". . . to worship the living God. . ."

Sermon by James W. Crawford

Third Sunday in Lent, March 15, 1998

Hebrews 9:1-14; 10:19-26

This last week The Boston Globe published a wonderful story about decorative changes at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Cross. It describes the original ivy green decor now turned to drab pea green. The Rector of the Church, Father Frank Murphy, tells us this green concoction met the taste of Richard Cardinal Cushing some fifty years ago, no one daring to disagree at the time with that august figure and what they considered his "truly appalling taste." The article includes some colored pictures of trades-artists splashing gold leaf on organ pipes, restoring luster to the stained glass windows, drawing and painting new stations of the Cross on the Cathedral walls. The caption over the Globe's pictures proclaims a "spiritual renewal." And Father Murphy speaks of returning the building to its original design, "letting the architecture speak for itself."

This article reminded me of how the newspapers in 1875 celebrated this room when our congregation met here for the first time. The Boston Transcript called attention to "a grand interior, unbroken by columns, unsurpassed in New England, the tint employed by the decorator producing a rich and harmonious effect without being gaudy." The Boston Globe wentthe Transcript one further. The headline began: "The New Old South: A splendid Temple of Worship." It went on to remind its readership that this building ended the highway" in the Back Bay and the critic wrote: "The magnificent temple of worship of the Old South Congregational Society was formally dedicated last evening, several prominent clergymen of this and other cities taking part in the service. Of the edifice itself, it may be said that nothing more ornate in church architecture exists in Boston. Its tower is one of the loftiest in the city; and the building with its beautiful stained glass windows and ornamented by its gilded dome is one of the finest houses of worship in the land. Its interior arrangements and acoustical  properties are worthy of special commendation; and the venerable Old South Church is to be felicitated upon the possession of one of the finest Protestant Basilicas on the continent."

When we renovated this sanctuary back in 1984 and 1985, like our neighbors today at Holy Cross Cathedral, we peeled off a drab battleship green, restenciled the walls, installed a fresh lighting arrangement, laid down a new carpet and merited, not only a smart reference in The Globe but won, as well, a prize from the American Institute of Architects; Ethan Bronner, writing in The Globe in December 1985, referred to our church as one "rich in history and one of the region's architectural gems."

I

But do you know something? Our author to the Hebrews is not impressed. In that passage we read just a moment ago, our author -- actually, he is a fantastic preacher -- our preacher describes a sanctuary filled with esoteric and beautiful religious icons and liturgical apparatus. He pictures for us the basic fixtures of an ancient Hebrew tabernacle; he embosses everything in gold. And after he lays out this vivid and florid picture for us, with a casual wave of the hand and an almost throwaway line he says, "but of these things we cannot speak now in detail."

Do you know what he is saying? Do you know why he paints a rich and garish picture and then just sort of trashes it? He is telling us all the beautiful fixtures of temple, tabernacle and church are beside the point. He is looking at our stenciled walls, our handsome cupola, our gothic chandeliers, our radiant windows and he is saying, well, folks, they're not exactly irrelevant, but you can set them on the margins; they're not really alien to everything you happen to be doing in this room but don't confuse them with the reality they point to; don't mistake them for the focus of your worship. The pulpit, the Bible, the Cross, the Table, the font -- all of them in impeccable order and in perfect liturgical position. You worship in a sanctuary with all of the articles bespeaking a glorious religion, a rich aesthetic and spiritual experience.

And not only do you possess in abundance the beautiful artifacts of religion, you also have a clown up there in your pulpit, someone to interpret the mysteries and rites of your religion. There he stands, in academic gown and stole, chattering on about the true meaning of faith, passing along arcane religious information, a supposed authority on how one gets to know and experience the living God.

