Proper 17, Year A
Exodus 3:1-15, Romans 12:9-21, Matthew 16:21-28
The bride is an only child, very close to her parents. Her mom has died. Her dad has cancer, but the cancer is in remission. All are looking forward to a beautiful wedding, a wonderful celebration of life and love. However, a couple of weeks before the wedding, the father’s health begins to fail. By the rehearsal dinner, the family knows the father of the bride does not have much time to live. So, in the middle of the night, the father asks to be released from the hospital. The priest is called. Accompanied by the ambulance driver and a nurse, the bride, the groom, the father of the bride, and the priest gather in the church. The father of the bride walks the bride down the aisle, and he witnesses the marriage of his only child. After the service, he returns to the hospital and he dies a few hours later. The next day, the wedding and reception proceed as planned. The priest presiding at the wedding explains what has happened during the night. Then, they proceed with the wedding because that is what the father wanted for his daughter, and because the wedding and reception are a celebration of a marriage and a celebration of the father’s life.
The person who shared this story with me is a close friend of the bride’s. She tells me the event was such a mixture of emotion, so bittersweet…not sad, but blessed. Blessed, at least in part, because the father desired to be a part of his daughter’s wedding in a church. The bride, and the groom, and the priest could have gathered in the father’s hospital room. But, the father chose, even in his compromised state of health, to check him self out of the hospital and make the journey across town to witness his daughter’s wedding in a church. We are drawn into places of worship, because here we sense God, here we ask the larger questions about life, about who we are, and why we are here, and how we live with one another…here we come closer to understanding our selves, to fulfilling our innate desire to know God. A place of worship may have pews and candles and an organ. A place of worship may be outdoors under a canopy of sky and trees and birds. Arguably, a hospital room can be a place of worship, “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt 18:20). But, my point is we create worship space; some are drawn to the stained glass windows, some are drawn to God’s Creation in nature. We gather in worship space because we are drawn to praise God, to give thanks to God, to cry to God, to petition God, to ask the big questions, to come to know ourselves.
In our lesson today from Exodus, Moses approaches the burning bush and God tells Moses to save God’s people, to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. When Moses questions his own ability to perform such a feat, God tells him: “‘I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you; when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain’” (Exodus 3:12). When we know God, we desire to worship God. When we know God in small kindnesses between friends, in comfort given by family through sorrow, in compassion shown by strangers, in discernment to a new path or a new direction in life, in the beauty of Creation, in the gift of love…when we know God, we desire to worship God. And, when we desire to know God, when we allow ourselves to be open to God’s presence throughout our lives, then we desire to worship God.
James E. Griffiss, former Theology Professor at Seabury-Western and former Canon Theologian to the Presiding Bishop, addresses our need for worship in his book The Anglican Vision, part of The New Church’s Teaching Series. Griffiss discusses the human need to give meaning to life. We struggle with questions about life and death, why we suffer, how we love. Sometimes the answers seem beyond us. Griffiss shows us the gift in our questioning: “Some people would say that since we cannot answer such ultimate questions we are better off not asking them. People of faith, however, believe that such questions demand another response, one that calls us beyond our ordinary way of dealing with questions to respond through faith, hope, trust, and love. I like to think of this ‘calling beyond’ as the courage to worship: to offer myself in praise and thanksgiving and to know myself in the presence of God. The courage to worship is not an act of resignation or one that denies or rejects what my mind can tell me. It is, rather, an act that opens me to new possibilities and understandings, showing me that my knowledge and explanations do not exhaust reality and that there is always more to my life and my world than I can think or explain or even imagine” (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1997, p. 89).
We are drawn to worship and worship leads to transformation. Griffiss discusses the many ways we are transformed through worship. We recognize God’s presence in our lives. We learn to pray for ourselves and for others in a more meaningful way. We understand sin as a turning away from God, and we understand the gift of repentance, of acknowledging our turning away, of wanting to turn back. We grow in “the knowledge and love of God.” We come to know God deeply and profoundly. And, we come to know that God loves us for exactly who we are. We know that God desires us, that God wants to live in relationship with us (pgs. 95-97). Griffiss summarizes: “…the real person I was and was struggling to become was the person who was in relationship to God” (p. 98). When we struggle in life, we are struggling with that innate desire to live in relationship with God. Let go….open your hearts….God is waiting for you.
And, so, we worship….in praise, and thanksgiving, in need, and in love. Griffiss calls us into worship and out into the world. He proclaims: “Here then is what I mean by the courage to worship. The liturgy takes our personal and individual prayers, our stumbling words of petition for ourselves and others, and our sometimes half-hearted words of thanksgiving or confession, and transforms them all into God’s Word to us and to the world in which we live. The problems are not solved: people still die of cancer, we don’t always get what we want, and we are still caught up in our own sins and failures, but God’s Word of faithfulness, Jesus Christ, is present. The courage to worship is to believe in the final victory of God” (p. 92). Amen.
