A number of years ago my family was living in Frankfort, Kentucky. That’s where the state capitol building is, where the state senate and house of representatives meet. If you look at any map of Kentucky, or if you google “Kentucky state capital,” it will say that Frankfort is officially the capital city of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.

But it turns out that’s not quite correct, because the real capital of Kentucky isn’t in Frankfort. The heart of Kentucky is University of Kentucky basketball: and the capitol building is Rupp Arena in Lexington, where the University of Kentucky Wildcats play their home games.

I myself have never attended one of their games, but I have talked to people who have. One of them told me this story. Somehow he had gotten hold of a single Saturday afternoon ticket for a seat in Rupp Arena. It has seating for 23,000 people, and all those seats were filled with boisterous fans. Except for one seat, the seat next to my friend. He thought the person must be arriving late, but it got to be half time and nobody had showed up to sit in that seat.

Well he thought that was odd, and because it was half time it was relatively quiet, so he leaned across toward the woman on the other side of that empty seat, and said, “Kind of interesting, this empty seat. I think it must be the only empty seat in Rupp Arena.”

The woman looked at him for a moment, and then she said, “That’s my husband’s seat.”

“Oh. I guess he had to work today? That’s too bad.”

She said, “No. He has passed on.”

That seemed a little awkward, so after a respectful pause my friend said, “I’m sorry for your loss. But I wonder: wasn’t anyone else in your family able to use the ticket?”

And the woman said, “No. They’re all at the funeral.”

Basketball is a sport, but in Kentucky it is more than just a sport. It is a culture. It is a religion. It is a way of life. In other parts of the world you may find sports fans who say, “I don’t care who wins, so long as it’s a good game.” They don’t say that in Kentucky. Instead, they say, “I don’t care who wins, so long as it’s the Wildcats.”

Imagine that you are in Rupp Arena, with four seconds left in the game. Kentucky is behind by one point against Duke University, their arch-rival. The Wildcats have the ball, out of bounds, and they can run one play and take one shot. It’s pretty noisy. The point guard passes the ball in. Another pass. Another pass, back to the point guard, a couple steps to the left from the top of the key. He’s looking to pass to one of the forwards under the basket, but the Duke defense has it all clogged up. Nobody’s open. The point guard lofts a long shot. Clang! Clang! As it ricochets off the back of the rim and the front of the rim and shoots straight up in the air. And Rupp Arena is suddenly dead silent as everyone gasps and holds their breath.

And as the buzzer sounds the ball comes down, straight through the net, swish! And all the fans quietly turn to their neighbors and say, “Well. That was pleasant.”

No, they don’t. This becomes what we call in the preacher biz a “theological moment.” The Duke Blue Devils have been vanquished, and the walls of Rupp Arena tremble, as the sonic boom of the cry of victory pours from the throats of all those fans.

There is a specific liturgical movement that these 23,000 fans use at a time like this. You may not be familiar with it, so I want to take a moment to teach you how to do it.

Hold your right hand in front of you, with your palm facing away from you: then turn your hand so that you’re looking at your palm. Now close your hand into a fist. That’s the first part of it: except that instead of doing this at eye level, you do it with your hand extended high in the air. Then you pull your fist downward, decisively, flexing your arm muscles, and you also nod your head, decisively, one time. And while you’re doing all that, you say, “Yes!”

That liturgical movement – the “Yes!” – is a little complicated. There are three things you have to keep track of at the same time, the arm movement, the nod, and the word. Multi-tasking. It takes some practice. So we’ll go ahead and practice for a moment: hand in the air, turn it and make a fist, pull it down, nod, Yes! One more time: hand in the air, turn it and make a fist, pull it down, nod, Yes! All right. That’s the “Yes!” You might need to practice at home a few times, but I think you’ll get it. And then you’ll be prepared, in case you’re ever in Lexington Kentucky and get a ticket to Rupp Arena.

What’s that? People do something similar at high school basketball games here? Huh. Small world.

