PASSING OF THE PEACE

Jacob and Esau were brothers. Brothers who did not get along. Brothers who did not like each another. Brothers who had polarized their family. Jacob was close to his mother and Esau was close to his father. Esau was the oldest and by middle eastern custom would inherit the bulk of his father’s money and estate. Jacob as younger brother would get a very small portion, and Jacob was jealous. So he and his mother concoct this plan for Jacob to steal Esau’s inheritance. You can read all about it in the 27th Chapter of Genesis but I will summarize it for you. Stuff they make Hollywood movies out of. Issac is an old man with bad eyesight he asks the oldest Esau to go out hunting and bring him back something so he can die in peace with a full stomach. His wife likes the younger brother Jacob better so she hatches a plot to fool her husband the old man into thinking Jacob was his older brother Esau and ask for the family inheritance... And it works……. I want to read though these concluding verses from chapter 27:41-43 Esau held a grudge against Jacob because of the blessing that he had stolen. Esau said to himself " The days of morning for my father are near; then I will kill my brother Jacob" When Rebecca was told this by the older son Esau she sent for her younger son Jacob and said to him " your brother Esau is planning to avenge himself by killing you. So go to my brothers house in Harran until you brother settles down and no longer wants to kill you ". So he does . Jacob runs away and for many many years the brothers have no contact with one another and Jacob assumes that Esau’s desire to kill him has just festered and grown over the time apart. Jacob is understandably very worried about the meeting that was going to take place between them. Did you grow up in one of those households where if you did something wrong You would hear “Wait until your father gets home…..” the stress and concern about what would happen. That is how it is when there is strife between us and someone we know. It especially difficult in the context of a church, especially small churches like ours. If you go to a church where there are 200 people in worship, it is pretty easy to hide. At one point in our life we did just that. We went to one of those big box non Denominational churches with a praise band. Who had about 3-400 at each Worship Service. It was easy to hide and decompress. But when there are only 15 or 20 of you, it is pretty hard to avoid someone you are having problems with. And so just like Jacob worrying about seeing Esau and me worrying about seeing my Dad, worship is impossible. Your thoughts are not on God but on that person – worrying about what has happened between you, worrying about what you are going to say if you accidentally bump into them, worrying about what they may say to you. Worship is just not going to happen.God know this. God knows that if you come to worship distracted by the person across the sanctuary you are trying to avoid you aren’t going to worship him – and that is why he has called you here. To worship. Thus why part of our worship service is the Passing of the Peace. We are spending some time this fall learning about worship. We have talked about the Call to Worship where we come together to focus on God and to admit God is greater than anything we can imagine, yet a God who wants to have a relationship with us; a God who wants us to gather together and as a community of faith and together acknowledge our love of him.
We have talked about our Prayer of Confession as a time when we realize we have fallen short of who God wants us to be; where we admit the ways in which we have disobeyed God – and also a time when we are assured of a God who forgives and forgets what we have done, but yet expects us to do better through the transformation of the Holy Spirit.
But there is one more step before we are totally cleansed and able to completely worship God in spirit and truth without any barriers in our ability to focus on the things of God. And that is what we talk about today.
We can accept the forgiveness we receive from God and put the sin in our lives behind us, but there is still a barrier if we are unable or unwilling to forgive the people we have come to worship with. Interestingly enough, the Passing of the Peace has been an integral part of worship from the very inception of the church. The earliest documents we have which record worship practices are from the 1st century and include this part of worship. While today it has become more of a ‘meet and greet’ kind of moment, it was originally intended for people to make ‘peace’ with one another so that they could then continue to worship with their focus on God and not on the person they were having problems with. It is to be directly after the Confession and Pardon because we have just been reminded that God has forgiven us and now God calls us to do the same thing with the people around us. So the Passing of the Peace was an opportunity to make peace with those we were having problems with. During this moment, the people who were having issues would approach one another and say “I’m sorry” and “I forgive you” and put their differences behind them while the rest of the congregation would pray for the people having issues. It was truly a time to pass the peace, to make peace so that now, the people could continue in their worship.
