Sermon 2, The Sacramental Nature of Corporate Worship

Sermon 2,
Preached August 15, 2010, 11:00
FUMC Wortham

Our Worship is Sacramental
Galatians 2:19-20

Last week we looked at how our worship is a life style, that it is not just for 1 hour a week but that we are to be worshiping God with our lives. Romans 12:1 tells us to “offer our bodies as living sacrifices, this is our spiritual act of worship.” In other words, a sacrifice is something that is placed on an altar before a god and given fully to that god. When we follow this verse we lay our bodies before God and give ourselves fully to God, not as a dead sacrifice that is given once but as a living sacrifice that continues to give and serve until we are taken from this earth. This is our spiritual worship.

But, lets not fool ourselves, when I say we are going to talk about worship the first thing that comes to our minds is what happens when you walk through those doors on Sunday morning from 11:00 – 12:00.

So, being mindful of that, we will be looking at the aspects of our Corporate Worship over the next three weeks and at the 5th Sunday Service to be held at Victory Church on August 29th.

Our Corporate Worship is the times we gather together to hear God's Word proclaimed and to sing praises to God. Our corporate worship is the time that we as the Body of Christ are drawn closer together and closer to God.
Something that seems to bog down discussions of Corporate Worship is when the discussion turns to styles of worship – We argue over what type of music is to be heard, whether video and lights are to be a part of the worship, who should participate, should it be contemporary or traditional...
The truth is to get past this we need to look at how worship has changed ove the years
Think of the change from a sacrificial system – that goes all the way back to Cain and Able,
or the nomadic worship of the Israelites in the Tabernacle that traveled with them,
or the Temple Worship of the Years in Jerusalem
or the Synagogue worship that followed after the Temple was destroyed
or the House church worship of the 1st Centuries of Christianity
or the Monastic worship of the early Catholic church
or the Cathedral worship of the Dark Ages
or the early Protestant worship in Germany and Sweden
or the Stoic white-washed worship of the Puritans
or the Pioneer worship of the Wild West
or what we now call traditional worship, or High Church, or contemporary Worship, or Emerging Worship, or the New Monasticism...

Volumes are written about each of these and I think it best to steer clear of trying to say that one is better than the other.
Rather than that, we are going to look at aspects of our worship and what they mean. Over the next 4 sermons we will look at how Corporate Worship is:
Sacramental
Communal
Incarnational, and
looks toward a future hope in Christ.

This week our topic is that Corporate Worship is Sacramental.

So, What is a Sacrament?
The word sacrament is the Latin translation of the Greek word mysterion – i.e. Mysterious
Way back in around 400 AD, Augustine of Hippo said that a “Ssacrament is a visible sign of an invisible reality.”
The Book of Common Prayer says that a “Sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible Grace.”
Sacrament. It sounds so Catholic doesn't it? In fact where we have 2 Sacraments in the UMC, the Catholic church recognizes seven.
Penance (Confession)
Confirmation
Matrimony
Anointing of the Sick (Extreme Unction or Last Rites)
Holy Orders (what we would call Ordination)
and the last two that we recognize as well
Baptism and
Communion.

For sure each of these are Sacred Moments, times when God's grace is revealed to us in special ways, but as Methodists we recognize as Sacraments only the events that Jesus himself participated in directly, that is Baptism, as he was baptized by John the Baptizer, and Communion as Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper or Communion.
Each week our worship should point toward these sacraments but how so, maybe it would be helpful to look at each of these for just a moment to see what they mean to us and then how they are a part of each week of worship.

Baptism - it is the door through which we enter the church and become a part of the Body of Christ.
We don't just recognize Methodist Baptism but we recognize all baptisms that come through churches that proclaim Jesus Christ is Lord.
We baptize all ages.
Since the earliest times children and infants have been baptized into the church.
- A legend I have heard says that during the early years of the church in Jerusalem, the Christian church would adopt children that had been abandoned at Gehenna (the Trash Dump/Incinerator outside Jerusalem). These children would be brought into the community of faith and baptised as a representation of God's grace on their lives and their full acceptance and membership in the church.
- Also, the baptism of children signifies for us God's initiative in the process of Salvation
“John Wesley preached “prevenient grace,” the grace that works in our lives before we are aware of it, bringing us to faith. The baptism of children and their inclusion in the church before they can respond with their own confirmation of faith is a vivid and compelling witness to prevenient grace.” (UMC.org)
(http://www.umc.org/site/c.lwL4KnN1LtH/b.1697379/k.9027/Baptism_Overview.htm)
We believe that Baptism is forever... It doesn't need to be done again. That is because we believe that baptism is a God thing, not a human thing. By saying that we need to be baptized again we are saying that God messed up when we were baptized. To be sure, we can mess up. We can fall away. We may need to redo our part but God doesn't. To take care of that we have a liturgy that is a Sacred moment in our lives just like any other. We call it a Service to Remember our Baptism, or to Reaffirm our Baptismal Vows. We recall the promises we made when we received God's Prevenient grace in that special way at our Baptism.
Finally, we believe that Baptism is the beginning of a lifelong journey with God. While it doesn't “save us,” in fact baptism isn't even necessary for salvation – just ask the thief on the cross, instead, our baptism starts us on the path toward salvation. It's not a once and done thing, but instead it is a beginning of a process of growth as we commit our lives to God and each day, through God's mighty grace we grow closer and closer to the perfection that we are called to in Christ.
Each week when we gather in corporate worship we remember our vows before God and our commitment to Christ and the Body of Christ. When we gather together as believers in the faith, we remember that Jesus was Baptized in the Jordan River. We remember that the Disciples baptized believers in the early church as its numbers grew. We remember the grace that God poured upon us as we were baptized. We celebrate the sacrament together each week, or at least we should.
By the same token, we remember the sacrament of the Lord's Supper – Communion. In the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the wine we remember that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and that Christ will come again. Each week as we worship together our worship should point toward the Sacrifice of Christ – that Christ died for us, the sinners – remember, Romans 5:8, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
We didn't deserve the sacrifice. We didn't deserve what Christ did for us that Good Friday. We sure didn't deserve what Christ did for us that blessed Easter morning. Yet, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
As we come together for Corporate Worship each week our worship should point toward the sacramental nature of our life with and for God. And just as we stated last week, it can't just stop with what happens on Sunday morning. Our very lives should reflect our Baptism into the Body of Christ and our Communion with Christ and the believers of all times.

What does that look like? How does that play out in our daily living?
What did Christ tell us that we as the Body of Christ are to do and be?
Matthew 25 reminds us that we are to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick
visit the lonely...
Matthew 28:19-20 reminds us to “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to obey the thing that Jesus has taught us.

What do we do in our lives that look like that? Maybe it's the Food Pantry. Maybe it's the Christian Clothes Closet. Maybe it's going to the Nursing Home. Maybe it's going to the Hospital, or the Prison, or a mission trip...
I can't answer that for you, but this week, as we worship corporately and you go to worship with your life, I pray that you will find where and how it is that God is calling you to worship him as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.