October 6, 2024 – Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
Kahu Gary Percesepe
God is a loquacious God. Loquacious means talkative, garrulous, chatty, voluble, verbose, wordy, effusive, noisy, gabby, talky. God talks to us, and God talks a lot!
The writer of the book of Hebrews puts it this way: God “upholds the universe by his word of power.”
You may believe that silence is important in worship, and you’d be right. One of the things that first drew me to Keawala’i was the observance of hāmau—the silence after the sermon. But hāmau in Christian worship is always expectant silence; like a rest mark in a musical score, we pause in anticipation of the next word or reflect upon the previous one. Christian worship inevitably takes shape in words, because God is a loquacious God who just will not stop speaking. God’s word is not a dead letter from the past; the word of God is a live event present in this room.
Worship is a vast conversation with God, an active ongoing dialogue between humans and the triune God. Sermons are not just thoughts for the day; at their deepest and best, the sermon is understood to be God speaking to human beings. Hymns are not just songs to enliven worship and enhance the mood; they are most often prayers and vows, declarations of faith and promises, expressions of praise and thanksgiving—musical expression in notes and words spoken to God, words spoken about God, and words spoken in response to God. We must never become careless about our words in worship. The human heart hungers for words that are beautiful, good, and true; healing words, thoughtful words. Redemptive words.
Christians experience God as one who speaks and who invites speech in return. We don’t approach God in an abstract or philosophical way. Our ideas of God are formed by scripture, primarily in story and poetry, and in these stories, God is quite a talker! Barely three verses into the Bible, God breaks the silence: God says, “Let there be light!” and nothing has ever been the same. God speaks the universe into being. God speaks, and human lives change. God says things like, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” or “Comfort, O comfort you my people” or “Whom shall I send?” When God speaks, humans respond—“Here I am, send me!” Or “Woe is me!” –and when God is silent, people cry out, “O God, do not keep silence.”[1] Even Jesus is understood to be a message from God, an expression of God’s speech whom John names logos, the very word of God, the one to whom the author of Hebrews points when he writes: “Long ago, God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.”
Worship embodies a conversation between God and humanity. The Call to Worship is announced—“Praise the lord! Sing to the Lord a new song!” – and what is this but a shout across the chasm from a God who wishes to engage us in holy conversation? A word from beyond intrudes into our world of everyday speech, summoning us to a new and urgent dialogue. “Holy, Holy, Holy” sings the congregation, and what is this but an awestruck response to this disruption? “We have wandered from your ways like lost sheep,” the people pray, and what is this but an honest outpouring to God of all human guilt and shame, truthful admission of the shadows that fall across our lives? “Go in peace, your sins are forgiven,” intones the Kahu. What is this if not God’s own response to our repentance? Back and forth the words of worship are woven, weaving the subtle fabric of the relationship between God and humanity.
But Christian worship is also a kind of dress rehearsal for human speech outside the sanctuary. Worship involves not only hearing and speaking truthful, life-changing words inside the hale pule, it also prepares us for truthful and life-giving speech outside the sanctuary. Worship is God’s ‘ōlelo school, where we are trained to speak in new ways, given the vocabulary to express a new reality.
Howard Thurman was dean of the chapel at Boston University, the first Black man to be a professor there.[2] He mentored Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. Thurman attributed his sense of dignity and vocation to his grandmother, a former slave, who repeated to her young grandson a message she’d heard in worship. Over and over, she told young Howard, “You are somebody.” She bore witness to her grandson of a truth she heard in church.
One day when Thurman and his family were traveling through the south in the 1950s, they stopped to rest at a park along the highway. His daughters immediately spotted a swing set on a playground in the park and pulled their father toward it. They were too young to read the sign warning that this playground was for “whites only by state law.” Sadly, but patiently, Thurman told his little girls that they could not play there and explained why. This was their first real encounter with the cruelty of racism. They instantly burst into tears. So, much as his grandmother had done when he was a child, Thurman gathered his children into a warm embrace and said to them, “Listen, you little girls are somebody. In fact, you are so important and so valuable to God that it takes the governor, the lieutenant governor, and the whole state police force to keep you girls from those swings.” In this story, the promise first made in worship that God’s people are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,” reverberated through generations to affirm the dignity and value of those precious children whose sense of worth was threatened by an evil ideology.
When we sing The Queen’s Prayer we witness much the same thing.[3] Study the historical note beneath the English translation. Notice that the graciousness of the Queen’s ‘olelo doesn’t excuse unjust actions of the past; rather, her voice soars above the sin of the colonizers who conspired to imprison a Queen but could never silence her cry to the highest heavens. The Queen doesn’t cry for vengeance, she pleads for mercy and forgiveness to Ke Akua enthroned higher than the heavens. The Queen trusts in God’s mercy and entrusts her people to God. The prayer is an extraordinary speech act that serves both as a confession of sin and an assurance of pardon, inviting worshippers to question: What now does God’s justice require? How shall we respond to so gracious a word, coming from an imprisoned Queen, but more than that, coming from Ke Akua and addressed to us who now live in these islands? What is the Still Speaking God saying to us in this prayer spoken through God’s servant the queen, who herself learned this ‘ōlelo in church?
Next comes the affirmation of our faith, our faithful response to God’s gracious provision to us in Holy Communion. Today’s affirmation of faith comes from another island off the coast of Scotland, from the Iona Community. It expresses our complicity in systemic injustice, the kind that executed Jesus, whom we now recognize as Christ the King, speaking to us a word of forgiveness, empowering us to change our lives for the sake of the gospel. The Iona affirmation of faith calls us to become our highest self in response to the grace we have received from our loquacious God, the God who never stops speaking to us. So be it.
[1] This sermon series incorporates insights on worship drawn from Thomas G. Long’s excellent book, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.
[2] The story of Howard Thurman and his daughters may be found in the aforementioned book, Testimony, by Thomas G. Long, pp. 63-64.
[3] Mahalo to Auntie Fran Aarona for her thoughtful and prophetic witness in worship this morning, in bringing a word about the origin of the Queen’s Prayer. Beginning today, this congregation will sing the Queen’s Prayer each Sunday as a faithful response to the word. An English translation is provided in the bulletin. Auntie Fran’s eloquent tribute may be found on our church website.