Sermon preached at Evensong in Duke University Chapel
Durham, North Carolina
July 20, 2025 / Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Valedictory Evensong of the 2025 RSCM Carolina Summer Choral Residency
Psalm 115
Romans 11:33-12:2
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
It is the custom of the Royal School of Church Music in America’s Carolina course that the term of the residency should have a theme. The theme that was chosen is a line from Psalm 115, which you in front of me will shortly hear – and you behind me will shortly sing – as it forms part of the text of this evening’s anthem. The theme is this: As for our God, he is in heaven. It has been printed on the front page inside our binders all week, but it hasn’t been remarked upon, at least not by this preacher, but that all changes tonight… at this service, right here, on this spot, where all the choir’s work comes together, and we hear sung the most glorious music ever written in English – Leighton, Howells, Wesley – and we are reminded what it’s all about.
The perspective of the psalm writer, as well as the author of and most of the individuals described in the books of Samuel, is that the “gods of the heathen,” what our contemporary translations call the “gods of the nations,” that they may be but idols, but that does not make them unreal or fictitious. Idols may be ineffectual or false or even malignant, but they are very real indeed, they have very real power over those who worship them, and they are in competition with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And the field of competition is the human heart.
This is true from the perspective of the New Testament as well. The demons whom Jesus and the apostles encounter and who are encountered by them in turn, those demons are not figments of the imagination in a pre-modern society, deployed to explain the root causes of bodily illnesses. The writers of the New Testament may have been pre-modern, but they weren’t fools. Ailments are ailments; demons are demons, and they knew enough to know which was which.
I wonder if we know enough to make those kinds of distinctions.
One of the shrewd observations that the psalmist makes is that those who create idols put their trust in them. We place our trust in what we worship, and we worship what we trust. In this sense, and in fact in the proper sense of worship, we’re not talking about devotion of a specifically religious kind. The word translated as “worship” in the New Testament connotes a spirit of piety and reverence on the part of a person or community.[1] Worship is about the disposition of the human heart, about what is placed at the center of interest of the individual, about where we devote our time and resources and attention, and why we do.
It would be overly facile of me to point to the small devices in each of our pockets as a particular kind of idol. But that wouldn’t be quite right, I think, because those devices are a window into what actually is at the center of our attention. Show me your apps, and I will show you what you worship. Show me your apps, and I will show you who you are. “They that make them our like unto them,” the psalmist writes in his most insightful – and most damning – line. Those who worship idols become like them: mute, ineffectual, with a heart of stone rather than a heart of flesh.[2]
Psalm 115 is a response to the accusation, the mockery, the taunting, the contempt from pagan onlookers that the God of Israel has no reality because the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not physical. And so the psalm mocks them right back: pagans make idols with their hands and then worship things they know are lifeless. It is absurd to place our trust in inanimate objects (even if they light up in our hands). The pagan idols have no ability to speak, smell, feel, or walk. The implication is that the God who is in heaven can be properly compared not to any inanimate thing but to a being that does see, smell, touch, and walk, who is alive in the way that we are alive. To make fun of pagan gods for having no functioning eyes or ears or mouth is in some sense to imply that our God does, or will.[3]
In his letter to the Romans, St Paul gives an extraordinary charge:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
It is a charge equal to the grandeur and majesty of the God who is in heaven, who is above those mute idols. Our God is life itself and life-giver to others. Those who worship him are on their way to becoming as alive as he is, and our reasonable act of worship is to present ourselves to God, and not to some lifeless idol.
All week, we have heard little glimpses of what that real life looks like. As we have made our way through parts of the Old and New Testaments in our morning and evening prayers, we have heard the interplay of God’s purposes with God’s people, and Scripture has modeled for us what a life of service to the living God consists in:
We have been reminded of the cosmic significance of what may seem to be small acts, and how no one is too small to be an instrument of the high purposes of God.
We have heard about the enduring value of friendship, how our love for those with whom we share a common interest or enthusiasm expresses our Lord’s command to “love one another as I have loved you.”[4] We actually heard about it again in our first lesson this evening.
We have seen how curiosity and a spirit of inquiry may very well be a part of God’s plan for the salvation of the world.
This past week has been an intense experience for all involved. We wake up, we have breakfast together; we pray together; we sing together; we have lunch together; we sing some more together. The entire disposition of every person behind me for the entire week has been toward making music in the Lord’s service and in building up one another in doing so. That is true for our choristers, our adult singers, our wonderful housemasters and organists and choirmaster and course manager and especially our proctors.
They have modeled and are modeling what true worship is. They are showing us in real time how to turn away from the dead ends provided by the objects of our own making and toward the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist,” the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.[5] And they are showing us how worship of the living God transforms us, little by little, into the kind of people who cannot help but be alive as well, and alive with the love and mercy that our Lord commends to all of us. I saw it just last night before the choristers sang compline together, I’ve actually been seeing it all week, and I think you’ll see it in the faces of everybody behind me when the last notes of the organ voluntary fade away into the chapel tonight.
The people behind me have laid down for one another – and for all of us – an example this week, an example of how the worship of the God who is in heaven transforms us and makes us alive, and I commend that example to you.
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
AMEN.
[1] James 1:27. See also: Andrew McGowan, “Worship and the ‘Mission-shaped’ Church,” in Ancient and Modern: Anglican Essays on the Bible, the Church, and the World (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2015), 183.
[2] Ezekiel 11:19; 36:26
[3] Jason Byassee, Psalms 101-150 (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2018), 102.
[4] John 15:12-17
[5] Romans 4:17