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"Detoxing Our Souls"
Returning the Kiss

Luke 4:1-13 (Detoxing Our Souls—part 3)

When I was thinking about this week’s sermon, I considered going in a different
direction, of doing an exploration of a different part of this text, but I actually decided to
go back to one of side items of last week’s sermon, the whole dilemma of idols, and our
own, very human struggle to avoid our worship of things, of that creation, rather than
the Creator, that mistake we humans so often make. But our mistake is rooted in
something that is good, this instinct to worship God, something that we were created
for. Sometimes we do our worship privately, in quiet times, and even in some not-so-
quiet places—I’ve certainly had moments in loud concerts where I found myself
immersed in the presence of God—even in concerts with no religious focus—
sometimes you just have to praise God because such moments of beauty and artistry
can exist in this world.

But most of the time, I worship with you, and with others that I have gone to church with
over the years, at different churches, in different parts of the country—all of them were
sacred places. And for me, worship is most powerful when it is with other people, when
the room just crackles with the Spirit, and you know that you are in the presence of the
living God, and you are with your friends and strangers, doing the work of worship
together. But the interesting thing about worshipping and serving at different
communities of faith is that there a lot of differences in the way we humans worship.
When I was at the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, the community really did reflect a lot of
diversity, and one of the woman that I worked with encapsulated that diversity for me.
Marty Ruggles was the Prayer Coordinator of the Cathedral, in charge of the different
prayer ministries of the church, and sometimes she would help lead worship, sitting up
in the chancel with the rest of the clergy and whenever we would be sitting next to each
other, I would always think that we must make an odd pair up here together! Marty just
worships differently from me—you could CLEARLY tell when the Spirit was working in
her—she would close her eyes and one of her arms would start to go up and I’m sitting
right next to her, with all my ex-Presbyterian alarms start going off, thinking “what’s she
doing?” Is she about to slap me upside the head? It might do me some good to
worship next to her, but I kept thinking that we make a funny couple we make up
here…Marty, who’s just swaying and smiling and got that hand up in the air and me—
one of the frozen chosen, not moving an inch, worshipping in my “don’t show any
emotion” sort of way. I always kid that you know that the Spirit is working in me on any
given Sunday when my foot gets a tapping—if you see that, you know that I’m having
my own personal spiritual revival up here!

But whatever our way of worshipping, high church, low church, or somewhere in the
middle, the truth of the matter is that we humans were built for worship—it is so
ingrained in us, so deep within us that it is like breathing—most of the time we are not
even aware that we are in the act of worshipping. In fact, I would say that 95 % of the
time we aren’t even aware of the moments we are in the act of worshipping God—or
even worshiping something else. And the worshipping “something else” is always the
problem, isn’t it? One of the great things about being built for worship, being created
for worship, even given the duty of worship as one of our purposes in life, is that we
know how to do it instinctively—we know instinctively how to worship, though, again, I
suspect most of us are not even aware that we are doing it. In our better moments, its
those times in our lives when our hearts leap for joy, when we see the beauty in the
world that God has created, and something sings within us, quietly, or even powerfully—
we see the shimmer of God’s glory and God’s presence in the world, and our hearts
leap for joy and yet we can barely name what we are experiencing at that moment.

But the other side of the coin is the darker side of this instinct to worship, those
moments in our lives when our instincts for worship fail us. Why? Because we were
built for worship, because we have been created to do this thing, we so often get
confused—in fact, the most human of all mistakes when it comes to worship is to
confuse the creation for the Creator, to think that the things made by God are actually
God. That is why the Old Testament is just filled with God saying to the people, “don’t
worship idols! Don’t confuse what I have given you for me!” I mean, there a lot of
reasons we humans have this tendency to worship “things”—I think that so many
beautiful things in our lives, the good things in our lives, they remind us of who God is,
they reflect the God we want so desperately, and we just make the mistake of thinking
that those things in our lives, the material things we acquire and are given in this life—
the cars, the house—or we even confuse God with the people in our lives we are gifted
with—the spouse we have, sometimes even our family, sometimes even our children—
we make the mistake of worshipping the gifts we have been given rather the Giver of
those gifts.

