Making Sacrifices to Keep God First

Brad Sullivan
Second Advent, Year A (RCL)
Sunday, December 9th, 2007
Emmanuel, Houston
Isaiah 11:1-10
Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
Romans 15:4-13
Matthew 3:1-12

Today, I’d like to talk about the corporate nature of our lives as Christians and the practices of our faith in the context of repentance as we prepare for Christmas. When John the Baptist was preaching and calling for people to repent, he wasn’t talking to individuals. He wasn’t saying, “You there, you sir need to repent.” Rather, John the Baptist was saying “Y’all repent. All of you, repent.” The word he used even, for repent, was second person, plural, not addressing any one person. John was calling the people of Israel to repentance.
The people of Israel seemed to have forgotten who they were; they had forgotten their corporate identity. Their identity was a people who had been set apart by God as his people, and they were to put God first. Individuals were to put God first in their lives as a part of the larger community of Israel which was to put God first. This meant sacrifice on the part of the people of Israel, cultural sacrifice. Israel was not like other nations. There were some things the Israelites could not do as the people of Israel. They had cultural practices, dietary restrictions, a faith, and a worship life which set them apart from the other nations.
Being set apart from the practices of other nations was not snobbery on their part. They had customs and practices to keep them focused on God, to keep God first in their lives. Throughout their history, when they began adopting the customs of other nations, they ended up losing sight of or forgetting about God. By adopting the practices of other nations, the people of Israel would become like other nations, nations which didn’t follow God. As their behavior changed, so did their beliefs. Stopping their own practices and behaving like other nations led to worshipping like other nations and believing like other nations. Time and again, the people of Israel ended up worshipping idols, rather than God, and time and again, prophets would call the people of Israel back to worshipping God alone.
So John the Baptist was calling the people of Israel to repentance. All of you Israelites together, stop following the practices of other nations and begin following the way of life given to us by God. John was calling for corporate repentance to a way of life lived by individuals within the community of the Israel.
Hearing John’s call today, then, we too are called to corporate repentance. Like the people of Israel, we are being called to examine how the practices of the world around us have taken over the practices of our faith. How have we let the world in which we live push aside the practice of our faith? Some practices of our faith are daily prayer, scripture reading, service to others, corporate worship, and others. For an example of how we let the culture around us interfere with the practices of our faith, I am going to talk about corporate worship, and how we sometimes allow other things in our lives to get in the way of Sunday worship. Let me be clear, before I go on, this is an illustration, not a condemnation. With what follows, I am illustrating how we allow other practices to stop our faith practices and how that can be damaging to us.
Coming together for Eucharist or any worship on Sundays is a central piece to our corporate life. As Christians, worshipping God together on the day of Resurrection is an important way we practice our faith. There are many things, however, which we allow to prevent us from coming together for the Eucharist on Sundays. Maybe we’re tired, maybe we’re out of town. We have sports, shopping, a myriad of other activities which we just don’t want to have to give up. Now I realize some people work, and some have little choice in their jobs, but there are still many things which we simply allow to stop us from worshipping. There are things which individuals decide they would rather do than come to church.
Realizing we have this clash of cultures, worshipping on Sundays and other things happening in our lives on Sundays, we need some kind of solution. One solution is to have services at a different time, that way we can have our cake and eat it too. There are many problems, however, to this way of thinking, and the mindset is basically this. “Worship gets in the way of other things in my life. I don’t want to give up those things so you should change when we do worship.” To say, ‘hold worship at another time so I can go do other things,’ however, is to seek church and worship as a consumer, rather than as a part of a community who worships together.
Worship is not something which the clergy do for the laity. Clergy do not hold services for the laity to come to and be fed as passive observers. We don’t come to worship the way we come to movies or other diversions. We come together in worship as a community. Clergy come simply as one part of the community to worship together with the community.
When we as individuals stop worshipping with the community on Sundays, the whole body suffers. As a people, we begin to lose our identity as followers of Christ. Following Christ, worshipping God, living lives of service to others become things we do rather than who we are. We stop being held together as a community and become a group of individuals who consume what we like. Put another way, when one of us removes our self from the community, the Body of Christ suffers loss, and the individual atrophies spiritually, emotionally, as a person. When we allow other priorities to stop us from prayer and service, we stop being who God called us to be.
We were called to be not just individuals, but a whole people, the Body of Christ. We were called to worship God together, to support one another with daily prayer, to seek opportunities to serve others. We were called to be a light to the nations. As Pastor Janie reminded us last week, put on the armor or light. Together, we put on the armor of light. How can we put on the armor of light? How can we, as a community, repent? How can we prepare the way of the Lord and make his paths straight? Having talked about corporate worship, I am going to talk briefly about daily prayer and service to others.
If you would, please open your prayer books to page 75. Daily Morning Prayer is just what the name implies. The service is designed as a corporate service, but it can still be done as individual prayer, praying not only for self but also for the community. Praying Morning Prayer takes some preparation initially. There are some different prayers for the different seasons of the church year so you actually need to read the small italicized print to get through the service, but it is a wonderful prayer service and worth every amount of effort to familiarize yourself with it.
Look now at page 84. Part of Morning Prayer is to read and pray over scripture, the Psalm or Psalms appointed for the day and the Lessons appointed for the day. These are found at the back of the prayer book. Turn to page 934. Here you have the Daily Office Lectionary. These are readings for every day of the year arranged in a two year cycle. Right now we’re in year two, so on page 937, you can see the readings for this week. These are different from the readings we have during the Eucharist so even today, you can use the daily office readings for your own prayer and devotion time.
Turn back to page 109. This is the last one. An Order of Worship for the Evening is the service we have recommended to use with the cards we handed out last week for use with Advent Wreaths or any prayer this Advent. Praying the daily office using this service or another service you may choose is how we are celebrating Advent this year as a community.
You can see from the prayer book, daily prayer is a foundational part of our life together as Christians and as Episcopalians. There are other daily prayer services and I encourage you all to keep looking through the prayer book for these other services and to begin or continue the practice of daily prayer.
Individual, daily prayer along with corporate worship is part of our life together as the Body of Christ. Living this life of prayer requires sacrifice on our part. Like the people of Israel who made sacrifices to maintain who they were and to keep God first in their lives, we also must make sacrifices in our lives to keep worship, prayer, and service central in our life as the Body of Christ. Hear God’s call to repentance to all of us. What must we each change in our lives in order to live as a light to the nations? What sacrifices must we make in order not to sacrifice our faith and the practice of our faith? Amen.