The Augsburg Confession: True Worship
Pastor Mathew Magera – 7/30/17 – Sermon 238
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from
God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Have you ever wondered why
Catholics go to mass and why Lutherans and other Protestants go to service? To
answer that question we need to look at the history of the term mass. How it
truly came into existence is really unknown but legend has it that it came from
a misunderstanding of the Latin words used at the end of worship which said,
and forgive me for my bad Latin, "Ite, misse est" or in English
"Go, it is sent" or "go, the church is dismissed." Being
the last words of worship, they were likely the most familiar. The common
person who was not fluent in Latin might have mistranslated the phrase to mean,
"go, this was the mass."
In any event, the term mass
came to be used in the Roman Catholic Church as the primary word for a service
of Holy Communion, so our Communion Sundays can also be called Mass. The reason
we don't commonly use that term comes from how the mass was understood in the medieval
Roman Catholic faith. When Roman Catholics have a service of Holy Communion,
the emphasis was placed on Jesus being re-sacrificed on the altar. It became a
sacrificial ritual in which it was believed that Christ needed to be sacrificed
again for the sins of the people in attendance, the church. The reformers in
the 1500s wanted to retain the mass, or the service of Holy Communion because
Jesus said we should do it, but they did not believe the re-sacrificing of
Jesus was appropriate, citing Hebrews 7:27 which says that Jesus' death on the
cross was "once for all." No further sacrifice was necessary. So, in
the years following the Reformation, believing that the mass was more about
what Jesus had already done for us more than us needing to sacrifice him again
and to avoid confusion between these two conflicting ideas, the "Divine
Service" or in German "Gottesdienst" was introduced to reflect
the truth that our gathering for worship was about what God had already done
for us, how God has served us, through Jesus Christ. Shortened it became just
service.
All of that will become
important but right now I want you to think of a movie. Any movie. A recent
one, one from many years ago, doesn't matter. Now, I want you to think of the
main character of that movie, the hero of the movie, if you will. Now, as you
think of your movie and the hero of that movie, I want you to think about that
same movie without that hero in it and I want you to ask yourself this
question: If the hero is not in the movie, would the same outcome occur? If
you're thinking of Star Wars, for example, if Mark Hamill wasn't in it, would
the story still have the same outcome? If you're thinking of Pretty Woman, if
Julia Roberts wasn't in it, would the story still have the same outcome?
A few years ago, I read a
theory about a classic movie from the 80s, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Of course
the hero of that movie played by Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. Maybe you've
seen the movie, maybe you haven't. Regardless, what I had read was that Indiana
Jones, the main character and hero of the movie, played no part in moving the
story along and the entire movie could have taken place without him in it. I
sat down and watched it again last night just to be sure and I could see how
that theory could be true. The same events could have occurred without the hero
being involved. Now, I don't want you thinking about this for too long, you can
watch it later, but the common person would think that a movie's main character
would have a pretty significant influence on the story's ending. I’m coming
back to this also in just a minute.
Today's articles from the
Augsburg Confession bring us back to worship. All three are essentially repeats
of previous articles, but they become slightly more specific to their day.
Articles 25 and 26 argue for the act of confession and of Christ to be at the
center of worship. Article 24, however, gives us something slightly new to work
with today and so I want to focus on that one regarding the mass. It's not a
very Lutheran word as I eluded to a few moments ago, but it still can be and is
used in the Lutheran Church. In article 24, the reformers are showing how the
way in which we worship conveys a message to those who are worshiping and to
those who are on the outside looking in. Worship does convey a message. Even
today. And that message is important to the life and survival of the
congregation.
In our reading from 1
Corinthians, Paul again is reaching out to the Christian church in a town that
is mixed with many different religions and traditions. Paul is reiterating to
the Christians in Corinth that everything comes from the one true God and that
if something they eat had been used in a sacrificing ritual to another god,
consuming that food would have no ill effects for the Christian. There is
nothing wrong with it. However, consuming sacrificed meat in front of someone
who is not a believer can make that person believe that you worship more than
one god, believing your god is not enough to save you, even though you know God
is. You, as the Christian, know that you don't worship another god but the
unbeliever doesn't. They see you eating of their sacrificed meat as a ritual of
their religion or tradition, not yours.
So, Paul says if you are
eating with an unbeliever and they say the meat has been sacrificed to another
god, don't eat it. Not because the meat is tainted in any way, but because of
the message it would convey to the unbeliever. It is more important that they
see you devoted to the one true God at this point than it is for you to enjoy a
steak without regrets.
Paul gets very specific here
but the point that we can learn from this is that what we do sends a message
and our worship needs to reflect what it truly is and points to. Our worship
needs to convey the right message not only for our sake, but for the sake of
others who enter this place and worship here. Worship must communicate the
sacrifice of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins once for all. How we treat
worship, how and where we value it speaks a very loud message. But it may not
be the right message and we do not want others to stumble in their faith or
lack of it by believing something about Christianity that just isn't true.
