This is the final sermon in a Lenten series focusing on John Wesley’s identification of six means of grace, disciplines of the faith that keep us close to God. On the first Sunday of the season we looked at fasting, and then the reading of scripture, holy conferencing (Wesley’s term for people gathering to discuss matters of faith), praying, receiving Holy Communion, and today, participating in worship.

But first, an apocryphal story. Two men go to a baseball game. In the first inning it is three-up and three-down for each team. Then, one of the men gets a phone call from the office. There is an emergency, and he needs to return to handle the problem. He says to his friend, “I have to go, but I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Well, it takes a while, so it is not until the top of the ninth inning that he makes it back to the ballpark.

“What’s happened?” he asks.

“It’s unbelievable,” says his friend. “Both starting pitchers are still in, and both are pitching perfect games – no runs, no hits, no errors.”

“Good,” replies the other man. “I haven’t missed anything.” Haven’t missed anything except the drama, the tension, the story of what has led up to this moment.

That is how it would be if we went straight from singing “All Glory, Laud, and Honor” this Sunday to “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” next Sunday without paying any attention to what happens in-between, to go from one celebration to another without living the drama of this Holy Week.

There is no Easter story without the Last Supper of Maundy Thursday, without the agonizing prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, without the betrayal by both Judas and Peter, without the trial in the kangaroo court of Pontius Pilate, without the lynching of Jesus on the tree of crucifixion. Without the whole story of Jesus in these next days there is no story of our salvation, no story of God’s love, no story that gives us hope for tomorrow. To miss Holy Week is to miss the whole point.

Let us confess that it is hard to find time during the week to pay attention to God’s story. Work, family, school, commitments . . . it is a week like any other week. But that is the point: it is not like any other week. And the Sabbath is not like any other day. One reason why we worship together one day out of seven is to make it unique . . . to enter a space that is unlike anywhere else we usually are, to hear music that we do not have on our i-pods or in our CD player, to listen to a vocabulary that already has used words like “Gethsemane, “crucifixion,” and “salvation,” words that do not come up in everyday conversation. When we worship together we sing hymns with timeless meaning, pray prayers preserved by the tradition, and we sit in an atmosphere of respectful silence that we seldom experience otherwise.

Worship is a means of keeping time that is different from the way the world keeps time, and Holy Week is an intensification of it.

Flora Keshgegian, who works with the faculty at Brown University, writes about the Sabbath in her book, Time for Hope: Practices for Living in Today’s World, “(Practicing) Sabbath intensifies time by seeming to suspend what we think of as ordinary time. The point of Sabbath is to approximate eternity and to experience it in some small way. To be in Sabbath time is to be in God’s time. Eternity is not endless time, but without time. Paradoxically, Sabbath, by focusing on time and the qualities of our living in time, takes us out of time.” (217-218)

Worship is a means of suspending time. So, if the morning service seems endless, then we have failed, but if it seems like an eternity, then we have succeeded because we have entered into God’s time.

God’s time is called “kairos;” a “kairos moment” occurs when time seems to stand still. A couple preparing for their wedding may say about their first date, “We talked for hours and never ran out of things to say to each other. It was so easy, and we just lost track of time.” “Kairos,” God’s time, not “chronos,” a clock’s time.

Of course, we have to be chronologically involved. We have to know what time it is. We have watches and we have an appointment calendar. We have a monthly calendar, a family calendar, a school calendar, a baseball schedule, a symphony subscription series, a medical calendar, and a community calendar. We have phones that remind us when it is time, and computers that will remind us when we have forgotten to submit something on time.

Worship takes us beyond all of that. Paul Simpson Duke, a Baptist minister in Ann Arbor, writes that we worship in order “to interrupt our self-absorption, lassitude, acquiescence, numbing entertainments, resigned despair, and all else that reduces our existence to sleepwalking.” He says that during the Lenten season our worship “wants to sling the cold water of baptism across our faces and awaken us to our position.” (Interpretation, “Preaching in the Half-Light of Lent,” p.65)

Our position, if we are not sensitive to the gift of Sabbath, is like the man who missed most of the baseball game and assumes that nothing happened. No drama, no tension, no meaning to the present moment as he sits down for the ninth inning.