All of this, asserts our author to the Hebrews, is beside the point! All of this is a frivolous missing of the mark in light of the tremendous live and dynamic presence of Jesus Christ. Our author tells us we have access to the recreative, transforming power and living presence of Jesus Christ apart from all these religious furnishings, garbed personnel and sonorous choir. He is affirming the one thing we want to know more than anything else when we step out our front doors and head off to church: will I encounter the living Christ today? Will I be embraced by the grace of God this morning? Will I know a communion with the One who takes me, bears me, lifts me, carries me through everything life can throw in my face and cast on my path? Our author tells us the appointments in churches, the talking heads in our pulpits claiming to pass along some spiritual truth -- that all of this human religious intrusion has been dissolved, set aside, transcended by what he calls our true sanctuary, our ultimate setting for worship, the wide and loving embrace, the recreative, renewing and transforming grace of Jesus Christ present with and for us apart from all this other religious looking and sounding paraphernalia.

I love the way that great 20th century mystic Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel puts it: "The true sanctuary," he writes, "has no walls." He warns those of us who practice religion to be wary of what he calls the "segregation of God." And we all know it. Religion, Heschel writes, "has often suffered from the tendency to become parochial, self indulgent, self seeking; as if the task were not to ennoble human nature but to enhance the power and beauty of its institutions or to enlarge its body of doctrines. It has often done more to canonize prejudices than to wrestle with truth, to petrify the sacred than to sanctify the secular. Yet the task of religion is to be a challenge to the stabilization of values. Religion is not for religion's sake, but for God's sake."

Right on, Rabbi Heschel! Heaven forbid we segregate God with all our ostensibly religious orders and furnishings. Pray God, even in this room, we recognize first of all, a sanctuary without walls. God grant the presence of the living, redemptive and recreative spirit of Jesus Christ may sweep us up, send us out, move shoulder to shoulder with us through the challenge and joy, the promise and peril of life in God's wondrous and surprising world.  Access to the living Christ in a sanctuary without walls: what a promise, what a gift!

II

But there is more. Our preacher admonishes us to worship with one another, "our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, our bodies washed with pure water."

I love that. Our Hebrews preacher tells us that when we meet together here, the matter of our ties with and treatment of other people goes hand in hand with our worship. Our gathering together here is not simply some  consumer enterprise, a feel-good exercise, an assembly with a bumper sticker objective: "don't worry; be happy." Our worship bears an ethical dimension as well.

I do not mind telling you I am wary these days about the quality and depth of what we might call conscience. I recall Daniel Patrick Moynihan's worry about what he called a "deviation down" in acceptable public behavior. As we observe the rising, fetid, moral smog from our nation's capital; as we witness the almost pornographic activity of sports and entertainment celebrities, men and women, we turn to with that sobriquet: role model, their turning the front pages of our newspapers and our television newscasts into blatant tabloids or worse, one wonders -- I wonder -- if the accepted loosening of constraints and our increased condoning of public activities smacking of personal betrayal and deceit are not reflections of this behavioral deviation down indicating a public and personal conscience, as one observer remarks, "wide as hell."

We need be alert to our Hebrews preacher's urging for worship supportive of and issuing in ethical sensitivity. We can never forget, of course, that we join here as sinners, and that life often engages us with tremendous ethical dilemmas. But we dare not use worship as a substitute for righteousness.  We cannot placate God with pious phrases and sentimental tunes. God will not be flattered. Alongside the Psalms and the highest invitations in our tradition for "worship in spirit and in truth" we place those Biblical references where worship apart from ethics catches a caustic fury.

Is it music? There's Amos:

Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps;
but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like  an ever rolling stream.

 Is it prayer? Hear Isaiah:

When you spread out your hands
I will hide my eyes from you;
Though you make many a prayer
I will not listen;
Your hands are full of bloodshed.

And Jesus? Do you recall that powerful ethical admonition from the Sermon on the Mount? "When you offer your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come offer your gift."

