Scripture Lesson: Matthew 13:1-9

Sermon Transcript for July 13, 2008

By Pastor Bob Coleman

As Rick has prepared us for this time of the message, it sets us up for the next two weeks, today and next Sunday, when Pastor Andy and I will be bringing a two-part sermon. I bring it first today and he’ll bring the second next week. And it relates to worship—the meaning and purpose and participation of worship, particularly the location. I’m going to read a scripture that is the Lectionary for today. And it’s only because it is a very familiar parable, but also because of the very ending phrase. That’s why we entitled it “The Eyes and Ears of the Gospel”.

So in respect and honor of Christ speaking these words to us, let us stand as we hear the gospel this morning. Matthew 13:1-9, “That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake. Such large crowds gathered around Him that he got into a boat and sat in it while all the people stood on the shore. Then He told them many things in parables saying, ‘A farmer went out to sow his seed and as he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came out the plants were scorched and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among the thorns which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil where it produced a crop a hundred, sixty, or thirty times what was sowed. He who has ears let them hear.’” May God add wisdom to the reading of this His holy word. Thanks be to God. Please be seated.

Actually, I wanted to entitle it “The eyes, ears, nose and throat of the Gospel” but it just gave the wrong connotation initially. The eyes and the ears, Jesus said, ‘Those without ears listen”. In another place Jesus said, ‘Open your eyes that you might see.” Other places He said, the Scripture tells us, ‘Taste and know that the Lord is God.” Jesus says, “Think about these thing” using our mind. Our eyes, our ears, our taste, yes, touch and know that the Lord is real. All of these senses, the deep participation as we say when we come to worship, we bring not just our heart or our mind but our mind and heart together.

So this morning I want to share with you to be a reminder or maybe for a first time indicator of some of the signs and symbols of this place of worship. You see, you’ve already taken the first step. You’ve come; you are in the presence. You entered in through the doors. Well, it’s common sense; how can you get in other than to climb through windows or such. But we think about that as very common place. You have to have a door to come in to. Someone has not yet asked, and I know they will after this service, “Where did you worship when you were in southeast Alaska on your vacation?” Nobody has asked that. Well, I won’t give you an answer if you ask me later. I’m going to show you the answers to that question. For Joyce and I went in to the presence of the Lord. I first want to expand your mind to recognize that, yes, this is a holy place, this sanctuary. And we are going to talk some more about the signs and symbols but I want us first to think about the grandeur of God and where we literally can worship any place that we are. So yes, by popular demand, some of you are going to see some of my pictures. I said some of you. If you want to close your eyes that’s fine with me.

What I want to show you first is what Alaska and other places like it are known for—the mountains, the glaciers, the grandeur of that great creation which God has made for us. And another one which is a very common one are the waterfalls. They are all over. I mean if you have mountain snow it has to melt to come down and that’s where you create the waterfalls or God has through his majesty of creation. And yes there are days when the sun does shine in Alaska and there are nights when the sun does set in Alaska. About 10:30 p.m.-11:00 p.m. as we were taking the Alaska Ferry a beautiful sunset. It’s always something that is inspiring to me. Sunrise or sunset, particularly when the color is as vibrant as this was. And, yes, there is even the night in Alaska or anyplace else in the world. This was on the way to Sitka. It’s a little dark and may seem dismal at first but it was very serene and quiet that night as the ferry was getting ready to pull in to Sitka. It just gently pushing the water ahead of it, not making much of a wave, but the ripple that you see and the clouds that were hanging because of the moisture in the air. A beautiful experience for that.

And another one that shows where we walked many trails and saw the beauty which is a little too dark, I need to lighten it up a little bit for you, but at least you can see the water and the sky and the mountains and the trees creating sort of an avenue through which you visually, if not physically, can walk through and be in the presence of God. And, yes, you can’t go to Alaska without someone saying, ‘Did you see an eagle?’ And we did! This one I captured on film with my digital. A beautiful sight but when you take 150 pictures you eventually come up with one or two good ones. And Joyce was particularly thrilled by this simple, but beautiful creation of God—a water lily flower. One that tells us that God creates the grandeur of the mountains and the simplicity of a small blossom.