Our worship experience tells us something else – there is a story to hear, to learn, to live ourselves. There is a way in which time stands still and all of eternity is now . . . the past and the future concentrated into this present moment. That is what the Church through the centuries has called “eternal life.” It is not life everlasting, but life ever-present. Being alive to this moment, seeing the profound meaning even in the little things, having reason to hope.

There is a lot of despair in the streets these days, people screaming insults of outrage unlike any tea party I ever have attended. Civic leaders being uncivil in their dereliction of duty. Cries of social justice being “subversive,” insisting that Christians deny their Savior in order to conform.

Jesus heard those same cries during the week upon which are about to embark. He heard the insults, the ethnic slurs, the unjust accusations, the fear of people leading to his violent death. He saw the leaders of the land – the Roman governor, the judges, the leaders of the temple – cave in to the clamor of the mob. He felt the injustice of cowardly authorities pierce his hands and his feet.

That is why we must submit ourselves to the story in these next eight days, so that we can live through these days into a day of hope. For that is where the story of Jesus leads us . . . not to despair, but to hope.

Now, not optimism. Cornel West, the Princeton professor, says in his 1997 book, Restoring Hope, that optimism adopts the role of the spectator who looks at the evidence and assumes things will get better. In contrast, hope actively becomes a participant and struggles against all evidence in order to make things better.

Worship calls us to be participants, not spectators . . . to live the story of Christ, not to sing “All Glory, Laud, and Honor” in the first inning, then to go back to the office to take care of business until the ninth inning, only to return to sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” Worship insists that we forget, if just for an hour, the clock on the wall and pay attention to the eternity God has placed in our hearts. Worship will lead us, if we take the time and concede to participate, to hope, even against all evidence. There is an Easter after Good Friday, but we cannot get to the resurrection without going through the crucifixion.

Now, we have gotten all this way without mentioning John Wesley and worship. The simplest understanding is that John Wesley was an Anglican priest to his dying day, and the guide for his worship life was the Book of Common Prayer. He was not out to start a new church that would challenge the Church of England but to foment a spiritual and sacramental renewal within it.

 I received an e-mail this past week from a Methodist historian who lives in Oxford in which he asks to meet our tour group there in a few weeks. He thinks that we must see the Lincoln College chapel from the 1630’s where John Wesley worshipped when he was a fellow of the college in order to appreciate how immersed he was in the worship life of the Anglican Church. “So often people picture him as a sort of ‘hot gospeller’ riding around the country, whereas in fact he was largely formed by his Anglican tradition.”

What happened that Wesley was not appointed to a parish position? Well, it seems that the Bishop of Bristol heard of Wesley’s unusually generous sense of God’s grace for all people, not just the 5% of the population who lived in the big houses on the hill and could afford to buy pews in the local parish church. So, the bishop refused to assign him to a parish, and Wesley then declared, “The world is my parish,” making a virtue of a necessity. He spent the next fifty years preaching outdoors in open pit mines, village squares, and county town marketplaces. He found it vile at first, thinking that no one could be led to Christ except at 11:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning in a proper liturgy held at the parish church. But he learned that God could take even his rigid orthodoxy and fashion something new.

Methodism grew up on the strength of preaching and hymn singing, usually led by the laity, not the clergy. But Wesley always counseled those in his renewal movement to stay close to the church. Observe the sacraments, learn the prayers, follow the liturgical seasons, and know what time it was, what time God said that it was . . . always the time to repent, always the time to rejoice. That is the glimpse of eternity that God gives us when we worship together.

In Seamus Heaney’s version of Sophocles, “The Cure at Troy:”
      History says, don’t hope on this side of the grave.
      But then, once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave
      Of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.
      So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge.
      Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

That further shore for Christians as we enter Holy Week is the hope of Easter, a hope that is not a naïve optimism where we sit back and wait for things to get better, but rather a hope that calls us to struggle against all odds to make things better. We must be participants, not bystanders, and that is what worship affords us the opportunity to do – to live the story of Jesus, from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, to his last supper with the disciples, to the agony of Gethsemane, to the betrayal, to the trial, to the cross, and ultimately to the resurrection. That is what we are doing today. Amen.