Intro:
• Since we have the Chehalis UMC Bell Choir with us today, I decided it would be enlightening for us to discover what lessons God might teach us from bells.
• I guess you all know why cows have bells? It’s because their horns don’t work.
• In 1996 the Taco Bell Corporation announced that it had bought the Liberty Bell from the federal government and was renaming it the Taco Liberty Bell. Hundreds of outraged citizens called up the National Historic Park in Philadelphia where the bell is housed to express their anger. Their nerves were only calmed when Taco Bell revealed that it was all a practical joke a few hours later. The best line inspired by the affair came when White House press secretary Mike McCurry was asked about the sale, and he responded that the Lincoln Memorial had also been sold, though to a different corporation, and would now be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.
1. Bells, especially smaller hand-bells have been around for thousands of years. Archaeological evidence has shown them to have been used in all the chief nations of antiquity, Babylonia, Egypt, Israel, Greece, and Rome.
• In Exodus 28:33-35 God instructs Moses concerning the creation of the High Priestly garment for Aaron, requiring gold bells to be sewn onto the hem of the ephod so that the sound of the bells, as he moved inside the Holy Place, would indicate that he was alive and had not died! So here we see the first Biblically recorded use of bells in worship.
2. Bells have been used throughout history for all kinds of occasions – for worship, for war, for peace, to warn of danger, to sound an alarm, to announce death, to proclaim liberty, to celebrate joy, to tell the time, to make music, just to name a few.
3. I have selected three broad uses of bells and want us to explore how these uses might be applied to our calling as Christians and as the church.
A. BELLS CALL PEOPLE TO WORSHIP
1. I’ve already referred to God’s required use of bells to sound on the High Priest’s garment as he entered into the Holy of Holies to worship and offer the sacrifice for sins.
2. The first Christian writer to make any mention of bells in regard to church worship was Bishop Gregory of Tours back in 585 A.D. These would have been fairly large bells that were struck or shaken, probably with a cord. They were rung before church services and to rouse monks from their beds.
• In 615, when one of his monks was dying, St. Columban assembled the community by the ringing of a bell
• The Canons of the Church of England prescribe "When any is passing out of this life a bell shall be tolled and the minister shall not then slack to do his last duty. And after the party’s death, if it so fall out, there shall be rung no more than one short peal, and one before the burial, and one after the burial."
• Further down the road steeples and bell towers were erected to house one or more bells for the added purpose of conveying the sound over a far greater distance – calling people to worship or to prayer.
3. In any Catholic Mass or Episcopalian High Church Eucharistic services – smaller hand bells are rung at specific moments during the service, such as at the Elevation of the Host or before the praying of the Our Father.
4. In the same way that church bells sound out in the community calling people to the worship of God, so I believe that our individual lives and corporate witness should be doing exactly the same thing.
• Just as no one can miss or ignore the sound of church bells ringing across a town or city, so they should not be able to miss or ignore the call that goes forth from our individual and corporate life elevating and honoring God in all that we say and do.
• That is what worship is – it is our action of declaring the truth about God’s worth, God’s honor, God’s greatness, God’s love. We declare it to Him, we declare it to host of heaven, and we declare it to all creation.
• Jesus said in Matthew 5:14 that we are “the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.” We were not called to be a gathering of undercover agents or disguised disciples. We are not to be ashamed of Him, but in our words and our witness pointing to Him and calling others to follow Him and exalt Him as we do.
• Our job is to lift Him up and as we do so, He will draw others to Himself.
• And lifting God up in our worship is not just something we do inside these walls between 11am and 12noon on Sundays, but every moment of every day as people observe the quality of our work, the genuineness of our friendship and love, our integrity, our humility, our compassion, our kindness and thoughtfulness, our generosity, our readiness to serve and to give – and in this harsh, arrogant, selfish, and self-centered age in which we live, those behaviors will soon stand out as starkly as the contrast between night and day.
• We are like bells calling people, through our actions and our words, to the worship of God.
B. BELLS SOUND OUT A WARNING
1. Bells have also had a long history of being used to sound out an alarm or a warning.
• Lepers in ancient times would sound a bell as well as shout out UNLCEAN when the healthy would come near.
• On ships they have served to warn of fog or other causes of poor visibility.
• In 1676 a chaplain, Henry Teonage, serving in the British Mediterranean Fleet, recorded "so great a fog that we were fain to ring our bells, beat drums, and fire muskets often to keep us from falling foul one upon another".
• British Naval Regulations in 1878 mandated the use of a bell in fog and still today, in spite of radar, GPS and other technology maritime law requires all ships to carry an efficient bell.
• Bell buoys in the ocean clang a bell to warn of dangerous underwater rocks or a sandbar.
• Fire engines have traditionally sounded a clanging bell to warn of a fire and to help clear traffic on their way to the location.
• Now a warning is not a bad thing - it is a good thing. Any person who decided to switch car service dealers because everytime they took their vehicle in the mechanics warned that the tires were wearing dangerously thin, would be foolish! So also the individual who says, "I am going to select another doctor because the one I have been going to just keeps telling me that my cholestrol level and blood pressure are too high and I am a prime candidate for a heart attack or stroke. The nerve! I want a doctor who will tell me good and happy things." That would be the height of stupidity!