I wonder, though, about doing this same thing in worship. Can worship be as much fun as winning a basketball game? Psalm 122 says, “I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let’s go to the house of the Lord!’” And just a few minutes ago our reading from Psalm 103 said, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless God’s holy name!” Do you hear the sense of exuberance in these psalms? Is it possible that people could be so excited, so delighted that they have this opportunity to offer up their hearts in worship to God Almighty?

When we lived in Kentucky, our high school youth group would travel to North Carolina each summer for the Montreat Youth Conference. It took place at Montreat College, in a large outdoor gazebo with rough benches that provided seating for about 950 people. That’s a little smaller than Rupp Arena, but we would have about 1,100 people, teens and adult sponsors, crowded together on those benches.

So you’ve got a thousand rowdy teenagers and a hundred adult sponsors crowded together into a space designed for 950 people: you might think you’ve got a recipe for disaster. These teens are looking for fun, and maybe the way to have some fun is to cause a little trouble. And probably a little drama, too. And by the second day they were all a little sleep deprived. And I saw what happened. Nine o’clock in the morning, these kids are dragging in, and they are not very much awake. But there are half a dozen college students up front, doing the motions for the morning energizers to the tune “Istanbul was Constantinople, now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople,” and will you look at that, they’ve got those thousand teenagers doing the motions, too. And now they’re singing, they’re singing loud! They’re singing worship songs, they’re singing hymns! And I tell you what, when you hear a thousand charged-up teens singing their hearts out to Jesus, it will lift you right up to heaven.

Back in the early 1800s the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard asked an important question: when we go to church, who is the audience? The answer might seem obvious enough: you’ve got some performers up front, some musicians, a reader, a preacher, and all the rest of the people in the sanctuary are watching and listening, and they are the audience. But that’s not right, Kierkegaard said. God is the audience. The performers are all the people in the sanctuary. And the preacher and the choir are the prompters.

Think of a Christmas pageant. You know how when the little children do a Christmas pageant, and they’ve learned their lines pretty well but not completely, and so on the appointed day for the pageant the children have to come into the chancel in the right order, and they all have to say their lines but they don’t quite have them? So a few of the moms are kneeling on the floor in front of the chancel, usually three of them, one on the left and one in the middle and one on the right, and you can’t really see those moms but the kids can see them, and when the shepherds or the angels or the wise men don’t quite remember what to say, the moms prompt them with the words.

So in church on a Sunday morning, the musicians, the preacher, the lay readers – we’re like those prompter moms. The performance of worship: that’s not about the preacher and the choir: we’re just the prompter moms, kneeling on the floor, helping and encouraging the children of God to say their lines in front of the audience, who is God the Almighty. The triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, sitting in the great balcony of heaven, looking out over the world, looking at us here in this building, as all of us little children of God do our performance before the Lord. Sometimes our performance doesn’t go very well: just like the children’s Christmas pageant doesn’t always go too well. But when we’re there at the Christmas pageant, and one of the shepherds forgets his line and gets scared and he starts to cry, and all the other children are embarrassed and don’t know what to do, and the moms are trying to get things back on track but now two of the angels are crying, too, and somehow we make it through to where the congregation joins in on Hark the Herald Angels Sing but it all just feels like a disaster: when all of that happens, all the parents and grandparents and neighbors and honorary aunts and uncles in the sanctuary still love us, and they tell us that they love us, and they hold us and say, “It might not be the way you planned it, but I think it went just fine. And I think everyone is always going to remember this Christmas pageant.”

And when our performance of worship doesn’t happen quite the way we planned it, God doesn’t say, “Well, that was pretty awful. I don’t think I’ll be attending any longer.” No: God still loves us, still holds us, and declares once again to us all, “You are precious to me. Each one of you.”

And then sometimes we do get it right. Sometimes we’ve learned our lines, and we speak them out with clarity and verve. Sometimes we sing the hymn, and it’s not just fill: we are singing our hearts out to Jesus, and it lifts us right up to heaven.

