This past Wednesday, for the fifth time in my life, I had jury duty. It was a six-and-a-half hour affair that took place in the county courthouse in Media. And if you’ve ever been called to this task before, here or elsewhere, you know. You know what my day was like. There was a lot of waiting involved – waiting for things to get started at 9 am and then for jury pools to be called throughout the day, for the lunch break to arrive, finally, and for the moment they tell you you’re done for the day. I spent a long time in the large, one-room jury lounge in the courthouse, but thankfully, that room has very soft chairs. It was a comfortable enough wait.
I’m of two minds about jury duty. On the one hand, I know the importance of juries, and on a larger scale, of self-government. There are places in the world where people are not guaranteed a fair or speedy trial, where power is arbitrary and often used unjustly. I know that our justice system works, in large part, because of juries and that our government works, in large part, because of the justice system. I know juries are important, and a big part of me didn’t mind being called and would have welcomed serving on a trial.
But the other part of me, he just has so much to do. He doesn’t have the time to spend the whole day waiting in the jury lounge. He thinks that someone else would be just as good, if not better, than him. That guy has a sermon to write and a youth group to plan. He has to set up interviews with the summer intern applicants, to develop a confirmation lesson plan about the first person of the Trinity and to sort out adults for next weekend’s ski trip. That other part of me is way too busy to take a day (or two or three) to serve his government because he’s an important person with a very full To Do List this week. That part of me was in solidarity with the three women who were sitting around me as 1 o’clock became 2 o’clock and then 3 o’clock, all the while complaining that they were important people and the system must be broken if it inconveniences us all this much.
I think most of us are like those ladies, or at least parts of us are. Most of us are really busy – too busy, in fact – and if we are kept from the things we need to do for long enough, we get antsy, irritated and perhaps eventually we get vocal about it. I bet we can all think right now about the things on our To Do Lists, those nagging tasks that are still not accomplished, or the ones that are coming around now that it’s the start of a new week. We are all very important people. And I say that without a sense of sarcasm – mostly – because we really are. The work of our lives is important. The tasks of school, work, family, friends, teams, organizations and the other parts of our lives do matter. We wouldn’t be working on them if they didn’t. Those ladies are right. Jury duty is a big inconvenience.
And this is where I think jury duty is a lot like worship, a lot like worship in Nehemiah’s time and Jesus’ time and our time. Not in the waiting part, I hope. Those of us who plan worship try hard to keep it from feeling like there’s a lot of dead time. And not the boring part, I really hope. We try even harder to make worship authentic, engaging and creative – all of the things that are the antithesis of boring. But in the inconvenient part. Worship, like jury duty, is terribly inconvenient. It keeps us from getting to everything we have to do. It gets in the way of our vacations (as one young woman in my jury pool tried to explain to a judge). It makes us stop for, consider and participate in something bigger than ourselves. And when we’re particularly busy and especially stressed, it’s hard to imagine anything that is bigger than we are, or at least bigger than the tasks before us. And these pews, well, they’re no jury room chairs.
That’s a problem with the lives we lead. We are so scheduled, committed and overbooked that we don’t see the world properly anymore. We lose our sense of order and place. We get distracted. We forget who we are, who God is, and how we’re inextricably and lovingly linked. We begin to serve too many masters, as if there were any other masters we should be serving. The word we use for that in the church is idolatry, of course – making anyone or anything into a god that isn’t the real, true God. Our spiritual ancestor and theological guide John Calvin thought idolatry was the greatest and most common human sin. He called our minds “a perpetual factory of idols.” Worship is an antidote for that. It shuts down that factory. Worship reminds us of the Three-in-One God to whom we should be giving our attention and crediting with worth. Worth-ship, worship reminds us that the big things in our lives aren’t really so big=, and that’s good.
