All In: All Generations

 Memories in worship - share a favorite memory of worship?

The power of Singing next to a loved one, a parent, a grandparent.

Sermons - discussing them in the car, or around the dinner table.

Mom passing a mint - sometimes going deep into that purse and find a life savor, or in our case a Whilamnina with probably some lint on it.  

Goofing around and playing tic. Tac, toe, or hangman.  

Not just adults.  Service of Russell Flahie, I learned that they used to draw on the red ritual of friendship pads. 

Somehow worship shapes us, over the course of our lives.  One shared hte power of singing with their grandmother.  A person who was suffering from Alheizmers but could still remember the words to How Great Thou Art.  

(TR) - If you are here I am probably preaching to the choir.  But I have come to hear in private conversations that some of the greatest fear is that the faith is not being passed down.  A grandmother will pull me close, and say that one of their fears is that a loved one does not go to church or have a faith community.  Worship is not a part of their lives.

But they are not alone… What we know according to Gallup is that national worship trends have changed dramatically.  From 2003 43 % of American attended a religious servies weekly.  In 2023 that number had schrunk to 30 percent.  In that poll it also found that in the same time persiod 11 percent said would never attend a religious service with it increaing to 17 percent.  

Another trend changed worship dramatically post-coveid and that is online worship.  Now please hear me.  What I have learned is that many people are watching worship for many really good reasons.  Heath, mobility, etc.  When I visit them, or see them they tell me about a sermon they have watched.  And so I am grateful for our online community but that has changed worship.  

Why do we worship?  I think Psalm 100 gives us some important reasons as to why we worship and they are to remember who and whose we are, to reclaim our identity, and to recenter our lives in a fragmented world.  

Make a joyful noise, all the earth….

Praise is the duty and delight, the ultimate vocation of the human community.  We have a resilient hunger to move beyond self,  to return our energy and worth to the One from whom it has been granted. In our return to that One, we find our deepest joy.” (Israel’s Praise

Know that the Lord is God.

Special particle in the Hebrew before the word Yahweh, that this is the only God set in a time of polytheism.  But that same time exists.  

And yet our gods usually come in the form of money, or power,. Or even ourselves.

We can become so self-sufficient that we can wonder why we even need to worship God.  We have it all under control ourselves.  Until we don’t.  Until something happens where we see our limitations.  

We gather in worship to remember we are the creature and not hte Creator. That God is the Alpha and Omega of our lives.  

And we gather to make a joyful noise.  We gather to praise God together.  

Who is the audience?  You are are the audience.  The choir, pastors, are the leads.  And you receive.  But Kirkegaard said no, what if you think about worship this way… that you are leads, and that hte pastor and choir are just support and that ultimately God is the audience.  That worship is about what we can create together in praise.  And we worship because God deserves our praise.  And sing and make a joyful noise.  As Amy is going to tell you over the years.  Don’t hold back. Sing out.  What can we create together with the central goal of praising God.  

We are not the center of worship.  God is.  

Remember we were created to praise God with all our lives.  That the reason we sing hte doxology every Sunday is that it reminds us the fundamental key of our lives and that is to praise God.

And we praise God because we belong to God.

We are as the Psalm says sheep of his pasture.  

The  Brief statement of faith begins with this simple line “In life and in death we belong to God.”

And we are invited to recenter our lives around this central truth… that God is faithful.  

Faithful:

Hesed - Faithful lovingness.  

Embodies that faithfulness in Christ.  

Recenter our lives on this truth.  

Centerboard.

Friends let us remember who and whose we are, let us reclaim our identity that we belong to God, and let us recenter our lives giving thanks for hte God who is faithful to all generations.  

All Generations We continue our sermon series about the four “all in” goals of the Session and the Church.  We began with our first ALL IN goal to be a Matthew 25 church.  And to  care for the most vulnerable.  We heard “all in” goal number two to be a church which focuses on connection to one another and to God.   Last week we talked about the third “all in Goal” to intentionally develop leaders of all ages and stages.  To listen to God’s call and to “lead a life worthy of the the calling to which you have been called.” And today we talk about our final goal: Intergenerational worship.  In our lives to God on a God who is faithful to all generations.

Our scripture for this Sunday is a simple one. And maybe one you are familiar with… But with it simplicity comes some of our sacred values and beliefs as Christians

That we are creature and not the Creator That we belong to God. And that we worship a God who is faithful to all Generations. Let us explore Psalm 100 in order to remember, reclaim, and recenter our lives.

Now I want to invite up (9:00 Ruby and Laura Sveen   & 11:10 - Lee and Will Pittman)  to  read our scripture.

Hear now the word of the Lord from Psalm 100:

Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness;     come into his presence with singing.

