"An Alternative Community" - Pastor Andrea

"Psalm 95 is a beautiful call to worship, but it comes with an attached warning not to let our hearts go astray like God's people did in the wilderness. Drawing on the Exodus story, Pastor Andrea reminds us that to truly reach up in worship, to glorify God alone, is to turn our backs on the small "g" gods of this world. This forms us, every time we worship together, into an alternative community. It will mean the world can look at believers and say, "They are built different." And in this way, we become a credible communal witness to the truth and power of God."

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We are spending four weeks, as you know, in you know, just being reminded of Madison's four-fold mission that we have, the four reaches. We are called by God the Father and empowered by the Holy Spirit to be transformed for Christ, for reaching up, glorifying God through prayer and worship, reaching in, growing spiritually, through caring relationships and biblical learning, reaching across, reconciling in Christ for multicultural living and leading, and reaching out, going near and far to share Christ's love in action and in words. And uh Al Gemman kicked us off last week with reaching out, and he used the healing pool in John 5 as a paradigm for outreach. And you could have given me a hundred guesses for an outreach text, and I don't think I would have come up with John 5. You should go back and listen to it. If you weren't here last week, you should go back and listen to it. It was fantastic. And now I have the next two weeks in a row, reaching up today and reaching in next week, and they are gonna sound a little bit like part one and part two of the same message. God is forming us into an alternative community. An alternative community. Reaching up to glorify God as counterformation, reaching in, growing together, an authentic community together, and biblical learning as counterformation. The world should be able to look at the church and say, they're built different. They are built different. Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, Paul says, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Now, of course, all of life is worship. I've actually preached that on a on a reach up Sunday before. Um, I know Lamar has preached that message on a reaching up Sunday before. So we're just gonna acknowledge all of life is worship. But weekly worship specifically, what we're doing here right now, every Sunday, 10 a.m., and churches all over the place, that worship, that reaching up, is a recalibration of our souls, it is a rearrangement of our allegiances. And we don't like our allegiances to get rearranged. We don't like that. It is a centering of our lives on God instead of on ourselves. Because we sing how great thou art, not how great we are. Right? It's a recalibration and a rearrangement. So that means we're not just reformed around here, we are reformed. Right? Emphasis on the re we're reformed every week, over and over, because the job is never done. We are reformed every week. And it is through this counterformation that we go through and into this alternative community that the church becomes a plausible collective witness to the truth and to the goodness of God. And it is through that that we also expose the falseness of lesser gods, of small g gods, of non-gods. And so our text today that we're gonna be in is a well-known call to worship. We already sang it together. Come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord our God, our maker, for he is our God. And we are the people of his pasture, the sheep of his flock. It's beautiful. So we're gonna read that as our text today. That's gonna get us into this. So if you would rise in body or in spirit, we're gonna read Psalm 95, starting at verse 1. Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song. For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Come, let us bow down and worship. Let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker, for He is our God, and we are the people of His pasture, the flock under His care. I mean, what a text. Right? What a text. We could stop right there, couldn't we? That's where most people cut it off, and I can see why. Right in the middle of verse 7. Right in the middle of verse 7, especially if they're using it as a call to worship, that makes sense. It's where I might stop today, too, if I was smart enough. Maybe try to keep it light on my first Sunday back, make sure everyone is actually glad I'm back, then I would stop right there. But Psalm 95 does not stop right there. It goes on. So shall we. Today, if you would only hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah. As you did that day at Masa in the wilderness where your ancestors tested me. They tried me, though they had seen what I did. For 40 years I was angry with that generation. I said, they are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways. So I declared an oath in my anger. They shall never enter my rest. This is the word of the Lord. We could have quit while we were ahead, but we did not, because all of Scripture is important for our formation. Amen? Let's pray together. