"The Maintenance of Divine Worship"

First Presbyterian Church
October 28, 2007
Peter S. Buehler
John 4:5-26
Third in a series of the Great Ends of the Church

Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,
but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.

When you come to church on Sunday, what expectations do you have?
What hopes, what needs do you bring?

We may see Sunday as our opportunity to express gratitude, thanksgiving for the goodness of life, for particular blessings during the previous week. For us our need is for a public setting to give thanks for God's mercy, God's generosity.

Or our need may be for encouragement, because we have encountered difficulty in our lives and need assurance that God is with us and for us.

Our need may be to know that we are not alone, that we have a community of friends who care about us and whom we care about. Sometimes just seeing people we know across the room is a comfort.

We may not say it in so many words but we need beauty, music that touches our souls; so also we hunger for meaning, for words that connect us with truth, with a sense of the holy, so we come to worship as to a well, to be refreshed in a deep way.

An expectation we may have for Sunday morning, a hope, may be as simple as wanting energy for the week ahead, feeling the energy of the church -- the people and the place. For us, beginning the week with worship means starting the week off right; going to church is what makes Sunday special: because we need a day in the week where we can just breathe, where we can look around at God's world and agree that yes, it is very good, life is very good.

We have expectations for the time we spend in church on Sunday morning. Ministers do too, incidentally, though they're a bit more mundane. We hope we don't misplace our sermon notes, for example. We hope cell phones don't go off in the middle of prayers. We hope the batteries in our mics don't die just when we starting the service. We hope we don't drop the communion bread or spill the grape juice during the sacrament -- mundane things like these are on our minds.
For a complete listing of pastoral anxieties, please visit our website at www.fpcsb.org/clergyneuroses.

But we also have high hopes. I think it is fair to say that our passage from the Gospel expresses our highest hope, our deepest prayer for Sunday morning.
I believe it is the same as yours: that what we all come to church for is nothing less than an encounter with the Living God -- an encounter so real that it allays our doubt, so personal that it stirs our souls, so true that it corrects our vision,
so gracious that it changes our minds, so startling that it kindles our joy.

No matter who we are. After all, the individual the Lord encounters at Jacob's Well in our scripture passage is about as unlikely a church person as there could be, a most unlikely person for Jesus to engage in dialogue. First, she was a woman -- in the biblical world a Jewish man would have no contact, no words with a woman he was not related to. Second, she was a Samaritan -- a member of the black-sheep of the Semitic family, a group descended from families left behind when Assyria hauled off the elite from the northern kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C., people who then intermarried with the hated Babylonians and Medes brought in by the occupying power. To Israel the Samaritans were traitors for turning their backs on the rebuilding of Jerusalem during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, just as they were heretics for failing to believe in the whole Bible -- prophets, history, and wisdom -- not just the books of Moses.

And, as if there needed to be yet another strike against her, the Samaritan woman was also a polygamist -- too many husbands, five altogether, not counting the one she had not quite yet gotten around to marrying. Jews were allowed only three marriages. Considering that in every village everyone knew everything about everyone else, the Samaritan woman was not someone you would want to be seen with.

Yet of all people, Jesus makes a point of encountering this woman. He doesn't hesitate, he asks her for a drink of water -- it is midday and hot and thirsty. But then the Lord offers her water, living water -- not just the pure mountain spring water so prized over stagnant cistern water, but something God-given, something startling that would well up inside her and transform her life.

Which is what happened; it is what we see happening. In her brief encounter with Jesus -- did it last ten minutes? -- she was transformed. Time stood still. We look on, we are witnesses: here in an ordinary moment on a typical day, for one unlikely soul everything changed -- God's love proved limitless, all-accepting, merciful, personal, startling, gentle, utterly human.

For us it is Sunday morning. We come to worship for lots of reasons, but we come first to be met by the one who gives living water, who makes the most outsized and outlandish promises -- even spirit and truth to gush up to eternal life, overflowing in human hope and peace and purpose. This is what Sunday morning is about! Coming ourselves to this well, expecting an encounter with one who asks us to minister to him so he in turn can transform us.

I hope when you come to church you bring with you nothing less, no low expectation. Saying this, I hope when you come to church you bring all of yourself to worship God -- your heart, mind, soul and strength. Rather than expecting a show -- a Sunday morning attitude where we figure we're doing our part just by showing up, therefore it is up to the preacher and the praise team/choir and the person leading the prayer to show us something: Move me, convince me, make my Sunday morning worth the effort.

Not that I have never had this same attitude myself when I am worshipping at another church. "OK, Lord, I'm on vacation and it's Sunday and I got out of bed to come to church when I could have slept in, so this had better be good." Of course, I would never entertain such a thought.

