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This sermon is based on the following scriptures.  Thanks to my colleagues on the Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary email discussion group for their input and discussion on these passages, especially Anne Le Bas.

Isaiah 58:9b-14
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17

My paraphrase of the Luke passage is as follows:

Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And a woman was there who had a spirit of disease for eighteen years. She was completely bent over and was never able to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he summoned her and said, “Woman, you are set free from your disease.” Then he laid hands on her, and at once she stood up straight and praised God.

But the leader of the synagogue began to speak with indignation because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath. He said to the crowd, “There are six days on which it is proper to do work.  Come on those days and be healed, but not on the Sabbath day.”

Then the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or his donkey from the stall and lead it away to give it water? Then shouldn’t this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set loose from this bondage on the Sabbath day?”

When he said this, all his adversaries were put to shame; and all the people rejoiced at all the glorious things that were done by him.

After I came up with today’s sermon title,
I was reminded of a series of old jokes many of you have no doubt heard.
They have to do with an 800 pound gorilla.
The jokes go like this:
Where does an 800-pound gorilla sit?” “Anywhere it wants to.”
Or “What do you call an 800-pound male gorilla?” “You call him Sir.”
Maybe you heard of some others?

In any case, the title of my sermon today “How Do You Worship a Consuming Fire?” begs for some kind of answer,
and my first response is to answer it by simply saying, “carefully,
very carefully.”
That’s how you worship the God whom the writer of Hebrews calls “a consuming fire.”
In our text from Hebrews 13 we read:

You have not come to something that can be touched,
a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest,
and the sound of a trumpet,
and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them.
(For they could not endure the order that was given,
“If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death.”
Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, “I tremble with fear.”)
But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God,
the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering,
and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven,
and to God the judge of all,
and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect,
and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant.
Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken,
let us give thanks,
by which we offer to God an acceptable worship with reverence and awe;
for indeed our God is a consuming fire.

Our God is a consuming fire.
Of course, what the writer of Hebrews is talking about goes back to Exodus, chapter 19, where God leads Moses and the Israelites to Mt. Sinai,
where they will receive the 10 commandments and other laws.
This mountain of the Lord was a scary place to be.
The verses we read in Hebrews attest to this fact,
as do these verses from Exodus:

And it happened on the third day in the morning,
that there were thunders and lightnings,
and a thick cloud upon the mountain.
And the voice of the trumpet was exceedingly loud,
so that all the people in the camp trembled.
And Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet with God.
And they stood at the lower part of the mountain.
And Mount Sinai was smoking, all of it,
because The LORD came down upon it in fire.
And the smoke of it went up like the smoke of a furnace,
and the whole mountain quaked greatly.
And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and became very strong, Moses spoke, and God answered him by a voice.
And The LORD came down upon Mount Sinai, on the top of the mountain.
And The LORD called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. And The LORD said to Moses, Go down. Command the people,
lest they break through to The LORD to gaze, and many of them perish.
And let the priests also, who come near to The LORD, sanctify themselves,
lest The LORD break forth upon them.  (Exodus 19:16-22 MKJV)
When the Israelites worshiped God, it could be pretty scary stuff.

And I know a little about scary worship myself.
There were times when the worship services in my boyhood church got a little scary as well.
I remember when my dad started a little store front church in Lebanon, KY.
A church not unlike those across the street from us .
If there was one thing my dad and Pentecostal preachers knew how to do,
it was how to scare the hell out of congregation members by invoking scenes like the ones we read about in Hebrews and Exodus.
But instead of the fires of Mt. Sinai, they specialized in the fires of hell.
There were times when my dad was preaching that I would swear I could see the flames of hell through the back windows of that small church.
Though not an educated man, having quit school when he was 14,
my father knew how to paint a picture with his words.
especially  when it came to describing the eternal torment that sinners would endure after their deaths.

“Hell is a place where the fire is not quenched and the worm never dies,”
my dad would proclaim with a shout.
And if I did not completely understand the relationship between an undying worm and hellfire,
the image nevertheless made my skin crawl.
“You will be tormented for all time,
and you would give anything you ever had – all your money and possessions-
just to have a drop of water placed on the tip of your tongue.
But you will never taste water in that God-forsaken place.”
“The flames of hell will lick around your body for eternity.
An d just when you think that you’ve felt the worst pain you could ever feel,
those demons will ratchet up the fire a little more,
and you will scream in agony and curse the day you were born and all the days that you failed to give your life over to Jesus.
Today is the day of your salvation,
and if you leave this church today without asking Jesus into your heart,
you risk damning your soul to hell forever.”

I had heard words like these many times before, and not just from my dad.
Hell was number two out of the top five sermons of Pentecostal preachers.
Number five was sexual immorality.
Four was baptism in the Holy Ghost as evidenced by speaking in tongues.
Condemning the so-called Christians in other so-called churches -
like Catholics and Presbyterians and Methodists was number three.
The only sermon preached more frequently than the one on the dangers of Hell was the one about the Second Coming of our Lord and Savior,
Jesus Christ.
Yet another fear inducing message that tried to get people on the straight and narrow way.

By the time I was a teenager, I had heard all of sermons countless times.
It got to where I knew what the preachers would say before they said the words themselves.
I  knew the rhythms and cadences that the best preachers employed,
and I even practiced, from time to time,
how to add an extra syllable to words at the end of sentences,
like “You need to turn to Gawdda!”  and “Praise the Lordda!”
But though I  knew that everything theses preachers  said was geared to getting people out their seats and down to the altar to confess their sins and be born again.
And though I also knew that in part it was all a show,
meant to entertain and bring about the desired response,
even so, there were many times when I looked out of that window behind my dad’s pacing figure,
and I would see the flames of Hell waiting to claim me, body and soul.