Know that the Lord is God.     It is he who made us, and we are his;[a]     we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving     and his courts with praise.     Give thanks to him; bless his name.

For the Lord is good;     his steadfast love endures forever     and his faithfulness to all generations.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Let us pray. Prayer.

Loving God.

Thank you for the gift of worship in our lives.  And that you are here with us.  And  Loving God may the words of my mouth and the mediations of all our hearts be acceptable to you. You are our rock, our refuge, and our redeemer.  Amen.

Manuscript:

Maybe you did not grow up in the church but If you did, I wonder  what are your favorite memories of worship as a  child? Recently, I asked a group and it was such a powerful experience. They talked about the joy of sitting by a loved one. A grandparent, a parent and singing together. They talked about sermons and discussing the sermon in the car after the service. And many remember goofing off in the pew. When I wold get antsy, I can remember my grandmother and even my mom Searching deep within their purses and pulling out a piece of dutch candy called wilhelmina’s and she would find a wayy to pass them to us during the service.  Sometimes even with a little lint on it.

Ours were not red but I can also remember doodling and playing games with my brother and sisters. on the pads we would pass at church.

Hangman, Tic Tac Toe, Recently, I was remeinded that this is not just kids.  At the funeral for Russel Flahie, Trent Carter shared that they used to playfully add drawings to each others names as they passed the red ritual of friendship pads down the pew. I always wondered what they were doing. But all of them shared some moment that shaped their life. One person shared how they loved one was suffering from Alzheirmers. And so  many of her memories had been taken, But she remembered with teasers in her eyes, singing together the words, How Great Thou Art.

If you are here.  You probably recognize the importance of worship in your life. As they say, “I am probably preaching ot the choir,” But in private conversations, I have found a great fear and worry.

As I have talked to folks over the years. Parents, Grandparents will say to me in hushed tones. One of my big fears is my son, or daughter, or grand children don’t go to worship anymore.

And they say it sadness, and some fear. 

But they are not alone. We know that worship habits are changing in our nation.

There have been a few significant changes especially post- covid and we are stil adjusting.

We also know that worship is one option on Sunday. Soccer, sports, sitting with a coffee at Starbucks, travel are all options for Sunday.  In March, Gallup did a study of worship attendance and here is what they found. 

Weekly attendance: In 2000–2003, 42% of US adults attended religious services weekly, but by 2021–2023, that number had dropped to 30%. 

Never attend: The percentage of Americans who say they never attend religious services has increased, from 11% a decade ago to 17% today. 

We also know that some people worship online.  Especially post-covid.  Many people each Sunday that you don’t see here are worshipping online.  For many really good reasons which include health, mobility.  

I am always suprised when I go Fresh Market and someone that I have not seen in a while will say I saw you on Sunday.  They will ask about something in the sermon and so I know they are watching online.

And so how do we respond to these changes?  

I think part of the answer is to explore, why do we worship?  Why come to this place week after week?  And is it important? Why is it important for our lives?

Psalm 100 gives us 3 important invitations why we worship:

And that is to remember who we and who God is, To reclaim our identity that we belong to God, And to recenter our fragmented lives on the faithfulness of God.  

Make a joyful noise all the earth, Come into his presence with singing…

Walter Brueggeman the Old Testament Scholar writes this Praise is the duty and delight, the ultimate vocation of the human community. . . . We have a resilient hunger to move beyond self, to return our energy and worth to the One from whom it has been granted. In our return to that One, we find our deepest joy.” (Israel’s Praise

The joy comes from remembering who and whose we are. That we are the creature and not the Creator. That we are not God. And when we connect back with the living God. This is our deepest joy and why we praise God.  

 Know that the Lord is God.   It is he who made us, and we are his;[a] we are his people and the sheep of his pasture. “Know that Yahweh is God….”  In the Hebrew, there is a little particle, hu, which emphasizes that Yahweh alone is God.  Against the background of polytheism, The Psalm claims that all of those “gods” are not truly God.  There is only one true God, and his name is Yahweh.

And the truth is we can worship so many other things. We can worship money. We can worship fame, power, or even ourselves. The issue for all of us is not no god. Most of hte time our sin is this that we worship the wrong God instead of no god.  We might not explicitly say it, but we worship ourselves, or power, money, or fam.e We need worship to recognize and remembeer that we are not God. With all our modern conveniences we can come to believe we are  totally self-sufficient.  And for many of us we have come to recognize, that we need worship.  There is something that happens in our lives when we make it a priority. There is a certain rhythm, order, to our lives.  In this time we remember who God is: Our Creator, The Alpha and Omega of our lives. God is the focus of our worship service. But sometimes we can get this wrong.  Soren Kirkegard the Danish theologian and philosopher once asked this question. Who is the audience in worship?

