GOD NEAR: GOD FAR John M. Buchanan

Isaiah 6:1-9, Romans 11:33-12:2 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
September 11, 1977 Colunbus, Chio

In a delightful and light-hearted book about the art of corporate worship
Colin Morris, a British Methodist, writes in a way that many Protestants will
understand:

"I had a bad start. My earliest memories were of mahogany pews
with squeaking doors, an aspidistra in a hideous urn on the communion
table and ‘Worship the Lord In The Beauty of Holiness' in flaking
paint above the pulpit. Only much later did I learn that liturgy
means 'the work of the people’. We didn't do any; just sat Like
blocks of wood except when we rose to sing hymns or recited the
Lord's Prayer, For the rest, the preacher got on with it, telling
God in prayers of interminable length what was happening in His
own world and telling us in the sermon what miserable sinners we
were and how Drink was ruining the nation, An hilarious time was
had by all. Had it not been for a nubile soprano with a saucy eye
in the choir I should probably have been a happy atheist by now..."

(The Word and the Words, p. 90-91)

Morris is writing autobiographically, of course, but I sense that we know
what he means. Earliest memories of corporate worship are not particularly pleasant
for many people; and the blunt fact that the majority of church members decide
every Sunday not to attend this exercise indicates that childhood memories have not
always been corrected by adult experience,

The American poet, Robert Lowell, in Waking Early Sunday Morning, describes
a sleeper, near the ocean in Maine, contemplating the day ahead, Shail he, or shall
he not, go to Church? The poet writes:

"O Bible chopped and crucified

in hymns we hear but do not read,

none of the milder subtleties

of grace and art will sweeten these

stiff quatrains shovelled out four-square
they sing of peace and preach despair..."

The poet concludes that a better idea by far is to stay home and spend the morning
rummaging in the woodshed,

(See Theology Today, April 1976, p.18-19)

To the despair of every minister most people make something Like that
decision every Sunday morning. Part of the reason, I propose, is that they do not
understand what we are about in this hour, And part of the reason,I propose, is
that we don't know either; that for many of us what happens between eleven o'clock
and noon - optimistically, is a combination concert and lecture with some curious
activities attached fore and aft to round out the hour,

Thus, a sermon on worship, a reflection on what we are doing at the moment,
an invitation to think historically, biblically and critically about this exercise
which, we keep claiming, is at the very heart of our life as a church. In short,
why bother coming - when you could be doing so many other things?

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One of the peculiarities of humankind among all the animals is that we,
alone apparently, have the capacity for self-consciousness, We have the bothersome
ability to think about what we are doing, to step outside ourselves, as it were, and
contemplate our situation. We, alone among animals, can look beyond ourselves, In
The Courage To Create, Rollo May asks, “Is it not the distinguishing characteristic
of the human being that in the hot race of evolution he pauses for a moment to
paint on the cave walls?" (Preface, p.vii,viii)

And Douslas Steere writes that our deepest need is to be in relationship
with the highest we know, to offer up the best we have, and that something essential
to our humanity dies when that right is denied, (Prayer and Worship, p.44)

The philosopher Pascal concluded that the best evidence for the existence
of God is that human beings seem to need Him; that God, Himself, calls this curious
self-transcendence, this looking beyond ourselves, out of us, Somewhere he wrote,
"You would not have sought Him had you not already found Him,"

If we turn to our family album we will discover a few pictures of our own:
Moses, for instance, removing his shoes before a burning bush, or Isaiah, in the
Old Testament Lesson, sitting in the Tomple mourning the death of his friend, King
Uzziah, and being overwhelmed with a sense of God's reality and majesty and
transcendence,

Christian worship attempts something very ambitious; namely, to hold up
the idea that there is a God, that He exists beyond our time - space orientation,
that He is ultimate, infinite and quite far from our experience of reality, in the
idiom of academic theology, God is transcendent.

