Worship from the Heart
Scripture: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
Friends, it is good to be here today, isn’t it? I am glad to be here again today to preach for you. I enjoyed our talk last week, and I am feeling very hopeful for St. Mark’s. I am excited to see what new adventures God has in store for this congregation. It seems to me that there is a strong desire among us to listen for God’s call and to be ready to follow. I hope that you are seeing these things, too. Will you pray with me?
Prayer: Gracious God, open our hearts to you, open our minds to you, open our lives to you. May your kingdom reclaim us, revitalize us, renew us, and reign through us. Amen.
Soon you get to decide if I’m the one called to be the preacher for this church for at least the next several months. So, to add a little intrigue to the proceedings, I’d like to make today the first day of a sermon series on the 5 marks of the church. You’ll just have to keep me on after a cliffhanger sermon like this one.
Well, it was worth a shot, anyway.
So what do I mean when I say the five marks of the church? In the early years of the church, there was a document written called the Didache, which means “Teaching.” It is a manual for early church people on how to do church—how to prepare people for baptism, how to handle wandering preachers, how to serve communion. It was written in the 200’s or 300’s, but has only recently been rediscovered and studied.
But even though the Didache was written 1700 years ago, the church of these early Christians had the same work, the same purposes, the same defining marks as churches alive today. These are the things that churches have done for thousands of years. Some churches are better than others at demonstrating these marks. Some like to emphasize one mark over another. But a healthy church will give good energy to all five marks of the church, and will allow them to be the focus of community life.
So, what are these five marks of the church? Well, what do you think they are? I’ll give you a hint – the one I’m going to talk about today is worship. One of the key things that a church does is worship. What else?
What do we do after worship?
What was our men's shelter director just talking about today?
What are all those Bible studies about?
The last one may be the one we’re least used to talking about here—when we invite friends to church with us, to see if God is calling them to be Christian. That’s right, the “E” word. Evangelism.
So the five marks of the church are: worship, fellowship, ministry, discipleship, and evangelism. Everything else needs to either be supporting one of these five purposes, or else the church becomes something other than what it is – the body of Christ, called together to serve God.
So, let’s talk about worship. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus is speaking to a crowd, when some Pharisees come up and challenge him on how he practices his religion. Now let me make a quick cautionary statement. Just because Mark says that the Jews have a particular way of practicing their faith doesn’t mean this is an accurate description of Judiasm today. Okay, had to get that in there.
But the way these particular Judeans were honoring God was by being very careful about the cleanliness of their bodies. They were washing their hands ritualistically, keeping the pots and pans they ate from sparkling clean, and otherwise observing a lot of laws. The idea, in case you’re interested was to make ordinary life holy by making it into an imitation of Temple worship. If the priests ate only from carefully cleaned platters in the Temple, then regular people in their ordinary lives could eat from carefully cleaned platters as part of living a holy life. So when the Pharisees meet Jesus, and he doesn’t do things their way, they challenge him. “Why don’t your disciples wash their hands? Don’t they know what the tradition is?”
Jesus answers them with a quote from the book of Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” Jesus goes on to say, “Look, the things you eat and how you eat them aren’t what make you holy. What goes in isn’t what makes you unclean, because that doesn’t touch your heart. The real danger is what comes out of your heart. That’s what makes you unholy – the evil intentions of the heart. It’s from the heart that murder, theft, and adultery spring. It’s from the heart that envy, greed, carelessness, and hate come. What goes in doesn’t make you unclean, what comes out of you does.”
I have to admit that on first reading, this is a difficult text. Jesus is making a good point – outward rituals aren’t what make for true worship. And it’s true, too, that true worship is worship from the heart – devotion and dedication to God. But gee, wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier if we could just get something to do? Wouldn’t it be nice to get some failsafe traditions in place – a set path and a predictable routine? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go through the motions, but still hold onto some of those comforting little sins? I tell ya—God is so demanding sometimes.
So how can we make a start on this call from Jesus – this call to worship from the heart? In a way, I can’t really tell you something to do, because that’s the whole point. It’s not about what you do, it’s about how you do it. Are we worshipping traditions for their own sake, even if our hearts are far from God? Does observing the letter of the law—getting all the ceremony details right—give us an excuse for violating the spirit of it—the transformation of our lives through communion with the divine.
