We continue our series on the Acts of Discipleship today by turning our attention to the act of worship. Last week, we considered prayer as the foundation of a disciple’s life. Prayer is about seeking to align our wills with God’s. Worship isn’t at all dissimilar. In fact, worship is a kind of prayer—it’s public, communal prayer. And like prayer in general, disciples of Jesus are hard pressed to think of themselves as disciples if they don’t worship, that is, come together publicly for prayer, regularly. A disciple’s life is one inherently marked by worship. It’s in the baptismal promises and the confirmation reaffirmation that we make—“Will you live among God’s faithful people and come to the Word of god and the holy supper?” Anyone who’s been baptized has said they’ll do that, asking for God’s help—God knows; we need it. And so it is, that there’s no escaping the fact that worship is a foundational hallmark of discipleship.
Yet why is it significant? We can pray in private. Why does communal prayer matter? Why does public prayer matter? What difference does it make? And doesn’t it seem judgmental to say that worship is a sine qua non, or essential condition, for life as a disciple of Jesus? Doesn’t Jesus love everyone. To answer that—yes. Jesus does love everyone. The question here isn’t about worship to earn Jesus’ love or God’s favor, but rather a question of honesty with ourselves and with each other about what we say, what we do, and what we say we’re going to do. As people who call themselves disciples of Jesus, worship matters, fundamentally. But why? Think on that as we delve deeper today into the sermon…
Let us pray. May the words of my mouth and the mediations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
Seven people find themselves marooned on a small, uninhabited island after their boat washes ashore during a storm. It’s a motley crew, to boot. The mate is a mighty sailing man, the skipper brave and sure. A millionaire and his wife. A movie star. The professor, and Mary Ann, a wholesome farm girl from Kansas, who won the trip in a lottery. During their three-hour tour, they run into a storm and are shipwrecked on an uncharted island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
What am I referring to, folks?
Yes! Gilligan’s Island!
With time, they evolve from a diverse group of different individuals on a pleasure cruise with widely different personalities and backgrounds to a group of people in a situation where they learn they need to get along and cooperate with each other to survive. They’re still a motley crew, but they come to understand more fully just what it means to be in the same boat with other people. No one single person is an island—especially if you’re shipwrecked on one with a group of other folks.
The same can be said for the church, the community of believers, especially the disciples of Jesus—it’s a motley crew. When Jesus called the first disciples, they all were very different.
There were James, son of Zebedee, and his brother John, fishermen. Peter, another fisherman, but also a businessman. There’s Peter’s brother Andrew, who’d been a disciple of Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist, so we can assume he’s a bit of a religious guy—maybe a synagogue rat, akin to today’s church rat, like a gym rat. There’s Phillip, and Bartholomew, both known for fervently sharing the good news. And Matthew, a tax collector—someone despised by Jews and Gentiles alike. Thomas, whose most known quality beyond his questions in St. John’s gospel is that he’s a twin. James, Jesus’ own brother. Simon, known as the zealot, which is significant because it means he wasn’t only really into his religion, but that he was looking for and actively working toward a forceful overthrow of Roman occupation in Judea so that the Jews could establish their own independent rule again, albeit a Jewish theocracy. And then there’s a disciple that has three different names—Judas, son of James, or Jude, or Thaddeus. Some suggest that he may, in fact, been another brother of Jesus as well—by another, later husband to Mary after Joseph. And finally, there’s the disciple from Kerioth—Judas Iscariot, who betrays Jesus to the Sanhedrin in the Garden of Gethsemane by kissing him on the cheek, all for thirty measly pieces of silver, which John’s gospel wants us to think is the chief motivator for him since “he was a thief,” we’re told, and “he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.”
And so that’s the group of folks who first made up the core community of believers, especially the disciples of Jesus, even before they became the church. They were Jesus’ closest followers, those who knew him best, and they had widely different personalities and backgrounds. They were, to be sure, a motley crew—an apt turn of phrase given just how many of them were fishermen with boats! I’m sure that they had their disagreements among themselves, but they were nevertheless together in the same boat. They were followers, disciples of Jesus. They believed Jesus to be, as St. Matthew puts it in the mouth of Peter, “the messiah, the Son of the living God.” This confession bound them together.
Matthew goes on to say that after the resurrection, before Jesus ascended to heaven, they came to the mountain where he had directed them, and “when they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.” They worshiped him; but some doubted…The first disciples, the first folks Jesus directly called to be his followers, to learn from him, who believed him to be the messiah, the Son of the living God. They went where Jesus told them to go, and there they worshipped him; but some doubted.
