Worship that Moves God's Heart

We are in, uh, the message series, The Reason Why We Sing, and I want to give thanks first of all to the last 3 preachers who held it down, uh, Sister Tammy, Brother Devin, and Sister Reverend Doctor Spiritual Director Chaplain Dawana Drew. Thank y'all for holding it down. Uh, the last 3 Sundays I was in Chicago at that Wieborg Center for Spiritual Direction and training the, the future of, uh, spiritual directors and I took a lot of the training that I received in healing care ministry to try to, you know, infuse in this new responsibility. But really, it was actually the North Park Theological Seminary asking me, what are we learning as a congregation about contemplative spirituality? Because of the desire to see it more infused in the local church. So I actually helped one of the professors with a Lilly Grant application. And we received the Lilly Grant application to actually train the future pastors for how to incorporate contemplative practices in the worship service. And so, I'll be going back to Chicago to do some more teaching, you know, pastors how to bring that into a local context and a local setting. This is a part of our ongoing journey as a community of faith to ask, how does our contemplative spirituality not just lead us inward, That's a misunderstanding of contemplative spirituality. But how does it lead us outward? Contemplative spirituality is never meant for just us to navel-gaze. It's meant for us to be active, to be missional, and on purpose for bringing God's kingdom on earth as it is already done in heaven. And some of the greatest leaders and influencers, even of the civil rights era, they were deeply contemplative. to discern where was God working, where is God holding out for the hope of the world, and how is God leading me and us together to go do that work for the sake of the world? In fact, whenever it comes down to MLK's birthday, there's always this challenge about MLK that he wasn't really a Christian. Anybody ever hear that? Mm-hmm. MLK, he wasn't really Christian, he was a socialist, and he didn't really believe in, You know, the divinity of Christ, and so forth, all these crazy accusations. They said the same thing of Howard Thurman, his predecessor, and one of his early mentors as well. But the message that Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr. were trying to bring in the context of the church was that they had missed out on the humanity of God. They had made God so high that they forgot that God was actually human and came to do work here on the earth. That he wasn't just concerned about people's souls, he was also concerned about their pockets. He was concerned about their relationships. He was concerned about how they had been othered by the idolatry of materialism and professionalism that ostracized people from receiving the good news of the kingdom of God. Howard Thurman and MLK, 2 great contemplatives, Heard a voice from heaven calling them to go and do the work of Jesus and sing about it. You know, sometimes when I engage with people who are doing justice work, it feels heavy because, man, there's a lot of injustices in the world. And one of the perspectives of a lot of justice people is how much wrong there is in the world. Right. How bad it is. And to be honest and fair, yes, it is bad. But the work of justice is not a work of drudgery. It is a work of joy. It is a work of encouragement. It is a work of delight. When, when we get to do and engage in the work of justice, it is a delight because it is the very heart of God. Today we're going to be singing a song of justice from Psalm 68, verses 4 through 8. You can stay seated because it's hot in here. That's right. But please read along with me together. Psalm, Psalm 68, verses 4 through 8. Sing to God, sing in praise of his name, extol him Who rides on the clouds, rejoice before him! His name is the Lord. A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in the name of his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing, but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. When you, God, went out before your people, when you marched through the wilderness, the earth shook, the heavens poured down rain before God, the one of Sinai, before God, the God of Israel. This is the word of the Lord. The people said, Thanks be to God. Let this word fill our minds, flow from our mouths, and free our hearts to live as the beloved Children of God. The sermon title today, if you're writing down notes, is Worship That Moves the Heart of God. Worship That Moves the Heart of God. And notice what's happening right in the front in verse 4. The psalmist commands praise. Sing to the Lord, extol him, and rejoice. How many of you, when you heard that verse of scripture, uh, you know, that he comes riding on the clouds, your mind went to that old, that old joint? Yeah. He called, he comes riding on the clouds, shouting at the sun. Yeah, and the trumpets call, lift your voice, it's the year of Jubilee. Out of Zion's hill, salvation. Help me out, help me out. There is no God like Jehovah, there is no— 2 people Don't have an idea of what we are singing. He comes riding on the clouds. Extol him, praise him in the middle of