We are the family of God. Just like a family we are not always going to agree, we are not always going to get along. We are going to step on each other’s toes and get on each others nerves and hurt each others feelings. We are not always going to get our own way and we are going to build up resentment. But God in Jesus Christ has forgiven us and in Christ we can have peace with one another. Don’t let strife with someone steal that peace from you so you spend your time like me waiting for my Dad and Jacob waiting for Esau, but let Christ’s peace, the peace that passes all understanding, tear down those walls.
That is why we pass the peace so then, we can do what we have come to do and worship our God!
Amen

The Call to Worship

Our daughter did her pastoral internship at First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. It was a large downtown church with a very large congregation. The church sat on a main street in downtown Pittsburgh where there was lots of traffic - especially on a Sunday where there was a home football game. Every Sunday morning, about 20 minutes before the worship service began, a bag piper would stand outside of the front of the church and play - so as you came to worship, you walked up the steps of the church and you were greeted by this bagpiper playing hymns to call you into the worship service. It was a wonderful way to help you be in the right frame of mind to gather and worship God!
Many churches have different traditions to help people focus on what the worship service is suppose to be - a time for the people of God to gather together and praise and honor God. The word ‘worship’ literally means to give something value - to let something or someone know how much they mean to you. Worship then is the opportunity for us to let God know how important God is to us. We gather here, in the sanctuary, to spend the hour focused on God and the things of God and in doing so, remind ourselves that God is or is to be, the most important thing in our lives.
This idea of gathering together and giving ourselves time to focus on God comes from ancient Israel and the building of the Temple in Jerusalem. The temple was built by specifics given by God. The temple was built up on top of a hill - called The Temple Mount. For the Israelites, worship began outside at the bottom of the hill. The Israelites would gather, and they would begin to sing together. The songs they sang we find in our book of Psalms - if you see a Psalm labeled ‘a Psalm of Ascent’, usually found between Psalms 120 - Psalm 134 those are the songs the Israelites would sing as they ascended into the Temple. It is also very interesting that when the temple was built, the steps up the Temple Mount were made uneven so that you would have to concentrate as you walked up the steps - the purpose being to help people focus on why they were walking into the temple - to worship God. Once they were inside and gathered before the Holy Place, there would be the sound of a Shofar - a rams horn - which began their worship with the standard words they used and had memorized.
They gathered for worship and then called themselves to worship so they could spend this time in the presence of God.
Church traditions for a Call to Worship are quite varied - and some of these traditions will sound pretty bizarre to us but they are all designed to let people know the time of worship is starting. Some churches run a countdown video. Others have the praise band start to play the first song. Some churches find it effective to have some kind of warm up song before the worship actually starts. Some churches begin with a friendly welcome by a leader, and other churches open with announcements. Many churches begin with the organ chiming the hour. But every beginning communicates meaning, sets an atmosphere and leads people to understand they are coming into the presence of an Almighty God.
We are busy people. We get up in the morning and we have things to do - houses to take care of, jobs, obligations, family, responsibilities…….. time is the most used up resource we have. And because we have so much to do and so many responsibilities we are always having to think about what we have to do next, when are we going to get it done, what all do I need, what do I have to remember…… and so we come into the worship service and we sit in our pew and we begin to think about all the things we need to do once we leave here this morning and what needs to be done next week and there really isn’t a whole lot to time for God because all these other thoughts are floating around in our heads. We read what we need to read and sing what we need to sing and we try our best to be attentive cause we know we should be but in reality all the busyness of our lives really doesn’t allow us much room to just stop and concentrate on why we are here. The beginning of the worship service is a time to allow ourselves to put aside all that we are thinking about and for at least one hour think only about God. Its hard - and we need to not be so hard on ourselves when we struggle with this idea of spending an entire hour not thinking about our To Do List. Remember the night of Jesus’ arrest and he took the disciples up to the Mount of Olives with him and what did he want them to do? They were suppose to stay awake and pray for Jesus. And what did they do? They fell asleep on one of the most crucial nights of Jesus’ life. And yes Jesus fussed at them but he still loved them and they still remained his disciples so as we all struggle together to try and focus our entire selves on this hour of worship, we need to realize that if we don’t make it, God will not cast us out, we just need to regroup and try again - and the more we do that - the more we work on concentrating of what is going on in our worship they easier it will be.
