Over these next weeks, we are our way with Jesus to the Last Supper, the cross, and to the empty tomb beyond that cross.  Today, we hear about this ancient ritual.  We don’t quite know what to make of the Old Testament.  It’s so . . . Jewish, so occupied with the Law, so taken up with blood and sacrifice and sin and atonement.  As Christians, we’ve moved beyond all that.  Part of the Bible, most of the Bible, is the Old Testament.  The Old Testament is all the Bible that Jesus had, that Peter and Paul had, that all those first Christians had.  It’s so taken up with blood and sacrifice, sin and atonement.  So, too, beloved, is our faith.  Anything that obscures this reality, this ground of our belief, this truth, anything that, in the name of belief, would turn our eyes away from the cross should be regarded with great caution.

My Bible study group is in the Old Testament.  We have been hearing an account of promise, deliverance, and guidance, and of slavery, betrayal, and disobedience.  We have been hearing of God’s grace and man’s ingratitude.

Moses instructs the people to take of the very first of this produce of the Promised Land and bring it with them, to worship the Lord.  Our translation says the people must take this first of the harvest “to the one place of worship” (26:2).  This is the Tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting.  Why one place?  Why not just anywhere?  Why not just however whoever wanted?  Moses tells them they are not to offer their worship to God however, wherever they choose.  Well, you don’t need to go to church to be a faithful Christian.  We nod supportively, all the while hearing in that still, secret sanctuary within that it isn’t so.  Those who never attend church but could if they chose to are choosing less than faithful living.  They are becoming lukewarm, nominal, lapsed.  Pray for them; encourage them.  Show me one person who has deep, fervent faith, faith that is clearly at the center of that person’s life, who devotes time to prayer and Scripture—show me one such person who never attends church.

Why do we gather, week after week?  Here we sense fellowship with one another and with God.  Here we experience mutual support.  Faith is not an individual enterprise.  Here, we hear the testimony: of Scripture, of preaching, and the testimony we share with one another.  By these we build one another up in faith.  This can’t happen where it’s just me and God and the ranch without church.  God calls persons to be a people.

Moses instructs the people to bring their basket of the first of the harvest to the priest.  No Christian has a priest, in the Old Testament sense.  We have teachers.  Our teachers are learners, too.  In Christ, we are all life-long learners.  Many of you are much farther along than I am!  You have particular gifts, and I have particular gifts.  Together, here, as this people of God in this place, we pool our resources through the Spirit.  You tell me whether that is blessing or not.

The priest was there, as I am here, as each of us is here, to help educate one another about worship in Spirit and in Truth.  Beloved, there is worship that is given without Spirit or Truth, which is to say, there is worship offered to the god concocted after my spirit, after my truth.   “We all have truths,” Pilate memorably says in Jesus Christ, Superstar, “Are mine the same as yours?”  Such worship cannot please God.  Such worship is not offered to please God but to please the worshiper, the worshiper’s self-conceived conception of some god: my spirit, my truth.  A very understanding god, who likes pretty much what we like, and who wants pretty much what we want, the god we may arrive at through science and the humanities: grace without God.  The Old Testament tells us about such gods, how God’s own people turned from God to worship their gods.  We discover through Scripture that claiming to worship God and worshiping God in Spirit and Truth are not quite the same.

When we gather together here, in the presence of God’s Word, this Word calls us to acknowledge something in Spirit and in Truth.  We are called together before God to admit, to confess something about ourselves, something revealed to us by blood and sacrifice, sin and atonement, Spirit and Truth.

The worshipers, who brought what God had supplied them, from the land He had given them, came before Him and recited the same words: everyone the same words.  This is liturgy: a fancy term for the words we say together, nearly every Sunday, the pattern of our worship.  We do about the same thing every Sunday, don’t we?  Does it ever grow tiresome?  The same thing, over and over?  We gather.  We participate in the call to worship.  We pray together, the same prayer.  We sing.  Over years, we enter into a pattern.  Patterns help us to remember, to get a way committed to memory.  Children say they have something by heart, and so should we.  Repetition teaches.  Repetition shapes.  Words have power to shape, don’t they?  We are all shaped by words.  By which words shall we be shaped: those spoken at us outside these walls, or those we hear together in the church?  Beloved, consider the shaping power of God’s Word.

Each week, we are called to confess—what?  Our sin!  But didn’t Jesus cancel all that?  Surely we aren’t sinners anymore: so why confess?  Why confess what we have not done?  Beloved, in Christ, we are not counted as sinners by God, anymore, and we are sinners who sin.  And we are redeemed, through blood and sacrifice.  We are forgiven, as we reach out for that forgiveness offered from the cross: forgiven because we are not hated but loved.

Together, in the Lord’s presence, those ancient Jews were to recite a liturgy retelling their history, their history in relation to God.  “My ancestor was a wandering Aramean” (26:5).  That wandering Aramean, Abraham, was not a Jew.  He became a Jew by trusting in God.  Those who trust in God are God’s Jews, God’s Israel.  Abram had some god before God called to him.  Everyone has some god: some source of meaning and purpose, some guarantee, something in which they place their trust, their hope.

Abram was a wandering foreigner.  Where he settled was not his home.  In his life, he had no home on earth.  His home was a place promised to him by the God who called him, the God whom Abraham trusted, and obeyed.