Yet this is where we meet the third Great End of the Church, the maintenance of divine worship, because worship is not about being entertained, or persuaded, or even inspired; it is about an encounter with the Living Lord -- and it is the church's sacred responsibility to provide public worship that both preserves the best traditions of the past while opening itself wide to the world, the community and the culture in which it lives, in order that every person knows that God is not aloof and out of reach and accessible only to perfect people but that God is waiting to refresh and to gush up in the well, the soul of every flawed, imperfect individual with power, hope, and joy -- all the startling signs of eternal life.

And "maintenance" is not a bad thing. At first as I was thinking about this Great End of the Church I found myself wishing it had more punch, more inspiration:
maybe the celebration of divine worship, or the passionate planning of and participation in divine worship, or the never boring but still really Presbyterian divine worship.

But maintenance is good. We maintain our cars and they run well and are dependable. We maintain our homes and they stand up against the elements while looking well-cared for and inviting. We maintain our relationships -- our friendships, our marriages, our ties with loved ones -- and thereby enjoy the blessings of trust, and intimacy, and companionship, and happiness.

We also maintain our faith. Howard Rice, pastor, professor, and spiritual guide to many Presbyterians, writes that worship is a means of maintaining and restoring the image of God in us, enabling us to function as people who know who we are.
Because during the week we are pulled in so many directions, not all of which are good or true. We are consumers, we are competitors, we are suspicious of outsiders, we are busy, we are weary, we face illness and disability and the diminishing of our powers, we fear we are not doing enough -- that we ought to be doing more, we are more restless than peaceful.

Friends in San Diego and elsewhere in southern California are doing everything they can just to maintain their lives in the midst of unimaginable destruction and devastation -- maintaining for them, we can be sure, takes all their resources, energy, and faith.

So we maintain and restore the image of God in us, we come together on Sunday morning and move together through the liturgy of worship -- gathering as God's people, all ages, all descriptions, all seeking to praise, and pray, to be still and to be filled; then confessing our sin together and being assured of God's complete forgiveness; then listening to the Word and to words that open windows and doors; then going out feeling ready for the life that awaits us, the blessings and challenges that lie ahead of us -- maintaining this life of praise and hope is a sacred purpose of the whole church, of each of us. It's giving God time to encounter us in Christ who is our Lord, our Savior, and our Friend. We come to church and find ourselves.

But just as Jesus asked something of the Samaritan woman, a cup of water from Jacob's well, so Jesus asks something of us, our reaching deep into ourselves for the best that we can give him.

It's Stewardship Sunday, so this is an opportunity for us to do our very best with our financial pledge. And it's significant that in order for the church, our church, to offer public worship, all of us have to reach deep -- because our worship costs us something, and that's as it should be. It is the main thing we do, it is something here that we attempt to do to the best of our ability. But all of us share in making it happen, in opening our doors to our community with the message of God's love for every human being in Jesus Christ, every person -- even those who cannot believe the Messiah would ever bother to be seen with them. They are the neighbors we open our doors and our arms to, they and the women and men, the youth and children we so look forward to seeing each Sunday.

I hope that as you bring your pledge forward this morning, it represents your deepest hopes and your highest expectations for this church. I hope you're excited to bring your pledge, because you know that for you it represents your investment in this ministry as well as your gratitude to God.

We come on Sunday hoping to receive -- we all do this, and it is not wrong at all to want to receive, to be fed -- yet the maintenance of divine worship is the church, all of us, remembering that on Sunday morning we come to give.
To give of our selves and not hold back. Because our true worship does not depend on our mood, whether we feel stirred and inspired, whether we get something out of the service, whether we gain a helpful thought for the week ahead.
First and foremost we come to honor and bless God, the One who gives us our life, the One who redeems us and blesses us and commissions us for effective ministry where we live and work.

My pledge to you is that we who plan and lead worship and music at this church will do our best for God, for you, and for every person who comes through the door. Please pray that we do this; please pray for our energy, intelligence, imagination and love.

We in turn will pray for you, that you bring your best -- your high hopes and expectations, your best voice and your best praise, your hope-filled anticipation that the Spirit will engage in a dialogue with your spirit whereby you are again assured that nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. We are all in this together; God calls us together.

Then we leave, we go home maybe an hour or two later. But while we may go out the way we came in, somehow after worshiping we are more ourselves than when we were before. God, once again, has maintained us.

For on Monday morning  our worship continues. We put our faith into practice.
We show what it means to love God by loving our neighbor as our self.

Amen.