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as we come before this word, I pray that it would convict us in all the right places, but also comfort us and inspire us in all the right places. And you know the work that needs to be done in each and every seat here today, and also on this platform here today. And so we pray that you would help us be receptive to the call to worship and the warning that we find in your word today. Amen. Yeah, I split those two sections up a little bit because the two parts of Psalm 95 do not seem to easily cohere together. Right? If the worship leader, if Queest got up here this morning and the first thing he did was kind of start in on Psalm 95, but keep going through 8 through 11, we'd all be a little bit like, what was that? What was that? The first half is this beautiful call to worship, but it comes with a warning tagged onto it. Do not harden your hearts like you did before. The psalmist is referencing the Exodus journey of God's people, right? God had had rescued his people for worship, as Pastor Erica said this morning. Let my people go so that they might worship me. God had rescued his people from the hand of Pharaoh, and he is leading them through the wilderness in Exodus, trying to reform them into an alternative community. But with every step they took toward freedom, they wanted to put one foot back in Egypt. Have a foot in both. Walter Brugeman is one of my favorite Old Testament scholars. He died just last year. And he's written over a hundred books. And he joked once in a podcast that he really has just written one book but a hundred times in different ways. But the one that I've been in the last few weeks is this one, a little book, Mandate to Difference, an invitation to the contemporary church. And his premise in this book is that the church should not, should not look like, operate in the same way as, or accept the systems that the world has on offer. The church should not take the same approach to people or money or land or worship that the world does. The church has a mandate to be different, right? Set apart. The world should be able to look at us and go, they're built different. They're built different. And so the Exodus journey, he says, this is sort of his premise of everything he writes. The Exodus journey, the Exodus story is the paradigm story for the people of God. It's the story that Jewish communities used to reperform every Passover. Jesus himself is the reperformance of the whole Exodus story. If you read the life of Jesus, there's all these echoes back to the Exodus story. And Brugeman argues that this Exodus story is always waiting to be reperformed among us in the church. Even now. Will we walk in freedom with God and worship him alone? Or put one foot back in Egypt. The trouble he says, of course, starts in Exodus when Pharaoh, the guy that has more than enough, has a nightmare. He has a bad dream about scarcity. Thin cows, scorched wheat, not enough. And he becomes so afraid of this possibility becoming reality that he starts to rule out of a scarcity mindset. Even though he is more than anybody, mind you, he rules out of a scarcity mindset. He wants more grain stored up and he needs more bricks to build all of that storage, and so more people to do it, but he wanted it done cheaply and with fewer resources because prophets. Prophets. And he began to see people as less than human, and that made it easy then to use them as commodities. To do all of this brick building, he he sees the Israelite community as nothing more than units of production to build up his surplus. And so it was more bricks, less straw, more bricks, less straw, no rest, no rest. And so the people cry out, and God rescues them from the hand of Pharaoh. Exodus 10 through 15. God leads them out of that reality. In fact, each of the plagues is a confrontation of a very specific God, small g God in Egypt. And so God liberates them into a new reality to live outside of the ways of Egypt and outside of the priorities of the empire and beyond the control of Pharaoh. And they are so happy at their deliverance. They sing on the banks of the Red Sea. They sing to the Lord. But Miriam's tambourine is still ringing in their ears. They're barely a few steps into the wilderness. And at the very first pang of hunger, they say maybe we should go back. Maybe we should go back into that bondage. Do you remember those pots of meat? Ah, at least we ate in Egypt. There was always plenty in Egypt, even though they probably weren't getting any of that plenty. But there was all there was always enough in Egypt. See, Pharaoh had such a strong grip on their imagination that they confused his regime of scarcity with abundance. They got it twisted, right? They got them confused with one another. But then in Exodus 16, it says they turned toward the wilderness, and it says they saw the glory of God. The glory of God. And they are fed meat and bread and water, all the things that they needed, the basic food groups. They're provided for. And they they learn over time, often the hard way, if you read Exodus, that this God is different. This God is different than the small g gods back in Egypt, and different than Pharaoh. This is a God of provision and of relationship and of rest. They're not just economic units