your wilderness. And why this would have shaken anybody in the first century Hebrew— they would have been shaken because worship is oftentimes, too oftentimes, seen As transactional and not connectional. That's the first point. Worship is connection, it is not transaction. If we are thinking that worship is what we do in order to get God to move, then what we have subtly done is made God a transactional God. I sing because he's made me happy. I sing because he's blessed me. I sing because he's protected me. I sing because he's healed me. And that's not a, a wrong thing to sing for all of those reasons, but if we're careful enough to pay close attention, we'll notice the subtle temptation to make God like a jukebox. When you put in your coin and you choose the song that you want to sing to God. You choose the song that you want to have on repeat. You choose the song that you want to get your needs filled. And that makes worship a response. And worship is not just a response. That makes worship conditional. Worship is connection. It's something we do before we even see it happen. Our worship oftentimes doesn't have vocabulary for suffering. For going through hardship, for grieving, for loss. It oftentimes doesn't have room for lament because the entire grammar depends on things being okay visibly. But a justice-oriented worship has a different motivation. It's all about connecting with God and connecting with God's people. Here's the main idea of the message where I'm going to spend the rest of the time. Justice-oriented worship Is an appropriate motivation that moves the heart of God to restore broken systems and people to wholeness. What is justice-oriented worship? This isn't just how I'm particularly reading the text. I believe I'm reading it faithfully, for those of you who think I've gone heretical. I believe I'm reading it faithfully. But I'm also reading it critically. In a real pattern of our American worship, It has been studied that the— particularly CCM, that is the more evangelical brand of worship that we all particularly are listening to today— lends itself to the absence of lament. Out of 100 top worship songs in CCM, less than 2 handfuls speak of hardship, speak of difficulty. Wow. speak of pain. Theologian Soon-Chon Rah says the American church avoids lament because it is particularly shaped by comfort and not by challenge. Congregations who are doing fine, they don't want their equilibrium mixed up or disturbed, and so they construct their worship to only point upward. Look at how good it is, look at how good God is, and let's deny ourselves of the hard, harsh realities that many people are facing on the ground today. Walk through those songs, go take a look at it in any American church on any given Sunday, and you'll find an enormous amount of thanksgiving, of gratitude, and comparatively little language for the injustice or a raw cry out for God. Soon-Shiong Rah's point is not that celebration is wrong, it's just that worship diet that only includes celebration quietly erases whoever is in the room that is actually suffering. He calls it erasure holiness. We erase the holiness that's found in the brokenness of God's people. We do not sing because everything is fine. We sing because sometimes, even through gritted teeth and clenched fists, we believe that God is a God who hears the cries of his people. Amen. Who sees the injustices of the world and is moved into action because God's people see God accurately. If that's true, then that means worship is not naive. It is a visual act of resistance against despair, a visual act of resistance against hopelessness, a visual act of resistance against the intimidation Of those who would try to keep ones silent. So, what's actually happening underneath these worship songs that are justice-oriented? These underneath tone is this second thing: God's justice is central to God's character. Why don't y'all say that with me? Because some folks be messing that up. God's justice is central to God's Character. Character. How many of y'all were shaped in that era of, you know, the sovereign grace, sovereign God, sovereignty, you know, just that very strongly strict Reformed kind of theology that emphasized the sovereignty of God above all other characters? Maybe that was just me, okay. In that overemphasis of the sovereignty of God, I had literally been in conversations with people who would look at the sovereignty of God to justify why some people were enslaved, to justify the triangular slave trade from Africa throughout the West Indies into South America, even India, and of course here in this North American continent, that because God is sovereign, God graciously brought those people out of Africa and their savagery so that they could hear the good news that Jesus loves them. Anybody else know? Nobody else ever heard that before, huh? I mean, this is literally being taught, and still today, some people are suggesting that 400 years of slavery and another 400 years prior to that of slavery all across the world is somehow justified when the Christians are the ones who constructed the image of people being less than what God created them to be. Shame on them. Shame on them. Shame on us. And may the Lord