Read the Lectionary Texts

I’ve very much enjoyed worshipping with you these past several weeks, even while on vacation in New Hampshire. Thanks to the marvel of modern technology, I was able to visit the church website to watch the sermon each week. Hasn’t technology changed our world?

In fact, it has become a humorous part of our family story to note that, forty-plus years ago or so, when we bought our camp on the lake in New Hampshire, we had no hot water, no telephone, and no television. It was very primitive! Forty-plus years later, however, we went to camp this summer with three laptop computers, several iPads, 6 iPhones, a Sirius/XM satellite radio, a couple GPS’s, and several random high tech partridges in a pear tree! Things have changed, and the Singley family is wired up, turned on and tuned in!

And so while watching several fine sermons on the art of worship, I found myself living in a bit of a contradiction. Through all this modern technology, I was able to join you in worship. And that was good! And yet, because of all this modern technology that occupies our life at camp now – and its propensity for bombarding us with constant streams of information, images, and connections to the outside world – the ability to experience God there in the simple beauty of nature has been greatly diminished. It’s very hard to “be still and know that I am God” when you are streaking down the information superhighway at 100 megabits per second!

But, of course, that’s the world we live in today.

So how – in this fast-paced, technology-driven world – can we hear the voice of God? How can we worship in a world so full of distractions?

Ryan – my four-year old grandson – and I were out walking one morning. He is such a great kid – curious – smart – full of fun! I don’t know if I told you this before or not, but Ryan knows what he wants to be when he grows up. He wants to be a comedian!

“Papa, what has four wheels and flies?”

“I don’t know! What has four wheels and flies?”

 “A trash truck! HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!”

Comedian.

And now, after listening to a PowerPoint presentation his dad made for his Middle School band students on the various genres of music, Ryan has decided to also become – an opera singer!

A comedian, and an opera singer! Now there’s a combination!

So I was out walking with this strange kid one morning. He wanted to know where we were going so I told him we were going to a special place. When he pressed me for details, I told him to listen and he would be able to hear it. So Ryan listened.

“Papa, I hear hammers,” he said. And sure enough, we could hear the echoing sounds of people building things around the lake. But that wasn’t it. So I told Ryan to listen more closely.

“Papa, I hear kids!” And in the distance could be heard the joyful sounds of children playing in the water. But that wasn’t the sound of the special place either. So he listened even more intently.

“Boats! I hear boats!” Yes, there were boats out on the lake and we could hear the motors racing. But that wasn’t it either. Ryan cupped his ears and really strained to listen even more closely.

And then a curious smile spread across his face. “Papa, I hear a…a roaring sound.”

I said, “Let’s follow the sound.”

And so we did, stepping off the dirt road and into the woods, and finding a narrow overgrown path that not many people use anymore. The roaring sound got louder and louder, and then – all at once – we came around a bend and Ryan saw it.

“Papa! It’s a river!”

Well, it is more like a stream actually, but swollen from recent heavy rains and roaring loudly as it ran very fast and furious. Ryan ran to the bank and looked upstream and downstream, drinking it all in as if he had never experienced anything so powerful and wonderful before. And for a few moments we just stood there in silence – a four-year-old comedian/opera singer and his Papa – experiencing and listening to the river.

I can think of no better way to describe the hope and purpose of worship! Good worship brings us to the river that runs underneath all of life. Of course, God is the river and when we find ourselves along the banks of the river of God, we are invited to jump in and be immersed in God’s cleansing and healing love. And we are invited to become silent and listen to the sound of the river – the voice of the One who is the Source of all things good.

Trouble is, that’s not what worship has become in our modern American religious culture.

For one thing, there’s not a lot of silence in worship services nowadays.

A number of years ago, a church organist I knew told me to watch her “play the congregation” during the organ prelude.

“Play the congregation? I asked.

“Just watch!” she answered.

As she started playing, people in the congregation were talking as people often do. Then, my friend the organist increased the volume. The people turned up their volume! Then she dropped the organ to almost a whisper. It took a moment for the people to catch up, but sure enough, they turned it down a notch. And for the next five or six minutes, the organist “played” that congregation – louder to softer to softer still and then louder. And they followed like a choir! We both smiled at each other and laughed, but really, we should have been sad because the organ prelude, you know, is a summons for God’s people to stop chatting and to come quietly now…to the river.

The Lutheran theologian Marva Dawn says emphatically that the worship experience must have silence built into it. In a very loud and increasingly noisy world, the worship service is one of the few places where people can find silence anymore. Marva Dawn says that modern worship services with their multi-sensory media – digital projection screens, fast-paced segues from moment to moment, constantly moving images, video projections and computer-generated sound may be a great communication model, but they are not very conducive to worship. How can you encounter the living God unless you listen beyond the music, the images, the voices, the boats, and the hammering until you get off the beaten path and can hear the sound of the river that runs underneath your life?