But this temptation towards making this mistake is so human, so common, that even
Jesus experienced this powerful choice between the creation and the Creator. Satan
tempts him with this offer: “worship me and I’ll give you all the power and glory that this
little world can offer you.’ And of course, Jesus refuses this, and he replies to Satan
that only God is worthy of worship—no one and no-thing else. And yet most of us have
at least spent some of our lives worshipping other things, actually, we probably spend
most of the 95% I spoke of earlier worshipping the things that aren’t worthy of our
worship. Besides, the reality is that the idols in our lives—whether it is our finances,
our partners, our families, power and prestige—all important things, beautiful things,
but not worthy of worship—all of the idols fail us. Eventually, they crumble and we see
them for what they are—faint glimmers of the God who created them for our sake, for
our care, but not to be worshipped.

And why it is so important not to fall for the darker side of our instinct to worship, for
that no so pretty other side of the coin I was talking about? Because worship is one of
the reasons we exist, because it is one of our purposes for existing—to adore the one
who created us, to see the world in all of its beauty, human and not-human, and to see
it as faint glimpse of the One who created it and us. And to be frank, the other reason
we probably should get this whole worship thing right is because of what worship really
is.

You see, in the New Testament, the word you find most often translated as “worship”
actually comes from the Greek word that means “to kiss towards.”
(Proskuneo = to kiss towards) When we get this whole worship thing right, we don’t just
simply adore God, we actually kiss God. In the ancient world, and to some degree
even today in some countries and cultures, especially in the Middle East, people kiss
each other on the cheek when they greet each other. In the early church, people
greeted each other with a “holy” kiss. It was an ancient sign of friendship and
welcome—and that is why Jesus is so hurt when Judas betrays him with a kiss—it is
such a betrayal of the gentle act of welcoming and greeting friends. Judas betrays not
only Jesus, but he disfigures what it means to be warmly greeted by another person—
he betrays human kindness and human warmth—and I suspected this broke Jesus’
heart as much as anything else.

I mean, let’s face it: kissing is such an intimate act in culture, beyond simply greeting
each other—the kiss of another is one of those things we don’t forget about them,
especially if we have loved them. And we can also usually remember the moment a
particular kiss really meant something to us—the heat flowing through our bodies, the
soft texture of his or her lips, the initial fumbling and awkwardness as you try to sense
how you and this other fit together, at least how you fit together in this particular
moment. Jeanette Winterson says in one of her novels, THE PASSION that “To kiss
well one must kiss solely. No groping hands or stammering hearts. The lips and the lips
alone are the pleasure. (p. 59). Kissing another person is an art-form, it takes
practice, and it takes time—you’ve got to learn how to kiss, much like we have to learn
how to kiss the face of God—and when things finally click for us in worship, when we
kiss God, the fireworks go off in our hearts and in our bodies, and those fireworks can
be seen in raised hands, in tears, in feet a-tapping, and the closed eyes of someone
who is obviously in the presence of God, quietly immersing themselves in God. The art
of human kissing, in addition to being a learned thing and an intrinsic goodness,
perhaps it is also a gift from God so that we can get some hint of what it means to
worship the One who has made everything, all of which contains hints of the One has
created it.

But this idea that we are kissing God when we gather together for worship, it doesn’t
just stop there—in fact, it wasn’t just us Christians who understood worship as
something close to human passion. Our ancient forbearers in the faith, the Jewish
people, didn’t just settle for this idea of kissing as being a warm, social greeting from
God, so to speak, as it was probably understood in ancient times. No, this idea went a
lot further, actually. In our Old Testament, you will find one of the most unusual of
books, the Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, because legend attributes it to King
Solomon. It is a poem between two lovers, and let me tell you, if you haven’t already
read it—its incredibly hot stuff! Some of the images are so charged with sexuality that it
almost didn’t make it into the Jewish Bible—it was so sexual that even some early
fathers of the church had a problem with it being in our own Christian Bibles. And I
always tell people when they read it, that all those moments when they are asking
“does he actually mean what I think he means or is she referring to what I think she is
referring to?” more than likely they are!   It’s probably what you are thinking!

