Transcript
The Spirit Inspires
First Baptist Richmond, August 10, 2025
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Isaiah 1:1; 10-20
Learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow.
The word religion has fallen on hard times lately. People used to be happy to tell you they were religious, but now? Not so much. It sounds too sanctimonious. But at its Latin root the word religion simply means “to tie back together again.” It comes from the word ligio, like the ligaments that tie your muscles to your bones, and the prefix re, which simply means “to do it again.” If you have a torn ligament some doctor might need to get in there and re-pair it, but if your connection to God gets torn, or even worse, severed, you might need some religion. But which one? What kind?
That’s the question.
I’m going to say something that may seem heretical but bear with to see if it isn’t true, and that is that all religions are man-made. Now, God isn’t man-made. The little pink paperback catechism I used to study as a child in the Presbyterian Church said: “No one made God; God has always been.” But the ways we try to tie ourselves back together again with God, the shaky ladders we build and prop up against the edge of heaven—those are man-made. And some of them work better than others, or, at least, some of them work better for me.
When I was in Greece a few years ago I decided to attend an Orthodox service on Sunday morning. I ended up sitting on a hard, wooden chair, listening to a priest chanting in ancient Greek, while an acolyte walked around the sanctuary swinging a censer that filled the air with so much smoke I could hardly breathe. I slipped out after an hour thinking, “This may work for some people, but it’s not working for me.” And yet I’ve had similar experiences in some contemporary worship services here in the States. The praise band was up there singing songs I had never heard before, and doing a good job, but I never did get to that point where I felt like I wanted to close my eyes and raise my hands.
No, the kind of worship that usually works best for us is the kind we’re familiar with, where we can relax into its regular rhythms and as the old hymn says, lose ourselves in “wonder, love, and praise.” But there’s a downside to that: worship can become so familiar, so routine, that we find ourselves simply going through the motions. Call to worship: check. Opening hymn: check. Children’s sermon: check. That’s why Phil Mitchell, our Minister of Christian Worship, spends so much time looking for ways to keep things fresh and meaningful. In our planning meetings he will sometimes get a gleam in his eye and say, “What if we did something like this on Sunday?”
When I came to First Baptist back in 2008 I asked Phil if we could start using the lectionary, because that’s what I had been using in my previous church. But at that time, for this church, it was new. I had to make my case. I told the congregation that the lectionary was nothing more than a plan for reading through most of the Bible in public worship over a three-year period. They agreed to give it a try, although we soon discovered that reading all four passages out loud every Sunday didn’t make for great television. But with the lectionary came an emphasis on the seasons of the Christian year: Lent and Easter, Advent and Epiphany. And with the seasons came the colors: green and purple, white and red.
I believe those things can make worship more meaningful, and that over time they begin to have a power all their own. I still remember something that happened in my church in DC, when Christmas Eve came on a Sunday. We decided that right there—during the eleven o’clock worship service—we would make the transition from Advent to Christmas. So, during the closing hymn I went to my associate and replaced her purple stole with a white one, and then she did the same for me, and something about going from the color of waiting and preparation to the color of joyful celebration, brought tears to my eyes, and I wasn’t the only one.
But even that can become routine.
Sheila Dixon heads up something we call the Walthall Guild here at First Baptist Church. Some churches would call it an “altar guild,” but we named ours after Jimmy Walthall, a member of this church who used to make sure that everything in the sanctuary was ready for worship, down to the tiniest detail. Now it’s Sheila’s job, and she may do it even better than Jimmy. But all this business about the seasons of the year and the corresponding colors was new to her. She didn’t grow up in that tradition. But you know what she did? She ordered a calendar from a Christian bookstore that tells her what color the paraments are supposed to be on every Sunday of the year and she uses that to make sure we get it right. Sometimes she’ll check in with me: “Now, it’s white for this Sunday, right? Because it’s Christ the King Sunday?” I’m impressed. But I would suspect that somewhere down in her Baptist bones Sheila wonders if it really matters.
I’ve worshiped in a few different traditions through the years and here’s what I’ve learned. Presbyterians seem to place a high value on knowledge. Their ministers are highly educated and their sermons are sprinkled with footnotes. Pentecostals place a high value on the Holy Spirit. Worship is at its best when the Spirit shows up through prophecy or speaking in tongues. Episcopalians place a high value on beauty, from the architecture of their buildings to the poetry of their prayers. And, finally, Baptists place a high value on sincerity: they want your prayers to come from the heart, and not from some book.
But here’s the truth: all of those things can become empty. You can hear an intellectual sermon that leaves you cold. You can endure the babble of meaningless tongues. You can sit in a beautiful sanctuary all alone. And you can listen to a sincere prayer that is sincerely awful. Am I right about that? Have you had that experience? We can get so good at doing worship a certain way that everybody knows what’s coming; there are no surprises anymore; and you end up doing that thing nobody wants to do: going through the motions.
I’ve done it myself.
