Hebrews 10:25, KJV: “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.”
The Church from its earliest inception has been a people who have physically gathered for Worship.
Whether gathered during the time of the Tabernacle during the special feasts times of the year as recorded in Leviticus 23 or whether gathered at the Temple God’s people worship as a gathered people.
These things come to mind as I pour out my soul: how I walked with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and praise.Psalm 42:4
I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go to the house of the LORD.”
Psalm 122:1A Song of Ascents. Of David.
When we get to the NT we see the gathered Church at Synagogues and then after the Resurrection the body of Christ becomes a gathered people regularly worshiping the risen Christ.
Acts 2:42 And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.
I Cor. 11:7In the following instructions I have no praise to offer, because your gatherings do more harm than good.
And of course the Hebrews passage this morning underscores this habit of gathered worship by reminding its audience the importance of gathered worship.
The Scripture taken as a whole, communicates part of what it means to be the Church is to be a people who are gathered by Jesus who gather regularly to devote ourselves to the preached doctrine, to receive the sacraments, and to encourage and exhort each other unto love and good works.
A Church that seeks to be a Church without being gathered is a oxymoron.
Our Reformed Divines understood this,
The Westminster Larger Catechism speaks in such a way about Worship that it is hard to believe they would have counted non-gathered “worship” as Worship.Q. 108. What are the duties required in the second commandment?
A. The duties required in the second commandment are, the receiving, observing, and keeping pure and entire, all such religious worship and ordinances as God hath instituted in his Word; particularly prayer and thanksgiving in the name of Christ; the reading, preaching, and hearing of the Word; the administration and receiving of the Sacraments; Church government and discipline; the ministry and maintenance thereof; religious fasting; swearing by the name of God, and vowing unto him: as also the disapproving, detesting, opposing, all false worship; and, according to each one’s place and calling, removing it, and all monuments of idolatry.
So, while the Christian is to be a man or woman whose whole life is characterized as Worship, the Christian is also known as the person who regularly gathers for Worship. 1st Century Ignatius of Antioch spoke of the import of gathered worship,
“When ye frequently, and in numbers meet together, the powers of Satan are overthrown, and his mischief is neutralized by your like mindedness in the faith.”
18 centuries later Albert Barnes played the same theme,
“Christians should regard it as a sacred duty to meet together for the worship of God … with all who bear the Christian name, with all who expect to make advances in piety and religious knowledge, it should be regarded as a sacred duty to assemble together for public worship. Religion is social; and our graces are to be strengthened and invigorated by waiting together on the Lord. There is an obvious propriety that people should assemble together for the worship of the Most High, and no Christian can hope that his graces will grow, or that he can perform his duty to his Maker, without uniting thus with those who love the service of God.”
Albert Barnes
Doubtless the Apostles had in mind the gathering of the Church as a true fellowship of Christians. There is no point in assembling together in assemblies where the assembly has become merely a diluted and pale reflection of the larger anti-Christ culture. There is no point in assembling in a place that has the word “Church” on the sign or doesn’t have the word on a sign but clearly advertises themselves as a Church when the people gathering are indistinct from the culture around them, where the clergy are one part hipster, one part Rogerian psychologist, one part Ad-man and no part theologian. There is no point assembling when the liturgy is merely a cheap knock off of some bad “boy band” concert where the groupies swoon at tatted Pastor McCool as he leads the praise and worship time. No point in assembling when the liturgy is as vertical as a dead cat on the highway.
This is one qualification we must give to Hebrews 10:25. Dead Churches require no allegiance and indeed the gathering of yourselves together in these types of night-clubs is absolute sin. You’re better served sleep in on Sunday morning.
Now lets turn to the forsaking of assembling together when in the midst of a public health crisis.
If churches are darkened in the face of sickness and death, only TV talking heads, media pundits, and public health officials will speak to our anxieties and fears. This reinforces the secular proposition: Life in this world is the only thing that matters.The docility of our Christian leaders in the cessation of public worship is stunning. It suggests that they more than half of what the secular talking heads are telling them when they tell them that “life in this world is the only thing that matters,” and “you only go around once in life grab all the gusto you can.”
Shuttering our Churches and so canceling the gathered worship service of God and His Christ is not a great deal different than removing the statuary of our heroes from the public square or changing out the names of places named after our heroes and wise-men. To shut down orthodox Christian worship services of the risen and ascended Lord Jesus Christ, as a matter of habit or routine, even in the face of plague and pestilence is to weaken the faith and to alter who we are and what we confess. To be sure, prudence may dictate an occasional cancellation – even for a period of time – but to create a culture of worship cancellation is to diminish the Christian faith and to forfeit our confidence in the God whom we confesses rules over all.
