There’s something powerful about singing our faith. 

I was running late one day to opening convocation in seminary. I slipped into the first seat I could find, failing to grab a program in my rush. Just as I was sitting down, the organ roared to life with the tune, HYFRYDOL. Now, you may be familiar with the old Methodist joke that we sing a million different hymns to the same five tunes. Such is the case for HYFRYDOL. In my memory, I hear that tune and I hear the hymn, “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus.” 

So, I launched into that classic Charles Wesley hymn. Now, the sopranos who sit behind me can attest, I sing like Winston Churchill, “loudly and with gusto, if a little out of tune,” as his biographer once wrote. So, loudly and with gusto, and a little out of tune, I’m sure, I sang the first lines of “Come, Thou long Expected Jesus,” while heads were gradually turning to look at me oddly. As I’m realizing that people are starting to stare, Jim Laney, former president of Emory and US Ambassador to South Korea, turned around, stared at me funny, pointed to the bulletin, and started chuckling to himself. I looked down, embarrassed, and saw we were singing not “Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus,” but, “Praise the Source of Faith and Learning.”

Despite my embarrassment, that hymn became one of my favorites. I read it as our morning prayer just a few weeks ago. The words from the bulletin that day sit framed on an end table in my office. This hymn speaks to the way that we should come to embody faith: in our heads and in our hearts. Faith is more than just what we believe; it’s a way of life that relies on God. When we practice faith, we do with our minds and our emotions; with both our heads and our hearts. 

Music is particularly powerful in connecting our heads and our hearts. There’s something powerful about singing our faith. In fact, singing our faith is one of the best ways to experience the healing power of the Holy Spirit meeting us where we have need. Singing, embodying our faith, connects the head and heart together. As we sing our faith through hymns, our emotions are connected to our understandings of God, leading us to embody our faith. 

Embodied faith. That’s a fancy way of saying what happens when we worship: we take in who God is through music, through hearing the reading of scripture, through hearing our faith proclaimed in sermons and through coming to the Table. We take God in, we embody our faith, and we are changed by it. 

Let’s hear our scripture for this morning, which is all about worship: Psalm 148

Scripture 

Inanimate objects praise God. 

At first, the reading of this psalm sounds beautiful, poetic. Sun and moon praise God. Snow and even fire and hail all praise God. But then consider that all of these objects I’ve just mentioned are inanimate. 

How do inanimate objects praise God? 

Originally, this Psalm would have been sung. The Psalter, all 150 of them in our bibles, were the very first hymnal. I love the Psalms because it’s people from long ago working out how to be in relationship with God. It’s them struggling with the tough questions of life. It’s them praising God when they see God come through! It’s them angrily speaking to God when life gets tough. 

It’s the whole range of the human experience! And they sang it together on a regular basis in worship, just as we sing hymns. 

Singing helps us embody our faith. It connects the head and the heart. We need that. Worship is about more than just acquiring head knowledge. In fact, sermons are not lectures in part because they should lead to an emotional response, not just an analytical one; a response of our hearts and our heads.

We come to worship to embody our faith; to literally take our faith into the depths of our being, into our bones and flesh, into our minds and hearts, into our hands and feet, and be changed by it. Singing helps with that. Other aspects of worship, like the sermon or morning prayer, can lead us to embody our faith in our heads and our hearts.

We come to embody our faith. But what does that mean, exactly? 

And what if, this morning, you hear this but you have rarely, if ever, felt like you’ve embodied your faith? Like worship is just going through the motions which sometimes has an effect, but maybe only rarely? 

If that’s the case, that’s okay. I’ve been there. 

For years, I sat through worship services and wondered why I wasn’t responding the way others were. Contemporary worship services were especially like that for me. I saw people moved to tears, moved to shout and sing and dance. Rarely was I moved and I definitely never felt the urge to shout and dance. It worked for them, but not for me. 

For years as a child and a youth, I grew up in a traditional Presbyterian service. The sermons seemed to hit home with some. But not for me. And the rest of the worship did very little to move me. 

As I grew in my faith, I felt greater resonance with worship. It seemed to have a greater effect, but to embody faith? To feel that sense of embodiment? That my faith had gotten deep into the depths of me through worship? That was rare. And I thought perhaps that was just the case; it was rare for everyone. Coming to worship on a regular basis, then, was to build the habit of practice so that when I needed God most, I could find my way more easily. 

There’s truth to that. But that answer was never fully satisfying. 