Doesn’t that all sound like us today, some two thousand years later?
We, who are part of the community of believers because of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in baptism…We, who call ourselves Christians, people who take on the name of Christ and own it for ourselves? We, who not only believe, but follow and learn from the ways of Jesus as his disciples?
Doesn’t that all sound like us?
We come to the place where Jesus tells us he’ll show up, just like the women at the tomb who tell the disciples he’d told them he’d show up on that mountain, that they were to go there to find him. We come to this sanctuary, this holy place—holy because Jesus promises to show up here, in the words of Scripture read, in the preaching, in the singing, in the body and blood of bread and wine at communion…in the faces of those who come here. We come here like we’re told to meet Jesus.
And we worship. We praise God. We extol Jesus. We celebrate the amazing grace, the unfathomable mercy, the wondrous love of God given us. We confess who we are trusting that God’s mercy comes to us here. We step out of ourselves for a time and repent. We reorient, refocus ourselves on what truly matters, on the relationships throughout our lives—relationships with God, with each other, with things, with nature, and even with our own selves.
And some of us doubt. In fact, perhaps it’s better to say that all of us doubt some of the time. There’s always someone among us who’s plagued by a question that unsettles them, that gnaws at them like the serpent in the garden asking, “Did God really say that?” And that’s another reason why we come together for worship—especially in our doubting. We come together to surround ourselves with God’s faithful people, with others who believe like we do, so that when we inevitably do waiver in our belief, the faithfulness of our family of faith strengthens us. And when our faith is strong, the Holy Spirit uses our own faithfulness to inspire and strengthen those who are tormented in their own doubting. We’re all in the same boat…the whole motley crew of us.
The church is special. We’re a diverse group of different individuals with widely different personalities and backgrounds. Yet the Holy Spirit calls us all here, to this place, to worship. Nothing else can explain it but the work of the Holy Spirit that enlightens us with the truth and brings us time and again back to this place. The central, most fundamental thing we do as Christians, as disciples of Jesus, is prayer, and worship is the public, communal way that we pray.
And so what the world sees of us Christians, of us disciples of Jesus, what the world recognizes first about us is worship. That’s what sets us apart from other groups—makes us holy, sacred, different, weird. And what’s more, in our worship, we’re a motley crew who probably normally wouldn’t come together if it weren’t that God has called us to this place and by virtue of what we hold in common, by virtue of our common confession that “Jesus is Lord,” there wouldn’t be anything binding us together.
Yet here we are—together. Doctors. Nurses. Teachers. Retirees. Elementary school students. Men. Women. Politically conservative. Politically progressive. Accountants. Scientists. Old. Young. Straight. Gay. Single. Married. Divorced. Remarried. Widowed. The list goes on and on…
We’re a motley crew, all in the same boat. We’re a diverse group of different individuals with widely different personalities and backgrounds, and for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of the good news, for the sake of sharing God’s creative and redeeming love with the world that so desperately, desperately needs it, we come together in worship, so that we can learn how to get along, how to cooperate with each, and how to move beyond to something far greater than ourselves. How to live our lives to the greater glory of God, who gave up everything for our sake, and for that reason rightly deserves our praise and worship.
In many ways, the very fact that we are so diverse, that we do have widely different personalities and backgrounds is precisely why God calls us together for worship. Our diversity reflects God’s very own self, and God calls us each with our gifts and graces, with our foibles and flaws, to be witnesses to his purpose. Worship brings us together around God’s love in order that we might go forth to disperse that same love—to love as we have first been loved.
And so it is that when we worship, we disciples of Jesus come to more fully understand that we aren’t alone, we aren’t shipwrecked on some proverbial island in the middle of the storm of life. We’re part of something bigger than ourselves, a vast company of different individuals with widely different personalities and backgrounds, who although they might be very different, are committed to bearing each other’s burdens—rejoicing with each other and mourning with each other as the season and every matter under heaven dictate according to the appropriate time. When we worship, we become part of something far greater than what we are individually. Worship reorients us away from ourselves, toward God and his purpose, and conforms our minds to the mind of Jesus—who lived his life and gave his same life in order that we come to embrace God’s love for us, and who sends us, just as he was sent to us, to do likewise as his faithful disciples—motley crew that we are.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
The Rev'd Daniel W. Spigelmyer, Jr. 