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Instructed Eucharist - Part B

May 14, 2006

Church of the Holy Spirit

Ashburn, Virginia

www.holyspiritanglican.org

We're continuing our sermon series on worship with this second of three talks

called Instructed Eucharist. This week we look at the sermon, creed, and prayers.

1. THE SERMON

At the National Day of Prayer service at Galilee Methodist Church in Sterling

last week, I got to hear several pastors offer their own prayers. You will not be surprised

to hear that Rev. Bob Bavendar of Galilee Methodist does not pray the same way that

Pastor Jeff Jacob of Word of Life Assembly of God prays! Jeff prays aloud even when

others are leading prayer, saying "YES, LORD" often. I love that man! The different

styles, the different kinds of content to the prayers told us something about these men and

women of God. I have always thought that if you want to know what someone really

believes about God, their denomination means little; their title mans less; if you want to

know what someone really believes, then listen to them pray. What we pray and how we

pray shows what we believe. This is expressed in the ancient aphorism: Lex credendi,

lex orandi. Literally, the law of believing is the law of praying. Loosely translated, "We

believe what we pray." How we worship shows what we believe. That's a great reason to

look at our worship pattern.

Biblical worship always follows this basic pattern: Divine action and human

response. As God speaks and acts among His people, the people respond to God. We are

an Acts 2 Church. We want to live like that first church in Jerusalem, a church of

Pentecostal power and outrageous love. The longest part of Acts 2 is a sermon by the

Apostle Peter to explain what speaking in tongues was all about. Peter retells the story of

Jesus life, death and resurrection, and in closing, Peter calls on the people to "repent and

be baptized, and save yourselves from this corrupt generation!" Three thousand were

baptized that very day. Not only are we an Acts 2 Church, we are also Great

Commandment Christians as Jesus commanded, we love God with all our strength,

which means our will. Part of loving God means to respond to the proclamation of God's

word by doing something. Evangelical sermons always call for a response from the

listener: perhaps to make a decision for Christ, or to forsake a sin, to take on a spiritual

discipline, or to receive a truth so that it brings peace. The response that I ask from you

varies from Sunday to Sunday, sometimes following a set format with Creed, prayers and

confession, and sometimes not, because we desire to be available for whatever God

desires to do among us. Often we respond with worship in song, because we find that

enables the message to penetrate our hearts, to take that longest journey in the universe,

the sixteen inches from our heads to our hearts

I take my responsibility for preaching very seriously, because I have the awesome

responsibility to open the Scriptures for you and bring to you a word from God. This

word ought to include meat for your mind, bread for your soul, and fire for your will. I

pray every week to hear God as I meditate on the Scriptures. I may succeed in filling your

minds with Bible truths and great stories, but if I do not preach the word that God has for

this congregation for this week, I have missed God's best for us. I covet your prayers for

that process. Please pray for me. Through the Word of God preached, I intend for you to

understand two things: 1. what a passage or concept from Scripture means; and 2. how it

applies to your life.

The purpose of preaching is to change our character and our conduct so we abide

in Christ, and draw all our nourishment from him. Read with me from John 15:1-5: "I am

the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no

fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more

fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Abide in me,

as I abide in you. As a branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine,

neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the Vine, you are the branches."

Preaching is about helping people to become more holy, more closely connected to

Christ, more like Christ. We become more holy and more fruitful through subtraction,

more than through addition.

The Pope's personal preacher, Fr. Cantalamessa says, in paraphrase: Holiness is

like sculpture. Leonardo da Vinci defined sculpture as "the art of removing." The other

arts consist in adding something: color to the canvas in painting, stone on stone in

architecture, note after note in music. Only sculpture consists of removing, of taking

away the marble covering the figure, so that it emerges from the stone. Christian

sanctification is obtained like this, by pruning removal; by cutting useless pieces away

form our personalities, namely: selfish desires and ambitions, like the ambition for a still

larger home. In our neighborhood, so many homes are so large already, yet the new ones

being built are still larger I must ask, to what end? Other bits to be chiseled away

include fleshy habits that distract us from true riches, like for example, those images on

flickering cathode ray tubes that light up our homes for hours on end; and lies that

deceive us and keep us bound up by the Devil's schemes, like the lie that divorce will

make us happy.

One day, Michelangelo was walking through a garden in Florence and saw a

block of marble protruding from the earth, half covered by grass and mud. He stopped

suddenly, as if he had seen someone, and turning to friends, exclaimed: "An angel is

imprisoned in that marble; I must get him out." And, armed with a chisel, he began to

work on that block until the figure of a beautiful angel emerged.

God looks at us and sees us that same way: as covered up with layers of stone.

God says to himself: "In that stone is hidden the image of my son Jesus Christ; I want to

bring it out!" Though we can become covered and obscured by sin, Christ abides in every

believer. We are predestined to "be conformed to the image of his son" (Romans 8:29).

That is good news it is our destiny to look like Christ! How does God do that?" God

has many chisels. He uses many things, including what St. Paul called the foolishness of

preaching.

How about you? What might God want to prune in you, to subtract from your

schedule or your character today? What has distracted you from abiding in Christ, from

dwelling in the knowledge of His presence, moment by moment? What has you covered

up so that your light does not shine as God intended? Take a moment in silence and ask

God to show you what he desires to prune in you, to chisel away. Then confess it silently

to God in prayer.