I felt like worship rarely worked for me; in that I felt like it rarely connected me deeply with God. I certainly rarely felt that my head and heart were connected to God; that I was embodying my faith. And I’d chide myself, saying that worship wasn’t about me. It was about God. But wasn’t I supposed to be changed by coming to worship? Wasn’t I supposed to experience God by coming to worship? 

Yes. The answer is yes. And the journey of my self-discovery about the power of worship takes us back to those inanimate objects in Psalm 148. 

Those objects, the sun and moon, the fire and hail, the snow and frost, embody a part of who God is. The sun shines exactly as God designed. The stars, suns themselves, shine exactly as God designed. The moon reflects that light at night, exactly as God designed. The snow and frost, even the sea creatures and especially the ones that appear monstrous, all function exactly as God designed. 

So it is for us. We function exactly as God designed when we come to worship. But we each relate to worship differently because God has designed us differently. To extend the metaphor, some of us may relate to God as a sun, others as the moon, others as sea monsters even, meaning that we experience worship differently. Different ways of worship speak to us, connect us to God more powerfully. Different modes of worship cause us to embody our faith, connecting our head and our heart. When I wasn’t responding to contemporary worship the way others did, for example, it didn’t say anything was wrong with me and certainly didn’t say anything was wrong with contemporary worship. It just didn’t work for how God designed me.

Not all of us will respond to preaching the same way, for example. For some, this moment is the highest and holiest; the most helpful means of embodying our faith. For others, the sermon is just okay but communion is the highest and holiest moment; the most helpful means of embodying our faith. For still others, it’s the music, singing or hearing the choir or the organ play. For even others, it’s the silences interspersed throughout worship; that time for stillness and reflection. For still others, it’s in the act of leading worship that they embody their faith.

In fact, for me, it’s the silence and communion that best help me embody my faith. When I’m attending worship and not leading it, times of prayer, times of silence, and communion are the times where I most fully connect with God; most fully embody my faith, feeling my head and heart connect. In fact, contemplative-style worship, not contemporary but contemplative styles like morning prayer and Taize, are my preferred way to worship. It may sound strange for one who delivers sermons week after week to not list sermons as the primary way of embodying faith, but for me, when I’m a participant rather than a leader in worship, that’s not how I’m designed. 

We all relate to worship differently. And knowing how we relate to worship helps us to embody our faith. First, it helps us by making it okay if some elements of worship are less impacting than others. When people around me were moved by the contemporary music and I was not, I sometimes wondered if something was wrong with me. Same thing when people were moved by a sermon. No, nothing is wrong with me. God has designed them to be moved by those things; those are ways they embody their faith. That’s not how I’m designed. And that’s okay, too. 

We each embody faith differently through worship. And that’s okay. God has designed us in just that way.

I first encountered this idea through a book by Luke Timothy Johnson. He suggests there are four different religious personality types. For me, understanding this has been transformative and I suspect it may hold power for all of us. 

He says that the first type, Type A, best embodies faith through ritual acts like communion and music, whether traditional like we do here or contemporary music. For these folks, they are changed by encountering God’s power through ritual and through elements that stimulate emotional responses. Not that we don’t all have emotional responses, but this is particularly important for Type A. Then, having encountered God in this way, they go and offer themselves to others through being emotionally present, available, and loving, because of how their encounter with God’s power has led them to embody that same spirit.

The second type, B, is less emotional in response and much more analytical; in some ways, the opposite of Type A. Type B best embodies faith through hearing scripture read, through singing hymns, and through sermons. They’re changed by encountering God’s power as discipline to grow. Think of all the athletic metaphors Paul uses in his letters. These folks come to worship to train, to borrow a bad pun, to cross-train, so that they can go and help make the world a better place. This type is more analytical, wanting to learn and grow in that way. And when they grow through being disciplined, through embodying in their minds what it is to be a Christian, they then go and help others live the life of faith by understanding how to follow in a disciplined way.

The third type, C, best embodies faith through silence, stillness, in settings that are simple and peaceful. This is my primary type. Prayer practices are particularly important, as is cultivating silence and stillness. Music that has a profound simplicity to it speaks the language of type C. This type comes to worship to feel a sense of transcendence, of connection with God through peace, so that they can go and offer peace to the world. And so that, in embodying peace and transcendence, they can go and be peace and facilitate transcendence for others. 

The final type, D, best embodies faith by helping lead it. These are the folks who embody faith by helping others experience God through worship. Some of you who desire to hold worship leadership positions have some of this type in you, and perhaps this is the dominant type. They come to worship to help others embody faith and, in doing so, they themselves embody their faith. 