to God. They are the sheep of his pasture, the flock under his care. And there was no rest back in Egypt, right? No Sabbath ever. More bricks, less straw, work harder, keep going. No rest. But in Exodus 16, they celebrate their first Sabbath. They rest. God is telling them, you are not units of production. You are the flock under my care. We rest on the Sabbath. And still, time and time again, God's showing them that He will provide, that He can be dependent on, that He is the one true God. He's the big G God, not those little G gods. Time and time again, their hearts keep going astray. Their hearts keep going astray. They would give thanks in one moment and they would grumble in the next. They would worship God in one moment and then they would worship idols in the next. This is what Psalm 95 is warning us about. God brought them up out of Egypt to worship God and God alone, but their hearts kept going back. Kept going back. The prosperity of Egypt had this hold on their hearts, and the wilderness felt kind of difficult. And they got the two confused. Brugemann points out that prosperity is not the same as abundance. Prosperity is not the same as abundance, even though we confuse the two. Because prosperity is only good for a very small percentage of people. But abundance is a communal phenomenon where everybody has enough. Everybody has enough. See, Pharaoh stored up this surplus while others went without. That might be prosperity. That's not abundance. But when God gave manna in Exodus 16, some gathered much and some gathered little, and everyone had what they needed. This God is different. This God is different, abundant. And then what happened when they tried to act like Pharaoh in the spirit of Pharaoh by gathering too much for themselves and trying to store up a surplus? It rotted. It rotted. See, here's what's happening: God was unforming them from Egypt's ways and reforming them into an alternative community. A community of abundance and generosity and hospitality and dependence on God. Remember, they they have are hardly out of Egypt, and one of the first rules they're given is do not oppress a foreigner. Why? Because you were foreigners. Right? You're being reformed into an alternative community from the one you just came from. But their hearts kept going back astray because the empire had such a strong hold on their imaginations. And on us, I think. And on us, I think. People still saying, welcome back. And on us, and on me, and on me. First and foremost. Too often we could be the ones described in Psalm 95. They are a people whose hearts are prone to go astray, right? Prone to wander. Lord, I feel it. I feel it. This call to worship comes with this warning: do not fall into the same trap as that community. Do not harden your hearts or be reluctant or resistant to turn your back once and for all on Egypt. And I don't mean Egypt locally, geographically, in its expression now or even then. That spirit of empire, whether it's Egypt or Assyria or Persia or Babylon or Rome or all the way up to today, do not resist turning your back on that to worship the one true God in spirit and in truth, the God of glory and provision and generosity and hospitality. Too often the church, and I don't just mean us at Madison, the church keeps trying to have one foot in worship of God and one foot back here. One foot still here. If you've met one, you've met them all. That spirit of empire, right? Of surplus, of prosperity for the 1%, lack of abundance, not everyone has enough, more profit. That spirit. So what does it look like then, week in and week out, to take Saul 95 seriously and turn away from that? To reject the world of empire and its empty promises and its empty ways, from its survival of the fittest and its prosperity mentality, and the optics of size and strength and the power dynamics of the strong over the weak, where the rich get richer. What does it look like to, as the church, step outside of that imagination once and for all? And instead turn to face the glory of God. This is what worship does for us week in and week out. It helps us do that work, it helps us be reformed into that imagination, right? We are a people who have been liberated. We are free to worship God, and we must, not because God needs it, but because he is worthy of it, because of what he has done. The mighty acts of the Lord. Says in Psalm 95 that he said that their hearts went astray, even though they had seen what I had done. But the mighty acts of the Lord are worth our worship, our worship, our worship. But also we do this because it forms us into the kind of community that God wants us to be. Right? We're reformed and we're reformed into the kind of community that God wants us to be. And it is always a dangerous temptation for the church to treat worship as something other than that. Something a little less dangerous than that, a little less challenging than that, right? To treat worship like it's a soothing escape from the world. Now, there is soothing that is found here from our hurts and our griefs, of course. But it's not a soothing escape from the world, or a pep rally just to help us face another week, or a safe space for all of our preferences, or an echo chamber for our politics. Worship