Bear with me here while I talk abut why
people come to church. Let me say this first, there is no bad reason to come to
church. Whatever brings you here; it’s okay.
Maybe you come because you had a bad week and want some peace and quiet,
an escape from everything. Thank you. Maybe you come because you like greeting
people as they come in to church. Thank you ushers. Maybe you come because you
want to hear some good music. Thank you Eric, Karen, and the choir. Maybe you
come because you want to see some friends and have coffee after the service. Thank
you Scott for making the coffee, week after week. And, thank you Bebe, for
providing real half-and-half instead of that powdered yuck! Maybe you come for
a Christian Education class or you come to teach and worship is what you do
before or after. Thank you for coming to teach and learn. Maybe you come because
you’re serving at the altar. Thank you Deacon Beth and our Lay Eucharistic
Ministers and acolytes. Maybe you come just because you always have, and you
don’t feel quite right if you stay away. Thank you. No matter why you are here,
these are all good and compelling reasons to be here. There is no bad reason to
come to church. Ideally, in addition to all those reasons and others I haven’t
thought of, the sermon gives you something to sustain you all week, even if you
don’t exactly remember what it was.
Today, if you take away one thing from
Luke’s Gospel, it’s this. The core purpose of worship is to send us out to
serve. That’s the reason we’re here. That’s the reason God has called us
together: to send us out to serve.
Luke’s gospel teaches us this by the
pairing of the story of Jesus transfigured on the mountaintop and the story of
healing a man’s son.
Let me tell you a little story about
two members of this congregation who understand what worship is all about. I’m
not going to identify them because they would probably duck their heads and
say, “Oh, it was nothing.” But, it wasn’t nothing; it was something!
These two people were driving somewhere
not long ago on a cold wintry day. I’m not sure if they were flagged down or
simply stopped for a person who needed help. The person needed a place to stay.
So the two people who stopped (remember, they are members of this congregation)
bundled the person into their car. You also need to know, the person was
totally unknown to them. But they took a risk and had the person get into their
car. They proceeded to drive the person from shelter to shelter until they
found a place that had room and would accept the person. You might ask why they
had to drive around. It was because this individual had been banned from
several shelters due to drugs or alcohol. Most places will only take people who
are clean and sober. When they told me this story, one of the two people said
simply, “Well, we couldn’t just leave the person on the street. It was one of
those really cold days and the person could have died of exposure.”
These are two people who really get that the core purpose of worship is
to send us out to serve. This gospel story is, in case you don’t know it, is the
pattern by which we worship.
Jesus gathers us together, just as he
gathered Peter, John, and James to go up the mountain.
Jesus discusses his coming crucifixion
with Moses and Elijah. Jesus opened the scriptures for the disciples just as we
open them in worship by reading them and hearing them again through a sermon.
Peter response and reflection is to offer
of housing, misplaced though we may believe his response is. But, it is a
response to his listening to Jesus. We reflect and respond through the
sacrament of Holy Communion.
And then Jesus and the disciples go
down the mountain and into the world to serve, to meet whatever needs healing
and wholeness.
We are sent out to serve by our Post-Communion Prayer, the Blessing, the
final hymn, and the deacon’s Dismissal.
That, my friends in Christ, is the
four-fold pattern of worship: Gathering, Listening, Responding, and Sending. This
is what Jesus did for the disciples on the mountaintop and in the crowd below.
He showed them the core purpose of worship. To gather, to listen to Jesus, to
respond (in our case by Holy Communion) and then to hear Jesus telling us what
we are called to do “on the next day.”[1]
The transfiguration of Jesus tells us the core purpose of worship is to
send us out for the next day. To gather us to serve, to strengthen us to serve
by listening, to feed us to serve with holy bread and wine, and to send us
forth: forgiven, healed, renewed, to serve in Jesus’ name.
And that, my friends in Christ, is why
I smile and say thank you, but sigh a little internally when someone says to me,
“Great sermon.” I appreciate it, of
course. But, what I really want to ask
is, “What are you going to go do about
it?” AMEN.
The Rev Nicolette Papanek
©2016
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