“Glad and Joyous Worship”

Psalm 100

A story: A good-ol’-boy was visiting in the big city. Sunday morning came, and he did what he did every Sunday. He went to church. The nearest church was directly across from his hotel. It was one of those high-steeple granite fortresses belonging to one of our mainline denominations.

He went in and was ushered to his seat. He found the gothic sanctuary and pipe organ awesome. He was so overcome that during the prelude he shouted out, “Amen!” At which time an usher came to him and quietly said, “Sir, we don’t have that here.”

Our good-ol’-boy had been raised right. So he politely tried to fit in better. But the choir’s anthem was so moving that before he could stop himself he shouted out, “Halleluia!” Again the usher came to him and said, “Please, sir, we do not have that here.”

So our young man settled back to listen to the sermon. It was a good sermon, a great sermon, an obviously faithful and passionate exposition of God’s Word. Caught up in the moment our less than sophisticated visitor shouted out, “Preach it, brother, preach it!” This was too much for the usher. Once more he came to the young man’s pew, and with a less friendly and much firmer voice said, “Young man, I told you that we don’t have that here.” To which our good-ol’-boy responded, “But I have the Spirit.” To which the usher replied, “We most definitely don’t have that here.”

At some levels I can identify with both the good-ol’-boy and the usher. I grew up in a prim, proper, stiff-upper-lipped Presbyterian Church that competed with the nearby Episcopal Church for the title of “frozen chosen.” Things were always done decently and in order, sometimes painfully so. I can still remember somber Communion services in which oh-so-serious and dignified older men in dark suits quietly brought around tasteless little bits of bread and tiny cups of watered down grape juice.

God was obviously being respected, but I never got the sense that he was being loved or enjoyed. If I had not been attending evening services with my Church of God evangelist granddad, I would not have realized that worship was supposed to be a glad and joyous experience.

I love that church. I was baptized there, my daughter was baptized there, and my granddaughter was baptized there. This was the church that nurtured me in the faith and sent me off to seminary. It has changed greatly over the last forty years. Worship there really is glad and joyful. Churches, like people, can, and do, change. That’s a good thing.

And a necessary thing. Listen to these lines from two books I’ve been reading recently. The first comes from one of Grace’s former pastors, Dave Miller. “What a shame to plod through the order of worship as though we were performing a checklist of duties or to murmur joyful hymns without emotion.”

The second comes from Annie Dillard “… people who attend services of prayer and praise, song and action, preaching and sacraments, often have to endure mumbling and stumbling of offputting sorts. This is not how God is to be praised…”

Plodding and murmuring, mumbling and stumbling are all too evident in Christian worship these days.

Sometimes such worship is rationalized in Presbyterian circles under the rubric of decency and order. Decency and order are important. Scripture mandates them in worship. But as someone once cynically declared, “Whenever Presbyterians have to choose between decency and order, we’ll choose order every time.” And sometimes that means opting for Spirit-stifling, joy-killing services of worship that really aren’t worship at all.

I am not an advocate of liturgical free-for-alls. In good Presbyterian fashion I greatly prefer order to chaos. But we must maintain a balance. While worship shouldn’t degenerate into anarchy, it should always leave room for expressions and experiences of joy and gladness.

Within the order of worship there has to be room for the adoration of our great and awesome Lord God Almighty. There has to be time for honest confession and repentance that leads to a sense of pardon. Praise and thanksgiving are a must. Instrumental music, choir anthems, choral responses, praise songs, and congregational hymns must be offered up to God with enthusiasm. Faith must be affirmed boldly. Prayers must be prayed with energy and sincerity. Scripture must be read with authority. Sermons must be preached with passion as well as precision. And Communion must be celebrated for what it is, a means of grace. In the words of one of my colleagues, “Communion is not a wake for a dead Savior.”

What does Psalm 100 have to say about the worship of the Lord our God? “Make a joyful noise to the Lord… Worship the Lord with gladness, come into his presence with singing… Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise.” Worship is all about joyful noises, glad singing, sincere thanksgiving, and blessings. It requires of us the same things that one of our ordination vows requires of our church officers: energy, intelligence, imagination, and love.

Psalm 100 is not an invitation to participate in drudgery. It does not encourage us to mumble and stumble through a few hymns. Nor does it allow us to affirm our faith and pray our prayers with the same energy an interest that we might apply to reciting the alphabet or reading aloud from the phone book. It doesn’t tell us that a worship service is to be an exercise in clock watching, something to be stoically endured for sixty minutes or less.

Worship is responding to the reality that the Lord is our God, that Jesus Christ is our only Lord and Savior. Worship is the glad acknowledgment that we are the people God has created, called, and in Jesus Christ, claimed. Worship is remembering and then celebrating that God is good, his steadfast love does endure forever, and his faithfulness truly is to all generations.

To be sure there must be room in our worship for some quietness: silent prayer and meditation, being still and knowing that God is God, shutting out the noise of this world and listening carefully for that still small voice of God. Sometimes in worship we are stunned into silence by the overwhelming awe and majesty of God. Sometimes we are stopped in our tracks by the realization of just how much God really does love us, of just how far he was willing to go in Jesus Christ to affect reconciliation with us.

There must also be room in our worship for some sadness. As we worship we are often reminded of those God has called home to the Church Triumphant. Even as we celebrate the reality of resurrection, we acknowledge the holes left in our lives after the deaths of friends and loved ones. There must always be a time set aside to grieve our own sinfulness, to sadly confront just how far we have drifted from the paths of righteousness, to sadly acknowledge the pitiful creatures we have become.

Quietly experiencing the movement of the Holy Spirit is a joyous experience. Giving into the grief of our sinfulness enough to confess and repent of it lifts a heavy burden from our hearts. In that there is always gladness. Quietly listening once again to the Good News of the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus, is a joyful experience. Quiet joy is still joyous. Lustily lifting up our hearts and hands and voices to God takes us out of ourselves and into the very presence of God. This is a glad and joyous encounter with God.

Joy and gladness, gladness and joy, these are the words by which our worship is shaped, defined, carried out, and experienced. How can we not be glad when Christ is in our midst? How can we not rejoice when God’s Spirit is moving in, through, and among us? How dare we mumble, stumble, murmur, and plod through such an experience? How dare we present such a dull, lifeless, and tasteless image of Christianity to the spiritually starving who come here in search of sustenance?

“Make a joyful noise to the Lord… Worship the Lord with gladness…” That’s not a suggestion. Nor is it an order. It is an invitation to join in something wonderful and good. Amen.