So, as I've mentioned with
the origin of the divine service vs. the mass and the example of a hero's role
in a movie, worship is about the message of what Jesus has done for us. It is
about his role in the story. If we believe what Jesus did was not enough and
that we need to finish the job, our worship is in vain. If we take Jesus out of
the story completely, our worship is in vain. There is one thing that true
worship is but many things in which true worship is not.
True Worship
is Not About Us
Worship is not about us, can
you believe that? The evolution of Christian worship in America has placed the
needs of the people in driver's seat. We want worship to meet our needs, to be
about me and what I think is right. Music I like, a pastor that I like, a lot
of people in church with me. These kind of things are the attractors of many
people today when it comes to church shopping. There is a fine line between
seeking good order and misplaced worship but that line gets crossed more than
we might think. Worrying about singing music that you like, finding typos in
the bulletin, watching someone make a mistake, worrying about whether the
flowers on the altar are real or arranged properly, upset about the color of
the walls, the carpet, or whether or not we’ll ever have projector screens in
the sanctuary.
When any such opinion like
these are used as the weight in which we judge the worship service itself and
our experience, it becomes more about us and not the risen Christ. Our desires
don't save us. Not one of them. When someone threatens to leave the church
because their needs aren’t being met, we have a problem. Now, it doesn't mean
that what I've mentioned are unimportant. Each of them can help to better
reflect the message of what God has done for us in Jesus but none of them are
saving factors yet sometimes we turn them into do or die and it is not healthy.
Satan wants to distract us from hearing that we are forgiven. He wants our
attention off of Jesus and onto something else and that something else is ourselves.
If Satan can get us focusing on our desires, what makes us happy, what sets us
off, then he has take our focus away from Jesus and the message conveyed of our
worship becomes wrong.
True Worship
is not about Pleasing God
This is a common
misunderstanding about Christian worship because of the nature of the word
itself. Worship, the word, has its root as worth-ship, or to make worthy. When
other religions gather to worship, they do so to ascribe worth to their god as
a means of seeking their god's approval. When Christians gather to worship, we
don't ascribe worth to God because he already is holy. There is nothing we can
do to make him any holier than he is. We also don't worship to seek God's
approval because our worship is never worthy to receive God's approval.
Instead, what our worship does is the other way around. In worship, God is
ascribing worth to us through Jesus Christ. Worship is about coming before God
as a sinner who feels worthless, hopeless, useless and being given worth
because of what Jesus did for us.
Now, this isn't to say that
we don't have a part in the worship service. Last year when we did a sermon
series on worship we learned how worship is a dialogue between us and God, a
constant dialogue that begins with God calling to us and then us responding to
what God gives. Yes, worship is a dialogue, but if you've ever had one of those
days where you come to worship and you're just not good for anything. You
couldn't give an offering because you forgot the checkbook or you just didn't
have enough to give. Maybe you couldn't talk or sing because you had a sore
throat. If you've ever had a day where you could not participate in that
dialogue, you need to know that what is most important is God's part in that
dialogue. Our inability to respond is not the place in which our worship fails,
but it is that Word from God that brings healing and restoration to broken
people. If worship becomes more about if we are pleasing God, it drowns out the
message we are really here for.
True Worship
is about the Promise
The message that came across
to the reformers in regard to the mass was that Christ's sacrifice wasn't
enough and that the mass was the way to make that sacrifice worth more by
re-doing it. True worship had become more about themselves, their idea that the
cross was not enough. True worship had become about pleasing God by completing
that sacrifice as the gateway to forgiveness. The true message had been
tainted. But, for those who would listen to the reformers, it turned them back
on course and told them that Jesus did it all and just like his last words in
John's Gospel give us all we need. On the cross, Jesus said, "It is
finished." No more striving to be worthy in God's sight. No more to-do
list for salvation. We had been made worthy in God's eyes. It was all finished
on the cross.
It goes back to that
distinction between the historical mass and the divine service. It goes back to
seeking out the true hero in the story and believing that what they have
already done made an eternal impact in the outcome of the story. Is it up to us
to earn forgiveness by re-sacrificing Jesus? No. True worship isn't a
re-sacrifice but it is the divine service of God giving us Jesus once for all.
If Jesus's death on the cross, if our hero altogether, were nonexistent, would
the outcome of our story be different? You bet it would be. True worship is not
like Raiders of the Lost ark where the absence of the hero could make no
difference in the outcome. True worship is a world that desperately needed a
hero and got one to change its very outcome.
How can we ensure our
worship gives the right message? The message of healing and forgiveness? Of
love and grace already completed? It requires faith, of course. It requires
faith that God is constantly working through us to change and transform us
through the cross to see and understand that message he wants us to share. We
could try to just be better about focusing on Jesus and what he did for us but
we know that at some point something is going to distract us. Just know that
even when it does, that call is still there, that true message is still there
re-orienting us once again. It's turning us away from the distractions and back
to Jesus. We need to calm down and remember why we are here. We are not here to
become angry again. We are not here to become frustrated again. We are here to
become new again. We are here to be given his life by which could only be
accomplished by his death. Jesus did it all. Nothing more is needed. Leave your
sins here, go home and forget about them. In the name of Jesus Christ you are
forgiven. That is the message. That is true worship. To God be the glory, now
and always. Amen.