deal with us ever so justly. Look back at verse 5 and 6. The psalmist doesn't describe God in generic terms as God being powerful and holy and exalted and somewhere else. No, God is very present in the middle of the call to worship. God is a Father to the fatherless. God is a defender of widows. God leads out the prisoners with singing. He doesn't just go in and join them in prison. He grabs them by the hand and says, come on, let's do a little dance and we gonna get on up out of here. There is joy in the character of God that acts justly because justice is central to the character of God. It's not peripheral, it's not secondary or tertiary, it ain't even in the back. It's right in the center of who God is, that God desires belonging for everyone. God desires family for every single person, that no one be without parenting and family and aunties and uncles. And he's not talking about a program, he's talking about relationship. That God is a defender of widows, that justice that protects the structurally exposed, the ones with no legal representation or economic leverage on their own. God identifies and says he defends the widow. And he doesn't just fling open the doors for those who are in prison, he restores them to thriving and flourishing. This is who God is. Amen. It's what they missed in the civil rights era. It's what King wrote about from a jail, calling not for the non-Christians, but for white Christians and Black Pentecostal Christians who also thought that God's sovereignty somehow justified the position of people being treated less than. This is not a stray theme. This is throughout the Bible. And I guarantee, when you start to see God's central character of justice in this one That passage, you won't be able to read the Bible without that justice lens. You won't be able to just turn a blind eye to it. You will see in Luke 4 when Jesus goes into the temple and he opens up the scroll to Isaiah 61 and he preaches the good news that has been poured upon him to release the captives, to give sight to the blind, and to give liberty to the oppressed. You will say that is central to the character and the heart of God. When you read in Matthew chapter 25, when Jesus says, uh, whatever you do to the least of these, you do it unto me because you see in them me. He's not saying that this is something peripheral. He's not saying that this is something tertiary. He's saying this is central to what it means to be a follower of God. To the point, to the point, in Matthew 25, he says, when you don't do it, I don't even know who you are. That's right. I don't know who you are. Some will come and stand before the Lord on the Judgment Day and say, didn't we cast out demons in your name? Didn't we raise up big churches in your name? Didn't we make good music that was passed all across the world in your name? Didn't we translate the Bible into thousands of translations in your name? Didn't we do it in your name? And he said, whatever you did to the least of these, you also did in my name. And I'm not a God that will be mocked. Even the New Testament writer James takes it and says, pure religion that is undefiled is to visit the orphans and the widows in their affliction. So how do we make all of this just a little bit more practical this morning? Right now, there is a global refugee and displacement crisis that by the end of 2025, 117.8 million people were displaced by violence and persecution and conflict. Not in a single year, but over a period of time, and that number keeps climbing. To picture what one 117.8 million people looks like, that is the total population of the country of the Philippines. The Philippines is the 14th largest country in the world. Imagine an entire country displaced and not able to go home. Speaking of home, let's make it a little bit more, more poignant. 117.8 million people is about a third of the population of the United States. So imagine a third of the population now displaced and not able to go back to their homes. Count 1 out of 3 people in this room and imagine you're not able to go back to your home, to your place of business, to your families, and to your relationships. And the ongoing conflicts in the Sudan and Syria that we don't hear anymore about, of Gaza still going on, of Afghanistan and the Ukraine, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They say by the end of this year that 117.8 will become 136 million. Where's the church that says God is the Father to the fatherless? Where's the church that says that he is a defender of the widow? Right now in the United States, according to census, 15.7 million families are headed by a single mother. 