November 23, 2014
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Many people will be heading “over the river and through the woods to Grandma’s house we go” this week. Thanksgiving is this Thursday and for some of you, it would be like another big meal from the one you’d be enjoying this afternoon upstairs. The week of Thanksgiving is typically the most active time for travel in the U.S. with airports and freeways jammed with people trying to get into or out of the city.
I can still remember the many times of trying to drive from Philadelphia to New York City or Boston that stretches the transportation infrastructure to the brink. With a little luck and lots of patience, we would eventually see the city limit sign or the skyline of our hometowns. We know that a certain view, a certain exit, a certain landmark means that we’re almost there.
When traveling to a major American city, the only gates one is likely to encounter are at the airport or at the tollbooth. For us driving to our hometowns for New York, it would be the Holland Tunnel; for Boston, it would be the final tollgate on the Mass. Turnpike. But in the old world of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, most traveling people would have a different experience.
For centuries, old world cities were almost uniformly surrounded by defensive walls dotted with gates that limited access to the city and, in many ways, gave the city its character. While the walls of many of those cities are gone or are now monuments to the past, the great gates remain as a testament to the universal joy of coming home to a safe and familiar place. When you arrived at those old cities and went through the gate, it was a moment for rejoicing.
A couple of years ago, a group of us went to Germany when we visited The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Built by Prussian monarchs in the 18th century, this gate became even more famous in the late 20th century as a symbol of peace when the dividing wall between East Germany and West Germany came down. Many families who had been separated for decades were now able to have joyous reunions.
The times that I visited Jerusalem and walked through the gates of the Old City, they reminded me of the times when Jesus himself walked through these gates. The Old Jaffa Gate in particular was the one we walked through the most with its outdoor vendors along the side as we walked up these wide steps into the narrow streets of the Old City.
I think about our own Chinatown Gate on the southern end of Grant Avenue as the symbol that invites visitors who may have already shopped in Union Square with its high prices knowing that the cheapest place to buy a SF sweatshirt to keep warm can be found in Chinatown at 3 for $10.00. By the way, built in 1970, the Chinatown Gate has the inscription by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, China’s democratic president that says, “All under heaven is for the good of the people.”
Whether these gates were built for defensive or commercial or ceremonial purposes, those old gates represented the difference between being outside and being inside, between security and vulnerability, between being home and being away.
The gates of Jerusalem had a still deeper meaning. For those pilgrims traveling to the city from faraway places, entering the gates meant entering into the holy city and the temple, the dwelling place of God. To enter the gates of Jerusalem, then, was to enter into the very presence of God, which was cause for great songs like Psalm 100. This psalm is called “A Psalm of Thanksgiving,” but, in this case, coming home for Thanksgiving was more than a family get-together, it was an act of praise.
Psalm 100 is one of the most familiar of the songs of praise in the Bible and the source of some of our most beloved songs of worship. The Doxology that we sing after receiving your morning offerings is derived from this psalm. The psalm itself is an invitation to sing: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come into his presence with singing” (v. 1).
A “joyful noise” was the appropriate greeting for a monarch in the ancient world, and, in this case, it is “all the earth” that cries out in joy at the presence of the Creator. It’s the kind of joyful noise whenever we gather for worship at FCBC. While in some churches, people come into the sanctuary quietly and silently; you always come with a joyful noise. It is the kind of noise we might make when we enter the front door of the family home after a long absence; the excited cry of being home at last. When entering the gates of the Lord, those excited cries then turn to songs of worship.
If we consider the place where we worship as our church “home,” this opening couple of verses has a lot to say to us.
Do we make a truly “joyful noise” when we come to worship, or do we settle for sighs of boredom or the sharp sound of complaint? Some people have actually complimented me about how consoling my voice is that it lauds them to sleep! Imagine that—they blame me for assisting them to nap!
Do we worship the Lord with “gladness,” or do we do so out of obligation? According to the printed calendar, Sundays are the first day of the week not the last day of a weekend. Do you want to begin the first day of the week with gladness?
Do we come into his presence with singing, or are we largely silent? Did you know that we have these blue hymnals so that we can all sing together? And if you have been told that you can’t carry a note like I have, when we are singing together, no one really notices. But the only thing you need to know is that God is hearing you sing!
If worship is designed to praise God in God’s presence, it ought to be joyful! When we worship, it’s noise that should shake the whole earth! Our church doors may not look like an ancient gate or the front door to your home, but entering them should be a cause for praise and thanksgiving.
Remember why we installed glass front doors in our church? We did this so that even during the hours when we don’t have them opened, people who walk by our church would see the lighted stained glass picture of Jesus inviting them to come to make a joyful noise to the Lord.