You see, the only way the Jewish people and the early church could justify having this
particular erotic book in its canon—most of which you couldn’t read aloud in church—
was to say that it was a metaphor for the love affair between God and the people of
God. The church has said that it is an erotic love poem that was meant to hint at the
passion that lies between the Creator and the creation—between God and the church.
To be in relationship with God is to be in a relationship like this—where the passion is
deep, where human lips meet divine lips, where all of the body and spirit is met and
loved by the very God who has created it in the first place. Now, I’ll be honest, I think its
probably stretching this ancient book beyond what it can handle—I mean, after all, it
could just be an incredible celebration of human love and passion, things that certainly
hint of the one who created both of those things. In my mind, however, this odd
traditional understanding of the Song of Songs says something about how both the
Hebrew people and the Christian church understood what it meant to worship God,
what it meant to be in relationship with God. To worship God is to return the kiss—in
fact, maybe our job in worship is to return the kiss of the One who made the first move,
the One who has always made the first move with us. Some of us have sometimes
been pretty reluctant to begin the relationship with God, haven’t we? No need to worry
in this case, because God has made that gesture towards you and me—an incredibly
intimate gesture, a kiss, a gentle, inviting kiss.

But you know, a relationship takes time, it takes effort, it takes showing up, and putting
in some effort, and to be honest, a lot of us have not always been prepared to make a
commitment, at different points in our lives.   And that is why I think we fall for the idols—
I mean, a relationship with a thing doesn’t require much from us—I mean, what kind of
demands can money really make of us, or things, material things, for that matter?
Worshipping those things may wither away our soul, but what was never alive cannot
truly ask anything from the living. And you know, worshipping stuff, kissing material
things, metal and stone—the truth is when we worship the idols in our lives, when we
kiss what cannot return the kiss, eventually we find that we can only be truly satisfied
for so long in this one-way relationship, in this one-person relationship.   That’s why
Jesus refused the toxin that Satan was offering him that day in the wilderness—he knew
it would poison him in the end, like it does us…and why we’re asked to do our own
detoxification each and every Lent. And even when we worship that which is alive but
not God, even when we worship other people, when we think they can fill us up and
complete us, we find out pretty quickly that no other person can fill up that piece of our
heart that is reserved for God and God alone—the place inside of us that is made for
the worship of the One who has created us.

So, on Sunday mornings, I come to meet God here with you…and I come to meet God
in you, and I hope that you stumble upon God in me as well. Is God everywhere? Oh
yes, most definitely. Can’t you worship God anywhere? Yes, once again, most
definitely. But you know, this is the only place in my life and I suspect in yours as well,
where I search for God wholly and completely, where I strain to get a glimpse of God in
you and I strain to even get a glimpse of God in me. One time a week, I am asked to
focus all of my life completely upon the One who has loved me from the moment I came
from my mother’s womb, and is the One who will be with me when I draw my last human
breath—we come to worship to the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega. And
if we believe the New Testament, we are also asked to gather together, and to worship
together, because for whatever reason, our personal relationships with God are made
stronger when we worship God together, as beautiful and fragile people—we get more
chances to get a glimpse of God in each other, the Spirit in each other. We come here
to worship together so that we can return the gentle kiss God has placed on our lives,
upon our lips, upon our hearts, and at least one hour a week, on this very day, we get
life and love and hope just right—we return the kiss of the One who has loved us more
deeply and more gently than anyone else ever has, or ever will. Amen.