January 7, 2007 Sermon

Caught
Acts 16:16-34

Under the leadership of our music director, Jill Justin, the Praise Team has started studying a book. Called The Unquenchable Worshipper, it is by Matt Redman, the same man who wrote the new-to-us song Heart for Worship. We hope this exercise will help us gain inspiration as we lead our congregation in our praise worship services. Redman starts with the idea that nothing can quench the worship of people who have the Spirit of Christ. From him we take our theme today: Worship God even in sorrow.

To illustrate how real people with real sorrow can worship God, we look first at the life of Fanny Crosby. Born in 1820, in infancy Crosby caught a cold that caused an eye infection. Treatments with hot poultices blinded her. Yet at the tender age of eight years, she wrote this poem:

O what a happy soul am I!
Although I cannot see,
I am resolved that in this world
Contented I will be.

How many blessings I enjoy,
That other people don’t.
To weep and sigh because I’m blind,
I cannot, and I won’t.

Crosby wrote about 8,000 songs of praise to Jesus Christ in her ninety years on this earth. Among her works are Jesus Is Tenderly Calling You Home and Blessed Assurance. She inspired millions with her music and speeches. I have sat in a hotel conference center and listened to hundreds of Koreans sing her To God Be the Glory, in Korean.

But maybe you cannot relate to such a relentlessly positive spirit. Maybe Fanny Crosby’s determined optimism, her powerful spirituality, overwhelms you. We’ll grant her sincerity, we think, but please spare us her fervor. Okay, she overcame her blindness and wrote a bunch of great songs, but we cannot always gather our spirits to face our problems. She had great sorrow, she kept her faith strong, and good for her. Just do not ask us to stay so happy. We have to pay the mortgage.

We can feel trapped in our troubles. We have financial, relational, health, and other challenges to face. But if we cannot worship God in the midst of sorrow how can we claim that our faith has real power? I do not advocate trying to hide our sorrows beneath a blanket of happy-go-lucky spirituality. I do not advocate trying to pretend that our Christianity makes all our problems go away. I do advocate, instead, that we worship God from the very heart of our sorrows.

We just read how the Apostle Paul worshipped God even when desperate. Paul, Silas, and their traveling companions had wandered into Philippi, a city on the eastern Greek frontier. There, they met a few Christians already worshipping Jesus out by the banks of a river. A slave girl tailed them there one day; she had what Luke, the author of Acts, calls a “spirit of divination”. A powerful spirit within her enabled her to tell fortunes—for a price. Her owners made a tidy profit by her.

This slave girl’s spirit clued her in to the truth of Paul’s beliefs and preaching. Drawn by the power of God’s Holy Spirit, which she recognized in Paul, she followed him around, crying, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” Imagine having somebody tracking you all day, yelling that. Paul finally called on the spirit in her to leave. She immediately fell silent. The problem was, she fell silent in every spiritual way, including fortune-telling. Her owners lost the income she had brought them. They went to the authorities to complain, falsely accusing Paul of disturbing the peace.

This was not the first, nor would it be the last, time Paul faced this charge. It is nothing more than misdemeanor to us. But the Romans feared public unrest above all else. You could get executed for it. In fact, the Jews got Jesus by telling lies about his supposed incitements to the mobs to riot. This time Paul and Silas got flogged and thrown into prison. The jailer tossed them into an inner dungeon and chained their ankles to stocks, huge blocks of wood. They sat in filth on the floor, the horrific wounds on their freshly flayed backs causing them agony. And they sang hymns of praise to Jesus, in whose name they now wallowed in pain.

Luke tells us that God sent an earthquake to spring Paul and Silas loose from prison. The next morning they worshipped Jesus together with the newly converted jailer. Perhaps we, too, could worship God in our sorrow if we received such a miraculous deliverance, but note that Paul and Silas sang praises to Jesus Christ before he freed them from prison. Can you and I ever hope to worship God in our sorrows? Can we worship him while still blind, as Fanny Crosby did? Can we worship him while still imprisoned, as Paul and Silas did?

We have met one woman, Fanny Crosby, and one man, Paul. Time to meet a second woman, Lisa Beamer. You may recognize her name; her husband, Todd, was one of the men on United Airlines flight 93 on September 11, 2001 who rushed the cockpit and prevented the Islamist terrorists from flying into the U.S. Capitol or White House. Todd uttered the now-famous words, “Let’s roll”, as they started forward.

Lisa Beamer has become a widow with two sons, and a daughter born four months after her husband’s heroic death. She is a devout Christian. She has appeared on television and has made speeches in the years since 9/11. She has never wavered in her message: she still believes in God, despite her tragic loss. She still worships God whole-heartedly. In her book, Let’s Roll, she writes, “After losing Todd I had wanted to remain as inconspicuous as possible, but Mordecai's rejoinder to Esther- `Who knows? Maybe God has you here for such a time as this'- echoed through my mind." Lisa Beamer has answered this call upon her life. Her example can inspire us to answer our calls, too.

Lisa Beamer did not volunteer for this mission. She did not want it. She makes certain her audiences know she does not see herself as heroic. She tells stories about how short-tempered she has become with her children, and how guilty that makes her feel when she reflects that they are her only living link with Todd. She does not claim to have any special spiritual insights, no new teachings. What she does have is the honest story of how the Holy Spirit has enabled her to keep her faith and to worship Jesus despite the sorrows she bears.

I do not call upon anybody to volunteer for pain. Trying to hurt so you can become a better witness for Christ does make you heroic, it makes you unstable. I do not call upon us to pretend our faith is stronger that it actually is. Pretending to believe does not make you exemplary, it makes you a false witness.

I do call upon us all to become unquenchable worshippers. I call upon us to pray to God for the spiritual power to worship Jesus Christ no matter what happens in our lives. I call upon this church to worship Jesus together with such energy that we would be so fed by our common worship that we might keep our spirits alive all the way to our next worship service a week hence. I call upon us to become honest witnesses to visitors that we can worship Jesus despite the real sorrows we bear. If you cannot follow the example of unique people like Paul and Fanny Crosby, follow the example of an average Christian like Lisa Beamer: worship God even in your sorrows.

The Praise Team hopes to become more authentically spiritual as it leads us all in worshipping Jesus Christ. I ask you to hold us accountable to this goal. With love and yet with honesty, let is know how well we are conveying the Spirit. Meanwhile, I call upon us all to court the Spirit through prayer and worship. Let us all grow in the Spirit. Worship can bring healing and hope even to grieving widows and imprisoned men. Make the commitment to worship God even in the midst of your sorrows.