Sermon 4, The Incarnational Nature of Corporate Worship

Sermon 4, Preached Sunday August 29th, 11:00 AM
FUMC Wortham
The Incarnational Nature of Corporate Worship
John 1:1-14

Well, we come to our final two sermons on Worship. We remember that our Worship is who we are. It is how we live. Our worship is our life. Romans 12:1 tell sus that we “present our bodies to God as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, for this is our spiritual act of Worship.”
We remember that our Corporate Worship, when we gather together on Sunday in what we call church, grows out of the life we lived during the week, the mission and ministry that we have done for Christ - the way we have treated our fellow men and women. It leads us to remember the sacrifices of Christ as we remember our Baptism and partake of Holy Communion.
And Last week we saw that our Corporate Worship is Communal, that we are a part of a community that communicates and builds unity to work together that others may come to Christ and be a part of the Body of Christ, that we may go out in ministry and mission to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the lonely...
So today we look at the final two elements of our Corporate worship. Tonight we will look at the future hope that our worship looks toward but today we look at the Incarnational Nature of our Corporate Worship.

Now there's a big word for you... Incarnational.
This word comes to us as a religious word. Not just a Christian word but a religious word. Greek Mythology is repleat with gods coming to Earth and taking on human form. Hinduism calls their deity in human form an Avatar, the one that brings order and peace to the world. Budhism is based upon the concept that the soul is continually reincarnated, continually working toward perfection until all the evil is vanquished from the body and one becomes a Buddah – a god in human form that needs not be reincarnated. Other religions have this concept as well but only Christianity has the concept of incarnation in the form of Jesus.

In John 1:14 we read that the Word, that is Jesus, became flesh and dwelt among us. A completely different concept. In the other ideas of incarnation the god comes down to take a wife, the god comes down and is seperate from humanity, or the god (the person themself) is seeking to overcome humanity. Jesus becomes human.



So, what does this look like? How can we understand the concept of incarnation in todays life? Well, without giving away the plot, I want to share with you a little of a story of two men. Their intersecting lives are the subject of the best selling book that they co-authored with Lynn Vincent called, “Same Kind of Different as Me.” I know many of you have read it and if you haven't I highly suggest it to you.

But how does the story of Ron Hall and Denver Moore share what incarnation is like?
Well, you have to start with Deborah Hall, Ron's wife. Deborah was a Godly woman who loved her husband and coerced him into helping out at the Homless Shelter off Lancaster St. in Fort Worth one day a week. At that point in their marriage Ron figured anything he could do to keep her happy was good for him so he agreed. The problem for Ron was that Deborah had a dream of more than just serving a meal one day a week. She wanted to change lives for Christ.

Most people that came into the shelter for this purpose would come in once or twice a week and tell the homeless how they needed to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and get a job. Good advice but not what they needed to hear or see. These others that came in were one of two types: either they were trying to make themselves feel better or they were trying to earn their spot in glory. In both cases it was about the big “I”.

Deborah was different. She came and served the meals, learned their names, came back to give birthday parties, took groups on trips to musicals and concerts, she came to them and got to know them. While she never “lived” at the shelter she became one of them. They loved her and accepted her because she truly loved them. Not for any personal gain but for the simple fact that God created them and loved them just as much as God had made and loved her. It was her presence among them that endeared her to them and them to her.

But one resident would truly test her patience. Denver was a large, angry, black man that had grown up in abject poverty as a share-cropper in Red River Parish Louisiana. Up till the late 1960's and 1970's black share-croppers were basically modern day slaves in that region – simply working for “the man” in order to have a place to lay their head and hopefully have a bite to eat.

This is where Deborah really put the screws to Ron. She wanted Ron to be friends with Denver. Ron obliged and once they finally got Denver to talk to them and open up to them Ron and Denver would go to Starbucks and Denny's and places like Del Frisco's and the Old Warsaw.
Gradually Denver left the shelter but continued ministering there. But it was Ron who was changed the most. Ron had come to make Denver a better person but as Denver came to dwell with Ron, Ron was changed.

It is a fascinating true story that goes on through tragedy and triumph but the point is that Ron thought he was coming to Denver because Denver needed his money and influence when in the end it was Ron who needed Denver's practical insight and spiritual guidance.

That is so much the way we are. We come to Christ, to the church, to church, because we think we are needed. We think we have something to give to God. Yet, when we actually get to know God and let God influence us we discover that it was God who came to us in the first place. We finally discover that it is we who need God.

That is what John 1:14 is all about...
The Word – the Logos – Jesus, the fulfillment of God came to us and became Sarx, flesh, human, and dwelt, tabernacled, pitched tent among us. What does all that mean?

In the Greek, John uses the term Logos that we have translated as Word. Translated, Logos means “word”, “speech”, “account,” or “reason” but about 500 years before Christ the Philosopher Heraclitus used the term for “the principle of order and knowledge.” Around the time of the Birth of Christ the Stoic philosophers used it as “the divine animating principle pervading the Universe.” So, when we say “The Word” we are saying much more than just another name for Jesus. John is telling us that Jesus was, is, and always will be. Through the use of the term Logos, John is telling us the one who orders all things and has all knowledge, that the one who is the creator of all the world came and became one of us.

Up to that point in History there had been stories of god's coming to earth but never of a god becoming fully human. The word John uses for flesh is Sarx. A word that means human flesh in all it frailty and weakness. No god would do that. The god's were too much above humans, better than humans. The god's wouldn't lower themselves to the weakness of humanity; but, that is just what Jesus did. Not only did he become flesh and blood, marrow and sinew, Jesus came to us in the most frail and fragile of human forms, a baby. Truly the Word became flesh, our Lord became one of us, and dwelt among us.

The Incarnation of Christ didn't happen like the incarnatin of the god's of Egypt, or Rome, or Greece. No, our God didn't live in a palace or cathederal. Some of your translations will say that “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us...” other versions will say that the Word”lived” or “tabernacled” among us. In our language it means that our God, Jesus, pitched tent among us. Think about that idea for a moment. When you go camping, who is it that you want pitching a tent with you? Only the closest and dearest to you. Inherent in this idea of Jesus coming to us and living among us is a certain closeness, a certain intimacy, a certain nearness that hadn't been seen among the religions of the world.

God came to us not when we had cleaned up our act and deserved it. No, God became human while we were still sinners that we might learn how to live and love in the life God had given us. In essence, Jesus came to us that we might come to God.

That is what our worship is all about. We, the Body of Christ, gather together in churches across the Continents of the world to celebrate that God is with us. For some reason we only seem to sing about this at Christmas but the idea of Emmanuel, God with us, is the reason we are here. We celebrate it through song. We celebrate it through prayer. We celebrate it through creeds.

In addition to that we realize that when we come into Corporate worship we know that God is in our midst as we remember that where two or three are gathered in Jesus name, then Jesus is in the midst. We worship God with God. Then, when we leave our Corporate Worship, we take God out into the world. We, the Body and Christ redeemed by his Blood, go out into the world to be the very presence of God in a world that needs God so desperately.

Deborah Hall saw that. She may have been wealthy and privileged but she saw that she was a part of the Body of Christ and could and should do the work of Christ in the world. Because of her vision her husband Ron, and Denver were never the same. Today because of her work at the shelter and Ron and Denver's work in the world, lives are being changed.

That is what heppens when God becomes one of us. That is what happens when we take God into the world around us. That is what happens when we become the hands and feet of Christ.
Now we are the incarnation of Christ for the world. Go then and represent Christ for the world.