2. In the same way we as God’s people have the responsibility to sound out the alarm to the world around us that while God certainly is a God of love and mercy – he is also a Holy God, a righteous God, a God of justice who hates sin and evil. He is a moral God who has built into the very fabric of His creation the law of sowing and reaping and we cannot just flaunt His laws without reaping the consequences.
• Listen to what Paul writes in Galatians 6: “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.”
• You sow apple or peach seeds and you will get apple or peach trees bearing apples and peaches. You sow clover, henbit, and chickweed and you know what you will have growing in your field!
• And one of the basic principles about this law of sowing and reaping is that there is a process involved - you do not reap in the same season as you sow.
• So the outcome of the choices we make is not always immediately experienced.
3. God judged the world in the days of Noah – but the flood did not come suddenly and unexpectedly. There was a build up to it of 100 years as Noah built the ark and people had the opportunity to hear the alarm and see the warning.
4. The writer of Hebrews states in chapter 10: “If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God. Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think a man deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God under foot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified him, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, "It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, "The Lord will judge his people.” It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
5. The purpose of using bells as alarms or as warnings is so that people will be saved from harm or rescued from danger. And when we have to proclaim God’s anger at sin and warn of His judgment on wickedness and rebellion, it is not done in arrogance or self righteousness, but with a heart that is broken and sorrowful, overflowing with compassion and love desiring that none should be lost but instead that they turn from their foolish ways before it is too late.
6. Alarm bells need to be loud and clear. Their purpose is not to entertain or cause us to want to listen to them for extended periods of time. Their purpose is to shake us up and make us respond promptly and immediately and get us out of harms way.
7. And there are many issues in our day and age where the church needs to serve as God’s clear warning bell - where we dare not issue a wishy-washy and uncertain sound!
• The Scripture says that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” – in other words everything that is belongs to God – He is the owner of it all and God is going to hold us accountable for how we use His earth and His resources and our bodies. We cannot just treat them any way we please and expect to have a good and favorable outcome.
• The family is God’s holy creation – it was His idea, including marriage being the union of one man and one woman. It is not some sociological experiment that we can tinker with and alter and modify as we see fit.
• God said in His word to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations." From God’s perspective human life begins at conception and to terminate a pregnancy just because it has become an inconvenience or embarrassment is a choice for murder.
8. If we are not allowing our witness to serve as a warning bell in our community and our world then the judgment of God rightly will fall on us for our silence.
C. BELLS PROCLAIM SOMETHING WONDERFUL
1. Bells have also traditionally been used in times of celebration and joy.
• When a couple gets married the church bells ring out the glad news. Following our wedding at First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood in 1968 the bells rang out the joyous news of Anne’s and my marriage. And then about a dozen "cheap bells" (tin cans) clattered down the road as we drove off for our honeymoon.
• At Christmas we put bells on our trees, on our garments, on sleighs, on our door decorations as reminders of the joy God has brought into our world in Jesus Christ His Son.
• On July 8, 1776 the Liberty Bell, inscribed with the verse from Leviticus 25:10 "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” rang out from the tower of Independence Hall in Pennsylvania, summoning citizens to hear the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence by Colonel John Nixon.
• The bell of the ice cream vendor who rode around my home town on a hot summer day would always bring a crowd of eager kids running onto the sidewalk.
• In my family home a dinner bell would be rung each evening calling us together to the dinner table.
2. So we have bells that excite us and stir our emotions because they proclaim something wonderful is about to happen or has just happened or are reminders of significant and special moments in our lives and history.
3. In this same way we Christians, as we allow the joy of the Lord to fill us, stir excitement and anticipation of good things wherever we go.
4. The Christian life should never be regarded as boring or ho-hum. For our God is the one who is always doing a new thing and His mercies never come to an end – they are new every morning!
5. In Acts 8 we read: “Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went. Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Christ there. When the crowds heard Philip and saw the miraculous signs he did, they all paid close attention to what he said. With shrieks, evil spirits came out of many, and many paralytics and cripples were healed. So there was great joy in that city.”
6. A major part of our calling is to be the bearers of God’s Joy and God’s Good News to the residents of Morton and surrounding county. We have experienced His Good News in our own lives and now we are eager to share it also with others.
7. We are those who believe and proclaim that because the Lord is our Shepherd we lack nothing (Psalm 23). He leads us to nourishing pastures for our spirit, soul and body and quenches our thirst from His refreshing streams. In spite of all kinds of threats of danger and harm – from terrorists and evil people, from natural disasters, from disease, old age, and even death – we do not succumb or surrender to fear because He is with us to encourage, comfort, and protect. Though surrounded by these threatening forces, He feeds and nourishes us in peace from His banqueting table. His Spirit is poured out upon us and envelops our being so that our cup of joy overflows.
8. And above all we have joy because the Lord who came once is preparing to come again and take all who love Him into the fullness of heaven where there will be no more darkness, be no more suffering, pain and death, and God will wipe away all tears of sorrow and sadness.
9. If that joy is yours today because you already know Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord, then may our next hymn be one way for you to express and proclaim it.
10. If you have never yet taken the step of surrendering your life to Christ – but have witnessed the transformation such a step has brought in the lives of others and you want that joy for yourself, then I invite you as we sing the next hymn to add your own firm YES of acceptance to God’s initial YES of love and forgiveness.
11. And then, for all of us, let the joybells ring!!
AMEN.
