God of Wonder

Me - World Methodist Council

As many of you know I have been gone the past two weeks in worship, because I represent our conference at the World Methodist Council that was meeting in that time.

Me being a delegate to the World Methodist Council

every continent except for Antarctica represented.

During worship there are live translators, translating into headsets in several different languages.

In the worship gathering there were diverse voices, languages, and practices represented

I began thinking about how unique and how strange this event was and about who was there

I was thinking about the two Palestinian activists for peace that shared about their experience of living in war

I think about the president of the seminary in Ukraine

A person that I met living in diaspora because the pacific island that she calls home is no long habitable because of rising sea levels.

The presidents of colleges and several bishop

The Sweedish Youth who led the way for three separate denominations in Sweeden to merge into one

The queer trans person that is struggling to explain the cultural significance of a pronoun button to the person next to them that doesn’t speak their language.

And many more names, faces, and stories that come to mind.

That people from across the world, vastly different cultures, faith expressions, languages, dancing styles, understandings of scripture. What was it that was drawing us together?

On a formal sense there was an answer to that, that there were these structures in place where we have formed denominations, and those denominations are in relationships with each other in and elaborate web, and that this type of ecumenical work is fruitful to the body of faith. There was certainly a practical answer to the question.

But it wasn’t satisfying. My question really was, what makes a person want to worship? Where does that desire come from? And what is worship about?

Because when we gathered despite the many places that we come from there is a powerful heart of worship

Not a heart of worship that comes from a particular type of music

Not a heart of worship that is based on the right words that come out of a sermon.

Not a heart of worship that is satisfied by easy answers or bumper stickers.

But I sensed in this gathering there was Grace when things didn’t go as planned in worship or when a translation didn’t quite capture the intent of the person speaking the words.

What I sensed was that

Wherever we were from, and whatever was going on there, there is a universal human need for worship.

We - We have a need to worship

When I talk to my friend’s who don’t spend a lot of time in the institution of the church, they can sometimes think that the act of worship is a bit awkward. Often we focus on what is being done, the Order of Worship as it were.

When we describe what worship is to other people, it seems that we often use descriptions of what it is that we do

Worship for us might include prayer, singing, dancing (maybe less so in our tradition but more so in other traditions), what I might broadly call rituals. A sermon, or a message or a presentation of somekind.

That is what we do in worship, but what is worship ABOUT?

The Passage

Dedication of the temple by Solomon

There are three things that Solomon prays or declares in this text that I think create a framework to answering this question of what is worship ABOUT?

1st Declaration - There is no God like God

1 Kings 8:23 NRSV

23 He said, “O Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth beneath, keeping covenant and steadfast love for your servants who walk before you with all their heart,

We have been talking intellectually for a while about what it means to be a people and what it means to have a God.

That God is separate from us that we are a People and that God is a being that is separate from that

And that God is our God, is in some way in connection and relationship to us.

There is no one like that God, there is nothing that compares

We have a need to worship we know this because if we don’t find a God to love another so called God steps into it’s place.

We will worship at the shrine of self-reliance, we may perhaps make trips to the temple of consumerism, of sing in the choir of conflict and fear. If we don’t worship here, we will find for ourselves a church somewhere else. And altar somewhere else. But out of all of those things there is no God like you in heaven above of on earth below. Nothing compares

This first declaration is about God’s incomparableness

2nd Declaration - God’s Trustworthiness

1 Kings 8:24 NRSV

24 the covenant that you kept for your servant my father David as you declared to him; you promised with your mouth and have this day fulfilled with your hand.

There is a sense of trusting in God

The sense of covenant that God always keeps God's covenant - there is no one person more trustworthy. People die, empires fall, creation itself crumbles.

The Israelites were a people of transition

Their temple for a long time was a tent, because it was infinitely portable and they journeyed to the Holy Land for 40 years

They were in a kingdom that was actively dividing into Israel and Judah

They were a people for whom held the generational trauma of slavery in Egypt

A people who had seen people die, who had seen empires fall, had seen people betrayed, and who still trusted the covenant that God made with their ancestors.

A part of worship is trusting in God

That is in part what faith is

John Wesley the founder of the Methodist Tradition believed that Faith was the only thing that was required in the life of faith

3rd Declaration - God is on the Move

1 Kings 8:27 NRSV

27 “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!

This is the first time that the temple has a physical address. Before this they were people that were on the move

God is both up there and down here

There is a certain transcendence to God

God resides in the heavens not in the temple - we are a church on the move - there is no place that we can go that God is not already at

There is no place that we bring God to

We have a mission in connection to Iowa State Students, Faculty, and Staff

When we go on so-called “mission Trips” as a church we go to understand better and to be enriched by the ways that God already is at work in another place, and to share from a place of mutuality our own experiences of God from our own context.

Our mission though is not to bring God to the people. It is to discover and to co imagine what God is doing in the lives and the communities of others.

If God does not dwell solely in the temple or in our case the church, than that means that the temple is not the only place that we can worship. And praise God for that. In fact in a couple of weeks on Sept. 15th our church will be worshiping at 10 A.M. on a Sunday morning, but we won’t be in this space. We will be in the Memorial Union at ISU worshiping with about 15 other faith communities in Ames.

Worship is an acquired skill

The more we recognize our need for a God and particularly the need for a God that is not like any other, the closer we find ourselves to that God.

Meaning that when we begin to lean on God we realize that it will hold our weight so we lean a little bit more on God, and a little more, and a little more

The more we sense that God is on the move the more we are graced by the witness and the example of what God is doing in other people’s lives.