is so much more than that, so much more dangerous than that, because worship changes us. Worship changes us. It recalibrates our souls and it reforms our priorities and it reorients our loyalties. Worship interrupts all of the allegiances we've been holding on to all week when we have to finally say, These don't even compare to the one true God. I'm gonna lay these down and worship the one true God. That's happening to us every week. It's in worship when we worship God that we say no and reject all the smaller G gods that have been clamoring for our devotion all week. And we say yes to the one true God because God is a great God. Psalm 95 is telling us that. Worship and bow down. He is high above all other gods. He is a great God. This is our act of joyful resistance in the midst of empire. And God's people have always been singing their resistance in the midst of empire. And the empire would love to take that song out of their mouths, but the enemy can take some things, but he cannot take our worship. See, the Israelites had to unlearn the rhythms of the empire and learn the ways of God. And the question today is: are we willing to do that education? To unlearn the ways of the world, how the world works and its systems, and relearn, be reformed into the rhythms of God, the ones that are truer, so that we can reach up in worship in spirit and in truth. Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, Paul says. And sometimes we read that and we like apply it to like sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Right? Oh, don't be worldly. The old school ideas, movies and card games and dance halls, right? Don't be worldly. It's so much more than that. Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, and that includes how we worship. Even worship in the church can take on the patterns of this world. Ryan Burge is a religious religion data analyst, and he researches the contemporary church, and he's been putting his work out on social media lately. And I'm always interested in his charts. I never know, like, how are you getting all this? So it's worth some deeper study. But one of the results that he was finding in his work was why so many young people are leaving the church. And it's not because the church is too religious and they're not interested in religion. And it's not because they don't believe in God anymore. One of the reasons they are leaving the church in droves is because the church looks too much like the world they live in. They haven't been able to look at the church and say, those people are built different. They look at the church and go, yeah, that tracks with everything else I'm seeing everywhere else. The church seems to operate in places with the same power dynamics, the same money structures, the same political divisions, the same slick production, the same abuses, and the same ethos of consumerism as what is on offer out there in the secular world. And so young people are like, I'm not interested. It all looks the same to me. See, churches can play Pharaoh as much as secular institutions can. Welcome back, Pastor Andrea. Okay, okay. No, it's fine. How you might say, churches play Pharaoh? Let me give you an example, and I'm never one to get up here and critique any particular church, but you might have read a news story a while back, I would say it's over a year now, where a certain large, high-profile church was accused of geofencing. Geofencing is when you draw a virtual boundary using GPS to target people's mobile devices when they are within a certain area with digital advertisements. And this large church was not doing that around their own church, like if you got close to them, you'd get an ad for their church. They had geofenced the other places of worship in their city. So that when people were going to their own smaller worshiping communities, they would be fed ads for this megachurch. See, that is the scarcity model showing up in a huge church that has a lot, but still trying to gather up surplus. Still trying to gather up no more, because of course big numbers is a criterion of Pharaoh. A Pharaoh. And we gather in worship, not just to do this reforming work, but because God is worthy of it, and he's a great God, and he made everything, and all of creation in his hand. That's what Psalm 95 tells us. Everything is his, everything belongs to him, including us. We are the people of his pasture, we are the flock under his care. And that care for his flock came at a great cost to God. Right? The pharaohs of this world don't want anything to cost them personally. They want the community to bear the cost for their prosperity. God is different than that. God bore the cost of this care. Jesus says in John 10, I am the good shepherd, and the good shepherd does what? Fleece his sheep? No, lays down his life for them. Lays down his life for his sheep. The pharaohs of this world could never, would never. Remember in our series on 1st and 2 Samuel, we were talking about kings? Kings take. God gives. Right? Every time kings do something in 1 and 2 Samuel, they take. They take crops and they take sons and they take people's daughters. Take, take, take, take. God gives. I lay down my life for my sheep. God gives up to and not excluding his own