NO TAME LION
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Text: Isaiah 6:1-8
O Lord, How can we know Thee,
where can we find Thee?
Thou art as close to us as breathing,
and yet art farther than the farthermost star
Thou art as mysterious as the vast solitudes of the night
and yet art as familiar to us as the light of the sun.
When justice burns like a flaming fire,
When love evokes willing sacrifice,
Do we not bow down to Thee?
Thou dwellest within our hearts,
As Thou dost pervade the world, and
We through thy Presence behold.
An Ancient Prayer
On Wednesday night I was privileged to attend a concert of the San Francisco Symphony under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. It was an enjoyable, if eclectic program. It featured two works – Franz Schubert’s charmingly simple and straightforward Mass in G, performed elegantly by the orchestra, chorus and soloists and a symphonic transcription of Charles Ives’s craggy, complicated Sonata Number 2 for Piano – the Concord Sonata. Composer Henry Brant gave thirty six years to arranging this incredibly challenging piano work for full orchestra. As is typical of Ives’s work, it overflows with ideas, dissonances, rhythmic and sonic complexity, melodies, original and familiar, layered one on top of the other in an attempt to capture the essence of the New England Transcendentalists. Each movement is sequentially representative of Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts and Thoreau.
As I considered the topic and text for today’s service, I thought how these two works on the same program in some sense are reflective of the nature and practice of worship. On the one hand we have what might be called domesticated worship, the ritualistic remembrance of our religious traditions, characterized by the lovely, simple strains of the 18 year old Schubert’s setting of the Mass. It is familiar and comforting music. It makes us feel warm and good. On the other hand, with Ives you have entered the realm of one fascinated with the endless possibilities of life reflected in music. This is not at all tame territory. One needs to approach this realm with open ears and open mind, with open eyes and open heart, and one should expect to be shaken by the experience. Here you are confronted by thoughts and feelings that stretch you into new dimensions of reality and new ways of seeing the world. It is in the nature of worship that we sometimes encounter both these experiences along with the thoughts and feelings they evoke – and more.
The ancient prayer that comprises this morning’s words of preparation lifts up the eternal tension we live in as a faith community. It is the age-old tension between transcendence and immanence, between the distance, even absence of God, and experiences of God come so close that our teeth rattle and our bones alternately burn and chill. Yet, this God also enters our lives as a poor peasant’s baby. This God can be best be seen and known through child-like eyes of faith. Still, this God, who comes with such grace and compassion, with such love and faithfulness, is no tame lion. This God is like the golden Aslan of the C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, who may lovingly lick your face at one moment and then roar such a prodigious roar that the foundations of the earth are shaken the next. When we worship God, we worship a great paradox and it is an ongoing challenge to know how to bring our worship before such a One.
When we speak of building a church with hope and spirit and we propose to rest one corner of that church on the worship of God, we ought to start with some awareness of what that means and what it might cost. Evelyn Underhill, the great English mystic, defined worship as “The adoring acknowledgment of all that lies beyond us—the glory that fills heaven and earth. It is the response that conscious beings make to their Creator, to the Eternal Reality from which they came forth; to God, however they may think of Him or recognize Him, and whether He be realized through religion, through nature, through history, through science, art, or human life and character” [Evelyn Underhill, “Education and the Spirit of Worship” in Collected Papers, p. 193.] This is a broad, panentheistic definition, but it captures the core of worship - reverent honor and homage paid to God. Though it does not require one to be in church or even in community to worship, today we are concerned with a community at worship, our community, as it worships God.
Clearly, worship is more than a worship service and there is no service we put together that will provide for adequate worship of God. In addition, Sunday morning, the appointed time for worship, is really the only time in the week that our community gathers as a community. So, we are faced with doing our greeting of one another, our community building, business, mission, education, all the things that pertain to the life of our congregation, on Sunday morning. We do the best we can, but we end up with a hybrid of all the dimensions of our community life in what we call the worship service – and, of course, it must all be done in an hour as God has to be at other churches by 11 or shortly after. Facetiousness aside, I hope we do come together with open minds and open hearts, open ears, open eyes and open hands in anticipation that our limited acts of worship will bring us closer to the holy and work some transformation in our lives. What we bring to worship is as crucial to our experience as what we receive.
