with worship: a lot of singing led by a very gifted group of leaders in a large amphitheater type sanctuary.

It's always interesting to worship somewhere else. I find that I notice the things they have that we don't have.

I was impressed with the sanctuary itself: the comfortable pews, the skylight over the chancel area, the stained glass windows that had kind of a Franklin Lloyd Wright look to them. I was impressed with the oboe player in the band, the difference that a drummer makes, how they used a choir with a praise band. I was really impressed with the artist in the corner who was actually crafting a painting throughout the evening that was both an expression and invitation into worship.

At the very end of this conference, after hearing from all kinds of people about worship strategies and song-leading and the use of technology and the arts, the very last speaker was Mark Labberton, the pastor at First Pres, Berkeley. He has a book coming out in February titled The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice. And he completely reframed the issue before us in worship. In essence he was saying: the question before us is not what we would like to have happen in worship or what other people would like to have happen in worship, but what does God want in our worship?

He ended up answering the question by quoting from the first chapter of Isaiah. In Isaiah's day God is fed up and disgusted with the people's gatherings for worship and all their offerings and prayers and festivals and professions of faith. God is fed up because of their failure to live out their worship in acts of justice and mercy. This is the passage he read to us out of Isaiah 1; God is speaking:

What does God want in our worship? Mark went on to say that God is not that concerned with our music or our sanctuary. The worship that pleases God will show up in our lives; it will seek justice. The worship that pleases God will "cease to do evil" and work to ease the burden of the poor.

Mark was like Isaiah at that conference, helping us get in touch with who God is and what the character of God is like and what God wants. And it was a humbling revelation because it revealed just how far away from God we are - in the church!

Mark confessed his own uncleanness, his own failure and idolatry in worship, not the obvious kind of idolatry like melting down jewelry into a golden calf like the Israelites did, but what he called "a more socially acceptable kind of idolatry," like being caught up with "myself, my world, my priorities, my church, my purposes," my family, my comforts, my needs. "What does it mean to live and worship in a world where 1.6 billion people live on less than $1 per day, and 1 million people are sold into sex trafficking each year, and 6,000 children are orphaned because of AIDS every day?"

This is the hard word that God puts before a dull people, who would rather not hear about all that or see it or absorb it. But this is God's greatest concern in our worship.

In his book Mark describes the American church as asleep and for the most part we are remaining that way because our worship doesn't wake us up. It is more about what we want than what God wants. It is more about making us feel good than confronting our own part in injustice and oppression. It is more about what is serving our needs than showing concern for the needy.

Isaiah lived among the elite in Jerusalem during unstable times. Their good king of 55 years had died. The Northern Kingdom of Israel and Syria had allied themselves against his people, Judah, and the growing super-power of Assyria had them all cowering in their boots.

In the midst of all that, he is encountered by the living God, on a throne, high and lofty, with the heavenly hosts calling to one another:

He recognizes and confesses his sin and from the altar of God comes a burning coal, a refining fire.

I went up to Mark after his talk and I said, "Your message was clear and convicting, and it makes me want to quit." He said he feels the same way; perhaps like Isaiah.

What are we doing in our worship?! That phrase in Isaiah, "your hands are full of blood," haunts me.

When I hear about the increasing bloodshed and instability in Afghanistan, a land that we so quickly invaded and overpowered, a land that is so crippled by extreme poverty, I wonder: how are we responsible for the increased bloodshed and suffering there?

Hearing about the recent study of civilian casualties in Iraq - far more than anybody thought - from a pretty reliable survey based on interviews with 2,000 households in 47 neighborhoods across Iraq - that estimates that 655,000 civilians have died from all the ripple effects of the war!

Quite honestly, the war in Iraq can feel like somebody else's war that is happening far away from me. It can feel very unreal. But deep in my soul I know that God holds us responsible. For all the bloodshed? No. For much of it? Yes.

How do our choices impact God's world? How do my choices and our choices to take care of our own concerns hurt the world's poor and oppressed? With the nuclear threat in North Korea and the proposed sanctions - the question was asked about who that will really hurt? The government or the ones who are already oppressed and starving under that government?

What does any of this have to do with our worship? Apparently everything! As we offer our prayers to God, is there blood on our hands? Is God appalled with our worship? Do we care?

Last week I waited at a stop light behind a Hummer with a personalized license plate (a Yosemite license plate!) that had the letters F-E-U-L-I-S-H. Obviously this driver was very aware of his personal choices as an over-consumer and even its impact on this world, and instead of changing it he was advertising just how FEULISH he was! And I was right behind him in my car, driving alone, burning up my own gas.

Only from the altar of God's holiness can cleansing come. Only in the waters of baptism, in the burning pain that Jesus experienced on the cross of our cruel indifference, only in his drowning under the weight of our self-absorption and rising again is there any way for God's people to turn and be healed.

Tonight I look forward to going to the Village Enterprise Banquet celebrating twenty years of investing our wealth in new micro-businesses among the poorest of the poor in Africa (just like the man from Bangladesh who just won the Nobel Peace Prize). Seeds of hope.

At the end of this month I will meet with leaders in this church to figure out how we can engage in justice issues as a congregation. They are people who are asking the justice questions: not just how to help the poor but how to address the causes that oppress the poor. I need their wisdom and we all need each other to move against the tide of rampant self-absorption and worship in a way that God wants.

This Christmas, how much money will we spend giving gifts to people who don't need anything, and how will that glorify Jesus Christ? What if half that money was spent on buying gifts for the truly needy around the world and honoring our loved ones in that way? (A goat, little chicks, supplies for AIDS orphans - Alternative Christmas Market on November 19, 26, December 3) Seeds of hope.

The hard truth is this: real worship is not just what happens here with our singing and prayers and sermons and sacraments. Real worship is our embodied experience of God's glory; it is our embodied experience of Christ's forgiveness; it is our embodied experience of the Spirit's calling to live God's justice in the world. All of us, ordained "ministers of word and sacrament;" that is our calling at our baptism.

May God give us grace to worship in a way that is pleasing to God. Amen.