Wear Your Hard Hat to Church!
A Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Karen Hill
November 29, 2009
Why do you come to church? Have you ever thought about that? Most of you come every week - week after week, month after month, year after year. Why? What brings you to worship? Is it friends or family? Is it the music, the beauty of the sanctuary, the prayer, the meditation? I wish it were the sermons, but I’m afraid it’s probably not...
So, what do we expect from worship? Do we come expecting to be entertained – expecting a funny joke or a heartwarming story? To hear a good children’s sermon and see the sweet kids up front? Maybe we come to learn something, to be challenged to live differently or better, or maybe there’s a Sunday school class that’s particularly good. Maybe we want a place to do some good in the world, and the church gives us mission opportunities. All of these are fine reasons to be here.
I guess my real question is do we come expecting to meet God, hoping that this will be a spiritual time? Do we come to experience God’s presence, knowing that we will be changed by it? I suspect that we come to worship for many reasons and that all of us have mixed motives. We come for a little of this and a little of that.
Rarely, rarely, do we come expecting to meet God in the way that Isaiah met God or in the way that Mary met God.
Worship, the heart of worship, is just that, meeting God. Os Guinness, a Christian apologist, called God, “the audience of one.” Properly, God is the focus of all of our lives, but most especially, our worship – God is our “audience of one.”
That means that the congregation is not the audience, and the choir, the liturgists and the pastors are not entertainers. All of us are worshipers, even though we forget that sometimes and worry too much about whether that silence during the confession went on too long, or whether that prayer was deep enough, or whether that minute for mission was five minutes too long….
What would happen if each one of us came to worship expecting to meet God? If we knew that coming to church meant an encounter with the living God, an encounter that might very well change our lives forever?
You know, I titled this sermon, “Wear your hard hat to church,” thinking of the danger involved in meeting the living God. Just for curiosities sake, I googled this phrase, and I found an article on the BBC website with this irresistible title, “Gull Dodging Vicar Dons Hard Hat.”
It seems that last year, the Rev. Canon Graham Minors, vicar of St. Petroc’s church in Cornwall, England, took to wearing a hard hat on his way in and out of the church, because a pair of seagulls was dive bombing anyone who approached the building. The birds stood guard on top of two stone crosses on the roof of the church, protecting their nest and baby chick.
Now picture this pretty, little stone church from the 15th century, with a grassy cemetery in its church yard, and then picture two large seagulls swooping down on members of the congregation, as well as mourners in the graveyard. The vicar said, “It is frightening, because the first thing you feel is a rush of wind as the birds come in. It seemed sensible to have an umbrella or a hard hat, and in the end I chose both.” There’s a great picture with the story, of the vicar wearing his hard hat, carrying his umbrella, and ducking the diving birds. Hopefully, the baby is fully grown and the birds have moved on by now….
I like to think that worship in St. Petroc’s in Cornwall began, as soon as the vicar and the congregants approached the building. I imagine they prayed as if their lives depended on it. What if we all approached worship in this way?
Annie Dillard, in her book Teaching Stones to Talk, wrote this,
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may wake some day and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”
Annie Dillard brutally confronts us with the power of worship – “The waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”
I think Isaiah knew this waking God very well - Isaiah saw God; God called him and sent him as a prophet to the people. Isaiah was never the same. Mary also knew this waking God. Mary met God’s messenger, Gabriel and through him, God called her and chose her to bear the Christ child. Mary was never the same.
This is the chance that each one of us takes when we show up for worship. Our Presbyterian Book of Order is a little more circumspect than Annie Dillard. Regarding worship, it says – “In worship the people of God acknowledge God present in the world and in their lives. As they respond to God’s claim and redemptive action in Jesus Christ, believers are transformed and renewed. “
Believers are transformed and renewed. Maybe that is why we show up here every week. Consciously or unconsciously, we are looking for transformation and renewal. We want our lives to matter…
In the Magnificat, Mary sings,
“‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for (God) has looked with favour on the lowliness of (this) servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;”
Mary is transformed. She is no longer a humble or lowly servant, she is blessed. The Orthodox Church calls her, Theotokos, the God Bearer. Her life has purpose and meaning since she met God, her Saviour.
Maybe it seems like Isaiah’s and Mary’s experiences are extraordinary, after all, they had supernatural encounters with God. Maybe those things happened back then, but they don’t happen now. Or maybe those things are mythical stories, meant to teach us something about God, but we shouldn’t expect that kind of thing to really happen to us.
Well, maybe none of us will have this sort of extraordinary encounter with God, but we all know God’s presence when we’ve seen and felt it. My experience of God may look nothing like yours, but that does not mean it is not real.
This morning, at the 11 o’clock service, the choir is singing an offertory, called “E’en so, Lord Jesus, Quickly Come.” This piece was composed by the church organist, Paul Manz, with lyrics written by his wife, Ruth. 40 some years ago, Ruth and Paul Manz had a three year old son who was gravely ill. He was dying, and the doctors had given up on him. The couple were keeping vigil by his hospital bed – Ruth by day, and Paul by night. Ruth began to write lyrics based on a text from Revelation 22, in which she heard the Advent message – a longing for the coming of Christ.
She says of that time, “I think we’d reached the point where we felt that time was certainly running out so we committed it to the Lord and said, “Lord Jesus quickly come.”
These are the lyrics written by this grieving mother for her dying son,
“Peace be to you and grace from Him
Who freed us from our sin
Who loved us all, and shed his blood
That we might saved be.
Sing holy, holy to our Lord
The Lord almighty God
Who was and is, and is to come
Sing holy, holy Lord.
Rejoice in heaven all ye that dwell therein
Rejoice on earth, ye saints below
For Christ is coming, is coming soon
For Christ is coming soon.
E’en so Lord Jesus quickly come
And light shall be no more
They need no light, no lamp, nor sun
For Christ will be their all.”
I am struck by the faith it takes to worship and praise God in a time of such deep grief, and I know just by reading this text and hearing the music that the Manz’s met God sitting by their son’s bed. I know that.
Let me tell you the end of this story – Ruth and Paul Manz’ son, John, lived. It was a miracle. He is now in his 50s and has the original manuscript of this hymn written by his parents while he lay so ill.
The Book of Order goes on to say, “Christians may worship at any time, for all time has been hallowed by God.” We worship in times of joy and in times of sorrow, expecting to meet God, knowing that God has promised to be with us always.
My prayer for you and for me this Advent season is that we will watch and wait, expecting to meet God, here and everywhere, in the midst of our everyday life, whatever our circumstances. May every part of our lives be an expression of our true worship of the living God and may we be changed by it.
Amen.
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