son, the true Passover lamb, the true expression of the Exodus liberation in Jesus. Like the people in Exodus, Jesus went into the wilderness. And when he got hungry, he didn't grumble. When he got hungry and certainly was tempted to turn back, the enemy shows up and gives him these temptations, right? Tries to lead his heart astray, to go back to where there's food, to go back to where it's not wilderness, to go back to something else. The enemy tempted him to be relevant or to be spectacular. Throw yourself down and angels will catch you, or to be tempted to be powerful. And Jesus said, No. Right? He said, If you bow down to me, all the kingdoms of the world will be yours. And Jesus says, No. It is written, worship the Lord your God and serve him only. Jesus' heart could not be led astray. And that is where we would draw our power from to have our hearts not be drawn astray. Because it's not like work harder, do better. No, Jesus is the one who went and did it for us on our behalf, who withstood the temptation in the wilderness. I have come that they may have life, Jesus said. Right? I didn't come to use them to make them production units to gather a surplus on their backs. No, I have come that they may have life and have it what? In abundance. Not the same as prosperity. In abundance, enough for everyone. During my sabbatical, I did a little bit of a church visiting tour on Sundays. I had a few criteria. I thought I want to be intentional about the churches I visit, so I said I want them to be churches that are under 200 people. That actually didn't narrow it down very much. And I said I want it to be churches that are either in or adjacent to our denominational sort of life because I'm interested in how everyone is navigating the current situation. And that still didn't narrow it down a ton. And then I said, and and also they make room for women to use the full range of their gifts. So okay. That, yeah. That got me to a much smaller number. So I had my list of churches that I that I went to visit. Okay. So a lot of the churches that I went to were pretty small, and it was summer, so yeah. It was summer. Some of these places seemed really low on numbers. I sat in some sanctuaries with 40 people at times. 50. Some churches had just one worship leader that day, or maybe just a piano player and a singer, and I experienced guest preachers or missionaries that were home, or retired transition ministers, or seminary students that were filling in on a holiday. The buildings weren't spectacular that I can remember. On the surface, on the surface, the optics, on the surface, coming into worship like that, the optics made me think, this is not super impressive. All right? Not super impressive. What is this? But week by week by week, God was up to something in me. Because as the weeks went on, every single Sunday, I was convicted anew that the things maybe I was looking for, production or perfection or performance or high big names, big numbers, those are the criterion of Pharaoh. The things that would have made me think this place is alive, I realized, I was convicted by, are things that are the criterion of Pharaoh. So I had to look with new eyes and say, well, is this community worshiping in spirit and in truth, right? It doesn't mean we can't strive for excellence, and it doesn't mean we can't have big bands, and it doesn't mean we can't have beautiful buildings, but we have to be sure that it's not those things we are worshiping. Right? God wants us to worship him in spirit and in truth, right? And that the shift from how great thou art to how great we are, oh, it's it's slight, it's putting a foot back, right? How great thou art, God, and how great we are. We have to be careful. So I'm in this church one week and I was waiting for the service to start, um, and I was reading my paper bulletin. I know it's never coming back, but I love a paper bulletin on a Sunday morning. Okay. I was reading my paper bulletin, and this family comes in. They come up the aisle that I'm sitting on. Two parents walking in with their adult son, who lay on his side on a cart that had wheels on it. And they swung his cart into a row that had had a pew cut out of it to the length of his cart. And people greeted him like they greeted everyone else. From what I could tell, he did not respond to them. I couldn't really tell if he didn't respond or couldn't respond. I was so struck by this family and this young man the whole time during worship. And I kept thinking, and I was listening and paying attention and worshiping, but I also was thinking, what is reaching up look like for him? What is worshiping God in spirit and in truth look like for him? His parents stood and sat and sang and clapped and passed the plate and shook hands during greeting time, but he couldn't do any of those things during worship. He can't bow or kneel or raise his hands, at least not physically, not the things we read in Psalm 95 physically. And I couldn't get him out of my mind and this image out of my mind of him sort of just fitting into this church body in that way. And um I emailed the pastor that I talked to that morning afterwards, and I just said how struck I was by this worshiper among them and wanted to know a little more. And