August 25, 2019 | Maurice Lee

Readings: Isaiah 58:9b–14; Psalm 103:1–8; Hebrews 12:18–29; Luke 13:10–17

A prominent church, on a recent Sunday, put a carnival ride — a fifty-foot spiral slide called a “helter-skelter” — in the middle of the sanctuary. During the service, the preacher (actually the bishop), rode the slide, in full regalia, halfway down, and then, standing there for the sermon, hanging on to the railing, said to the people: “God is a tourist attraction,” before sliding down the rest of the way. [1]

Given other things that have happened in other churches through history, we might think this to be much more on the mild side than on the wild side. And yet we could also raise the question: Is that what it takes in the twenty-first century to make Christian worship fun and enjoyable? I think the question should be asked not because I want to mock a church that seems to be confusing itself with a carnival. These days, you can only sympathize with huge, nearly-empty churches desperately seeking new ways to be attractive and relevant. Mockery isn’t my purpose. I’m asking the question because I don’t think it’s simply obvious, it can’t be simply assumed, what it means for worship — or for anything else — to be “fun” and “enjoyable.”

Note, first, what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that worship shouldn’t be enjoyed. That’s not my thesis. Because if it were, then you could point right away to our remarkable Old Testament reading for today from Isaiah 58 — a prophetic word, in the voice of the Lord God, to his chosen people Israel — and specifically the remarkable promise in verses 13 and 14:

If you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable, … then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth.

If I were to try to characterize the worship of God as not at all for our enjoyment, then you could say: “Wait a second. According to God himself, speaking through Isaiah, the day set especially apart in Israel for particular attention to God’s word, for particular thanksgiving for God’s mercies, for particular remembrance of God’s mighty acts, for particular rest from workaday human needs and demands to God’s glory — worship on that day, God said to his people, is not to be a drudgery. It’s not to be something you hate. It’s not to be imposed by compulsion or intimidation. Instead, the sabbath worship of the people of God is intended to connect with the beating heart of what it is to be truly human. It’s meant to resonate with our deepest desires and interests. It’s not a means to some other end but instead it’s supposed to be an end in itself, something savored for its own sake. Sabbath worship is a living definition of celebration. ‘If you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable, then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth.’ ”

And if that was the case for Israel 2500 years ago, then why wouldn’t it be so as well for us today? In fact, even more so for us, us who have been grafted by God’s grace into the tree of Israel, and, because of that very reason, who — as our Epistle reading for today from Hebrews 12 puts it —

have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

So shouldn’t we, too — in the company of angels and archangels and all the hosts of heaven — delight in worship, enjoy this opportunity week by week to sing and pray and confess and eat and drink together in the ways that God has made available to us?

The answer, of course, is: Yes, we should! And that brings us back to the original question. Is it obvious, can it just be assumed, what we mean by, or even how we experience, “delight” or “enjoyment”? It might seem that way at first glance. When we say something like “That was fun,” or hear something like “I enjoyed this class,” no one suddenly becomes a philosophical skeptic and says in response: “Hang on. Are you sure about that? Do you really know what you’re talking about?” Mary Norris, the Comma Queen, says: “Either you can have friends, or you can correct people’s grammar.” [2] Well, either you can have friends, or you can question people’s assumptions about fun.

And yet maybe being a little bit of a skeptic would be wise. Look: we’re easily confused, we actually know very little, about how to eat healthy, how to save the environment, how to have a civil conversation on social media, and a hundred other things. We make lame excuses; we deceive ourselves; we misinterpret, willfully or not, the intentions of other people and the signs of the times. Why should we think that we already know what it is to celebrate, to be delighted, to have fun? Why should we assume that we’re already aware of what it would take for our hearts to be lifted up into true gladness and for the desires that move our lives to be met? Why should we imagine ourselves already so good at telling when the sad notes have been resolved and when the valley of desolation has been crossed? The short answer is: We shouldn’t, because we don’t and we can’t.

Maybe there’s more to delight, maybe there’s more to enjoyment, for Israel and for us, than would appear on the surface. Maybe there’s more to the celebrating, the reveling, in worship that God talks about in Isaiah than a dopamine rush and a temporary high. And maybe there’s more to worship than an hour’s worth of cheap entertainment at the end of the week. Maybe worship is more tied in, more integrated, with an overall way of life, a life where the whole point and purpose is God, because maybe worship has to do ultimately with who God is and what God is like.

It’s very thought-provoking, isn’t it, in our first reading from Isaiah 58, that verses, promises, about serving the needy and defending the helpless are right next to the verses, the promises, about keeping and delighting in the sabbath:

If you remove the yoke from among you, … if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. … If you refrain from trampling the sabbath, … if you call the sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable, … then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth.

A random coincidence? I don’t think so. When all was said and done, for Israel to delight in the sabbath was simply to be re-directed, re-oriented, re-fascinated by God. To delight in the sabbath was to be taken away from yourself, not by some emotionally manipulative media experience, but taken into the story of God’s word and God’s work: the creation of the world, the covenant with Abraham, the exodus from Egypt, the promises to David, and, through it all, the making of a community to reflect, and to practice, God’s own priorities, God’s own heart. Not everything, you know, that captures people’s ultimate commitment aims to build a community that brings good news to the poor, healing to the sick, release to the captives. Not everything that people hang their hope on at the end of the day connects their worship in the closest possible way with feeding the hungry, giving a hand to the weak, standing for those with no one on their side. But the true God does. To worship the true God, to delight to worship the true God, is to be caught up in what the true God is accomplishing to keep his promises to his creatures, and to be called by the true God into relationship with sisters and brothers who are in need of our prayers, our time, and our love.

On one particular sabbath, Jesus — according to our Gospel reading for today from Luke 13 — was teaching in the synagogue. That was his custom, of course. Luke is silent on what the topic was, but it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in New Testament to know that Jesus would have been teaching on God: the God of the Bible, God’s kingdom, God’s will for his people. And Jesus did something else, which, as we know, was also his custom. He healed a woman — right there in the synagogue — of a problem which had crippled, distorted, her, physically and emotionally, for eighteen years. For Jesus, it wasn’t only a matter of straightening something that had been bent, the way you might work with a piece of metal. It was also a liberation, a release: “Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” Jesus healed both as an act of mercy and as an enactment of God’s kingdom. He transferred the woman from one realm, Satan’s realm, to a realm where she could at last stand up straight and praise the Lord. On the day set apart for worshipping God, Jesus portrayed in words and in deeds what God wants for his creatures and from his creatures. Jesus called the sabbath a delight, and the day of the Lord honorable, as with his whole life, his giving of his whole life, he opened the way for others to follow him in saying: “To God be the glory.” As we remember our baptism, as we hear the word, as we gather at the table, as we’re joined to Jesus, that’s where we’re going too. Thanks, and glory, be to God.

“Norwich Cathedral: Bishop delivers sermon from helter-skelter,” bbc.com.
“The Comma Queen and the Internet’s copy chief on what matters to a copyeditor,” lithub.com.