Text
introduction: Luke tells the story of the days immediately following the Ascension in
two places: Here and in a much expanded
version in the first chapter of Acts. I’ll make reference to that account from time to time.
Luke 24:50-53
Late in 1942,
the Allies won a decisive victory at El Alamein in North Africa. It signaled a turning point in the war the
Britons had already been fighting for three years. In November, Winston Churchill referred to
the victory in a speech at Mansion House.
He said, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end; but
it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
The story of
Jesus’ Ascension could occupy our entire
time this morning but I want to focus elsewhere. So, let me say that the Ascension once again
affirmed the deity of Christ and signaled to the disciples that a new era had
begun. It was the end of the beginning.
What these
verses following the description of the Ascension do is present a snapshot of
the community in worship. Let’s look at what is explicit and implicit in the story.
Understanding Worship
The first
thing we need to do is try to understand worship. Our English word “worship” comes from the same root as “worthy.”
Worship involves recognizing the worthiness of the one worshipped to
receive our praise, adoration, honor, and tribute.
Terry York has
written a song that reflects this notion of God’s worthiness
to receive worship. You’ll recognize it.
Worthy of worship, worthy of praise,
Worthy of honor and glory;
Worthy of all the glad songs we sing,
Worthy of all the offerings we bring.
You are worthy, Father, Creator.
You are worthy, Saviour, Sustainer.
You are worthy, worthy and wonderful;
Worthy of worship and praise.
Worship, then,
begins with an understanding of God and what he has done and is doing on our
world.
Worship looks
at aspect of God’s character and work, especially as
it is seen in Jesus Christ. We are
helped in this by Scripture reading, the sermon, and our music. The hymns, songs, and choruses we sing are
designed to rehearse the work of God on our behalf.
A hymn is the
product of the author’s own reflection about God. A good hymn not only helps us see something
related to our faith in a new light, it guides our reflection.
Our reflection
prompts us to respond to what we have discovered or even rediscovered.
In worship we contemplate
and celebrate the character and work of God.
Prepared for Worship
What prepared
these disciples for their worship experience?
They came with
a sense of confident expectation. They
had spent time with the Risen Christ. He had showed them a new way to look at
the Scriptures. That filled them with
joyous expectation. They knew God could
be trusted and that Christ’s promise to them would become a
reality.
Does this mean
that if we don’t have absolute, unshakable faith we
can’t worship? No. We
don’t know if the disciples still
harbored any doubts following their forty days with Jesus, but we do know they
had seen him respond graciously to the one who honestly said, “Lord, I believe.
Help my unbelief.”
And, of course, the disciples had known his patience when they struggled
to believe.
For all of us
this confident expectation is important because it keeps us from looking at our
worship service as just another way to treat an hour on Sunday morning. We know it can be a moment of life-changing
reality.
We need to
also remember that when the disciples entered this time of worship they were
living in obedience.
Jesus had told
them to stay in Jerusalem until they were “clothed with
power,” until the Holy Spirit had come upon
them. And, that’s just what they were doing.
The quality of
our worship experience is directly related to our obedience. The Old Testament prophet Micah understood
this. He expressed it in a powerful
passage.
“With what shall I come before the
LORD,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the LORD be pleased
with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
8 He has told you, O mortal,
what is good;
and what does the LORD require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
Some of the “acts of worship” Micah
mentions—like human sacrifice—were forbidden in Israel’s
worship. The prophet was not endorsing
them; he was using them to show how it is possible to impressively go through
the motions in when we come to church.
What was important was the fundamental obedience to the Lord’s requirement: “to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with
your God.”
This is a
multifaceted obedience. It would do no
good to refuse to bow down to idols while you were cheating your neighbor or
plotting “pay-back” for some offense your neighbor had committed.
If the man or
woman in the midst of an affair or some shifty business deal should complain
about “getting nothing” out of the Sunday service, God’s response would likely be, “What do you
expect?”
