Sermon delivered Sunday, Feb. 12, 2017 (Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany, Year A), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA, as part six of a seven-week series on baptism and the Baptismal Covenant.
Sermon Text(s): Deuteronomy 30:15-30, Matthew 5:21-37, Baptismal Covenant Question #2
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”
Moses’s speech to the Israelites in today’s reading from Deuteronomy reminds them that while God has given them a set of commandments and instructions for living, he does not make them behave in a certain way. They always have a choice whether they will follow the commandments or not.
We, too, have a real choice as to whether we will follow the commandments we have been given in our Baptistmal Covenant. Because we have free will, our obedience to our baptismal vows is by no means guaranteed. It is always a choice, and because we are human, we will mess up sometimes. We will make the wrong choice. Sometimes we choose death and curses instead of life and blessings.
This is why our baptismal covenant has built into it a vow about what we will do when that happens. In this sixth week of our preaching series on baptism, we look at the second question of the baptismal covenant:
"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"
Notice that the question does not say IF you fall into sin, but WHEN. The Baptismal Covenant does not assume perfection from us. It assumes we will mess up. Being faithful does not mean never sinning. It means properly making amends when we do.
Jesus’s teachings in today’s passage from the Sermon on the Mount set an extremely high standard for our behavior, pretty much guaranteeing that we will always fall short! Don’t just refrain from murdering someone, but refrain from being angry at them, he says. Don’t just refrain from having an affair with a married person, but refrain from even thinking lustfully about anyone who is married.
Seriously, Jesus? How is it even humanly possible to obey these teachings completely? Maybe it’s not, but his point is that you’re not made right with God simply by refraining from certain actions. Fully embracing the ethical standards God sets means making an effort to live with integrity, purifying your inner life and thoughts as well as your outward actions. Even if you never kill someone, if you nurture anger and resentment toward that person, that in itself is its own kind of death, for you and for the person you are angry with.
Jesus encourages us to go the extra mile in the work of reconciliation and actively seek to restore relationships with our neighbors as part and parcel of what it means to be reconciled with God.
Right after the teaching about it not being enough to simply not murder someone, but not to be angry with them either, Jesus says,
“So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”
This is the theological basis behind the passing of the peace during our liturgy. After we collectively confess our sins, first we are reconciled with God, symbolized by the priest pronouncing absolution over us, reminding us that God forgives us, and then we are reconciled with our neighbors, symbolized by our sharing the peace with one another.
When we say “peace” to one another, we are offering a sign of reconciliation, making peace with everyone before we receive the Eucharist, as Jesus instructs us to do in this passage from Matthew: “First be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come [to the altar].” Some interpretations of this passage say that we should not receive communion if we are in a serious conflict with anyone in our lives that we have not attempted to resolve. I once voluntarily denied myself communion for several months because I was in conflict with a member of my family. He did not immediately respond to my attempts to reconcile, but after I had written a letter and reached out and done all that I felt I could at that point, after I had made a good faith effort to be reconciled, I started to receive communion again. As much as we enjoy greeting one another and being cheerful during the peace, the peace is not meant to be a time to casually greet one another on a social level. It is meant to be a time to seek forgiveness from anyone whom we may have harmed and to forgive anyone who may have harmed us in the community.
While I was serving a congregation in Omaha, Nebraska, as an intern through one of the Episcopal Service Corps discernment programs for young adults, I carelessly made a remark that offended one of my parishioners. At a book study one night, I was commenting about the lack of mental health services for veterans coming back from war. My intent was to express concern and to advocate for veteran’s needs, but the way I said it – making a comment about how the military “turns people into killing machines” through basic training and then doesn’t give them the tools to undo that training when they return to civilian life – inadvertently upset one of the people in the book study, who was a veteran and didn’t take kindly to my categorization of soldiers as “killing machines.” We talked about it afterwards and were able to come to a congenial resolution. That Sunday, we intentionally approached each other at the peace, and that handshake and brief eye contact we made while saying “peace” to one another had a much deeper meaning to me in that moment than it ever had before in the liturgy.
If you have ever been through a Twelve Step program, or know someone who has, you know about the importance of Step Nine – making amends. Making amends means approaching anyone we have wronged and attempting to make things right – to apologize for what we have done and to offer any kind of remuneration appropriate to the situation, anything we can do to “make it up to them,” as the saying goes. After this initial reconciliation, Step Ten is to “continue to take personal inventory and when we [are] wrong, promptly admit it.” Since the founders of AA and the Twelve Step program were influenced by biblical teachings, it is no surprise that Steps Nine and Ten echo these teachings of Jesus and the second vow of our Baptismal Covenant:
"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"
In other words, this question asks us, “Will you continue to be vigilant in your resistance against evil, against sin, against addiction, against whatever it is that draws you away from God, and whenever you find yourself going astray from that, whenever you realize you have done wrong, to promptly admit it and make amends – to others and to God?”