I learned that his name is Isaac, and he has spinal muscular atrophy, a very slow and degenerative version of ALS. And the doctor said, told his parents he's not gonna live to see 20, but he's 25, so praise God. He's 25, went against what the medical community said would happen. And the pastor told me that he used to be able to understand Isaac's vocalizations, you know, a few years ago, but but at this point, really, only his parents can, and his sister can a little bit as well. But he had made profession of faith in that church, and after doing so, he expressed a desire to help lead worship. And uh I thought, help lead worship? I'm sorry, you're gonna have to explain this to me, I said. So we were emailing back and forth. And he said, Yes, when when his sister is on the worship team once a month or whenever that is, his stretcher gets rolled up onto stage and a microphone is placed near his face, and he helps to lead worship. He vocalizes as best he can to the songs that they're singing in worship. Can you imagine with me a minute how counterformational that must be? In a church culture that can too often start joining into like the sort of consumerism, glitz, glamour, performance of the world, how counterformational it must be for this church to sit there and have Isaac helping to lead worship. God is is counterforming them, God is reforming them into an alternative community through Isaac. They are resisting a world that says he cannot produce anything. Right? He's not a production unit. He really takes resources because he needs them. He can't produce anything. And a world would say, well, there his value is lower. His value is lower. But this church is saying, no, no, it is not. Isaac is a part of our body. We need him. We need him. They are resisting any church that would say, Well, don't put Isaac up front. That's gonna be a distraction. They are resisting a church that would say, Well, he he can barely talk much less sing. It's not gonna sound good in the mix. They are resisting these Pharaoh-like ways in the church so that Isaac can worship in spirit and in truth and lead them to the same. Isaac has said, listen, it might look like I'm a prisoner in this body, but I am walking in freedom with God. And I want to help lead worship. I want to help lead worship. God has delivered me, and it is out of his abundance that I must sing. Can I sing? Sort of. Is it the best singing in the world? Maybe not. I must sing because God has led me into a place of worship, of freedom, so that I can worship him. This is not spectacle. This is the church saying, We cannot say to him, we have no need of you. We need you to help lead us into worship. Psalm 95, come let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our God, our Maker. Isaac is doing that his way, and that church is being counterformed into an alternative worshiping community. I came in there as a Christian, as a pastor, and I went, This church is built different. This church is built different in seeing how they had made those adjustments for one of their own, a sheep of God's flock. They made their worshiping community a plausible collective witness to the truth of God. And I would love for us to do the same. Can we be a plausible, truthful witness to the ways that God is different than the world? And by coming in to worship that God, we ought to look different from the world. Being formed into this alternative community today, the psalm says, if you would just hear his voice, can you hear? The psalmist is almost like, People, if you would just hear his voice and do not be like that wayward generation, yes, God, a little bit of Egypt, little bit of Egypt with my other foot. No, we want to be liberated from that bondage. We want to live lives of worship to our God, and he is a great God, and he is above all other gods. Let us shout for joy to the rock of our salvation. For from God are all things, and to God are all things, and God deserves the glory. Amen. Amen. Let's pray. God, we thank you that your word tells us that the yoke is easy and the burden is light, and it never lets us off the hook. The burden is easy and it never lets us off the hook. In fact, we we kind of get hung up on the hook, and Jesus pulls us down and says, I have come that they may have life and have it to the full, have it abundantly, enough for everyone. We thank you that Jesus was the one who fulfilled all the parts of the Exodus story. We thank you that he was the one who did stand up under the temptation of the wilderness, that he was the one who did not let his heart go astray. And because you have joined us to Christ, that can be said of us as well. But our sanctification is slow individually and collectively, and so we pray, God, that you would not abandon us, but keep working on us, keep reforming us into an alternative community. You are not like those other gods. You are high, far above all the other gods. You're different. May we, your people, the sheep of your pasture, the flock under your care, may we also be different. May we be a plausible collective public witness to the beauty and the goodness and the generosity and the hospitality and the abundance of you, our great God. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen.