"Celebrate And Have A Good Time"
A different kind of party.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, May 1, 2005
Text: Zephaniah 3:14-20
We communicate with each other in the same place, at the same time, every week. Every Friday evening, I go downtown to an office building to pick up my wife, Marial, from work. In the entranceway to that building, there is always a man sitting on a blanket. We exchange niceties. We say hello to one another. We ask each other how our week has been, and then I move on through the revolving door and into the building.
A couple of weeks ago when, I walked past this man, he seemed to be in a particularly agitated state. Normally, he sits there quietly and peacefully, and just looks up at me. This time, he had his hands over his ears, and he looked distressed. Knowing as I do that some people with mental illnesses hear things, I wondered if he was going through such a moment, and so I leaned over him and I said, “Are you okay?” He responded by repeating one word over and over: “Noise, noise, noise.”
I realized there was no chance of communicating with him, so I walked around the corner where there didn't seem to be too much noise to me. I decided just to be quiet in my own mind, just to listen. The subway was rumbling underneath; taxis were coming to a screeching halt; a hot dog vendor was trying to get people's attention to sell end-of-the-day hot dogs; buses were thundering down the street; an airplane went overhead; and at a construction site a block away, there was the sound of hammering and thumping and the whine of a construction pulley lifting people up and down.
I realized there was noise - and a lot of it! He was not out of his mind; he was just more aware of his circumstances and his surroundings then I was. So often in the city, it is true that familiarity breeds contempt, and if it doesn't breed contempt, it certainly breeds complacency. We have become so accustomed to environment and the things that we hear and see, that they hardly even register in our consciousness, and neither do the needs around us.
So, too, with this man, who sits in a corner each and every day in the same place. One walks by him as if he is hardly noticeable any more. He is part of the landscape. So often, in the city, we have noise without knowledge and pace without purpose. It is frenetic; it is active; and we don't even see it.
Just last week, I visited New York City. As I was walking along Broadway, I could hear the same sounds that I hear in Toronto: there was the rumbling of buses and the screech of taxis; there was a man in corner speaking Chinese to another man; another conversation in Spanish; a vendor trying to sell magazines. Whether you are at 42nd Street and Broadway, or Yonge and Dundas or King and Bay, all you need to do is close your eyes and there is the same noise of the city. One becomes so accustomed to it that one barely realizes it is there. Our surroundings have become muted, and our sensitivity has become numbed. We have pace without purpose; we have noise without knowledge. That is modern city life!
I was in New York to see the minister in charge of one of the fastest-growing churches there. His name is Tim Keller. In 1989, he started a church that has grown in leaps and bounds. It doesn't have a building; it meets in auditoriums. Tim, along with his team, has become successful and vibrant and passionate about its ministry. At Redeemer Presbyterian Church, the underlying motto, the one thing that really causes them to ask themselves about the nature of their mission, is this: “What kind of city does God want New York to be?” Tim Keller started his ministry there not by asking what kind of congregation should we be, what kind of church should we be; but what kind of city does God want? It followed, therefore, to build a ministry, a mission, a discipleship that reaches that city: the message of the gospel, the heart of the faith.
It struck a chord with me, for it seems that this is the very question that we here at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church need to ask ourselves as we move into the future. We do so, not based just on a contextual assessment of what is going on, but on a profoundly biblical understanding of the importance of the city. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the words from the Book of Zephaniah. This unknown poet, this unknown prophet speaks so powerfully! Listen to his words: “Sing O daughter of Zion, shout aloud O Israel, be glad and rejoice with all your heart O daughter of Jerusalem, for the King, the Lord of Israel is with you.” Look at the language: What is it about? It is about the city. It is about Jerusalem. In the heart of Zephaniah was his passion, his overwhelming desire for his city to know and love and worship the living God. He wanted the daughter of Zion, the daughter of Jerusalem, i.e. the rest of the country of Israel to know and to appreciate and to celebrate the power of God. “O sing O daughter of Zion, shout and be glad!” He wanted to say, “Celebrate O city, and have a good time!”