Beauty was everywhere. Worship was everywhere. Being in the presence of God was everywhere. In fact, when you come in here you stand before God, you kneel before God, you even sit before the Lord and that’s part of who we are to be. The very structure here is one where when the pitched roof is used, it points toward heaven. The structure should give you a sense of honor and glory and majesty. Maybe not like the mountains of Alaska but truly to give you a sense of when you come here to think about upward to heaven. It’s a little harder for me to worship in a square roofed building and particularly one that does not have a cross. And I’ve been in a few. There’s a reason behind it and I don’t agree with the reason because I think the cross being at the top of you sight, but also on the hymnals before you, on the baptistery over here, or if you haven’t noticed coming in to the church, on the steeple and in the prayer garden over here. The crosses are everywhere as well as they should be because the cross is a part of who we are reminded of as the key and principle symbol of sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And there are crosses inside in Price Hall, on the left. And when the light is just right in the morning or evening, they fashioned the doors to have crosses in windows so that the light would shine upon the floors as you see upon the right.

The signs and symbols are there. Do you have eyes to see? Do you have ears to hear? Do you understand the meaning of what we have before us? It is important for us to see even the symbols that are present physically around. For example, the very message of the trinity. The trinity is the representation of God as creator, God as savior, and God as sustainer. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And it’s a little small, but if you come up close, and I encourage you sometime to do so, on the very left is the hand of God coming down. The hand of God as creator in a sense like Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling where God is reaching out to touch Adam and to create life in that way. And the middle symbol is the one of the Lamb of God so that we can know that Christ is our savior, the sacrificial lamb. And the third symbol on the right is the dove itself symbolizing the Holy Spirit descending upon us, upon Christ, upon this gathering here today. Think of that, carried forth, as I have been told that this is from the old church downtown, to keep the history and the movement coming forward in that way. And, yes, the fourth symbol is the crown of thorns up at the top that reminds us of Christ’s sacrifice.

Continual reminders so that the altar below, where we have communion, is a place where we can come to receive something that reminds us so much of who we are. And over on this window, a dove which is a reminder of the communion itself. And if you hadn’t noticed it, the very shape of the sanctuary is in the shape of a cross. The aisle comes down and completes at the altar which is the vertical. And the horizontal goes from that window to this window. It wasn’t just a way to place some chairs over there or some tables over here for the bell choir. It truly is to represent even in the physical structure of a church, the cross as the center.

Now I want to also point out to you that the trinity is many other places. You probably have not noticed the very end, in a very artistic way, of each pew is designed and cut in to the word for the trinity. And one more, this is the one that some of you know very much and very truthfully because your history is with you and you’ve carried it from family to generation to generation. And some of you are very new in to this church and don’t have that sense of connection yet. But on each pew there is a plate. And I want to read two of them to you. One is current because it says, “Given by Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Petro, Kent, and Trent”. That’s a name we know; they still attend. And then also, “Given by Lee S. Jarrett and Dr. D.L. and Elizabeth Jarrett Fields in memory of Evelyn Jarrett”. I don’t know that person long since gone, but what these remind you of is not only do you trod where people have trod before, but you sit where people have sat before. And that gives us a sense that a sanctuary is a place where the crowd of witnesses that Pastor Andy spoke of in his prayer. The great crowd of witnesses of those faithful who went on not just generations but centuries, millennia before us and have placed their footprints in this church in the literal and figurative sense in the old place downtown and new place here. The sense of the power of ongoing stream of faithful worshippers that help us to know fully and completely that we are in the presence of the Lord. Signs and symbols of the sanctuary, they are very important, eternity further carried on in an artistic way on the kneeling rail. A place where you can come, literally, to be in the presence of God. But you can in the grandeur of the mountains of Alaska. That’s where we worshipped. It was a place that reminded us every time that we were there.

And in preparation for next week when Pastor Andy will bring more of a personal identification and a sense of how to engage on a regular basis in worship in a personal way, I want to share with you the scripture which was the inspiration for our opening hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of all. It comes from Isaiah, Chapter 6. I’m going to read it to you and share it with you because in the very first eight versus of that Chapter 6 of Isaiah, Isaiah spells out for us the components of worship and how they reflect on what I just shared with you. As it is shared with you, the beginning of the passage is in to the presence. You can not worship God until you are in the presence of God. Now literally God is everywhere. So simply God is waiting for us, but now it is God’s presence whether it is in a church like this or in our own backyard or driving to work or whatever we might be doing. We can be literally in worship at any location. But Isaiah, of course, is carrying forth with his presence where he says as it is recorded, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on the throne, high and exalted, and the train of His robe filled the temple. Above Him were seraphs, each with six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty: the whole earth is full of his glory.’”