Reason for Worship
Now that we know that when we worship the Lord, we are to make a lot of noise, why would we come at all? Verse 3 offers the reason for worship. “Know that the Lord is God,” says the psalmist. “It is he that made us and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.”
Entering the gates of the Lord’s dwelling place, just like entering the doors of our childhood homes, reminds us of who we are and from whence we came. Outside the gates we try to make a name for ourselves, making up our identity from our vocation, our bank account, our friendships and accomplishments.
I can still remember when we would arrive home to Boston where my mother lived. Once climbing up the steep steps and into the parlor, I would give my mother a kiss on the cheek and she would always pat my behind like I was still her little boy. I would go over to the mantle of the fireplace where there stood one of those German glass-domed clocks that you only need to wound once-a-year to see if I had any mail sent to my mother’s house. Coming home reminded me of who I was, still my mother’s boy and from whence I came, a native Bostonian.
But inside the walls of God’s presence, we also remember who we are and to whom we belong. We are “the sheep of his pasture,” and it is God’s presence that provides us protection and care better than any defensive wall ever could. Worship reminds us that our identity begins and ends with God, the one who made us and cares for us. Today in worship, we pray and seek God’s mercy and grace to care for our loved ones and friends. Our identity is that not only do we believe in the skills of physicians and the effectiveness of medicine, our identity is that we believe that God’s miracles can happen on us.
In shaping our identity, worship also shapes our worldview. If God is the one who made us all, then we also find our identity with the people of “all the earth.” Worship can push us beyond the boundaries of race and nationality, and help us to recognize that we are not called to be at home with just our people, but with all God’s people. Remember we prayed for the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria as well as the Christians in Myanmar? We prayed for the people in Ferguson, Missouri as well as the people in the Bay Area. We pray for people who are simply associates or office colleagues as well as the people we share our dinner tables with every night.
The gates of God’s presence are wide open to a multitude of travelers coming from all over the place, all made to be focused on reflecting the image of God within them, rather than reflecting on their differences. They’re called to join in making a “joyful noise,” a cacophony of sounds in many languages, but all giving worship to God.
It’s been said that the American Baptist Churches is the most diverse Christian group in the United States. And hopefully when some of you may be joining me to attend the 2015 Biennial Mission Summit that we have become a “Booster Sponsoring Church,” you will witness how all of us are reflecting the image of God within us, rather than reflecting on our differences. Worship is the universal language of God’s world, and, no matter where we call home, we’re able to join together in thanks and praise.
In the next line, verse 4, we see the command: “Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. Give thanks to him, bless his name.” And why do we offer thanks and praise? “For the Lord is good: his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations” (v. 5). We praise God because God is good, and we give thanks because God’s love, grace and faithfulness have extended across the generations, even when God’s people sometimes forget their identity.
When “the sheep of his pasture” are wandering, God is still the shepherd who will keep searching until all of them are back in the fold. Remember Luke 15, Jesus told this parable of a shepherd having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, leaves the ninety-nine in the wilderness and goes after the one that is lost until he finds it. When he finds it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.”
The gate remains open because the gatekeeper wants his sheep to come in and live an abundant life. In John 10:9, Jesus says, “I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture.” He goes on to say, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (10:11).
Give Praise
What we are about in the sanctuary is to praise God. On the face of it, that seems to be pointless. Of all the people in the universe, God is the one who shouldn’t need praise. Unlike us human beings who crave for affirmation and compliments, God doesn’t need them. What could the “immortal, invisible, God only wise” probably want from our humble hymns and anthems?
We don’t praise God because God needs it. We praise God because there’s something in us that is incomplete, unsatisfied, unfulfilled that we want to complete, satisfy and fulfill. We praise God because we discover who we are and to whom we belong. We praise God to shape our worldview to extend beyond the people we know to all the people that God knows and God would like us to know too. We praise God when we are wandering and lost because the Good Shepherd will not forget us and will rejoice when we are found.
Can you find another word in the word, “Praise?” The word is “raise.” And that is how we make people feel when they know who they are and to whom they belong. They raise their voices to make a joyful noise. They raise themselves up to worship. They raise up the concerns of others so that people in all the earth would know God.
Many of the great gates of the world are now more historical or ceremonial than they are main passage in and out of the city. The gates into God’s presence, however, are still open for business, inviting God’s people to come and worship. We are invited into God’s presence, and that’s a great reason for thanksgiving!
Let us pray.
Thank you, O God for inviting us into worship to make a joyful noise and to be in worship with gladness. In this season of thanksgiving, reminds us who we are and to whom we belong. But lead us also to leave the safety of the pasture to faithfully invite others to also come and enjoy your protection and forgiveness for the entire world is yours. We pray that through the ministry and mission of this church that your steadfast love endures forever. Amen.