The Trinity (Unknown, 1380)
The Sermons at Calvary
By Father Richard Humke
WORSHIP IS AN INTRINSIC GOOD
June 6, 2004, Trinity Sunday C,
Calvary Church
Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
Revelation 4:1-11
John 16:5-15
Early
in my school days I learned the primary colors: red, yellow and blue. As
I recall, I was taught at that time that they were primary colors because they
were not reducible to another color.
Other colors were formed by putting them together -- orange was
made of red and yellow, for instance, and green was made of yellow and
blue. But red, yellow and blue just are. They are not reducible. They have value in themselves.
Certain
human actions and experiences are good in themselves and not to be thought of
as serving an end beyond themselves.
Like the primary colors they just are.
Sometimes
we distinguish such things by the use of two terms: instrumental good and intrinsic good. Instrumental good is something that is good for something else,
as aspirin is good for a headache. No
one eats aspirin for its own sake but only because aspirin helps with
headaches. It has an instrumental good
-- it is good for something else.
On
the other hand, there are things that have an intrinsic good -- we want them
for themselves alone and not because they will do something. Good pieces of art may be like that. We don't buy them to go with the colors of
the room. We don't buy them to fill in
a blank space (except perhaps in ourselves).
We have them because they are, they have value in themselves.
And
now to today's Scripture: "Holy,
holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory."
You
may have wondered when I was going to get to the Scripture today and away from
primary colors and aspirin. Well,
that's the passage that I would particularly call to your attention. Our First Reading today, from which it
comes, is one of the most famous passages in Scripture: Isaiah's call to be a prophet, as he stands
in the presence of the glory of God in some sort of mystic vision. Isaiah is worshipping in the most pure sense
of that word. He is standing in awe before
the Deity.
You
see, the same distinction between intrinsic good and instrumental good can be
applied to our worship of Almighty God.
Could it be that you and I have been thinking of the worship of God in
instrumental terms -- what it is good for, what it will do for you,
what can you can learn from it?
But, you might think of it in intrinsic terms. That is, it has value in itself.
One worships God because God is.
One worships God because the LORD of hosts is holy and the whole earth
is filled with God's glory.
Now
I don't for one moment think it would be at all unusual if you thought the
first way. That's the way that most of
us approach worship most of the time, and as a matter of fact many people's
whole religious life (or the little they any longer have of it) is viewed that
way. When one, however, begins to go
more deeply in one's spiritual development than that, then the worship of the
Holy God is seen as good in itself rather than as an act that will
produce something else.
Richard
Holloway, at one time rector of the Church of the Advent in Boston and now a
bishop in the Scottish Episcopal Church, said in one of his books (LET GOD
ARISE, p.147)
Worship
is the basic and instinctive response of man to the transcendent reality of
God.
Worship is acknowledging that God
is holy, that God is other than anything else, that the whole world is filled
with the glory of God.
Worship
has value in itself, you see, just as good art has value in itself and not
because the blue goes with your room.
And instinctively we know this, as Holloway indicates, even though
almost everything that organized religion does is to squeeze this out of us and
put in its place the expectation that coming to church on a Sunday morning will
do something for us. Now of
course, if it never does anything for us, it is most likely that we will quit
coming. But my point is that, first of
all, worship is the acknowledgement of the glory of God.
All
of us have worshipped in that way when we were least aware that that was what
we were doing. You stand on an almost
empty beach on the Gulf early in the morning and see the sun coming up. You stop at one of the look-outs in the Blue
Ridge Mountains and gaze out over that magnificent landscape. You pause at the west door of the cathedral at Chartes, or some other
ancient cathedral in Europe, and are awe-struck with what you see.
In each of those cases you are doing
something similar to what I am talking about.
You aren't asking what the Gulf or the mountains or the cathedral can do
for you. You are, in a sense, saying,
"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts.
The whole earth is full of his glory."
When
we are most true to who we are as Anglicans, we will provide an opportunity for
the worshipper to enter the presence of the Holy when he or she steps into one
of our churches. That isn't what the
crowds think they want these days, and so we find ourselves on the
periphery, and we wonder if perhaps we had not best join the crowd. And perhaps we should -- but I'm not
going there. I believe that we offer an
alternative, and though it may seem that not many want that alternative these
days, what would be the state of Christianity in America if Calvary, and others
like it, just disappeared? Who would
then tell people that God is not a Something to be used to produce something
else; but God is God and must be worshipped for that alone?
I
invite you on this Trinity Sunday, our yearly celebration of the mystery of the
Godhead. to consider approaching worship differently from your usual way: for its intrinsic good, not for its
instrumental good. Because God is. You find a new dimension to life -- not
popular today certainly, not practical if your god is pragmatism, not easy for
our cluttered minds.
It
isn't that I ask you to leave the other aspects of worship behind you, but
rather, to consider the fact that worship is important in itself. You come, first of all, because God is God,
and you are only a created being.
"Holy,
holy, holy is the LORD of hosts. The
whole world is full of (God's) glory."
Richard
H. Humke