15.7 million families, a single mother. Their poverty rate is 21%, almost 5 times higher than married couples. They live check to check, and in this household they are working, trying to make ends meet, and we wonder Where is God the defender of the widows? And that's not to say of the single-parent homes that are led by a father as well. They just didn't count them in the census. In a mass incarceration, where a reentry system makes it brutally hard for people to actually come home after they've served their time. In a country— Man. that privatizes prisons that are literally traded on the stock market. Y'all know what the stock market was created for. Y'all know what Wall Street was created for, was the exchange and the purchase of Africans who had been enslaved. Yes. The stock market was a profit business. Y'all are quiet. And God, we wonder, where is God leading the prisoners into prosperity? Anybody hearing something like this could easily say, well, you're just being political. I'm just reading the Bible. That, you know, for all of y'all who say it's clearly written in the Bible, it's clearly written in the Bible. That justice is central to the character of God, and it begins by allowing our eyes to be open to see people as people and not as categories. Can you begin to see people as people and not as categories? Can you begin to see people as people and not as an issue to deal with? Can you see people as people and not something that needs to be addressed? But people as people reminds us that God is the one who created us in God's image. Amen. All of us. All of us. And where there is a disruption to the image of God, it don't make God happy. God is not pleased. God is not pleased at all. And God turns around when we sing these songs of justice. He sings them back to us and says, where will you go? Now here's where I got to give a warning for 'Cause when I read this passage and I engage with folk in the justice work, we sing songs, we pray prayers, and we start to get to work. And I ask myself this question all the time: does God want reversal instead of redemption? Does God want reversal instead of redemption? Hang in here with me. The danger when we get engaged with justice work is that we will clearly see injustice. Mm-hmm. You'll see it everywhere. And the more you see injustice everywhere, the more you'll start to want to correct it. And the more you want to correct it, you will want to punish it, not just end it. There is a slight temptation of not just wanting to end the injustice, but to punish it. You will start wanting to punish the oppressors. You will want them crushed. Oh yes. Take them and their family out. If we're not careful in our hunger for justice, to see wrongs made right, we will become the very thing we set out to resist. You come— you become the very thing you protest. You become the very thing you raise red flags about. You become the very thing that you oppose. Look closely at what the text says. The rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. Not the rebellious are destroyed, not the rebellious are wiped out. They live in a parched and barren and dried-out place. It's severe. And the severity of the place is to expose their injustice, expose their idolatry, and expose their lack of generosity to do the work of God that God has even allowed them to afford. Howard Thurman understood this danger better than most anyone. In his chapter, Jesus and the Disinherited, he has an entire chapter titled Hatred. And in the chapter on hatred, he talks seriously why the oppressed reach for hatred in the first place, because of their marginalization. For people who've been stripped of power and dignity, hatred can function as a kind of psychological survival, he says. It gives coherence and energy where there was only vulnerability before. This is the same kind of fearmongering tactics that we liberals will judge them conservatives for. Huh? Them conservatives will speak all in the language of fear. Look what they're taking away. Look what they're gaining. Look— and then the other side of trying to correct that will say, look at what they're taking. Look at what they're gaining. Look at what we're giving away. And then you can't oppose evil, beloved, with evil. That's right. That just makes and turns your heart even more inwardly. So the temptation that Howard Thurman raises is that hatred hatred destroys the core of the hater. It turns you into the very person that you are opposing. We like to read the scriptures, right, and say, look at them. Rarely do we read the scriptures and say, look at us. Look at me. Even when we read this Psalm 68 passage, Lord, get 'em, yeah, send 'em out to a dry and parched land. You know, take they shoes off they feet so they feet can burn. You know, let 'em, let the skin just boil over and do it all, but we don't want the same for us. We don't ask for that kind of judgment for us. Thurman warns, even Jesus rejected hatred not as a moral nicety or some pietistic persuasion, but because he understood his purpose was unity with God And communion with one another. And as the beloved MLK said, hate can't drive out hate, only love can do that. So, here's the hope buried though in verse 6, these harsh and dry conditions, is that they will become people who repent. That our work of justice is actually to call people to repentance, to turn from injustice. Amen. To turn from their wicked ways and to become the heart of God in God's formation. And this was— this passage here in Psalm 68 is sprinkled all over the Bible, really from the Old to the New Testament. And in the new church, in the early church, the church that Paul spent a lot of time building churches and planting churches and raising up leaders, and that Peter sent out leaders to go be speakers and teachers and prophets and pastors. That same church in the early days wrestled with this same heart and character of God. How do we sing? How do we worship when we have all of these challenges and difficulties? And here's where the heart of God shows up even in the communion, the Lord's table that we are about to take. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul is responding to some news that he heard about the church in Corinth. And the church in Corinth had become a multiracial, multidynamic, multigenerational worshiping community. I mean, if you wanted to go see what God was doing, Corinth was one of the places you would go to see how things were popping off. It was glorious. And in chapters 11 through 13 in particular, he addresses all kinds of issues that had come up in worship. And one of the issues that came up in worship was how the Lord's table was being practiced, but it wasn't being practiced in the heart of God. You see, there were people who had food and they would bring that food to the worship place, but they would bring their leftovers and not their best. They would get full and then come into the worship service where they were supposed to be sharing all things in common, and they weren't sharing their best, they were sharing their leftovers. Some people had even gone so far as to come into the worship service drunk because of the inebriation of having so much communion wine prior to the worship service. And the way Paul addresses it is he says, you have not taken into consideration the poor. You have not taken into consideration those who came with empty bellies. You have not taken into consideration those who have not been filled or had their opportunity To partake in the festive intention of what the Lord's table is supposed to be, a joyful opportunity to celebrate what Jesus has done for us. And as a community, we all get to share in this joy together. So let me bring my best and let me share it with those who are not able to bring, oh, as much as I am able to bring. And let's celebrate and do that together. And Paul said, when you do that, You eat and you drink damnation to yourself. Now, I don't know about you, but I grew up in a Baptist church, and that eat and drink damnation to yourself was oftentimes meant as a personal piety, in that you need to get your life right with Jesus so you can take this bread and this cup. And if you eat and drink this bread and cup unworthily, you might go to hell. You would do it unrighteously. You would do Jesus a disservice. Anybody else? You know, you took that thing seriously, right? Yes. There would be long repentance, you know, times and confession times. I got to get my heart right. I got to get my heart right. That bread come around here, I do not want to go to hell. But Paul isn't talking about personal piety. He's speaking outwardly in the community. It's not just about you and your own relationship. It's about you and your relationship with others in the community. How are them relationships doing? Because if you eat and drink the bread and the cup without the mindfulness of who doesn't have, he says that's when you eat and drink unworthily. This table is to be for everyone. This invitation is to be for everyone, not just for some. This is for everybody to come and receive as much as they would like so that they can take home even more with greater joy. When we, church, ask ourselves, Lord, who is among us Church, who is among us that is in need? Who is among us in our city that is in need? May we be mindful of those who don't have so that we can expend ourselves for the sake of others. That's the context that Paul mentions this communion service. And as we, beloved, come to this moment— Amen. You didn't have to bring any food to share today. Maybe we need to go old school potluck. Bring your school— That's, that's family day. Family day is coming up. You had to bring all your food. But in this bread, in this cup, as we come to this table, I want to invite you to hold 2 things at once. I want you to hold the fact that God is a father to the fatherless, a defender of the widows, the one who leads the prisoner out. And it's entirely possible to join people in their wilderness and teach them what it means to have joy as they march their way out. And that God is inviting you and me and us to be the people to go into the wilderness with others. And that doesn't mean that God has forgotten about your own needs. To care for the needs of others doesn't mean that God doesn't care about your needs. Amen. That is a scarcity mindset. I don't have time to get into it. That is a mindset that leads us to say, I can't do that, I can't do that because I got my own needs. God is inviting us to step out of our own needs for a moment and to be about what is central to his heart. So I'm not going to invite us to do a whole long confession. But in the Book of Common Worship, there is a wonderful prayerful confession that is by community, and one that I want to invite us to pray out loud together as we prepare ourselves for the bread and the cup. Let's read together. Most merciful God, We confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us, that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your name. Amen.