Of course, while we may be able to right some wrongs we have done to others in this life, some wrongs are impossible to correct. An apology doesn’t bring someone back from the dead, for instance. When we come up against the limits of our ability to make amends, we are forced to acknowledge our dependence on God’s grace.
Remember in stewardship season when we talked about how we can never really “give back to God?” Well, it is also true that we can never really “make amends” to God. What could we possibly give to God or do for God that would make up for all the ways we have harmed God when we have fallen short of God’s intentions for us, for God’s plan for us to live with one other in peace? Despite the universal foxhole prayer – “Dear God, if you just save my life, if you just get me out of this situation, I’ll make it up to you – I’ll go to church every week, I’ll give up all my possessions, I’ll become a preacher, I’ll….” whatever the bargain is we’re making with God” – in reality, we can never actually “make it up to God.” If we do make it through whatever difficult situation we’re in, we know that our success or relief is a gift of pure grace.
If our relationship with God is built on trying to “make up for” all the things we have done wrong, we will only sink further into guilt and despair. The heart of the Christian message is one of pure grace – completely undeserved, unearned mercy shown by God to us, a complete gift. It is a foundation in this overflowing mercy of God that frees us, that compels us, to forgive as we have been forgiven. Knowing that God forgives us for anything and everything we have done allows us to begin to work toward forgiving others.
This is why I like the absolution from the New Zealand Prayer Book and why I’ve been using it in our liturgy for the past several months:
“God forgives you. Forgive others, forgive yourself.”
It is through fully coming to understand that God forgives you that you can begin to forgive others and yourself.
And the second part of that absolution: “Through Christ, God has put away your sins. Approach your God in peace.” – reminds us that God has ALREADY forgiven us. I, as the priest, am not pronouncing you to be forgiven in that moment. I am reminding you that, as Jesus said on the cross, “It is finished.” You are already forgiven. You are free. Free to approach God in peace, without fear of retribution. Free to approach your brothers and sisters secure in the knowledge of your own acceptance and forgiveness and therefore free to offer them your forgiveness.
After this, we flow seamlessly into the exchanging of the peace. We “approach our God in peace” by approaching one another in peace, being reconciled with one another, and then coming together to share the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ “given for you and for all for the forgiveness of sins.”
Repentance, reconciliation and return. We rehearse these steps every week in the structure of our worship. It is meant to be a pattern for our lives outside these 90 minutes on Sunday mornings as well.
"Will you persevere in resisting evil, and whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?"
We will, with God’s help.
Showing posts with label liturgy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liturgy. Show all posts
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Sunday, August 11, 2013
What are the multitude of your liturgies to me?, says the LORD.
Sermon delivered Sunday, Aug. 11, 2013 (12th Sunday After Pentecost, Year C, Proper 14) at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN. (Isaiah 1:10-20)
For the past month or so, our readings from the Hebrew Bible have come from the prophets: Amos, Hosea, and this week, Isaiah. This prophetic tradition will continue through the rest of the season after Pentecost, with readings from Jeremiah, Joel, Habbakuk, and Haggai.
Although the details of their historical contexts differ, all the prophets speak to a people who in one way or another have fallen away from God. They point out the ways the people have not lived up to what God has called them to do and to be, and call the people back to right relationship with God.
Oftentimes the “issue” at hand for the prophets is that the people are worshipping other gods or have adopted ritual practices other than those prescribed by the God of Israel. Our passage from Isaiah often gets read in that way. “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?” God says to the people. “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?”
At face value, it sounds like God is mad about the Israelites doing something he didn’t tell them to do, like worshipping Baal or other gods. And since both Judaism and Christianity ultimately came to believe that animal sacrifice is not necessary to please God, it is easy to read that understanding back into the text and judge the ancient people for their “primitive” understanding of God.
“Those silly people back then,” we think. “They actually thought God wanted them to kill animals for him? This passage clearly shows that God didn’t want sacrifices, but they kept on doing it anyway! Apparently they really were hard-headed and rebellious.”
Latent in this assessment is the assumption that we, the modern reader, are not so hard-headed, that we understand what true worship is, whereas the ancients did not.