Whenever God
calls us to obedience, he has our good in mind?
When we teach our dogs to sit-up or “speak,” we are likely trying to show what good trainers we
are. When God asks us to obey, he wants
to bless us.
When you get
the chance, take a moment and look at each of the Ten Commandments. You’ll find that
for each commandment, there is something God wishes to protect us from and to
preserve for us.
In the case of
the disciples, their obedience would lead to the blessing of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus once
told his disciples that if they came to worship and realized they were at odds
with another person, they should deal with that before going on with their
worship. He was underscoring the
importance of our spiritual condition when we worship. So, when we come to worship and discover we
are in a state of rebellion against God what should we do? Doesn’t it seem like
it would be a good time to raise the white flag?
Worship Manifested
How was their
worship manifested?
I could talk
about their amazing unity they displayed.
Acts says they were “completely together” as they prayed.
They shared a new unity of purpose and resolve, when they had been
quarreling about their positions only a few weeks before. In time, the unity of the early church would
transcend racial, ethnic, gender, and economic boundaries. It’s a worthy
study.
But this
morning I want to put the emphasis where Luke puts it in his gospel. He says they were filled with “great joy.”
B. L. Davis,
former Director of Missions for the Amarillo Baptist Association was attending
the Baptist General Convention of Texas which was meeting in El Paso. After one of the evening sessions he got
together with some fellow-pastors at the hotel restaurant for a bite to eat and
some reminiscing. The longer they talked
over their iced tea and coffee, the louder their laughter became. Finally, a waitress walked over and said, “Look, we’ve got lots of Baptist preachers
staying here tonight, you drunks have got to quiet down!”
Folks who have
trouble with worship becoming too enthusiastic, would probably prefer to forget
the participants in the first worship service of the Christian Church end up
accused of being drunk. Check out Acts
2.
Because this
passage features “speaking in tongues” we often miss the how an enthusiastic worship service
became an evangelistic crusade.
Praising God led to proclaiming the gospel. Joy roused the curiosity of the crowd.
The Holy
Spirit energizes Christian worship. In
Ephesians 5:18-20 Paul links being filled or submitted to the Spirit to joyous
worship and links that joyous worship to music.
…be filled with
the Spirit,
speaking
to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,
singing
and making melody in your heart to the Lord;
always
giving thanks for all things in the name of
our
Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father…
We’re told that our age is one without a lot of hope. It’s been that
way for some time. Remember the term “beat generation?” I always thought it had to do with the kind
of music popular in the fifties and sixties.
It doesn’t.
The “beat” generation
was that generation which came to maturity following World War II, that
generation which was emotionally and spiritually running on empty, exhausted,
beat.
From the beat
generation to the members of generation X that same emptiness and despair has
been passed on from generation to generation.
It doesn’t impact every individual in the same
way but there’s still a great need for Christians
to model the genuine joy which comes from their relationship with Christ, the
joy which is a fruit of the Spirit.
Manifested in Singing
This morning,
as we think back to those disciples meeting in Jerusalem, we might ask: Did they sing?
We’re not told but it wouldn’t be
surprising if they did. Music was part
of Jewish worship. Both Matthew and Mark
speak of how the final Passover service with Jesus ended. With the crucifixion only hours away, Jesus
and his disciples “…sang a hymn
and went out to the Mount of Olives.” I can never recall seeing an artist’s portrayal of Jesus singing, but apparently he did.
I’m not going to insist it happened, but it seems likely the
waiting disciples sang as they worshipped.
Of course,
mention “worship music” in some places and you’re sure to hit
a sour note. In fact, church music
sometimes inspires as much discord as harmony.
During the
90's there was a conference at a college in Northern Michigan where a number of
church leaders met to discuss changes in church music. One group of pastors was
particularly incensed by the introduction of what they considered to be
"worldly" or inappropriate instruments into the churches. Another
group, while appreciative of their denomination's musical tradition, felt these
new instruments might help reach a new generation. The conference ended with
the participants agreeing to respect one another despite their differences.