There’s much to learn about these four types and, in fact, I could do weeks of teaching or weeks of a sermon series on them. But suffice to say here they reveal this truth: we relate to God differently through worship. We come to embody our faith in worship through different means. For some of us, different elements of worship are more powerful, better able to help us embody our faith. And that’s okay; that’s by God’s design, just the same way God designed the sun, moon, snow, and sea monsters to all praise God in their different ways.

It means that we are to live into those ways that we discover best help us embody our faith. To really pay attention to those elements of worship. We’re to be present throughout worship, but to really focus our attention during those times where we most powerfully encounter God. I imagine, if I were to ask you to list those elements of worship that are most impacting for you, where you feel the best and deepest connection to God, you could name those. Those are the elements that help us embody our faith by connecting our heads and our hearts.

Today, we begin stewardship here, talking about worship rather than money, because this is the primary way that we are changed and shaped in our faith. We come to worship week after week because we need that life changing encounter with God. We need this set-aside time and space to embody our faith. To experience the power and presence of God in our lives. So that we can then go and offer ourselves to others. So that we can then go and serve. So that we can then go and, having experienced in worship the embodiment of our faith, we can go and embody our faith for those who have little or no faith. 

In short, worship causes us to embody faith so that we can go and be healers. That’s our stewardship theme: we are healers. When we worship, when we grow in faith, when we serve through the church, and when we give of our finances, we do so in furtherance of the healing mission God has laid on this church. God has gifted us, designed us, each differently, both in how we embody our faith and live out God’s healing presence into the world. The more we lean into the elements of worship that best speak to us, best connect us to God, the more we will embody our faith. And when we embody our faith, we naturally live out Christ’s healing power into the world. 

We at Mulberry are healers. And being healers begins with worship. 

That’s why we ask that you be in worship every week. We need this regular experience of embodied faith to go and embody our faith for others; to be healers. And as we are changed by that regular encounter with God, we are better able to see how God is calling us to serve, including giving charitably to the church of the money God has entrusted to us. 

Yes, weekly sounds like a high standard, but I believe we need high standards in our lives. And, to throw in a little inside baseball, the churches thriving the most in this climate of nationwide decline are churches that set high standards. 

So, what do we mean by attend weekly? Come here, in this space, every week. If you can’t make it because of traveling or other obligations, join us online at 11am so that you’re part of the live worshipping congregation. And if that won’t work for some reason, tune into the recording of our livestream on Facebook. In other words, make worship a priority. 

What else do we mean by attend weekly? If, in hearing about these different ways of relating to God, different ways of embodying our faith, you feel like there are elements of worship we’re not currently offering that would best help you embody your faith, best help you connect your head and your heart, then I’m all ears. I want this service to help as many different kinds of people as possible encounter God and embody faith. If there are tweaks we need to make, things to add in or subtract, sermons to shorten even or communion to offer more frequently, I want to hear that. And it may be that we need to add a contemplative-style worship service or other style of service, for example. It may be we need to offer worship at other times during the week. I also want to hear that. 

And here’s how you can communicate that: you’ll notice a link and QR code in your bulletin. This links to a summary of each of the four types. And it asks that you let us know what type you are. If you need tech help, stick around after worship and we’ll help you. 

Our responsibility as a church is to provide worship spaces that best help each member of the church embody our faith. The responsibility of you the church member is to be in worship weekly. In doing so, in embodying our faith through worship, we are equipped to go embody the healing presence of Christ into the world. At Mulberry, we are healers.

And, when you give to this church, you support our ability to do worship. You provide the resources necessary to have things like a survey linked in the bulletin, to produce the bulletins, to provide for our music ministry, to provide the technology to livestream, to have staff who can offer various forms of worship, and to keep our beautiful sanctuary cooled and in good repair. Worship takes resources, and so we invite you to pledge during this stewardship campaign. Complete the pledge card that’s been mailed to you, grab one from one of the ushers, or complete the online pledge card at mulberrymethodist.org/stewardship. That link is listed on the back of your bulletin. Your gift in any amount gives us the opportunity to help all who walk through our doors embody their faith, so that we can go and be healers. 

Psalm 148 ends with the words that God has raised up a horn for God’s people. It’s an old-style way of saying that God has provided worship as the best means for honoring God and for growing in faith. It’s the way that we encounter who God is, are changed by that encounter, so that we can go and change the world around us; be the healers that we at Mulberry are.

Worship causes us to embody our faith so we can go and be the embodiment of Jesus Christ to the world. At Mulberry, we are healers. Being healers begins in weekly worship. Let’s worship together every week.

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Amen.