I think Jesus might have had that in mind that when he stood up to read from the scroll of prophet Isaiah. Jesus knew, knows, what people are really like – busy, distracted and prone to the manufacture idols. And I don’t think people have changed, in a lot of ways, since Jesus’ time, or since Nehemiah’s time, for that matter. So, as our Lord and Savior begins to participate in that synagogue worship service, he slows down. He becomes deliberate, intentional and methodical. He stands up. He receives the scroll. He unrolls it. He finds his place to read. Luke makes a point of describing each of these mundane steps, as if to slow us down and concentrate our attention. Why else mention them in such detail? And after reading, Jesus does the exact same things in the opposite order – rolls up the scroll, hands it back and sits down. Jesus takes his time, and in doing so, makes us take our time. And as a result, “the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.”
Good worship is just like that – slow, deliberate and even inconvenient. It has to be in order to make us actually stop and pay attention. If we really are to step away from our lives for a moment and stop making things bigger than God, all in less than 75 minutes, then it takes some doing. It takes a full minute of silence during the personal prayer of confession. It takes a time with children of substance and length. It takes hymns with lots of verses, multiple anthems, a prelude, a postlude and even a Psalter. It takes losing track of time, if only briefly. We need all this to down-shift our brains and recalibrate our souls, so that we can focus in on the words and on the Word. It takes a while for us to all fix our eyes – and ears and hearts – on that which God would have us see, hear and believe.
And that’s all of us, together. Who we worship with matters as well. If you were following along in your pew Bible as Jon read from Nehemiah, you noticed the verses he skipped were full of long, very unpronounceable Old Testament names. Now, it would be unfair to make him – or anyone – take a crack at saying “Malchijah, Hashum and Hash-baddanah” on the fly. But nonetheless that list of people is the most important part of that passage, for it tells us exactly who was present at that service of worship. When we worship, we not only slow down and concentrate, but we are pulled out of our individualistic, overcommitted society and returned our family of faith, to our communion of saints. We are reminded that we are not an instrument playing a solo, but single note in God’s grand concerto.
For the Word of God is never just for us as individuals. And it’s too big, too important, too life-changing and life-giving for us to miss because we are distracted by an e-mail that needs to be sent, a test that needs to be studied for or a report that needs to be rewritten. Our messiah is making grand and powerful declarations. He is proclaiming an end to oppression of all sorts – economic, political, physical. For what else is good news to the poor but an end to their poverty and economic struggle? And what else is release to the captives but a cessation of their debt to society or grace for their political dissention? And what else is recovery of sight to the blind but a chance at healing, in some fashion, for those who desperately need it?
These are the life-giving and life-changing tasks that our God is about in this broken, old world. And if Jesus’ proclamation didn’t have our full attention, we might be apt to dismiss them as metaphor or hyperbole. Because if we are honest, we have to admit these things are at best optimistic and impractical, and at worst chaotic and near impossible. These promises are more than bold. They’re really hard to fathom. They mean the end of the world as we know it. And at least from where we’re sitting, they don’t seem to have been fulfilled in our hearing. Two thousand years later, we still have the poor – more, it seems, than we used to. We still have captives – to the point of overflowing our prisons. We still have the blind, the mentally ill and the cancerous. I believe that history has yet to record, by Levitical standards, a proper year of the Lord’s favor. So now that we’re listening, what on earth is Jesus talking about?
He is preaching about the world as it should be, as it was created to be and as it will be someday – someday soon, we hope and pray. And until that someday comes, we are to keep on worshipping. We are to step away from our lives at regular intervals – even more when we are at our busiest and when doing so would be the most inconvenient, because that is when we need to worship the most. We are to confess our sins when the silences comes, listen along when the children come forward and let our spirits soar with the music of our faith. We are to remember who we really are – forgiven sinners, beloved children, creatures made in God’s image, not makers of little gods nor servants to the busyness of this broken, old world. We are worshippers of the living God, and our eyes, our minds and our souls are to be fixed upon the one who was with us in the beginning and will be with us when the scripture is finally fulfilled. Amen.