Meditation: Known, Worshipped and Obeyed By The Rev. Nathanael Saint-Pierre Second Sunday after the Epiphany: January 19, 2014 We invite you to worship with us during our 8:30 or 10:30 AM Service of Holy Eucharist to hear the full sermon. ~~~~~ Known, Worshipped and Obeyed Jesus is light! A light that is in the world to expose the world in its wholeness: beauty and ugliness. A light that is in the world so that darkness does not conquer. It is however a light that we need to acknowledge in order to comprehend its usefulness. A light that should help us straighten our paths. A light that we should get to reflect. A light that we should become for those living in Darkness. To achieve all of that, we need to be introduced to Jesus. To be cleansed from all the stains that can prevent us from reflecting this light in full and complete brightness. Although Jesus has introduced himself to the world, only a few have given him the opportunity to illumine their entire lives. Jesus, revealing himself to us constantly, has to be received, accepted and shared. In fact, Jesus is the one we need to know, worship and obey because he was sent to teach us who God is. No one can know God without a deep understanding of Jesus. To know Jesus is not just repeating his name, to talk about him and never to meet him. So many people want to make of Jesus a fiction, a character that man created as a story for children. What is wrong with a fiction? Actually, a good moral fiction is preferable to one that is preaching violence, hatred and division. Our world seems more comfortable with the story of Superman, a child coming from outer space with super powers, than we are with the Gospel. Our faith should be strong enough to own the idea of Jesus: God in humankind, humankind in God, to profess it, study it so deeply that we can share our experience of him. Jesus is very real when we receive him as he reveals himself. A human being who was simple, knew God, and gave more value to a relationship with the Divine instead of a relationship with material goods, who dedicated his life to service and teaching. The people referred to in the Gospel of John, did not know Jesus. They were seeking to know him; they were asking questions about him. They got to know him through the testimony of the Baptist: “And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” Yes, many of us know Jesus thanks to the testimony of the apostles and our church predecessors. We also have to testify the Lord by what we do when we share our experience with him to our neighbors. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. testified to know Jesus when he wrote: But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice: ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’ Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ Was not Martin Luther an extremist: ‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.’ And John Bunyan: ‘I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.’ And Abraham Lincoln: ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’ And Thomas Jefferson: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ...’ So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvarys hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists. When one speaks with that eloquence and that faith about who Jesus is to the very people who have created him, we can understand that the phenomenon they created has turned around to bite them. Jesus does not belong to one race anymore. His words of love and forgiveness, but also of justice and righteousness make him God revealed to all. He is not dead for a few but for all. To worship the Lord is not just singing some old hymns, obsolete praises and predefined prayers. Can we use the creativity and imagination we have received from God to “sing to the Lord a NEW song” (Ps 96)? a friend of mine, Marylyn J. Paul-Beauregard, asked on Facebook. She went on to write: “If our Christian worship becomes limited to past glory then we are just guardian of a museum.” God is not God of the past he is God of NOW. It is not worship to go to gatherings where the discussion is about God and/or Jesus. It is not to vest in a certain way and decide on a form of celebration. It is not a service with or without incense, with or without candles, with or without pipe organ. Worship is not Liturgy; the latter is only ONE of the MANY ways we can express our emotion in regard to God. The form is not essential, the depth is, and the emotion is. Worshipping God is not time limited; we cannot just be doing it while we are only sitting in a certain space. Churches are not exclusive places of worship and two hours on a Sunday should not be the only time. We worship God everywhere and at all time, in what we do and how we do it, not just in buildings dedicated or not to the cult but also out in the wide open. We are church, worshipping God beyond the walls and confinement we set for the cult. We are church worshipping in our active ministry to the people. Jesus was a testimony of that because of his choice to live in the community and with the people. He tried, in every way possible, to alleviate the pain and the suffering of the world in practical ways. He definitely changed the discourse about God. He changed the very definition of God, was accused of blasphemy, condemned and killed. To worship God is to be prepared to be accused, condemned and killed, literally or figuratively. When Dr. King stood up for his dream, he knew the risk to which he was exposing himself. He decided not to be just the pastor of a Baptist Church down South but to defend the rights of all Negroes no matter their beliefs. He transformed the teaching of a church that used to side with the segregationists. Many of his fellow church leaders distanced themselves to preserve their blessings of the institution. Here at St. Augustines the two slave galleries in the balcony are also the testimony of the injustice false worship used to be in this space. Martin Luther King, Jr. irreversibly changed the way church looks at scriptures. From an instrument of oppression scriptures have BECOME the base for human rights and freedom. He has “wept over the laxity of the church.” “But oh!” he wrote, “How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through the fear of being nonconformists.” True worship is transformative. It is not a place for bullying or domination. It must leave the cult itemization, bullet point in an order of service, to become the concrete expression of our daily lives in Christ. Worship is not just an accumulation of static gestures that we do as a ritual, in all places and at all times; instead it morphs depending on the place, time, and occasion, to the way we want people to live and experience faith at a certain stage of their spiritual journey. That is why a priest is a ritual designer, always adapting worship to become an expression of our current experience with the Sacred. He is a prophet not perpetuating tradition only, but changing the liturgy to be relevant to the generation here and now even when the word of God can resonate beyond generations. To obey has become a verb employed mostly when we discuss our pets. It is as though obedience were obsolete for humans. We don’t know and are not worshipping God if we don’t obey his word. Our contemporary society with its modern concepts, does not want to abide by rules. We are living through a period of civil disobedience and Martin Luther King, Jr. seemed to have bought into that. Laws are written to be violated he wrote, when they don’t serve justice. Unfortunately, many success stories that we serve to our youth are based on violation of laws instead of their application. We glorify people and sometimes murderers who have become rich and famous because of their disobedience to God and “the system”. Dr. King’s observation, however, is that every single law of God that we disobey, sooner or later, is proven to have grave and terrible consequences in our lives. No disobedience of the law goes unpunished, I believe. One might believe otherwise but it is terrible when the consequences of our actions catch up with us, it is sometimes too late to go back to erase what we have done. Of course our God is different from “the system”. God is ready to forgive. God wants a new relationship with us. Obey God is to carry his creation, his redemption and his grace to all. Obey to God is to do what is just not what is fair. Obey to God is to follow in Jesus’ footsteps. To know Jesus is to obey God’s commandments. To worship Jesus is to practice what he taught us. May we all get to meet him in each other, so that he can be: 1. Known 2. Worshipped 3. Obeyed. Amen. ~~~~ St Augustine of Hippo Episcopal Church 286-290 Henry Street New York NY 10002
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 16:06:51 +0000
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