Church can’t be done online…. not for a long and sustained period of time. We are the body of Christ together as we meet as a covenant community in real space and in real time. We are the body of Christ as we exhort on another face to face, hear each other’s stories of God’s faithfulness, pray for one another, and bear each other’s burdens. To reduce worship to what happens virtually online, is to suggest that the tactile presence of one another with each other is irrelevant for the fellowship of the saints and the communion of the body of Christ.
We need to be careful that this pestilence doesn’t diminish who we are in our covenant collective identity as the militant Church … the Church as the Army of God who continues to battle for the crown Right of King and heavenly country.
Look what the visible Church has done in the face of a shadow pestilence. We have fled like so many mice before a shadow cat. Compare our current actions to the Church during the time of the 3rd century Roman Emperor Diocletian. Diocletian rendered the 3rd century version of an Executive Order for Christians to cease and desist from gathered worship. Diocletian’s order was routinely disregarded and flouted by many Christians who chose the promise of martyrdom for the privilege of gathering to Worship the thrice Holy God. If Diocletian could only see how easy it was for Gov. Wretched Whitmer to successfully shutter churches he would be dizzied.
The early Church was persecuted because it refused to pinch incense to Caesar and here we are two millennium later repeatedly kissing the ring of Caesar as seen in our closing down over a modestly more dangerous expression of influenza compared to what we see annually. The clergy across the nation has done to our people what Popes used to do to whole Kingdoms who refused to be brought under their thumbs. When Kingdoms went their own way during Medieval-ism the Popes would bring down the hammer of the Interdict against the whole Kingdom. The Clergy were forbidden to give the Mass. Refused to solemnize Marriages. Forbidden to baptize children. Forbidden to give last rights or hear confession. Forbidden to give a Christian burial to the dead. This was what it meant to be under the Interdict and when leveled the Pope would not lift it until the King repented of whatever offense that brought Interdict.
“The interdict of 1208 decreed that no services were to be held in the parish churches. The Mass was allowed in monasteries—but only behind closed doors. Infants could not be baptized except at home or in the church porch; the dead could not be buried in consecrated ground; the living could not receive Holy Communion except at the point of death; church bells were silent” (David Edwards, Christian England: Its Story to the Reformation, 130).
And this is what the Church has done to itself. It has put itself under the Ban because the State has told it to. I ask you Saints … is this sane? Is this God-pleasing?
Where is the desperation to hear the Word broken among God’s banned saints? Where is the longing for the Sacraments broken and distributed? Shall these be ended all because a State that has a long and distinguished record of lying tells the Church of Jesus Christ to shutter?
All of this belies how we are the lesser children of greater Fathers. Our greater Fathers, once realizing that there was no danger would not have put up with being refused the Preached Word or the Sacrament distributed. Our Greater Fathers would not have tolerated or trusted Magistrates who had a long record of lying. Our Greater Fathers would not have prioritized Science so-called over Theology.
Listen to another account of our Greater Fathers,
In 303 a minority among the church in Abitinae in North Africa at the time of the persecution unleashed by Emperor Domitian refused to cease gathering. On the verge of his surprise abdication, this ruler, who would rank among the greatest of the Caesars had he not unleashed massive persecution upon the Church, issued a decree on 24 February 303 ordering the churches across the empire to cease and desist from public worship and to hand over the Scriptures and the sacred vessels to the civil authorities. Bishop Fundanus of Abitinae succumbed to pressure, committed apostasy, and surrendered the Scriptures. A plucky minority of his flock remained within their baptismal grace and continued (clandestinely, they thought) to meet for the regular Sunday Eucharist under the leadership of the priest Saturninus. A group of 49 were caught as it were in flagrante delicto as they assembled for their chaste sacramental union with Christ, brought under arrest to Carthage, tortured, put on trial and swiftly executed on 12 February 304. Saturninus’ four children, including his infant son, stood steadfast in loyalty to Christ, sharing the martyr’s crown with their father. When asked by the interrogating judge why they had defied Diocletian’s orders, one of the 49 martyrs of Abitinae gave a reply that rings through all subsequent centuries of the Church, delivering a powerful message not least to our own time and place: “Sine dominicis non possumus—Without the Eucharist/Divine Service we can’t get by.” The prevailing attitude among professing Christians in North America and Western Europe at this time appears to be a lukewarm “Sine dominicis bene possumus—We can get by quite easily without the Eucharist.”
It is time to gather again Saints. Time to respect and honor the truthful Word of God more than the lying Word of either stupid or lying Magistrates. Time to remember that we are not to live by lies. It is past time now to remember again that Christians should rightly oppose any Governmental power that prevents the placarding of Christ crucified and the administration of the sacraments as based on either bogus science or outright lies.A “virtual” technocratic Christianity is a defective Christianity, a specter of the Church instituted by Christ as an assembly of people that needs must surface and gather in the public arena for the purpose of Worship.
Gathering a bunch of cars so that we can privately worship Drive in theater style is not gathered worship. Indeed, one thing the Reformation warred against was private Masses and when we gather around the internet or radio we are back to a type of private mass.