This is not an easy question at all. I think most of us have come to church at one time or another not ready to be there. Maybe we’re tired, or distracted by some other worries, or maybe there is something brewing in our hearts that we’re just not ready to let go of, even though we should. We’re human beings, and we can’t always be “on.”
It’s also not an easy question, for a community, because folks don’t always agree on what the spirit of the law is that we’re trying to observe. Let me give you an example – getting dressed for church. In some churches, it’s very important to dress nicely for church. But in other churches, people are expected to come as they are, in their regular clothes. For the folks who dress up, worship is about coming before God with reverence. Presenting your best self, including being dressed and cleaned up, is a way of showing God respect. For the folks who dress casually, comfortable clothes are a way of being comfortable with God. It’s a sign of wanting to be authentic before God – to demonstrate trust in God’s ability to love the worshipper as they are.
Which group is right? Ah ha! Trick question – I think they both are. But both groups can be wrong, too. Because the point is not what’s going on on the outside, the point is that we’re to worship from the heart.
So how do we do this? How do we worship from the heart? Tune in next week…
Just kidding. Although to be honest I can only give you a partial answer. First, we need to remember what worship is for: it is time spent together focused on God. When we worship God, we thank God, we honor God, we praise God, we look for God in our lives, and we do it together.
Second, we need to continually pay attention to whether our rituals serve the spirit of worship, or undermine it. This doesn’t mean we have to be changing things all the time, or keeping things the same all the time. But it does mean asking ourselves, “What does this mean to us as a community?” Does it help us honor God, praise God, and look for God in our lives?
Finally, worship happens on Sunday mornings, but it can’t stop there. If we are going to worship from the heart, then we have to be ready for our hearts to be changed. We have to be ready to give up those evil intentions that Jesus warns us about. To truly worship from the heart, we need to give our whole lives to God.
This is a tall order, but we’re not in it alone. For one thing, we have each other – for encouragement, for support, and for challenge. It’s not an accident that churches are communities, not individuals – we need each other to grow in our faith.
We also need God. And God is with us. God loves each of us, and is calling us to transformed lives. God is calling us to worship from our hearts with our whole lives. We are not alone. God goes with us.
May the kingdom of God, reclaim us, revitalize us, renew us, and reign through us. Amen.
Friends, it is good to be here today, isn’t it? I am glad to be here again today to preach for you. I enjoyed our talk last week, and I am feeling very hopeful for St. Mark’s. I am excited to see what new adventures God has in store for this congregation. It seems to me that there is a strong desire among us to listen for God’s call and to be ready to follow. I hope that you are seeing these things, too. Will you pray with me?
Prayer: Gracious God, open our hearts to you, open our minds to you, open our lives to you. May your kingdom reclaim us, revitalize us, renew us, and reign through us. Amen.
Soon you get to decide if I’m the one called to be the preacher for this church for at least the next several months. So, to add a little intrigue to the proceedings, I’d like to make today the first day of a sermon series on the 5 marks of the church. You’ll just have to keep me on after a cliffhanger sermon like this one.
Well, it was worth a shot, anyway.
So what do I mean when I say the five marks of the church? In the early years of the church, there was a document written called the Didache, which means “Teaching.” It is a manual for early church people on how to do church—how to prepare people for baptism, how to handle wandering preachers, how to serve communion. It was written in the 200’s or 300’s, but has only recently been rediscovered and studied.
But even though the Didache was written 1700 years ago, the church of these early Christians had the same work, the same purposes, the same defining marks as churches alive today. These are the things that churches have done for thousands of years. Some churches are better than others at demonstrating these marks. Some like to emphasize one mark over another. But a healthy church will give good energy to all five marks of the church, and will allow them to be the focus of community life.
So, what are these five marks of the church? Well, what do you think they are? I’ll give you a hint – the one I’m going to talk about today is worship. One of the key things that a church does is worship. What else?
What do we do after worship?
What was our men's shelter director just talking about today?
What are all those Bible studies about?
The last one may be the one we’re least used to talking about here—when we invite friends to church with us, to see if God is calling them to be Christian. That’s right, the “E” word. Evangelism.
So the five marks of the church are: worship, fellowship, ministry, discipleship, and evangelism. Everything else needs to either be supporting one of these five purposes, or else the church becomes something other than what it is – the body of Christ, called together to serve God.
