God Hates Our Worship????? a sermon based on Isaiah 1:10-20 Humber United Church August 11, 2013

Isaiah 1:10-20  (based on "The Message")

“Listen to me, you leaders schooled as if in Sodom!!! Receive God’s revelation, you people schooled as if in Gomorrah!!

“Why this frenzy of sacrifices?” God asks. “Don’t you think I’ve had my fill of burnt sacrifices,  rams and plump grain-fed calves? Don’t you think I’ve had my fill of blood from bulls, lambs, and goats? When you come before me, whoever gave you the idea of acting like this, running here and there, doing this and that - all this sheer commotion in the place provided for worship?

 “Quit your worship charades. I can’t stand your trivial religious games: Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings! Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them! You’ve worn me out! I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion, while you go right on sinning. When you put on your next prayer-performance, I’ll be looking the other way. No matter how long or loud or often you pray, I’ll not be listening. And do you know why? Because you’ve been tearing
people to pieces, and your hands are bloody.

Go home and wash. Clean up your act. Sweep your lives clean of your covert evil doings,  so I don’t have to look at them any longer. Say no to wrong. Learn to do good. Work for justice.
Help the down-and-out. Stand up for the homeless. Go to bat for the defenseless.

“Come. Sit down, and let’s argue this out.” This is God’s Message, says Isaiah: “If your sins are blood-red, they’ll be snow-white. If they’re crimson red, they’ll be like wool. If you’ll willingly follow, you’ll feast like kings. But if you’re willful and stubborn, you’ll die like dogs.” That’s right. God says so.
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Woooo. Ouchie! Get the sense that God is just a tad ticked off? Hotter than Death Valley in the middle of July? Who can read these words, without getting reduced to ashes? God is the Sovereign Mad Hatter who shoots at us with firebrands of finger-pointing and indictments. And sitting squarely in the bull’s eye of God’s displeasure, it seems, is our most treasured sacred cow, the one which garners more comments and complaints from congregations than just about anything else. And here is God, attacking the time-honored practice of worship altogether.

You can almost see the smoke and flames, hear the thunder. All of the promises and the covenant have been disregarded. Yet when the people come to worship they offer sacrifice of animals, incense, and as God says - insincere prayer. God says “who asked you to do this? I didn’t!” God says that the worship practices of this people are a travesty - charades, smoke and mirrors, talk of religion and faith even while the sins and evil continue.

What is it about worship that’s got God’s dander up? What makes God’s nostrils flare so? Note, that it isn’t the ‘order’ of worship. If that were all, we could just tinker and make a few editorial changes in the bulletin. God isn’t particularly upset by the content - the call to worship and prayers of the people are fine. I don’t think God even gets too upset about the chaos of Passing of the Peace. Nor do I think God is really worried about whether our responses are Taize, or verses from old hymns.

What has God incensed is that worship lasted only an hour on the Sabbath; there were people consulting their portable sundials and signaling the priest from the rear, if worship went overtime. People didn’t want to spend any more time than they had to in the temple - there were other things to do. Worship was fine, but don’t take any more time than necessary to get through the rituals. Fire up the altar, light the incense, pray hard - and get it all into an hour.

God’s original intent was that worship would be a 24/7 expression of faith. For too many Israelites in Isaiah’s day, worship was an intentional, carefully enacted-performance. The rest of the week they went back to live the way they wanted with no reference to God, and certainly no interference from God.

Hypocrisy is the sin here - singing one thing and doing another. Offering prayers but never being part of an answer to prayer. Preaching against the enemy on Sunday, and making lucrative deals with the enemy on Monday. God says to these worshipers, "cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow."

The great Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, says that worship minus direct impact on our neighborhoods = silly geese. Here’s a paraphrase of his story. There was a barnyard full of a gaggle of geese. Each Sunday they gathered to hear wonderful words about creation, God’s plan, and extol the glorious destiny of geese. "We were meant to become air-borne on the winds and to soar in the heavens," the leader of the flock would tell them. At the mere mention of heaven the ganders would cackle and the rest would curtsey. After the meeting they would waddle home. But that’s as far as they ever got. They grew fat and plump and at Christmas they became Christmas dinner - that’s as far as they ever got. Behind the story of tubular necks and webbed feet, Kierkegaard saw weak worship that had its “performance” of religion once a week, but failed to impact the neighborhoods in practical ways.

There is a television drama called “Hitler: The Rise of Evil”. One of Hitler’s arguments in the early years was that people were indifferent, didn’t care about their country. He was able to play on emotions and fan the flames of racism and hatred, yet few in Germany stood up to him. The church was conspicuously absent in opposing him, with the sole exception of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Indifference, and fear, prevented those who might have stopped him.