Now for some, that’s what it means to worship a God called consuming fire.
Worship of God necessarily involves provoking fear in the hearts and minds of listeners, thereby also inspiring them to also change their lives.
And to be truthful, there is some merit to this idea.
Worship of a living God ought to make us at least a little wary of the power to which we so casually pray.

One of my favorite writers is Annie Dillard,
and in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk, we find this oft quoted passage:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs,
sufficiently sensible of conditions.
Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?
Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?
The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets,
mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.
It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church;
we should all be wearing crash helmets.
Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares;
they should lash us to our pews.
For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense,
or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

Or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.
It seems to me that this is what Jesus does in today’s passage from Luke.
In the gospel, a woman, bent double by disease for eighteen years comes to her local synagogue.
Maybe she was a regular,
or maybe she made some extra effort to come on this day because she knew Jesus would be there.
But either way it must have been a struggle.
If you can’t stand upright everything is difficult.
Dressing, eating, shopping, getting around.
You can’t even see where you’re going when your eyes can only stare at the ground.

But this woman has more with which to cope than just her physical illness.
Being bent double means never being able to look others in the eye.
You can’t see them properly, and neither can they see you.
So you are below their gaze, under their radar, so to speak.
For this woman this meant that people probably no longer saw her at all -
and certainly not as an equal or a proper, real person.
To her local community she is a nobody.
She is even a nobody to the good people of her synagogue, her church.
And yet in spite of this, or maybe because of this,
when Jesus sees this woman in the synagogue,
in the place of worship, he calls to her.
Further, he speaks to her directly,
something that in itself was against the religious rules of the day,
“Woman,” he says, “You are set free from your disease.”
Jesus then laid his hands on her,
another violation of the cultural codes,
and immediately she stands up straight and begins praising God.

Now you would think that everybody there would have joined this woman in a time of praise and thanksgiving.
But you would have thought wrong.
Many people only see that rules have been broken and that their place of worship has been disrupted by the traveling Rabbi and this woman.
The reaction of the synagogue leader is one that others shared.
When Jesus heals this woman, all he can do is complain.
All he can see is that Jesus has broken the law.
He is full of indignation,
and he doesn’t just make one odd, stray, and insensitive comment.
No, Luke tells us that he kept saying to the crowd over and over again,
“there are six days on which work should be done.”
He goes on and on about it,
and many in the church that day nodded their heads in agreement.
While the woman herself was praising God for her healing,
this leader and the church regulars are having none of it.

It is a staggeringly cruel reaction,
and it tells us how warped these folk’s view of worshiping God had become.
As Jesus points out,
they would treat their oxen and donkeys better than they would this woman -
she is less than an animal to them.
But for Jesus, this woman in the synagogue is a daughter of Abraham.
She is an equal member of the family of Israel.
He saw her as she was,
and nothing, nothing was more important than helping her to see that too,
so she could stand tall and walk straight,
not just in body but in spirit.

She’d been bent double for 18 years.
Perhaps the leader of the synagogue thought that one more day would make no difference.
But to Jesus it was an abomination to put religious laws and rituals and respectability  before the needs of one of God’s own children.
It was an abomination even to think of waiting till the Sabbath was over.
She was here, now.
She was in need, now.
He could help her, now, and that was all there was to it.

So you see, do you not, that true worship of a living God has consequences for how we live in community.
True worship is not about singing so many hymns or songs,
hearing a good sermon (or a mediocre one for that matter),
saying a few prayers,
and then leaving the comfort and sanctity of the sanctuary so we can resume our lives as if what we do here has no bearing on how we live out there.
True worship breaks through the ordinary and commonplace and shakes us to the core of who we are and who we should be in Christ.
In the case of the people in the synagogue that day,
true worship required them to welcome and embrace an outsider, a nobody,
it required that they pay more attention to the needs of this women than they did to their religious traditions and rituals.
It meant that they needed to see her as Jesus saw her.
As a woman and person of worth.
And until these things were a reality in their church,
they may have been doing many other things,
but the one thing they weren’t doing was worshiping the living God.

Worship is not about us, after all,
it is about praising this living God, this consuming fire,
which burns away our pretensions and prejudices.
It is about opening our lives to a God who draws us out to new ways of living and loving,
who takes us places from which we can never return,
not if we have truly worshiped him, even a little bit.

True worship does not end after an hour spent in church on Sunday morning,
indeed, true worship never ends,
and it changes us and shapes us in our day to day living.
And if that is not happening,
if what we do here for one hour on Sunday morning has no impact on how we live our lives during the other 167 hours of each week,
if what we do here makes no difference in how we treat people,
even people very different than we are,
if the prayers we pray and songs we sing do not shape our living,
then what we do here is not worship at all,
but rather a going through the motions of ritual and habit.

This is what Isaiah is talking about in chapter 58 of his book,
and I close with his words:

Shout out, do not hold back!
Lift up your voice like a trumpet!
Announce to my people their rebellion,
Day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that practiced righteousness
and did not forsake the law of their God;
they ask of me righteous judgements,
they delight to draw near to God.
`Why do we fast, but you do not see?
Why do we humble ourselves, but you do not notice?’

Look, you serve your own interest on your fast-day,
and oppress all your workers.
Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.
Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

If you would do these things,
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up quickly;
your vindicator shall go before you,
the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.

This is the power of true worship,
a worship that transcends the walls of any synagogue or church,
a worship that impacts the way we live, communally and individually,
This is how we worship a consuming fire:
not just by what we do in here,
but by what we do out there as well.
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