The idea has not been without its problems. It has been consistently
suggested that if God is apart, holy, remote, then people must somehow rise above
the confines of normal bodily and mental existence in order to be in touch with Hin,
When the Appalachian Holy Roller becomes stiff as a board and falls to the floor in
a kind of trance, he is engaging in behavior and expressing an idea as old as history
itself, namely that God is experienced when a person leaves ordinary physical and
mental processes behind, That, I believe, was and is the fascination with LSD and
other hallucinogenic drugs: they seemed to lift the user out of ordinary existence
and deposit him on a higher plane. And it is no accident that former LSD users
frequently describe their experiences in religious terms,

I was fascinated to learn a little bit about the Cult of Mythras this
summer, a very prominant religion in Rome in the first century. Digging beneath a
church in Rome archaeologists have discovered an apparatus used by the Mythras
Cult, On the first floor is a room with benches around the periphery and a dramatic
statue of a bull in the center. There are tiny holes in the walls and in the ceiling
above. During initiation rites a bull was slaughtered in the room above and its
blood drained through the holes onto the initiates below who were engaged in a
frenzied dance around the statue, Candle light was beamed through the holes in the
wall, and the total effect was not unlike the psychedelic mode of a contemporary
discotheque. The initiation experience was one of religious ecstacy: the psycho-
somatic shock of light, music, blood and dancing created a trance in the initiate
which was regarded as an experience of God. The Greek word for the experience is
the root of "metamorphosis", and for obvious reasons it isn't found very frequently
in the New Testament. St Paul, however, took a risk in our New Testament Lesson

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this morning and used it, Notice the very important sequence - God is described in
transcendent lanjuape: "O the depth of riches - How unsearchablc his judgments and
inscrutable his ways." And then - "present your bodies - be transformed" - thera
it is, "metamorphosis": "be transformed by the renewal of your mind,"

That is te say, Christian worship intends to put people im touch with the
mysterious "Ground of Being", but not by way of an ecstatic trance, Rather, the
mind, the precious human capacity for rational thought, is to be fully engaged and
part of the way ve do it,

God is far - but He is also near. Christian worship maintains that the
same Holy God who dwells in mystery and transcendence, also draws near. Thus
Isaiah does not just sit in the sanctuary enjoying the sensation of holiness, God
comes to him, his lips are tauched and he has a conversation with the Almighty. The
very essence of Christian worship is that in Jesus Christ God has shown His face:
that He has to do with us personally: that He cares about us and all the details of
our living: that He wants us to be in as intimate relationship with Him as a child
with his own parents,

The tuo ideas: God Near and God Far, I believe, are absolutely essential
to the practice of worship, What has happened in the Churches of the Reformation,
however, is that the emphasis has been rather totally placed on the intellect: we
have become suspicious of feelings, emotions and our worship has become a sometimes
rather staid process of thinking about God. At the time of the Reformation the
liturgy, the mass, most of the statues and rites and eymbols with which the church
had expressed the mystery and transcendence of God were swept out as so much magic.
sne Reformation was necessary but we must, I think, allow for the possibility that
with the symbols the idea of God's mystery and transcendence disappeared as well,
Protestant Churches became lecture halls, and by the twentieth century God, in
some of them, was addressed as casually and flippantly as ome of the folks,

We do well to learn from these branches of the church which see things
differently, We are so precise and exacting in our tradition thai a major faux pas
is committed if our worship exceeds sixty minutes, The Black Church, in our
culture has something to teach us about exuberance and celebration. My favorite
story about the contrast comes from a remark made by one of our Executives, a Black
man, Asked where he worshipped he replied, “Depends on the time of year. In the
fall I attend a White Church; I like football and I can count on being out at noon,
The rest of the year ~ a Black Church. You folks go to Church to get out ~- we so
to worship and ve don't go home till we're done,” Or from the Scottish tradition -
I'll never forget our summer leading vorship in Kinlochleven: the service was very,
very staid, reverent - it included five hymns, seven verses, sunt slowly: but
everyone sang, deliberately and vigorously, Ox Eastern Orthodox tradition: their
gorgeous, mysterious liturgies express the belief that in Heaven God is worshipped
constantly, Puolic worship is simply the Church on Earth joining the service for
a while - "a little bit of earth invadine Heaven",

But meanvhile, in the mainline churches of the West, our emphasis has
shifted from God, about whom we no longer feel comfortable talking, to humanity ~
about which we never tire of speaking. Theology has become anthropology: confession
of sin has given way to self fulfillment: praising the God of Holiness and Majest:
has been replaced by exploring the infinite varieties of the human potential move-
ment, Hans Rudi Weber states flatly that we in the West are che first people in
history who have trouble praying. Our dilemma was predicted in the Last century

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by the Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, who wrote a now very familiar commentary
on the attitudes of people as they attend worship. We go, Kierkegaard suggested, as
if to the theater. We sit as an audience and our expectation is that something will
be done for us and to us, We fully expect to be entertained, stimulated, inspired,
made to laugh or cry. We are an audience: the players are the clergy and choir

whose job it is to provide the show. God, if He has any part in this at all, is the
prompter who on occasion, one hopes, catches the minister's ear and tells him what

to say. That analysis, one hundred years old is, I continue to discover, dis-
tressingly contemporary,