I’ve got this ritual of making the coffee and saying my prayers in the morning, and as part of that ritual I pray for many of you. I’ve got a list of nearly sixty names, and I simply pray my way down that list. But I’ve been praying for some of the same people for so long now I don’t even need to look at the list. I’ve got it memorized. And sometimes, to my horror, I realize that I’ve rattled off a half dozen names without even thinking of those people, without even seeing their faces in my mind and remembering their particular need. I have to back up and start again. Rituals can become empty. Worship can become empty. And that’s where we find God’s people this morning.
They had been faithfully offering sacrifices to God, as prescribed in the Book of Leviticus. And if you’ve ever read it you know how particular God seems to be about how those sacrifices should be offered. Here’s one example: “If you present a sheep as an offering of well-being, you shall bring it before the Lord and lay your hand on the head of the offering. It shall be slaughtered before the tent of meeting, and Aaron’s sons shall dash its blood against all sides of the altar. You shall present its fat from the sacrifice of well-being, as an offering by fire to the Lord: the whole broad tail, which shall be removed close to the backbone, the fat that covers the entrails, and all the fat that is around the entrails; the two kidneys with the fat that is on them at the loins, and the appendage of the liver, which you shall remove with the kidneys. Then the priest shall turn these into smoke on the altar as a food offering by fire to the Lord” (Leviticus 3:7-11).
Can you see how you might become so concerned about the form of worship that you forget its content? “Did I follow all the steps when I sacrificed that sheep? Did I remember to burn the fat around the entrails?” But apparently the priests of Israel had become so adept at offering sacrifices that they were like me, offering my morning prayers: they could do it in their sleep. And if you’ve read through that part of the Bible you know that God’s people were continually offering sacrifices. It was the way they worshiped. And apparently their worship had become empty even though (and let me emphasize this) they were doing it by the book, in exactly the way God had instructed. But for that and every other way of worship, it’s not about form, but content.
In today’s reading from Isaiah God says, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of lambs or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?” And the people might have said, surprised, “Well, Lord…you did!” But the Lord says, “Trample my courts no more! Bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation—I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.”
And that word iniquity is a clue that it wasn’t the form of their worship that God despised, but the circumstances in which they offered it. These people were coming to worship with hands that were still filthy with sin. They were laying those hands on the heads of the animals they were about to sacrifice. They hadn’t confessed their sins; they hadn’t repented. They just kept on doing the things they were doing and then came to worship as if everything were fine. But it wasn’t fine, and the Lord knew it. He said, “Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.”
So, what do you do in those circumstances? It’s not easy, but it’s simple. In verse 16 God says, “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove your evil deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil.” And then, in verse 17: “Learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead for the widow.” And that helps us understand precisely what kind of sin was contaminating their worship. From God’s perspective they weren’t doing good; they were doing evil. They weren’t seeking justice; but rather contributing to the injustice in their land. They weren’t rescuing the oppressed; they themselves had become the oppressors. And they weren’t defending the orphan or pleading for the widow; but instead trampling on the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.
“You can’t do all that,” God says, “and then show up for worship as if everything were fine. I won’t listen to your pretentious prayers. I’ll cover my ears when you start to sing. I’m telling you what I want from you, and it’s not a more glorious worship experience. What I want is for you to learn to do good. I want you to seek justice. I want you to rescue the oppressed. I want you to stand up for the widow and orphan. If you do that I think I could be happy with whatever form of worship you choose, because then the content would be right.”
But how do we do that? How do we fill the forms of our worship with the content God desires? Again, it’s not easy, but it’s simple: we ask for help. Specifically, we ask for the help of the Holy Spirit. I think about those disciples who gathered in that upper room in the days before Pentecost. Jesus had told them he wanted them to be his witnesses in “Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” but he knew they didn’t have the power to do it on their own. Shucks, they probably knew it, too. He told them to wait and pray for the promised power from on high and when it came it filled that room. It filled those disciples. They were, quite literally, inspired.
Do you know that word? It means “to breathe in.” When those disciples breathed in the Spirit of God they found themselves able to do all the things Jesus had asked them to do, and more. If you read to the end of Acts, chapter 2, you will find that after the excitement of speaking in unknown tongues, after pouring into the streets to proclaim the mighty acts of God, after Peter’s powerful Pentecost sermon and the subsequent baptism of 3,000 converts, those disciples settled into their new, spirit-filled life.
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship,” Luke writes, “to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved” (Acts 2:42-47).
Did you hear that next to the last line? They had “the goodwill of all the people.” Not just their fellow believers—all the people. In other words they were giving religion a good name! I think we could do the same! What if we prayed for that power from on high? What if it came? What if the Holy Spirit filled this room like it filled that other room on the Day of Pentecost? What if it filled us? What if we breathed in that Spirit until we were literally inspired to do good, to seek justice, to rescue the oppressed, to plead for the orphan and widow and to do all those other things I just mentioned? Don’t you think it would tie us back together again with God? Don’t you think it would give religion a good name? Don’t you think that we, too, might have the goodwill of all the people?
So, close your eyes, friends.
Take a deep breath.
Breathe in God’s Holy Spirit,
And be inspired.
—Jim Somerville © 2025