He said, we Christians have it wrong. If the ministers have the leading roles, Witht he choir, and organist, if the parishioners are the audience, then what role does God play when we worship? 

The problem with thinking of ourselves as the audience is that it leaves God out of the picture, and out of our worship.

But the psalmist says comes into His presence. And so we worship to praise God.  That our focus would not be on ourselves but on God.

So Kierkeggard proposed a different model. He said, what would it be like if we understood worship like this: you parishioners are the primary actors and actresses; You have the leading roles. The clergy, the organist, the choir and the ushers--they form the supporting cast. And God, said Kierkeggard, God is the audience.

All that we do in worship is directed toward God. The way we say the prayers, the way we sing the hymns, the attentiveness we give to Scripture and sermon, the money we offer: all of that contributes to our worship with a focus on God.

And that in worship we gather up all our gifts, our singing, our praying, the scripture reading to praise God.  

And I think this is a healthy corrective beacuse sometimes in our consumer society we can think worship is about me.  

Until  you have had the experience where you have thought to yourself. I did not like that hymn. Or man was John off today.  He put me to sleep.

Only to ask someone else who will say, “that was just what I needed to sing or hear today.” And you think God is at work there.  

And what we know about faith formation happens when we have a place in worship. When we participate together. All ages and stages.  When we contribute our voice to congregational singing. And so one thing you are going to hear from Amy is the encouragement to sing. To not hold back.

To sing and praise God together not thinking about yourself but like a huge choir to combine our praise together.  And your voice is needed.  So sing out. 

Don’t hold back.

As Matt said so beautifully a number of months ago. A joyful noise does not mean that it is on pitch.  

And we remembeer this important second truth:

We reclaim our identity that we belong to God and to one another.  Brief Statement of Faith, found in our Book of Confessions it begins with this simple first line.  “In life and in death we belong to God.” God is the source of our life, from whom we come and to whom we return: the ultimate grace—we belong to God forever.

Know that the Lord is God.     It is he who made us, and we are his;[a]     we are his people and the sheep of his pasture.

And in worship we recenter our lives:

But we worshtip God because God is faithful to all generations.

And God’s faithfulness is the center of our lives. The word in hte psalm is Chesed.   It is one of the core characteristic of God, This is the faithful love of God.  That does not change. That is embodied in Christ.

This summer I had the privilege of teaching the kids how to sail while at the lake. My parents have a small, old, red,  force five sailboat.  And one of the keys to teaching your kids to sail is the importance of the centerboard. I remember my Dad teaching me. And it was fun to teach my kids.

And to teach them to put in that cetnerboard, once you are deep enough. That centerobard is is what keeps you going straight and not wandering, even in the midst of the waves, and the wind.  Worship is like that centerboard in our lives and in the lives our kids.  And maybe we need it now more than ever.  We live in times of great upheaval. The waves of change are huge. The wind of anger is so loud.  From natural storms to politics that seeks to divide us.

   But we gather together.  Each Sunday, to find our center again. To put that centerboar down in the deep waters of scripture, song, and prayer.  And together to find our footing again. To remember, and to help our kids, and our world remember and find our center that will hold.  To remember our God. Our God who isour creator. Our God whom we belong to.  A God who is faithful to every generation of his people. Our God who is  the center of our lives.  And who is faithful to all generations.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Notes:

Praise is the duty and delight, the ultimate vocation of the human community. . . . We have a resilient hunger to move beyond self, to return our energy and worth to the One from whom it has been granted. In our return to that One, we find our deepest joy.” (Israel’s Praise) - Walter Brueggemann writes,

For our kids lives?  Why do we worship? The psalm says that this world is the loving creation of The Creator — “It is he that made us, and we are his.” This psalm sings that we walk daily through a creation that God loves, and that God loves us (“we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture”). The psalm sings that God’s character is different than those other gods — money, success, youth, etc. — who would seek to rule us. The Lord is a God whose character is marked by “steadfast love” and “faithfulness.”

The Presbyterian Church (USA) asked him to chair a committee to write a Brief Statement of Reformed Faith, and he did so magnificently. The opening line is “In life and in death we belong to God.” God is the source of our life, from whom we come and to whom we return: the ultimate grace—we belong to God forever.

Psalm 100:3 reminds us that we belong to God. The Common English Bible states: “Know that the LORD is God—he made us; we belong to him.” The Hebrew original of the last phrase can be literally translated, “we are his.” The next part of the verse reinforces this truth by adding, “We are his people, the sheep of his own pasture.” Thus, we belong to God because he made us to be his very own people. He continues to watch over us as our good shepherd.