Now, lest you think I have slipped a cog in my mind and reverted back to Kool and the Gang and their song, and am losing any attachment with today's culture, let me assure you that it is not just that which moves me. Indeed, it is the contrary! A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at my photograph album, and saw photographs taken in the 1970s when I used to go to a nightclub and with me dressed in spandex and a shiny shirt! Trust me, these are not photographs I want to keep anymore! If they are put on the Worldwide Web, my ministry is over, right here and now!
I asked Marial if she would destroy them.
She said, “Under no circumstances! I want to keep these forever and ever to remind you of what you were like!”
Kool and the Gang celebrate and have a good time! Sounds good, doesn't it? The world thinks of celebration and having a good time with a very different set of priorities than Christians do. To celebrate and have a good time in the city, in the eyes and the minds of most people is nothing more than hedonism; nothing more than the baptism of our own materialism; the celebration of our own sensuality; the pride in our own fulfillment.
To celebrate is to make a lot of noise. To celebrate is to have others make noise with you. That is what “celebrate and have a good time” means in the minds of many people within our culture. In a biblical sense, it is far different. Celebration might mean being quiet and acknowledging the presence of God. Having a good time might be doing God's righteousness and God's justice, serving others, loving and worshipping the Almighty, joyfully being with others in the presence of God, doing good, having a conscience at peace and a life that conforms to holiness. To celebrate and have a good time is what Zephaniah wanted for the city of Jerusalem, not on Jerusalem's terms, but on God's terms, for they bring a far deeper and long-lasting celebration.
Zephaniah needed to be clear that the city was between two empires: Assyria was on the decline; Babylon was on the rise; and Jerusalem was going to get caught in the middle not just because of political circumstances, but also because the political leaders of Israel, the kings, had become corrupt. The people had become syncretistic: They had lost their moral foundation; they had forgotten the importance of worship; they were being led in a myriad of directions, but none of them were healthy or holy or towards God.
Zephaniah looks out at the city and he sees that it is coming apart at the seams; he sees that it is going to be vulnerable to the power of the new imperialism growing in Babylon, and he says, “You have to stop, but in stopping, you also have to celebrate. You have to renew your faith. You have to renew your foundations; otherwise, you are going to get lost in the quagmire of your own making.”
At the heart of what Zephaniah was saying was that you have to renew your covenant with God. You start out with that covenant side by celebrating your obligations. Most people do not associate the word “obligation” necessarily with the word “celebration.” On the contrary! We think of an obligation as something demanding rather than something affirming in life. But not so in the mind of Zephaniah. He says, “Do not fear, and do not let your arms become weak.”
In other words, commit yourself to the service of God's kingdom; commit yourself to God's will and God's purpose. Don't let your arms get weak; let your arms get strong in God in order that you may do God's will and purpose. Looking out over the city of Jerusalem, Zephaniah says, “The only way you need not fear, the only way that you can survive, is if you will serve one another and serve God.”
Here at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church, many people do not realize how much we do that every week. We do that through our food bank, which is the fastest-growing food bank in the City of Toronto, and needs continuous attention by volunteers and a continuous flow of food and money and other resources. This week, I met members in our parking lot on their way to deliver “Meals on Wheels.” We have the “Handicapable Ministry,” where we bring in the handicapable from all over the metro area in order that they can worship and be with one another. Financially, we support “The Stop” we support homeless ministries, and we provide support for the Toronto City Mission. We do all manner of things to help people who are in need.
For those who need pastoral care, we have Stephen Ministers, and Jean Hunnisett has made an appeal for more of them. We provide a meeting place for organizations that are seeking to do good for our society. Along with the other Churches-on-the-Hill, we put on the Stephen Lewis event last fall. We now have a whole group of people who are working to help with AIDS in Africa. This fall, we are bringing in Roméo D'Allaire to speak about what we can do for Rwanda. We have created the Community Action Group to make us aware of the needs of the city. Through this radio broadcast, we minister to the city and beyond, to people who can't get to their church and are unable to worship. We bring the word of God and comfort to them.