...[Absolution]

The Nicene Creed follows the sermon, and helps remind us of what the Church

believes, in case the preacher just preached something heretical! So let's stand and recite

the Creed.

2. THE CREED

The Nicene Creed was written at the first ecumenical council of the worldwide

church in Nicea, present day Turkey, in 325A.D. It begins, "We believe," not "I believe."

This is the faith of the Church, the faith of the community. We recite what the Church

believes about God in Christ. This is one way the followers of Jesus obey the first and

greatest commandment and love God with their minds, their cerebral cortex. One way we

worship God is through how we think about Him. So much pain is caused by wrong ideas

about God! Fitz Allison, Bishop Chaplain for the Mid-Atlantic Convocation of the

Network, wrote a great book on this called The Cruelty of Heresy. Friends, it's true:

heresy is cruel! A college classmate of mine named Steve believes that God is Creator,

but his God is uninvolved in our lives today Steve is what we call a Deist. He is

depressed, and resigned to his depression, because it is an existential depression, caused

by his worldview. He has no hope ever to have his prayers answered. No possibility of

divine healing. No Bible, no special revelation from God to show him how to live. No

eternal destiny to dream for. No possibility of eternal forgiveness. No reason not to do

whatever he feels like doing, beyond his bare conscience, which is as thin as his hair has

become! Steve's depression is caused by wrong belief! Almost every sin you can name

is a result of a wrong idea about God. Lies we believe cause pain. Heresy is cruel.

The Creed is a summary of Biblical faith. Reciting it reminds us that there is

positive cognitive content to the faith; there are propositions of truth that you must

believe in order to think about God in an Orthodox manner. It expresses in Greek

philosophical categories what the apostles taught in Aramaic and Hebrew concepts. The

Creed was written with an eye to the controversies of its day, defining what is Christian

faith, and what is heresy. It gives boundaries to our faith. For example, we say Christ

was "eternally begotten of the Father" because the heretic Arius taught that "There was a

time when Christ was not." The church wants us to be clear that Jesus was fully God,

uncreated, the second person of the Trinity, and eternally existent with the Father. There

are other boundaries besides the Creeds, such as the plain meaning of the word of God.

Within the boundaries of orthodoxy, there is room for Christians to disagree about many

things. Christians do not have to agree on every point of doctrine, much less of politics,

in order to remain in communion with each other. Thanks be to God! Christians have in-

house debates about many things, like predestination and free will; church polity; views

of end-times; and how to view Baptism and Eucharist. We can disagree about these

things and still recognize each other as genuine believers. Even so, there are real limits to

acceptable disagreement. That is what the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 decided: Gentiles

need not become Jews first in order to become Christians, but they must abstain from

sexual immorality. The Windsor Report affirmed this understanding for today. The

boundaries of orthodoxy are narrower than simply the Creeds. Heresy is cruel, and our

loving God protects us from danger through these boundaries.

3. PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE

We pray after the sermon and creed as part of our response to the Word of God.

How God longs for us to respond to him! Robert Webber, in his book Worship is a Verb,

tells the story of meeting with his teenaged son for breakfast. As he asked his son how he

was doing, the son grunted out one-word replies. Have any of you ever been there?

Robert became so frustrated with this stunted communication that he reached out and

took hold of his son's arm and said, "Boy! I'm trying to connect with you, and right now

it's not happening!" The son said, "Oh! Sorry, Dad, I was not really here with you." And

the boy proceeded to tell his Dad how it really was for him in school, and more. I imagine

that God is like that Father with us, waiting for a significant, real response from us.

After the word preached, now we know better how to pray in response. We pray

together because Jesus taught us to. He taught us to pray, "Our Father," not "My Father,"

as a sign that we are to pray together. Jesus taught us in Matthew 18:19 that when two or

three of us agree on earth on what we ask, it will be done for us by his Father in Heaven.

So we say Amen at the end of our prayers, in agreement with what we just prayed. I

think many believers don't believe that any promise any more, because we have prayed,

and didn't get the answer we wanted. Implicit in this promise is a condition Jesus gave

elsewhere, that we pray in His Name, which means, according to His will. We pray

written prayers when we gather, and we also pray extemporaneous prayers. We pray in

general categories because if we didn't, we would pray only for the things we care about

personally. Even if you don't know anyone personally who has ever been to prison, God

cares about prisoners. God cares about the lost, and he cares about the sick, and He cares

about the hungry. God wants us to care as well. These prayers are for us as well as for

God. Praying changes us.

We say thanksgivings because we Americans are prone to complain. Did any of

you complain about the rain this week? If we are abiding in Christ, we will thank God

for the rain, for all the blessings that come in various disguises. When we pray free

thanksgivings, that is a great time for a quick praise report of answered prayer. Thanks

be to God for Bennett Schwarting's healing! We can't all be mothers, but we all had

mothers. Let's thank God for our mothers today. We will have our open mike for

Mother's Day during our time of Thanksgiving. You are welcome to honor your mother

publicly by sharing a very brief story of how your mother has blessed you. Let's pray

together now.

We shall continue next week with instruction on the Liturgy of the Table. May

God bless you as you worship Him in spirit and in truth. Amen.

Please rise: The peace of the Lord be always with you.