One of the problems with this interpretation is that this passage is not about the people adopting unacceptable religious practices. In fact, all the religious rituals described in this passage – offering sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem, observing the Sabbath, celebrating the appointed festivals on the religious calendar – had been commanded by God in the Mosaic law. By all outward appearances, the people were actually doing everything right. They were performing the ritual actions God had said God wanted. So why does God suddenly say he doesn’t want them to do the very things he had commanded them to do?
Well, because they were really only fulfilling one part of the instructions God had given to them. God had not only given commands about ritual practice, but also about ethical behavior – and the people weren’t doing so great with the second half of that equation. Their ritual observances, however correctly they were performed, were not acceptable to God because outside of worship, the people continued to behave unethically.
This is not an unfamiliar theme in our own day -- that outside of worship, people continue to behave unethically. Christian author and speaker Brennan Manning observed this about the modern-day church: “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, but walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” However much we may be tempted to assume we in the modern world have “matured” and made “progress” from the “primitive” times of the ancient world, human nature has not actually changed very much. It may be dressed up with technological advancements and an “evolved” understanding of God and what kind of rituals God requires, but the fact remains that it is still easier to say the words of faith than it is to live them.
We read the Scriptures not so that we can pat ourselves on the back by how much “progress” we have made since ancient times, but so that we can hear how God is still speaking to us today. In order to do that, sometimes we need to undertake a little modern translation. To hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people through this passage from Isaiah, we might consider what it would sound like if we translated all those references to ancient Israelite worship to references to our worship in the Episcopal Church today. It might sound something like this:
What are the multitude of your liturgies to me?
says the LORD;
I have had enough of your Eucharists and baptisms;
I do not delight in red wine,
or these flimsy wafers you call bread.
When you come to appear before me,
who asked you to pour water over things and call them holy?
Don’t come to church any more;
giving your tithe is futile;
lighting candles and processing down the aisle is an abomination to me.
Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter… the calling of vestry meetings and diocesan conventions --
I cannot endure these sacred gatherings while you go on sinning.
Your liturgical calendar and your church gatherings
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you say the Prayers of the People just as they are written in the Book of Common Prayer,
I will not listen;
Because your hands are full of blood.
Hopefully this “modern translation” makes clear that the meaning of this passage is not that God hated the sacrifices of the Israelites, any more than God hates us celebrating the Eucharist. Those things were and are the core elements of our ritual lives. This passage must be read with a tone of thick sarcasm, spoken like an angry lover in a quarrel: “You expect me to accept those roses after what you’ve done??” God speaks in this passage like a hurt lover refusing to accept an otherwise desirable gift because the giver has been unfaithful.
If we want to consider what the Spirit is saying to us through this Scripture today, we must consider how our hands are “full of blood” in the Episcopal Church today. How are we complicit in the world’s ways of violence, degradation and exploitation of our fellow human beings? Are we nurturing scorn and contempt for our brothers and sisters who have left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with Anglican churches in other parts of the world? Are we gaining revenue for our ministries by investing funds in companies whose business practices may not be in line with the ethical teachings of Jesus and the prophets? Do we provide food or financial assistance to those in need but ignore the systemic inequalities that keep them trapped in a cycle of poverty?
The “blood on our hands” may not be literal blood from going out and slaughtering anyone, but in subtle and often unintentional ways, even we, who think of ourselves as a “social justice-minded church,” can participate in and benefit from the unjust structures of this world. That is why we have the prophets to call us back, to sit us down for a “come to Jesus” meeting and point out where we have fallen short. And the good news is that like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, we can make a choice to change our ways once we have been made aware of our sins, and God has promised forgiveness if we do. Even at the end of that angry speech about how much he hates our rituals because of our unethical behavior, God still ends with a promise of forgiveness: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow.”
God’s promise is that he will wash away the blood on our hands, offering us new life, another chance – over and over and over again. In our baptismal covenant, we promise to repent and return to the Lord whenever we fall into sin. Not if we fall into sin, but when – because, human nature not having changed much in 2,500 years, we know that we will. And we also know that God’s grace and mercy will be there for us every time, because God’s nature hasn’t changed much in 2,500 years either. Like the lover who ultimately forgives her partner because her love is stronger than her anger, so God’s love for us is stronger than God’s anger over the ways we are unfaithful. And that, my friends, is good news.
Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.
For the past month or so, our readings from the Hebrew Bible have come from the prophets: Amos, Hosea, and this week, Isaiah. This prophetic tradition will continue through the rest of the season after Pentecost, with readings from Jeremiah, Joel, Habbakuk, and Haggai.