Well, I’ll be honest, if I came into this sanctuary or another place and saw seraphs and cherubim’s flying and covering their face and feet and all of that, I would have a different emotion than I have when I normally come here. Wouldn’t you? What would be your emotion? For me it would be one of recognition that we are in a sense of awe and wonder. So even as we see in Scripture, at the sound of their voices, of the angels that were speaking, “the doorposts and the thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.” Now I suppose technology, we could do that for you and make the walls shake and we could enter smoke in to here and sort of create the environment for you. No, that’s not the point; that’s a tricks kind of a thing. It’s a sense of awe and wonder though even if there is nothing else happening but just being here. That’s in the presence of the Lord.

So awe and wonder is a part of our worship. And, yes, fear because of course if you saw those angels and heard the doorposts shaking and smelled the smoke you too might express what Isaiah did when he said, “Woe to me, I cried. I’m ruined. For I’m a man of unclean lips and I live among the people of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” That’s probably how I would feel, that sense of awe and wonder turning to true fear. How can we, mere mortals, just broken human beings, come in to the presence of God? How can we? Well, simply because God tells us in the next verse what He will do and what He did through Jesus Christ. It’s that we have for us forgiveness. “Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, ‘See this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sins atoned.’”

With that Isaiah knew of his forgiveness. With his forgiveness he moves on to the awareness now that he doesn’t have the right to be in the presence of God, but he has the privilege for God has made it so. God invites us to be in His presence. God wants us to be in His presence and to come with a sense of awe and wonder and, yes, even fear knowing that we also hear the words of grace of Jesus Christ that we are forgiven. But it doesn’t stop with just that said. It could! The chapter could be ended; the scripture could be done. But there is a little bit more that needs to be done and that is that God now moves Isaiah into the choosing, into the setting. “Then I heard the voice of the Lord say, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ ‘And I said,’ Isaiah said, ‘Here am I, send me.’”

There must become that moment when we leave that place. There’s that time when we come back from Alaska. There’s the time when we end our formal worship and you leave and exit out the door. I hope that as Pastor Andy will share with you more next week, you’ll get a deeper sense of that choosing and the sending. The understanding of who we are, not just because of what God has done but the way God has created us.

So my hope for you today is that you have had the eyes and ears of yourselves opened up. Your mind and your heart may be a bit enriched by the symbolism that is around in all of God’s creation and the very presence and design of this church. Every place within it is intended to be a reminder of the presence of God, not just a formal place of worship. Rick sang about coming to the altar so I want us to give you an opportunity to this morning as we will conclude this service with our closing response, “Open my eyes that I may see, open your ears, open your mind, open your heart to the Lord.” That we will close this formal time in the message with a prayer time. Plenty of silence first because, you see, part of the awe and wonder of the majesty that we found in southeast Alaska was the quietness of it. No human disturbance; it’s just there. God is just present. And then some guided expressions. If you would like to come and pray with me during that time, that’s fine. Or, of course, obviously pray there, if you would like to come forward to the altar rail. Or if you would like to stay afterwards and Pastor Andy will be glad to stay and pray with you. I’ll greet you at the door. If you have that feeling, sense of wanting to take a few extra minutes to be with God this morning, I give you that invitation.

So here we are, a place called a house of worship for your eyes, your ears, your very being, the stimulation of all your senses come here to engage and to be a part of God but first of all knowing of the generations who have gone in strong preparation to say, “This is to be a holy place. Let us have it set aside where people can find solace, relief, joy, feeling, and now prayer.” So let us enter now into a time of prayer. “Most powerful and holy God, spiritually we are before you. You’ve opened the doors of your house and called us in. We’ve prepared a place with candles and lights and signs and symbols. We sense the history here—the families who have gone before, the people who have been faithful in their journey. We sense the presence of forgiveness, the grace that we find through your Son and our Savior, Jesus Christ. We feel your Spirit. Maybe you choose not to come as angels with wings and smoke and thunder and fire, but in stillness, a small voice inwardly speaking to us. “You are my child. It is you that I love.” Thank you, Lord, for this place, this sanctuary where the world’s troubles and heartaches follow us where we can trust that you are present. We can feel the forgiveness and we can move forward to live our lives as forgiven, to do your ministry. And may we be able, by your words, to see with our eyes and hear with our ears the places of worship that you have for us in your world that we might experience you everywhere. In the name of Christ our Lord we pray, amen.”

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