So, let’s talk about worship. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus is speaking to a crowd, when some Pharisees come up and challenge him on how he practices his religion. Now let me make a quick cautionary statement. Just because Mark says that the Jews have a particular way of practicing their faith doesn’t mean this is an accurate description of Judiasm today. Okay, had to get that in there.
But the way these particular Judeans were honoring God was by being very careful about the cleanliness of their bodies. They were washing their hands ritualistically, keeping the pots and pans they ate from sparkling clean, and otherwise observing a lot of laws. The idea, in case you’re interested was to make ordinary life holy by making it into an imitation of Temple worship. If the priests ate only from carefully cleaned platters in the Temple, then regular people in their ordinary lives could eat from carefully cleaned platters as part of living a holy life. So when the Pharisees meet Jesus, and he doesn’t do things their way, they challenge him. “Why don’t your disciples wash their hands? Don’t they know what the tradition is?”
Jesus answers them with a quote from the book of Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” Jesus goes on to say, “Look, the things you eat and how you eat them aren’t what make you holy. What goes in isn’t what makes you unclean, because that doesn’t touch your heart. The real danger is what comes out of your heart. That’s what makes you unholy – the evil intentions of the heart. It’s from the heart that murder, theft, and adultery spring. It’s from the heart that envy, greed, carelessness, and hate come. What goes in doesn’t make you unclean, what comes out of you does.”
I have to admit that on first reading, this is a difficult text. Jesus is making a good point – outward rituals aren’t what make for true worship. And it’s true, too, that true worship is worship from the heart – devotion and dedication to God. But gee, wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier if we could just get something to do? Wouldn’t it be nice to get some failsafe traditions in place – a set path and a predictable routine? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go through the motions, but still hold onto some of those comforting little sins? I tell ya—God is so demanding sometimes.
So how can we make a start on this call from Jesus – this call to worship from the heart? In a way, I can’t really tell you something to do, because that’s the whole point. It’s not about what you do, it’s about how you do it. Are we worshipping traditions for their own sake, even if our hearts are far from God? Does observing the letter of the law—getting all the ceremony details right—give us an excuse for violating the spirit of it—the transformation of our lives through communion with the divine.
This is not an easy question at all. I think most of us have come to church at one time or another not ready to be there. Maybe we’re tired, or distracted by some other worries, or maybe there is something brewing in our hearts that we’re just not ready to let go of, even though we should. We’re human beings, and we can’t always be “on.”
It’s also not an easy question, for a community, because folks don’t always agree on what the spirit of the law is that we’re trying to observe. Let me give you an example – getting dressed for church. In some churches, it’s very important to dress nicely for church. But in other churches, people are expected to come as they are, in their regular clothes. For the folks who dress up, worship is about coming before God with reverence. Presenting your best self, including being dressed and cleaned up, is a way of showing God respect. For the folks who dress casually, comfortable clothes are a way of being comfortable with God. It’s a sign of wanting to be authentic before God – to demonstrate trust in God’s ability to love the worshipper as they are.
Which group is right? Ah ha! Trick question – I think they both are. But both groups can be wrong, too. Because the point is not what’s going on on the outside, the point is that we’re to worship from the heart.
So how do we do this? How do we worship from the heart? Tune in next week…
Just kidding. Although to be honest I can only give you a partial answer. First, we need to remember what worship is for: it is time spent together focused on God. When we worship God, we thank God, we honor God, we praise God, we look for God in our lives, and we do it together.
Second, we need to continually pay attention to whether our rituals serve the spirit of worship, or undermine it. This doesn’t mean we have to be changing things all the time, or keeping things the same all the time. But it does mean asking ourselves, “What does this mean to us as a community?” Does it help us honor God, praise God, and look for God in our lives?
Finally, worship happens on Sunday mornings, but it can’t stop there. If we are going to worship from the heart, then we have to be ready for our hearts to be changed. We have to be ready to give up those evil intentions that Jesus warns us about. To truly worship from the heart, we need to give our whole lives to God.
This is a tall order, but we’re not in it alone. For one thing, we have each other – for encouragement, for support, and for challenge. It’s not an accident that churches are communities, not individuals – we need each other to grow in our faith.
We also need God. And God is with us. God loves each of us, and is calling us to transformed lives. God is calling us to worship from our hearts with our whole lives. We are not alone. God goes with us.
May the kingdom of God, reclaim us, revitalize us, renew us, and reign through us. Amen.
posted by Amy Sens at 6:44 PM
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