Polka Service Sermon: Make a Joyful Noise | October 15, 2022

This weekend was my first time preaching at a polka worship service! The service was a lot of fun, with the Lutheran liturgy set to a variety of polka tunes arranged and led by musicians from our congregation here at Christ the King Lutheran Church in Port Washington.

The readings I selected for this service are 1 John 4:7-12, 19-21; Psalm 100; and Matthew 28:16-20. No recordings of this service, but here’s the sermon text.

The theme for tonight’s service is making a joyful noise to the Lord. My question for you tonight, is what noise are you making in your life?

I don’t mean what instrument do you play, or what style of music do you prefer for worship, I mean, what story are you telling with your life?

This is my first time ever being involved in a polka service. I have a vague memory that the congregation I grew up at did a polka service for a few years, but somehow I don’t think my family was ever there those weeks. As I think about it, that might not have been coincidental…

But since it’s my first polka service, and I needed to select Scripture readings for tonight, I made the mistake of searching the internet for polka worship service readings. And mostly what I found was a bunch of blog posts complaining that polka worship shouldn’t exist (example), because it’s not reverent enough, or because it’s not traditional sacred music.

I read a few of those complaints, and then I decided they said more about the authors’ narrow-minded, grumpy vision of worship than they did about God.

We’re going with the picture of worship we find in the Bible, in passages like Psalm 100. It says, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth. Serve the Lord with gladness; come into God’s presence with singing.”

You and I are called to praise God. Why? Because God is the one who made us, and we belong to our creator. Our job is to worship, to make a joyful noise.

Elsewhere in the Bible, especially in Psalms, it does mention some particular ways of praising God, such as harps and cymbals and pipes, but I’m quite confident accordions and maracas and guitars count too. What matters are the words, the message, the story we’re telling, and the spirit in which we’re telling it, the noise we’re making with our lives.

As Christians, our lives are shaped around a story, and it’s a joyful story. John summarizes the entire Christian story in his letter. He writes, “God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.”

Jesus came into our world—God broke into creation—to reveal God’s love to us, to demonstrate far God will go out of love for God’s people. Jesus loves us enough to lay down his life for us.

That’s the story we’ve been given. God loves you! Can you imagine any more joyful news?
So what do we do with this story? We share it. We proclaim it.

Jesus told his disciples, “Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”

That’s a command for us. Go and tell people the good news. Teach them of God’s love, of God’s grace, revealed in Jesus.

And yet somehow, we mix up that message of love and grace. Too often, Christians make lots of noise, but miss the joyful part. We get stuck on rules and regulations, telling people how to live and judging others when they don’t live the way we think they should. Christians are seen as judgmental, stuck in the past, irrelevant, only interested in condemning others.

You know what? Sometimes that’s true. Too often, we deserve that portrayal. Instead of making a joyful noise, instead of telling a story of love, we argue and divide, and turn inward. We argue about things like coffee and carpet colors.

What noise are you making with your life?

John says the way to respond to God’s love is by loving others. If you can’t love the sisters and brothers around you, if you can’t love your neighbors who are right here, visible, tangible, how are you going to love God, whom you can’t directly see?

We have been trusted with a message of joy. Somehow, God chooses to trust the message to us to share. I know a lot of Christians, and I’m not always sure God made the best choice in trusting this holy message to us!

We can be pretty timid about sharing it. We do all kinds of things that directly contradict the good news we’re supposed to be sharing.

And yet, God takes our sinful lives, and makes us into messengers, apostles. We earthy people get to proclaim the divine. After all, the whole point of Christianity is that the profane, the earthly, can carry the sacred, the holy. God has come to dwell with God’s people in the person of Jesus. The profane carries the sacred, the finite bears the infinite, and is made holy. God works through the ordinary stuff of this world, because God so loves the world!

You and I are witnesses to what God has done for us. With all of our failings, in-fighting, traditionalism, distractedness, with all of our hypocrisy, selfishness, and timidity, we are witnesses to God’s love revealed in Jesus’ Christ. We know the extent to which God will go to show love, all the way to death. We are living proof of God’s grace. We know the story, the promise that Jesus has defeated death. This is good news!

There are plenty of different ways to share that good news. For some people, it’s providing food to neighbors in need here in town. For others, it’s donating to people on the other side of the world.

Maybe it’s checking in with friends, offering encouragement when good news is hard to see. Maybe it’s through your job, caring for others, or helping society function. Maybe it’s through public protest of injustice, or behind the scenes making sure the coffee’s made and the floors are swept.

Maybe it’s preaching, explicit public proclamation. John says what’s important is the attitude of love. Whatever noise you make, as long as it’s made in love, as long as it’s done with joy, it’s worthwhile.

Good news can be shared through an organ, or a rock band, through hip-hop or polka or Gregorian chant, even through German drinking tunes. The key is that it’s done with joy in response to the love of the one who first loved us.

Polka music can be sacred, because God makes it sacred.

If God can take sinful people like us, and make us ambassadors of good news, if God can work through all of our failings and our shortcomings and our fearful, timid attempts at sharing the gospel, if God can claim us and make us holy, God can certainly proclaim good news to the tune of “On Top of Old Smokey” and “Roll Out the Barrel.”

May everything we do, every noise you make, every action you take tell the story of God’s love, revealed in Jesus Christ who came to give us life.

Make a joyful noise to the Lord. Amen

Our hymn of the day is I Love to Tell the Story.