I suspect that one of the reasons modern American Christians are so superficial and ineffective is because our worship is superficial and ineffective. We listen to music as though it is our job to enjoy it! We look for churches with great music programs. We listen to sermons as though we are supposed to be inspired. We look for churches with great preaching.

But worship is not about enjoying either music or preaching. Worship is about hearing the roar that is underneath the music, and coming to the river that runs through the sermon.

“Love divine, all loves excelling,

Joy of heaven to earth come down!”

Can you hear the roar of God’s mighty love streaming through that hymn, flowing to you in the midst of your recent experience of rejection, or loss, or hate? Can you feel the powerful spray of the river of God’s love flowing out to the children of Israel, and Gaza, and Knoxville and Loudon?

“Jesus, thou art all compassion,

Pure, unbounded love thou art;

Visit US with thy salvation;

Enter every trembling heart!”

You can’t just sing that! You have to dive into that music and let Jesus’ pure unbounded love immerse you and possess you so that when you leave this place today you go and LIVE the song we sang on the banks of the river of God!

Now, I know what some of you may be saying. “I don’t sing. I CAN’T sing!”

And do you know what? You may be right. And for the sake of the rest of us here and all of humanity, you probably SHOULDN’T SING!

But you need to find your way to the words. You need to find your way to the place of LISTENING for the voice of God speaking to you. If you never get to the river, you’ve missed the whole point of why we sing hymns and listen to anthems.

And sermons.

I once heard a preacher preach a sermon on how to listen to sermons. He started by saying that his job was to ask God to help him say what God wanted him to say. The job of the congregation, he said, is to ask God to help them hear what God wants them to hear.

I think that says it all! It was not long into my ministry when a young couple came up to me after a worship service and told me that God had spoken to them in the sermon. I asked them to tell me more. They shared with me what it was that had meant so much to them. But it wasn’t even a main point of the sermon! It was none of the things I would have thought it was. It was really just an afterthought to me. But it was the voice of God to them. They had found their way to the river and heard the voice of God!

I’ve been preaching for a long time. I can honestly tell you that my greatest disappointment in preaching is that Christians today mostly want to hear only what they think they already know, and certainly only what they already agree with. And in those moments when the preacher says something that doesn’t sound quite like what we want it to sound like, there’s trouble in River City.

A dear friend and colleague once invited Tony Campolo to preach at his church which is located in a very affluent community in New Jersey. Tony started by quoting the Scripture where Jesus says, “Its harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.” Then Tony put down his Bible and said something like, “So let’s make sure we understand that most of you here today don’t have a chance of ever getting to heaven!”

Then Tony went on with his sermon. But by then, of course, no one was listening! Come Monday morning, my friend says, the church phone started ringing off the hook with irate parishioners calling to complain about the sermon. They were mad!

But why were they upset?

Tony only repeated what Jesus himself said.

It’s HARD for rich people to find their way to the kingdom! It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle! Do you realize how dangerous it is to be people like us? Not only can our affluence distract us and lead us into all sorts of self-delusion about our own self-sufficiency, but wealth sometimes keeps us from seeing that God places special responsibilities around the shoulders of those who have been blessed with abundance. I have often heard rich people say that poor people ought to work harder. But I have never heard a rich person say he or she needs to work harder to use their assets to help others. And yet, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required, and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”

That’s what Jesus said. It’s hard – maybe even impossible – for the well-off to find the kingdom!

Does that upset you? Jesus said a lot of things that got people upset. That’s why they killed him. Sometimes when preachers repeat those things, congregations want to kill us, too!

Why?

Because what we really want to hear when we come to church is what we already think we know and agree with. We don’t really want to hear the sound of the RIVER!

By the way, when it came time to select a guest preacher for the following year at my friend’s church, who do you think the people voted for – almost unanimously?

You guessed it! Tony Campolo! To the credit of the people of that church, they were able to understand that within every sermon there is something God wants us to hear no matter how disturbing and troubling it may be. And oftentimes it is at those places where the river turns to whitewater and makes us really nervous that we come face-to-face with places in our lives where we need to grow and to conform our lives to God’s will and not our own.

I believe the places in life where we find our minds, our hearts, and our souls most stretched and uncomfortable are often the places God has identified in us as places we need to grow. Don’t go off to college only to learn what you think you already know. And don’t come to church that way either!

So there we were – the four-year-old comedian/opera singer and I – standing by the banks of the river. We dipped our feet into it, and splashed it with our hands. We tossed some rocks and then we headed home. Worship always does that, you know. Good worship always sends us home to live in the love and redemptive power of what we have heard and experienced at the river of God.

A day or two later, Ryan and I were fishing from our dock. All at once, Ryan smiled and said, “Shhh! Can you hear it, Papa?”

And sure enough, when I listened closely, I could. In the faraway distance I could still hear the roar of the river.

I hope you can hear it, too.