WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE CHURCH: IT’S NOT OVER WITH THE BENEDICTION

A Sermon by Bill McDonald from Isaiah 1:10-20, 27

August 12, 2007

Isaiah 1

¹⁰ Hear the word of the LORD,

you rulers of Sodom!

Listen to the teaching of our God,

you people of Gomorrah!

¹¹ 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.

¹² When you come to appear before me,

who asked this from your hand?

Trample my courts no more;

¹³ 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.

¹⁴ Your new moons and your appointed festivals

my soul hates;

they have become a burden to me,

I am weary of bearing them.

¹⁵ 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.

¹⁶ Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings

from before my eyes;

cease to do evil,

¹⁷ learn to do good;

seek justice,

rescue the oppressed,

defend the orphan,

plead for the widow.

¹⁸ Come now, 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.

¹⁹ If you are willing and obedient,

you shall eat the good of the land;

²⁰ but if you refuse and rebel,

you shall be devoured by the sword;

for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.

²⁷ Zion shall be redeemed by justice,

and those in her who repent, by righteousness.

God does not want us to come to church. It’s right there in the scripture, verse 12, “Trample my courts no more.” If I had just known that verse when I was 13 years old!! I would have had it printed on a t-shirt and would have marked my Bible at that passage to plead with my mom on Sunday mornings. God doesn’t want me in church! And I can see some of you writing down that chapter and verse right now!

She went to wake him up on Sunday morning. “Get up and get dressed; we’ll be late for church.” He responded, “I’m not going to church today for two reasons. One, I don’t want to go and two, nobody there likes me anyway.” She replied, “You are going to church today for two reasons: one, I’m telling you that you have to go and two, you’re the minister and everyone expects you to be there.”

So, why doesn’t God want us in church? Believe me, God wants us here. The rituals of worship are designed to make us feel closer to the God who wants us to act on his behalf in the world. The problem is that we tend to approach worship as if we are sitting down to watch our favorite TV show. We want it to be pleasing, heart-warming, relaxing, with a shiver of excitement and a tear of emotion. Nothing wrong with all that—except that worship is more than that. It adds one more essential element in that it is most importantly challenging, inspiring, calling us to some response. Too many churches and too many worshippers are willing to settle for the good feeling instead of the great commission. Too many of us assume that worship is over when the benediction is pronounced.

If, to us, worship is only ritual, bringing no guidance to our behavior, holding no authority over our principles, then God isn’t listening to us. “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.”

I spoke last week about the first church I ever attended, Decatur Street Christian Church in Memphis, Tennessee. I was about 10 years old when we started going to church. There I learned the rituals of worship while squirming in the pews. I remember that I was fascinated by the offering plates, mostly because of the money in them. The prayers seemed to drag on forever. But the solemnity around the communion service was so compelling that I wouldn’t even draw pictures or play with my sneaked-in toy car while it was being served. But somehow I knew that all this was good, good for me, good in the eyes of God. Many years after I grew up and left Memphis that mostly blue-collar congregation moved out of its rapidly declining neighborhood, one turning quickly into slums, a ghetto, and they built a new church just outside town. But that old church building remained there on Decatur Street and became a community center to serve the people who now lived around it with food, clothing, medical help and referrals. Once a church, then a community center—in the years since I have often wondered which one God preferred.

I was much too young back then to know the extent of that congregation’s community service while it was in that church building, but I know that for many church people in the 1950s and 1960s churchgoing became just part of the pattern of life, and there was seldom any after-action associated with their worship. Take communion on Sunday, cheat the public on Monday. Preach love on Sunday, stand against civil rights and integration on Monday. Pray “Thy will be done” on Sunday, let society dictate all the choices on Monday. It wasn’t much different then from the Hebrews in 700 B.C. described in Isaiah’s writings. Have we improved any today? Isaiah’s words are timeless as he brings God’s words and God’s will to us in frank terms: “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.” Like the Hebrews, we mistakenly think that worship is a way to earn brownie points with God, a way to win God’s favor. But that is a completely mistaken interpretation. Worship is more about what happens afterward than what happens during. Worship is not “got that done,” but instead is “got this to do.”

Most of the world seems to have a cell phone now, from the nomad in the desert to the elementary school student in the U.S. So we all know that you have to plug your cell phone into an electrical socket on a regular basis for recharging, right? Now, what is the purpose of that? Is it because the cell phone enjoys the juice from the electricity? No, it is recharged in order to function, to perform, to produce, to do what it was created to do. Worship is like plugging in your cell phone for recharging. Through worship we are recharged to do something. It is not for the juice but the produce. It is not for the thrill but for the skill. It is not for the feel good but for the do good. Worship recharges us to do what we were created to do. Cell phones were meant for communication; we are meant for service. Plug in—function.

Though it is an Eastern philosophy, most of us Westerners are familiar with the concept of enlightenment, that aha moment when things begin to make sense. After that moment nothing is ever the same for you; you walk away a different person. That is how worship is supposed to affect us. It is not like a good cold shower whose pleasing effects last only a few minutes. For those of you who think it has been miserably hot and humid recently, I invite you to spend a few years in Shreveport, Louisiana. In the summers there, even in the insulated comfort of our air-conditioned house, you would step out of a bracing cold shower and begin to towel yourself dry. You would swear that you had already dried your back and yet it was still wet. Refocusing on that, you would discover that your recently dried legs were wet again. You could run through two bath towels and yet, when you put your clothes on, your body would still be damp. The shower helped, but not for long. Worship is not a good cold shower that soothes for only a few minutes, but is instead a life-changing event, that sends out a different person than the one who came in. “Wash yourselves and make yourselves clean…cease to do evil, learn to do good.”

“Seek justice,” God commands us. Then our worship will have produced God’s desired effect. We are called following worship to defend the orphan. I wonder what God thinks about the fact that with all the churches and all the Christian voters in America, we can’t get a better health insurance bill for poor kids through our Congress and administration? I am convinced that God’s command to “defend the orphan” includes lobbying for children in need. “Plead for the widow,” God says through Isaiah’s voice. Widows in Isaiah’s day could not hold property and therefore had no income, no way to provide for themselves and their families unless kind people gave them the essentials of life. We have hundreds of thousands of citizens who have no resources, own no property, and depend upon the kindness of others for their essentials. Many of them are homeless on our streets and are served in God’s name by programs such as Room in the Inn. God calls for us to be in that supportive group of others and to plead for the helpless.

No, the benediction is not the end of worship; justice finally achieved is the end of worship. Worship is the pep talk in the locker room, but out there is the game.

So, it’s not that God tells us not to come to church. It is that God tells us not to just come to worship, but to let worship come to us and change us and charge us. For we shall be redeemed not by the rituals we observe but by the justice we achieve.