They allowed the "peace of Christ" to rule in their hearts.
By the way, I
should tell you that this conference took place in the 1890's and the
instruments that caused such controversy included the piano. As late as 1903 the pope declared the piano
unfit for use in a Christian worship service.
We’re so accustomed to the piano in
church that some might believe Euodia and Syntyche’s squabble was over who got to play on Sunday morning. (Philippians 4:2)
Years ago,
when both my sons were still at home, they would occasionally offer
observations about the music at our Sunday services. Often, their comments would be something
like, “Well, Dad, this morning every song
was from 18th century,” or “Today, we didn’t get into the
20th century even once.” They’d learned to
look at the information at the bottom of the page to find out when a song was
composed.
I am familiar
with most of the old songs. I know about
the lives of people like eighteenth-century Pastor Augustus Toplady (author of Rock of Ages and such a mean-spirited
Calvinist you wouldn’t want him as a pastor) and I know
what it means to “raise my Ebenezer,” but I sometimes wonder if our young people are puzzled by
what some of these phrases mean.
The boys were
right to point out that we sometimes seemed “lost in the
sixties”—the 1860s or
1760s. But the solution is not to
replace our hymnals with ring-binders that can hold nothing written over a
decade ago.
We need a
connection to the past and a connection to the present. When Paul pictured the churches singing “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs” I think he was saying there was room for the old and the
new.
Maintaining
both a hymnal and this chorus book is our attempt to honor that notion.
--We could
hold on to all of the old hymns but our hymnals would be multivolume
works. Charles Wesley wrote some 6000
hymns in his lifetime; today only about a dozen of them are still found in our
hymnals. Some hymns probably don’t merit being kept.
Some are time-bound. A few years
ago our hymnal included a hymn by Thad Roberts that began with this stanza:
God of earth and outer space, God of
love and God of grace,
Bless the astronauts who fly. As they
soar beyond the sky.
God who flung the stars in space, God who set
the sun ablaze,
Fling the spacecraft thro the air,
Let man know your presence there.
Now, there’s nothing really wrong with the song. If Capt. Picard weren’t so politically correct, he might have had it sung on the Enterprise. Pat and I were members of the church Roberts
served as minister of music, a church in Houston, you know, as in “Houston, we have a problem.” Back in the seventies, it made sense to be
singing about God and outer space. Yet,
somehow the hymn seems to belong to another age, an age when space travel hadn’t become such a drain on the national budget. Ultimately, it seems almost no one sang the
hymn so it was dropped from our hymnal.
--We’ve considered projecting the newest choruses onto the wall
as we sing but we’re reluctant to cause
coronaries. Seriously, the dynamics
would be a bit tough—too much light, too little wall, and
not a few of us would need binoculars to see the words.
Our chorus
book allows us to make the best of the newest choruses available.
We’ll use the book like we always have—alongside the hymnal.
However, if you can memorize all the verses of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” I suspect you
can learn to sing some of our favorite choruses without the words in front of
you.
If we let
them, the oldest hymns and the newest choruses can enrich our worship.
Conclusion
Luke begins
and ends in the temple. Zachariah was
waiting in the temple when the angel announced he would have a son. That son would be the forerunner of the
Messiah. As the gospel ends, Jesus’ disciples are waiting in the temple for the coming of the
Spirit.
Yet, as
important as the temple may have been, the Spirit was not given there. The Spirit came as the disciples were
gathered in “an upper room,” their gathering place as they planned for the future.
The lesson
seemed clear: God’s people don’t have to be
in a particular place to truly worship—we just need
to be together in Jesus’ Name, yearning to do his work.
[1] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version.
1989 (Mic. 6:6–8). Nashville: Thomas
Nelson Publishers.