However, to be a viable church, to be a growing church, to meet the needs not of ourselves, but also of the city, we need to do and be more. Where is our source? Where does the power come from to do this? Zephaniah looks at Jerusalem and he says, “We find in the Lord that he is in our midst, and because he is with us, our arms will be strong.”
A part of the people of Israel's ability to reach Jerusalem was their love for a living God. Elaine Barton-Mains sums up a lot of Christian experience in the last part of the 20th and the early part of the 21st century. She said, “A lot of Christians have made a mistake. We do the following: We worship our work; we work at our play; but we play at our worship.”
Zephaniah understood that for people to really engage the city around them, that needed to be reversed. Worship becomes the launch pad; worship becomes the inspiration; worship becomes the place where the saints see and hear and are inspired about the needs of the city.
We must not only celebrate our obligations, we must also celebrate God's delight in us. One of the beautiful things about this scripture is that it shows that God enjoys us: God celebrates us! When we worship God, God hears our worship and is pleased. When God listens to the sound of our voices, God is excited. God, in God's grace, hears what we have to say, and is enthralled.
John Donne, the great English poet, lived a life of profligacy in his early days. He drank too much; he was promiscuous; and his life, to quote him, was sliding down a hill and he had nothing to hold onto. As his life was spiraling down, he called out to God in his need, and Christ answered him, giving him the power and strength to turn his life around, so much so that he finally met the love of his life, Anne. He thanked God for sending Anne into his life. He married her, and he was blissfully happy, never happier, never more at peace, never more content than when with Anne.
Then, his beloved Anne died, and John Donne once again saw his life spiraling downwards. God had given him this great gift, and now it had been taken away: He was just going down and down and down, and he saw no way out. However, he remembered when he had been like that many years before, how God had come into his life and given him a sense of joy and peace, bursting into his existence to save him. So John Donne turned once again to God. In one of his sonnets on holiness he said:
Except you enthrall me, I never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
John Donne understood the power of God's love. He understood what a difference it made in his life, and it turned him around.
When we celebrate God's love for us, when we celebrate God's inclination towards us, then we truly celebrate! Zephaniah said, “When you reach that moment, you are quiet in the love of the Lord.” Worship gives us the ability to hear that love.
Robert Lee tells the story of a native American from Arizona who visited his good friend in Manhattan. They were walking along a street and the native American said to his friend, “Oh, listen to that cricket!”
His friend looked at him and said, “Are you mad? What cricket?”
He said, “Listen! Listen to the cricket.”
His friend said, “I can't hear the cricket. I can hear the subway rumbling, I can hear the cabs, I can hear people screaming at one another, I can hear New York with all its sounds, but I don't hear a cricket.”
He said, “No, no, listen! I'll go and find the cricket.” So he walked a block and turned the corner - no cricket! He went back in the other direction, and he turned the corner and he went back into an alleyway. There he saw a tree in a pot that was about to be planted, and he looked down and saw a cricket sitting at the base of the tree. He picked the cricket up and held it in his hand, and said, “See, I told you I heard a cricket.”
His friend said, “This is amazing! This is incredible! How on earth did you hear this cricket in the great massive noise of New York City?”
He replied, “Because I have different ears than you do, and I am listening for different things.”
His friend said to him, “Oh, that sounds very good, but that's a little way out, don't you think?”
So the native American reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of quarters and dimes and nickels, and he dropped them on the ground. All of a sudden, everyone within a block turned to look at him, and some started to walk towards him. He said, “You see, what you hear depends on what you are listening for.”
Worship is about listening to the word of God in order that we might hear and in hearing, that we may know the sounds and the needs of our city, so we no longer have noise without knowledge, or pace without purpose. Instead, we celebrate and we have a good time, and we hear the word of God in order that we might exist for the city that God truly loves. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.