Now friends, I do not know about you, but that illustration from the Sermon on the Mount of what life can be like when we are changed by Christ, givesme no little trouble. I must confess that I occasionally join in the processional on a Sunday morning with someone's perceived assault rankling in my viscera. I confess further that I may approach this chancel with umbrage over a perceived cheap shot. I may nourish an argument going on in my brain over some apparent unfairness, and, sadly, even follow the recessional to the rear of this nave with a minuscule, wispy, hardly detectable desire to get even. (I know none of you labor under the same condition. Bless you!) In any case, as I consider this troubled condition of mine, I brood over our Lord's good counsel that as I prepare to offer my gift at the altar, if I remember that my brother or sister has something against me, I leave my gift before the altar and go; first to be reconciled to my brother or sister, then to offer my gift." Is Jesus kidding? What does he think we are made of? It is too much! I am compelled to beg, "Please, Lord, let me worship a little first. Please, allow me to gain my spiritual legs for the trek to reconciliation. This man you call my brother I find to be inordinately difficult, indeed, impossible. That woman you press me to forgive and I always trigger one another's fuses leading inevitably to a further blow-up. Something transforming must happen to me before I can approach them. Let me worship a little first. Perhaps if I could worship I might see myself so desperately in need of forgiveness that I should be eager to forgive; maybe if I were to gaze at the Cross and see there the risks love takes for reconciliation and the cost it may finally require, or even, if I were to sit in a pew and consider the frailty of our human nature, its fierce readiness to bail out our fragile egos, its fear of our being overlooked, its  readiness to cover with some self-deceptive and self-assuaging rationale a stupid, careless or heartless action while perhaps, putting myself in the other's shoes, accepting with gratitude the totally undeserved forgiveness you offer me, if I could worship first I might find myself able to step out into Boylston Street and make my way to that offended -- and perhaps offensive -- brother, that wounded or perhaps wounding sister and there, mutually forgiven, begin again. . . Yes! Let me worship a little first!"

So friends, we come to church this Sunday and every Sunday committed to approach the house of God, even Jesus Christ, "with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our heart sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water."

III

And just once more, when we gather here to worship the living God, at our preacher's behest, "let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another and all the more as we see the Day approaching."

Friends, as we meet here seeking to encounter here the living God, we understand ourselves as a community with an agenda for bringing the life of the world closer to the vision of Christ. Simply: our tradition conflates worship and service; praise and justice. Divine anthems and community action are all of a piece. Worship and mission go arm in arm.

And for all of our preacher's insisting that the furnishings of the church are beside the point, we do have in this room vivid and trenchant symbols depicting the kind of world offered by the God we worship here. Right here, for instance, from the New Testament, this radiant window in the middle of the panel of five: a depiction of the our Lord's parable of the Good Samaritan: "Go and do likewise," commands the little phrase beneath the window. Romantic, isn't it? Sentimental? Colorful? A marked aesthetic addition to this room. A tragedy, if that is all it is. For we see in that window a Samaritan caring for a Jew. And here is the point: when that parable is told Samaritans and Jews represent the most virulent of enemies. They hate each other. They detest one another. They will not speak, nor mingle, nor engage commercially with one another. The Jew lives at one pole, the Samaritan exists 180 degrees at the other end. There is no way one can call a Samaritan "good." Jesus dissolves the gulf. Jesus calls them neighbors. Jesus binds them into one human family. That window and its vision of Christ's intended world shines on our gathering here week in and week out, insisting that worship and mission, Brahms motets and affordable housing, Wesley's hymns and gay rights, prayers of confession and universal health care, so-called Protestant Basilicas and economic justice -- all go hand in hand. That is a glorious window, to be sure. Beside the point? An inert religious artifact? Not on your life: an urgent prod, spurring us to social service and action residing at the core of our worshipping the living God, prompting us, as our preacher urges, to consider how we provoke one another to love and good deeds.

We meet, friends, in a beautiful and aesthetically intricate house. Pray it may be truly a sanctuary finally without walls. Pray that we, with good conscience and an eagerness to provoke one another to love and good deeds, may soar with the poet when he sings:

Source of every blessing, bless us here who name you,
let our words and deeds proclaim you.
Like the saints and angels praising you in glory, may we
servants sing your story.
And in all, great and small, may we do more nearly,
what you love most dearly.