It is what my seminar colleague Neal Plantinga calls a “second simplicity.”  This is a simplicity that lies just beyond the most basic level of a simple thing.  All piano students sooner or later learn how to plink out the simple tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”  But when no less a composer than Mozart wrote a variation on this tune, you get something that is at once simple and complex—you get a second simplicity whose refinement helps you re-appreciate the original.

So also with Psalm 100.  It plays in one sense a tune as simple as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”  It is in one sense as simple as a Kindergarten guide to praise.  Yet there is a complexity here too that helps us understand afresh the basics of who God is and why we praise God and all that is involved in God’s sticking with us in his immense kindness and grace.  It is a second simplicity and it is in this way a deep and profound simplicity as well.

Notes about Psalm 100:

5 things:

 Joyful noise.

You are not alone… All the earth - all creation….

Shepherd - we belong to this covenant God.  This God has claimed us.  What are the gods taht calim our life and identity.  We belong to God.  We remember

All about the King, God is the Shepherd King.  Guiding, leading, protecting, feeding.  

Lineage, the Lord is Good, God’s steadfast love endures forever.  Not just for you, for your family.  Belonging to God and to each other.

Finding a center… Which holds us.  

Vern Bengtson, a professor emeritus of gerontology and sociology at the University of Southern California. He and colleagues tracked more than 350 families over almost four decades and published their findings in “Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down Across Generations.”

Notes:

Not all folks have memories of growing up in Church.

Mints in worship.

Singing together

Sitting with a loved one

Worshipping outside in nature

Worshipping with friends

Charlene - not afraid of water because of Baptism

How Great Thou Art - Alzheimers

Habit

We miss it

Welcome, warmth

Part of the body… To participate in worship.

“Chesed is like that as it relates to the character of Israel’s God, Yahweh.  And so the word gets rendered as “kindness” or “lovingkindness.”  Sometimes it’s just rendered as “love.”  Sometimes it gets rendered as “grace” or “mercy” or in the final line of Psalm 100 in the NIV and some other translations, it is “faithfulness.”  Whatever chesed is, it is the core characteristic of Israel’s God, and in the psalms and elsewhere it is also the #1 reason on the doxological hit parade to praise God.  When we enter God’s courts with singing and praise as Psalm 100 says we should, it is at the end of the day the chesed of God that animates us most of all.”

Rev. Scott Hoezee

"idolatry involves the misplacement of hope and trust.” 

Luke Timothy Johnson 

rship out not to be construed in utilitarian ways.  Its purpose is not to gain numbers nor for our churches to be seen as successful.  Rather, the entire reason for our worship is that God deserves it. (1). Marva Dawn “A Royal “Waste” of Time  The Splendor of Worshiping God and Being Church for the World It is important to ask this question. Do our efforts in worship lead to genuine praise of God and the growth of character in the members and the whole body of this Christian community?

Worship as character formation: “My major concern for the Church has to do with worship, because its character-forming potential is so subtle and barely noticed, and yet worship creates a great impact on the hearts and minds and lives of a congregations members.  Indeed, how we worship both reveals and forms our identity as persons and communities.” Dawn, Marva Reaching Out without Dumbing Down. (4).

Worship - Who is the Audience? Most people who come to worship think that church is a lot like the theater. So they come to watch, to observe, to listen, perhaps, to be entertained. They see themselves and the other members of the congregation as the audience. And that all seems to make sense. After all, the ministers are the ones up front on an elevated platform not unlike a stage. The ministers are the ones who dress up in something like costumes. The ministers are the ones who seem to have the leading roles. And they are the ones who are ably assisted by a supporting cast which includes the organist, the choir and its director, the lay liturgist and the ushers. It is only natural that most people who come to worship think of themselves as the audience. But Soren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth century Danish philosopher, said, No, no, we Christians have it wrong. If the ministers have the leading roles, if the choir and organist are the supporting cast, if the parishioners are the audience, then what role does God play when we worship? The problem with thinking of ourselves as the audience is that it leaves God out of the picture, and out of our worship. So Kierkeggard proposed a different model. He said, what would it be like if we understood worship like this: we parishioners are the primary actors and actresses; we have the leading roles. The clergy, the organist, the choir and the ushers--they form the supporting cast. And God, said Kierkeggard, God is the audience. All that we do in worship is directed toward God. The way we say the prayers, the way we sing the hymns, the attentiveness we give to Scripture and sermon, the money we offer: all of that contributes to our worship performance before God. "http://www.practicingourfaith.org/cfm/library/view.cfm?id=445&page=1&practice=12" http://www.practicingourfaith.org/cfm/library/view.cfm?id=445&page=1&practice=12

“When the congregation becomes an audience and its worship a vaudeville act, then the Church finds itself at risk;  the death of faith and Christian character is a clear possibility.”  (13) Dawn, Marva Reaching Out without Dumbing Down. (4)..