And God loves it. The Triune God is watching, from the balcony of heaven. All the angels, and saints from all the ages are there, too, including your great great grandparents, born just after the Civil War: they’re right there, too, shouting with great joy. But look especially at the persons of the Trinity: the Father and the Son are clapping each other on the back in delight. Oh and look: there’s the Holy Spirit doing the Yes!

Revelation 5 is one of my favorite chapters of the Bible. God had granted John a series of visions of heaven and earth and human history, and John managed to get a bunch of these images written down. And in this chapter he is recalling what it was like when he was there for the pageant: not a Christmas pageant, as it turns out, but a pageant that was a symbolic representation of the establishing of salvation.

In the hand of God there was a scroll. John didn’t know what was in the scroll, but he knew it was important, because he could tell it was written on the inside and outside both, and it was sealed up with seven seals: that would have been impressive enough, but this scroll was held in the right hand of God Almighty!

There was an angel, a mighty angel, and the angel sang out loud: “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?” And there was no one who was worthy. All the great men and women of history: none of them were worthy. There were mighty angels standing there, the seraphim that Isaiah told us about, drenched in the holiness of the Almighty: they were not worthy. No one in heaven or on earth, no one living or dead was found, worthy to take the scroll.

And John began to weep, to weep with the deepest emotion. He had been a young man, probably a teenager, when he became a follower of Jesus. He had seen the crucifixion of Jesus. Years later he had seen his brother James executed for believing in Jesus. He had seen the war coming, which was nothing special because really everyone had seen it coming, and everyone knew how devastating that war would be. But in this vision John saw the scroll, and maybe the answer to everything was in that scroll, and there was no one who could take the scroll and open it.

Then one of the elders said to him – I should note that the text doesn’t say whether it was one of the elders currently serving on Session, or an elder previously elected and not on Session right at the moment – but one of the reasons that Presbyterians insist that ministers need to learn to read Greek is so that we can read the New Testament in its original language, and that’s really fun to do today because there we are, right there in the Bible in Revelation 5:5, the word for elder is presbyteros: which of course is the root from which the word Presbyterian comes. We Presbyterians are right there in the Bible. The text says that one of the elders – one of the Presbyterians! – said to John, “It’s okay, son. No need to weep. The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David: he is victorious! And because of his victory, his victory over sin and death and hell, he is worthy. He is worthy to open that scroll!”

And then, right in the midst of everything, John says, “I saw this Lamb standing there, you could see it had been slaughtered and yet it was standing there, and he went and took the scroll from the right hand of the Father. And when he did – oh, when he took the scroll from the hand of the Father! The angels and the elders – there’s that word again, presbyteros! – the angels and the Presbyterians fell on their knees before the Lamb, carrying the prayers of all the saints of God, and they sang!

But wait, it wasn’t just the angels and the elders on Session: it was a whole passel – that’s a technical term, passel – I don’t know for sure how John counted them up so quickly, but I’m guessing he had high speed cameras and facial recognition software and a heavy duty computer with good algorithms – and he reported that they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands.

Wait. How many is a myriad, anyway? When we’re counting in English we count to ten, and then twenty, and soon we’re up to eighty, which means “eight tens,” then we get to ninety, which means “nine tens,” but when we get to ten tens we don’t say tenty, which would mean “ten tens;” instead, we have a new word and we say “a hundred.” Then we keep on counting, eventually we get to 800, and a little later we get to 900, and then we get to ten hundred. But we don’t say “ten hundred;” once more we have a new word for this number and we say “a thousand.” We keep on counting, we count up to 8,000, then 9,000, and then we get to ten thousand. In English we don’t have a new word at this point, so we say “ten thousand.” But in Greek they don’t say ten thousand, because in Greek they do have a new word, and that word is “myriad.” So when John says myriads of myriads he’s talking about tens of thousands of tens of thousands, which is to say hundreds of millions, a number roughly equal to the size of the whole population of the United States, made up of angels and elders – angels and Presbyterians! – singing with full voice: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!”

And if you think it’s amazing when a thousand charged up teenagers are singing their hearts out to Jesus, just imagine what it’s like when you have a combined choir of myriads of myriads of angels and Presbyterians singing their hearts out to Jesus.