Isaiah seems to have entered the temple in such a state of openness and readiness. While he must have been weighed down by the burdens of a people who had lost their good old king and now were being overrun by foreign invaders, whose life of faith was under attack as pagan gods were brought into the sanctuary, who faced conquering, captivity and exile, he turned to the place of worship. He must have entered with his shoulders bent and his eyes on the floor. Who was he hoping to find? What was he hoping would happen? How much of his movement toward the temple was the instinctive, yet unconscious, act of a person of faith who had walked that path many times? Do we know anything about coming to church like Isaiah? Who do we hope to find here? What do we hope will happen? How often have we made our way here out of habit or because we knew no place else to go or because we were actually glad when someone said “let us go up to the house of God”?
Well, suddenly, there it was, ready or not, this great vision of God, high and lifted up, so immense that just the hem of God’s garment filled the temple. Heavenly beings, smoke, a shaking of the foundations, angel choirs - it’s a wonder Isaiah could even stand in the presence of the Holy. Yet, here he is. What does he recognize first? His inadequacy before God, which does not mean that Isaiah is not a good and remarkable man, one whom God has chosen to send as God’s own messenger. Then what happens? In the experience of worship, the prophet finds a righting of his soul, a cleansing of his lips and a commission to carry God’s word to God’s people. How often has this happened to you in your own worship?
Surely there are times in worship when we need to be confronted with the unimaginable majesty of God, when we need to recognize the inherent limitations of human beings before God, when we need to acknowledge our need for God. We need to be reminded that the God we serve is no tame lion, that there is power here that can shake the foundations of the earth and transform all of life, even ours. One is reminded of Annie Dillard’s cutting observation of the church, “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does anyone 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, Teaching a Stone to Talk.)
We cannot unpack all this this morning. If properly addressed, we cannot unpack it in a life time. But we do need to know that we serve an awesome God. At the same time, we make the claim that it is this very God who comes near in the human flesh of Jesus. This is an amazing reality, the paradox made manifest, and, as it gives us hope and heart, it ought also to shake us up every time we consider it, certainly every time we come to worship. Both the transcendence of God and the immanence of God are fearsome phenomena. When we say we want to build a church whose mission is to worship God, we should understand that we are entering on a life’s work. In one sense we do not have the tools to do this work adequately, but in another sense, once we have entered into covenant with God, we have no choice but to engage in it and trust that God will see us through. We can attempt to place ourselves outside our created purpose of worshiping the God who created us, but only by turning our backs, numbing our senses, shutting our eyes and ears, hearts and hands, minds and spirits. Such an attempt to shut down may buy us time to live out a dream, to build a fortune, to sow wild oats, to wander away to far countries, but in the end we will find ourselves somewhere, some day in Isaiah’s shoes or Annie Dillard’s frame of mind and wish we had paid more attention to the work of worshiping God.
And let’s be clear that the work of worshiping God is not a domestication process. God will not and cannot be tamed by us. However, through Jesus Christ we can approach God to receive the blessings prepared for us from the foundations of the earth. It is this great paradox, a thing of wonder and mystery, that the great God of the universe, creator of all life, knows us and desires to be in communion with us. This is the truth of our tradition and the basis of our worship. Can we, will we build our church on such a foundation? How might we need to change? What might we need to do differently? Perhaps God will yet lick us lovingly on the cheek, then roar such a prodigious roar that the earth will be turned right side up and creation redeemed and we will live to see it. This God we worship is both love made visible and no tame lion. Let us live to worship God in spirit and truth. Amen.
1In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. 2Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. 3And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” 4The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.
5And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” 6Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. 7The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” 8Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”