Sermon: The Divine Liturgy Pt. 1 - What Is Worship? (Psalm 29:2)

The Divine Liturgy Pt. 1 – What is Worship? Sunday, March 16th, 2025 Christ Covenant Church – Centralia, WA Psalm 29

Prayer

Make your voice O Lord to resound within our souls, that having our hearts tested and pierced by Your Holy Word, we may be found altogether pleasing in your sight. Give now, what only you can give, light and life, salvation and peace. We ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

Introduction

Consider for a moment two men. We’ll call one of them Richy and the other Gordy. Richy is an avowed atheist and unbeliever; Gordy is a faithful Christian. Both men are scientists, both are university professors, and both take pleasure in studying the natural world. These two scientists are outdoorsy types, they like to camp and hike and be out in the woods. And so one summer they plan to go exploring together. They travel to the Pacific coast and behold the ocean in all its mighty power. They visit old forests and touch trees large enough to drive through. They pitch their tents upon a hill, and on one clear night they both look out and see in the sky above, the cold moon, stars innumerable, the outline of our galaxy, and distant planets far away. And in that moment, a sense of fear and reverence comes upon them both, a sense of their own smallness and insignificance in the face of a world so vast.

• The question I want to pose for you is this: What is the difference (or at least, what should be the difference) between Richy the atheist and Gordy the Christian in that moment under the stars? Put another way, What distinguishes Christian fear and reverence, from the atheist’s fear and reverence?
• The answer the Bible gives (in Romans 1 and elsewhere) is that the unbeliever worships the creation, whereas the Christian worships the Creator.
  • Psalm 14 says, “The fool says in his heart, there is no God.” And therefore, when Richy is confronted with something transcendent, beautiful, awe-inspiring and glorious, he isn’t quite sure what do with it. There is tension within him.
  • The most reasonable thing to do would be to acknowledge and give thanks to some Creator and then search out at all costs who that Creator might be (go to Church!).
  • But if you refuse to do that, well your options are kind of limited.
    • You could choose to invent from your own imagination some story of how the world came to be (call it a big bang billions of years ago). You could invent your own deities or gods who created the universe. Take the Greek myths as an example of this impulse. The Bible calls this option idolatry and vain superstition.
    • Another option is you could choose to worship the thing itself as divine, as many other pagan religions have done. They offered sacrifices to sun, moon, and stars, to trees and rocks, making the whole world into a divine being worthy of worship. We call this species of idolatry pantheism or monism (all is one).
    • A third option, perhaps more common in our day, is the choice of irreligion and irreverence.
      • This is the person who has become so blind and numb to reality, that if they ever look at the stars, if they ever touch grass or taste the ocean’s salt spray, if they ever hold a newborn baby in their arms, they are unmoved. It doesn’t do anything for them. There is no fear or reverence or sense of wonder.
      • There are some people whose conscience is so seared, and whose mind is so darkened, that they cannot even recognize truth, goodness, or beauty, when it is staring them in face. The Bible warns of this kind of hardness of heart, where you become intellectually disabled from seeing God’s handiwork in the world.
  • Paul says in Romans 1:22, “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged [trade