So we start our service with scripture, reminding ourselves of what we are doing, of why we are here and that this is a special time set apart, we do our business with our announcements and then we Call ourselves to worship - imagine God being here in front of us and we are in his presence and so we are bowing down to honor the one who is Lord of our lives.
Scripture actually tells us many times we are to bow down before our God; we are to kneel before the Lord our maker because we are overcome with joy, gratitude, and awe and God is greater than we are. Kneeling before God shows our submissive attitude and spirit before this "Great God" whom we serve.
Now I realize we are not people prone to bowing. It is not part of our culture or our faith practices. The Jews did bow down before their leaders and before God in their worship and many faith traditions today still honor the God they worship by bowing. Several faith traditions kneel as part of their worship practice. I’m sure many of you have been in a sanctuary where there is a kneeling bench in front of each pew. I don’t know about you but I’m pretty glad we don’t bow or kneel as part of our worship because I would have an awful time getting back up! Our Call to Worship is to help us think about that type of action - kneeling or bowing because we are before an Almighty God who is greater than we are - the Call to Worship is a way for us to figuratively kneel with words rather than physically. Our call to worship sets the tone and helps focus people’s hearts to respond to the God who we recognize as being so much more than we are. The call to worship isn’t a random use of words to get people excited. It’s a well-thought-out litany that is pulled from and rooted in Scripture and helps to center people’s thoughts and minds on this time of worship. It is to say “We are here to honor and give value to our God.” And it is a litany for everyone to participate in because everyone here should have that attitude of worshipping and valuing and honoring God.
We also need to realize that every worship service has a theme which generally isn’t stated anywhere - but all of the words used, the hymns, the scripture passages, the words in the liturgy and the prayers all are very thoughtfully written to help the worshiper focus on one aspect of our relationship with God and our work as the people of God. The Call to Worship begins to introduce that theme as we begin our service with each of us reading together words that reflect what we are all about and why we are gathered to worship God on this particular day.
Take this service for example, the hymns, the words in our liturgy, the scripture passages, the prayers, all reflect on what we are to think about during this time - and in today’s case, to help us think about readying ourselves to be in the presence of God through our Call to Worship.
I want you to think about something. We mentioned before how the Israelites would walk up the uneven stairs singing Psalms as they would come into the temple and gather before the area of the temple known as the Holy Place. They knew, that God was actually in that Holy Place and they had tremendous fear and respect because they understood the true power of God who was just a few feet away from them. How different would this time be in this sanctuary if you knew that God himself was right here in front of you and your job was to let God, who you could see, know how much you loved and honored him. If that were the case, how would you act differently than you do now?
The correct answer is that there should be no difference in how we approach God - whether we can see him here or not. I know you know that God is here. God is everywhere. We have heard that since we were small. But when we are here for this worship service, we use the Call to Worship to remind us that we are here to worship an Almighty Powerful God - a God who created the universe and everything in it, a God who created us. The Call to Worship is to get us to stop, to put aside all that stuff we are thinking of, and to focus solely on God and the things of God so that we can interact with God - our giving God honor and our God giving us his words to help us as we live our lives.
In the passages of scripture we used today - Jesus reminds the Pharisees that they can’t stop the people worshipping God. God wants to be worshipped and if the Pharisees try to silence the people God would just have the stones sing out and worship. In other words God will be worshiped one way or another. We heard the passage from Revelation and from Isaiah both having the angels fly around God in his throne singing God’s praises - calling people to a time of worship where the people respond by giving God praise.
And we are here today for the same reason. We begin the service with scripture and after do our business in our announcements, we begin the time of true worship, calling ourselves to come before a holy, almighty God and giving God value as the people of the Kingdom of God.

Amen.