The history gets condensed, then—from the homeless wanderer to slavery in Egypt.  They came to Egypt under assurances of protection, safety, plenty, peace.  The longer they stayed in Egypt, the more they realized, the more painfully and personally they came to realize, that there is no place on earth that can guarantee these blessings.  Blessings are not guaranteed by a place, beloved, but by God.  When we put our trust in someplace, something, rather than in someone, we are sure to stumble.  Consider this—God’s Israel became slaves here on earth, enslaved to the powers of this earth, after Abraham had answered God, trusted God, obeyed God.

Did God deceive Abraham and his descendants, then?  No, of course not.  God is Truth.  God does not lie and does not deceive.  The world, in ignorance, futility, and sin, lies.  The world deceives.  We do not have to listen.  We do listen.  We do not have to give our allegiance to the world and the lies it tells us, the false assurances it gives us.  Yet we do.  Like those children of Abraham, people still today—and we Christians are by no means immune!—we chain ourselves to the things, the assurances this world tells us will free us.  Here are a few things the world calls freedom: the innocence and harmlessness of pornography (Hey! It’s free speech!), the sacrosanct status of abortion.  Joy measured by material prosperity.  Freedom from our hang-ups.  Freedom from children.  Freedom from unhappiness.  Only what is happiness?  What is true happiness?  Who can tell us?  Who knows?  Why would we ever think that this sin-shattered world could tell us?

As the worshiper recited the liturgy, the shared, shaping words, getting them by memory, getting them by heart, he tells how, in that enslavement to the things we had trusted to set us free, he tells how the people then “cried out for help to the Lord” (26:7).  For some reason I do not pretend to understand, beloved, it seems to take enslavement for some to remember God, to cry out in the hope that maybe there is a God who might listen, who might answer, who might save.  You and I know, sisters and brothers—we would not be, we could not be here today if we did not know—that there is such a God: the living God, the true God, the only God, creator and ruler of the universe, whose plans and ways and thoughts are unfathomable, and who tells us by His Word that He loves us and shall save us.  Using the same words as every other worshiper, reciting the same story—the same, tired old story?—the worshiper recites how, when the people finally cried out to God, He saw, He heard, and He delivered.

He delivered through signs and acts of awesome power unlike anything this world could produce or display.  Sure signs of God.  He has, hasn’t He?  This ancient Jewish liturgy is our story.  The Old Testament is our story, too.  It is the story of humanity: shown the truth, given the way, and ignoring it, rejecting it, preferring any other way to that way, desiring any god but God.  People chain themselves seeking freedom, turning from God who sets people free.  Nothing crazy there, friends!

This God who sets free promised a land, a place for His people, a place for living in holiness, righteousness, blessedness, a place for true worship, in Spirit and in Truth, a place for restored relationship, right relationship with God our Creator and our Savior.  Beloved, we are journeying to that land.  It has also been given to us in Jesus Christ, from the cross, partially to live there now.  We are redeemed.  We are saved.  That promised place of holiness and blessedness is redeemed life.  You can experience that life here, by the Holy Spirit.  But you won’t experience it, you will not perceive it, making a habit of not attending worship, not participating, by being alone at the ranch.  Or alone in front of the TV.  There is nothing wrong with the ranch or the TV; there may be great blessing at the ranch or even, somehow, via the TV, but don’t think that these are a substitute for your relationship with God, an adequate substitute for gathered worship, saying the words together, receiving the Word, together, being formed and supported in Christ, together.

In that land of promise, that land of faith in which we live here on this fallen earth, what has been your harvest?  What might you yet harvest?  What will you offer to God?  What has come to you apart from God?  What have you gotten by yourself, besides the misery and guilt of slavishly following sin that urges you?  Turn to God.  Cry out to God, and He will deliver you.  The blood and the sacrifice are for you.  You don’t have to live chained by sin.  In that blood of that sacrifice upon that cross upon that hill far away, your chains are gone; you’ve been set free.  In Jesus Christ, you are now free for joy, free for life, free for holiness.

We are grateful, but how do we show it; how shall we testify?  Stay mindful of all God has done and promises to do for you, in Christ, by the Holy Spirit.  Think upon it, tell it, share it, feel it, pray about it.  Moses says, “Be grateful” (26:11).  There is a connection between the words grateful and gratitude.  We trace them back to their Latin root word, gratia.  The common translation of that word is grace.  Moses says be grateful, by which it is as if he is saying, be grace-ful.  To be grateful is no command, then, but a blessing: to be grateful is to be full of grace.

What to do with it?  Share it.  Invite others in; bring others to join in the celebration of what God has done and promises to do.  Everyone is struggling with something.  Neighbors, friends, co-workers, fellow students are, spiritually, foreigners, widows, orphans, unable to support themselves, knowing they are unable to support themselves, held back by barriers of language, of education, of culture.  Barriers to belief, barriers to trust.  You can help them overcome those barriers, here.  Here, gathered as God’s people in worship, God overcomes all barriers of language, all barriers of education.  Here, together, God overcomes in us the barriers of culture: a culture that talks about God less and less, with more and more anger and derision, a God-less culture, a culture of death.

Worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!