Since we are hearing Kierkegaard, let’s take a look at Denmark during the war. Denmark had an uneasy kind of agreement with Hitler, and yet was able to refuse to allow his excesses. By far the greatest success in Danish policy toward Germany was the protection of the Jewish minority. Throughout the years of its hold on power, the government consistently refused to accept German demands regarding the Jews. They would not enact special laws concerning Jews, and their civil rights remained equal with those of the rest of the population. German authorities became increasingly exasperated with this position but concluded that any attempt to remove or mistreat Jews would be "politically unacceptable."

Of particular note was the Norwegian resistance to Hitler following Hitler’s ultimatum. King Haakon reported the ultimatum to his cabinet, mindful that although he could not make the decision himself, he could use his moral authority to influence it. He told the Cabinet:
“ I am deeply affected by the responsibility laid on me if the German demand is rejected. The responsibility for the calamities that will befall people and country is indeed so grave that I dread to take it. It rests with the government to decide, but my position is clear. For my part I cannot accept the German demands. It would conflict with all that I have considered to be my duty as King of Norway since I came to this country nearly thirty-five years ago.”

Nor, he said, could he appoint any government headed by the man namedQuisling because he knew neither the people nor the government had confidence in him. However, if the Cabinet felt otherwise, he himself would abdicate so as not to stand in the way of the Government's decision.

Nils Hjelmtveit, Minister of Church and Education, later wrote: "This made a great impression on us all. More clearly than ever before we could see the man behind the words; the king who had drawn a line for himself and his task, a line from which he could not deviate. We had through the five years [in government] learned to respect and appreciate our king and now, through his words, he came to us as a great man, just and forceful; a leader in these fatal times to our country".

Inspired, the Government unanimously advised the King not to appoint any government headed by Quisling, and telephoned its refusal to Bräuer. That night the government's refusal was also broadcast to the Norwegian people. The government announced that they would resist the German attack as long as possible, and expressed their confidence that Norwegians would lend their support to the cause.

Here’s another story - from the American Civil Rights movement:
 "I walked down the sidewalk on my way to seminary and I could see the blood still on the bushes where one kid got shot. So I went to church that Sunday needing to, hoping to, hear a word from God. I needed to hear the gospel help me to make sense of the bloodshed and hatred. Instead, I sat through the entire liturgy of the worship and not one word was said about the tragedy that had rocked Chicago during the past week. It was as if nothing had happened; as if God had nothing to say about the tragic week I had lived through."

Today, in North America, we are seeing a rise of precisely the kind of thing these stories describes. More and more political leaders are pushing back the rights of women, and legislating that if a woman miscarries without a doctor present, she has to turn herself in to the police. People are arrested for peaceful demonstrations which involve singing and handing out flowers. We are seeing a rise in a police culture that shoots first - or tasers first as the case may be - and has no skill in dealing with mentally ill, confused, or just lost people. Republican leaders have stated they would rather ruin the whole of America than allow medical care for everyone. In Canada we have leaders who are concerned only with big corporations and big profits. Ordinary people don’t count any more, and any contrary opinion is seen as “terrorist”. Is it really so far from now, to a return to oppressive and repressive regimes which do not tolerate contrary opinions, who have government “hate” lists? And yet they present themselves a religious Bible-believing people who follow the example of Jesus.

And  Jesus comes into the temple in Jerusalem, all those hundreds of years later, and sees that nothing has changed since Isaiah’s words? Jesus throwing animals out, turning over tables, money on the ground, claiming that worship has become an excuse to take advantage of people. It’s not accidental, this story about Jesus. There is a clear parallel.

Yet God does not write this ancient worshiping community off as a hopeless case. God does not splutter like an exploding volcano ready to burn a sinning world away in wrath. Nor does God sit dispassionate and aloof, no longer caring about the people who perform "worship charades" on Sunday. God says “Come on, then, let’s argue this out.” and God holds out hope. "If you become dead serious," God says, "then I’ll transform you just like colors can be transformed from red to white or white to black."

God says stop doing wrong, learn to do right, defend the oppressed. Worship is meant to strengthen and prepare us so that who and what we are has a positive impact in our neighbourhoods. It means that when someone speaks hatred against Moslems, we are willing to speak back. It means when someone is treated poorly because of their colour, faith, economic status, we speak back. True worship doesn’t begin when we walk *in* the door of the church, and it doesn’t end when we walk *out*. True worship *begins* when we walk out the door, and come into contact with the world, with all of its failings. True worship has no end, and isn’t confined to a time or a place. Particularly in these times, when phobias and fear of those who believe differently provokes legislated, and unlegislated injustices, we who are Christians must exercise our worship in a way which counteracts those injustices, and holds them up to the light. May it be so.

Sources:
1. Telling the Truth about Worship a sermon based on Isaiah 1:1; 10-20 by Rev. Thomas Hall
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Denmark