And that’s just the opening lines of the pageant. Because all those myriads of myriads of angels and elders were just the prompters. That huge multitude of a choir of angels and Presbyterians – that’s just the prompter moms, on their knees on the floor in front of the chancel, helping and encouraging and prompting all the children of God, telling the story of Jesus the best they can. And the moms turn out to be pretty good prompters: those myriads of myriads of prompters are helping the whole creation to sing. The text tells us that John heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing in praise and worship. The whales were singing. The grasshoppers and the June bugs. The aunts and the uncles. People from ancient times, like the 1990s, and people from ancient, ancient times, like the 1950s. All of them singing their hearts out to the Lord.

And the Father and the Son stand and cheer and pour out their love for us, and the Holy Spirit does the Yes. And all of us in the whole world know that we are beloved of God: and our hearts sing out in praise to God.

I was meeting with the youth group one Sunday afternoon, back in an ancient time in a previous century, in the 1990s, and we were discussing church. I asked, “What do you think is the most important part of the worship service?”

There was an uncomfortable silence. For a moment it felt like maybe I had asked a question that was too hard. But I knew that they were all thinking that the answer was obvious, so it must be a trick question. Finally Mary Margaret rolled her eyes and said, “The sermon.”

I could tell she had said that because she thought that was the answer she was supposed to give, even though maybe it wasn’t her favorite part at all. I said, “Oh, Mary Margaret, that’s so kind of you to say so. I work hard on preparing my sermons, because like you I think they’re pretty important. But no. The sermon is not the most important part of the worship service.”

Now all the high schoolers were looking at one another: if it wasn’t the sermon, what was it? George spoke up: “Is it when the ushers collect the money?”

I said, “That’s a shrewd answer, George. The church has to pay its bills, just like any other organization, and we can’t do that if people aren’t faithful in their giving. But again, no: that’s not the most important part of a worship service.”

Now they were stumped, and so I told them: the most important part of a worship service varies from person to person. It’s the moment when you say something like this in your own soul: “Here is my heart, Lord: I give myself to you.” Maybe that happens during one of the hymns: like the words in the third stanza, say, touch your awareness in a powerful way, so that even while you’re singing the words you’re doing the Yes! in your inmost being. Maybe it happens during the reading of scripture, or during the Lord’s Supper. Sometimes it might even happen during the announcements, if one of those announcements is about something that deeply matters to you. It’s different for everyone. But the most important part is that moment when your heart deliberately expresses your deep devotion: I love you, Lord, with all that I am and all that I have.

John Calvin, the founder of Presbyterianism, had a motto: cor meum tibi offero domine prompte et sincere. I know it’s in Latin, but I’m confident that all of you automatically translated even while I was speaking it. No? You mean not everyone learns Latin in high school any more? All right. It means “I offer you my heart, Lord, promptly and sincerely.”

And it doesn’t matter if you say it in Latin or in English or any other language. You don’t have to use the same words Calvin used. What matters is that you find a moment in the service where you can tell Jesus, directly and sincerely, in your own words, that you offer your heart and life to him. Here is my heart, Lord. I give myself to you.

Maybe you say it with a thousand exuberant teenagers, all of you making the Yes! with all your heart and soul. Maybe you say it instead within the silence of your own mind: just as devout, but considerably quieter. Maybe you do it during the assurance of pardon after the prayer of confession, or during the Doxology. It doesn’t matter how loud you do it: just so long as you do it. It doesn’t matter when you do it: just so long as you do it. Somewhere in the process, you find your way to the moment where your soul bows down in holy devotion: “Here is my heart, Lord; I give myself to you.” Or “Cor meum tibi offero, domine, prompte et sincere.”

Jesus, the Lamb of God, offered up his life to establish the forgiveness of sins for the whole world. He was raised from the dead, victorious forever, and all the saints and angels, all the elders, all the Presbyterians, join in and sing in deep devotion. And we all do the Yes!