True worship, Kierkegaard went one, maintains the idiom of theater, But
it is God who is to be worshipped. He is the audience, The actors are the congre-
gation who have come to do worship for God, The prompters are clergy and choir
whose job it is to help the congregation, Preachers, obviously, delight in this
simile because it can be used to excuse mediocrity, That is, I can preach a poor
sermon, but that isn't why you came anyway so it doesn't matter. The point, however,
is that true worship is somethins you do for God, and whether the sermon is good or
poor, the anthem sweet or sour, you may still worship Him and do what you came
here to do,

Now, toward a recovery of both ideas - God Near and God Far - in an
experience that honestly reflects what we believe. It begins, I would suggest,
with the sense of expectation you bring with you, Donald MacLeod suggests that we
will not worship until we shift our focus from self to God. He writes: "Ye do not
come to engage in exercises that are profitable to our souls, or to edify one
another, We come to meet with God," (Word and Sacrament, p.106,112)

We have homework to do, that is to say, before we come here. We are going
to meet Someone and we need to get ready, How you spend the moments before the
service begins is terribly important,

There is a rhythm and a movement to Reformed Worship when it is done well.
It is not simply a hit-or-miss series of separate acts surrounding or leading up
to a sermon, This morning we are using the format recommended for Presbyterian
Churches in the Worshipbook: it incorporates ideas from John Calvin, the early
church and the Jcwish traditions of the Old Testament, There are three distinct
parts to this act of worship: The Approach, The Word and The Response of the People,

One of William Barclay's favorite stories involves a group of tourists in
Germany visiting the room where Beethoven lived and worked, In the corner stood
the piano over which he composed The Moonlipht Sonata, An American girl rushed
over to the instrument and thumped out the first movement, looking up with a sense
of triumph, "You will be interested to know," the guide remarked, "chat Paderewski
himself was a visitor here last week," "Really," the girl replied, "I'll bet he
did what I did: I'll bet he sat down and played the Sonata," "No", the guide said
dryly, "he didn't. Everyone begged him to but he said,'I am not worthy, '"

There is something of that in The Approach, The first part of worship
intends to express the most incredible and awesome fact of history: there is a God:
a God of holiness and majesty whose name is best invoked with loud and joyful
hymns of praise, processionals and doxologies. And then - if we have been lifted
up by the spirit of that - we will want and need to express the distance, That is

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the function of the Prayer of Confession. It is an acknowledgment of our humanity;
not an obsessive celebration of our evil, but a simple confession that we are not
God and that we rather consistently fail to live up to His expectations of us.

The second part expresses an equally incredible and awesome fact, The God
we would worship has chosen to be in conversation with us, And so we listen to
ancient words through which He has been addressing His people for thousands of years;
to beautiful music offered to Him by part of our congregation and to us as another
vehicle for His voice, and to the voice of one whose burden and deepest joy is to
search for words through which God himself might choose to speak.

The climax, the highest point, is our response: our prayers, our verbali-
zation of faith, and our offering of goods and self. It is not a collection of
dues, In fact, given the common use of checking accounts most of the offerings
are received in the office by mail, Nevertheless, the offering is the point of
personal dedication and commitment regardless of the mechanics. It is our response
to the grace of God we have been thinking and hearing about, It is the single most
important act that is performed each week,

Because We are Presbyterians our worship is corporate. \We need one another,
we believe in worship, When we pray and sing and respond together we do so not
simply as individuals who happen to be here at the same time, but as brothers and
sisters bound tosether by our faith. Our prayers are not ours alone - they are the
prayers of the Church: our hymns and creeds are more than personal - they express
the faith and hope of this congregation of God's people,

Why bother? Why come to worship? There are a thousand answers to that, My
very deepest conviction is that we are fully human only as we put our lives in
relationship with the One who has created us: only as we acknowledge our humanity
and His awesome infinity. Then, I believe deeply, we will know something of His
acco « this infinite God who has walked among us: this Almighty who wishes to be
known as our Father: this God who calls us here - and promises to meet us here and
have dealings with us,

Amen,

Eternal God, our Father, we are grateful for the privilege of worship.
Lift up our hearts to mystery and wajesty and then help us to know the miracle
of Your presence in our midst, Through Jesus Christ our Lord,
Amen,

camer,