Although the details of their historical contexts differ, all the prophets speak to a people who in one way or another have fallen away from God. They point out the ways the people have not lived up to what God has called them to do and to be, and call the people back to right relationship with God.
Oftentimes the “issue” at hand for the prophets is that the people are worshipping other gods or have adopted ritual practices other than those prescribed by the God of Israel. Our passage from Isaiah often gets read in that way. “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?” God says to the people. “I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?”
At face value, it sounds like God is mad about the Israelites doing something he didn’t tell them to do, like worshipping Baal or other gods. And since both Judaism and Christianity ultimately came to believe that animal sacrifice is not necessary to please God, it is easy to read that understanding back into the text and judge the ancient people for their “primitive” understanding of God.
“Those silly people back then,” we think. “They actually thought God wanted them to kill animals for him? This passage clearly shows that God didn’t want sacrifices, but they kept on doing it anyway! Apparently they really were hard-headed and rebellious.”
Latent in this assessment is the assumption that we, the modern reader, are not so hard-headed, that we understand what true worship is, whereas the ancients did not.
One of the problems with this interpretation is that this passage is not about the people adopting unacceptable religious practices. In fact, all the religious rituals described in this passage – offering sacrifices at the temple in Jerusalem, observing the Sabbath, celebrating the appointed festivals on the religious calendar – had been commanded by God in the Mosaic law. By all outward appearances, the people were actually doing everything right. They were performing the ritual actions God had said God wanted. So why does God suddenly say he doesn’t want them to do the very things he had commanded them to do?
Well, because they were really only fulfilling one part of the instructions God had given to them. God had not only given commands about ritual practice, but also about ethical behavior – and the people weren’t doing so great with the second half of that equation. Their ritual observances, however correctly they were performed, were not acceptable to God because outside of worship, the people continued to behave unethically.
This is not an unfamiliar theme in our own day -- that outside of worship, people continue to behave unethically. Christian author and speaker Brennan Manning observed this about the modern-day church: “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips, but walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.” However much we may be tempted to assume we in the modern world have “matured” and made “progress” from the “primitive” times of the ancient world, human nature has not actually changed very much. It may be dressed up with technological advancements and an “evolved” understanding of God and what kind of rituals God requires, but the fact remains that it is still easier to say the words of faith than it is to live them.
We read the Scriptures not so that we can pat ourselves on the back by how much “progress” we have made since ancient times, but so that we can hear how God is still speaking to us today. In order to do that, sometimes we need to undertake a little modern translation. To hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people through this passage from Isaiah, we might consider what it would sound like if we translated all those references to ancient Israelite worship to references to our worship in the Episcopal Church today. It might sound something like this:
What are the multitude of your liturgies to me?
says the LORD;
I have had enough of your Eucharists and baptisms;
I do not delight in red wine,
or these flimsy wafers you call bread.
When you come to appear before me,
who asked you to pour water over things and call them holy?
Don’t come to church any more;
giving your tithe is futile;
lighting candles and processing down the aisle is an abomination to me.
Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter… the calling of vestry meetings and diocesan conventions --
I cannot endure these sacred gatherings while you go on sinning.
Your liturgical calendar and your church gatherings
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you say the Prayers of the People just as they are written in the Book of Common Prayer,
I will not listen;
Because your hands are full of blood.
Hopefully this “modern translation” makes clear that the meaning of this passage is not that God hated the sacrifices of the Israelites, any more than God hates us celebrating the Eucharist. Those things were and are the core elements of our ritual lives. This passage must be read with a tone of thick sarcasm, spoken like an angry lover in a quarrel: “You expect me to accept those roses after what you’ve done??” God speaks in this passage like a hurt lover refusing to accept an otherwise desirable gift because the giver has been unfaithful.
If we want to consider what the Spirit is saying to us through this Scripture today, we must consider how our hands are “full of blood” in the Episcopal Church today. How are we complicit in the world’s ways of violence, degradation and exploitation of our fellow human beings? Are we nurturing scorn and contempt for our brothers and sisters who have left the Episcopal Church to affiliate with Anglican churches in other parts of the world? Are we gaining revenue for our ministries by investing funds in companies whose business practices may not be in line with the ethical teachings of Jesus and the prophets? Do we provide food or financial assistance to those in need but ignore the systemic inequalities that keep them trapped in a cycle of poverty?
The “blood on our hands” may not be literal blood from going out and slaughtering anyone, but in subtle and often unintentional ways, even we, who think of ourselves as a “social justice-minded church,” can participate in and benefit from the unjust structures of this world. That is why we have the prophets to call us back, to sit us down for a “come to Jesus” meeting and point out where we have fallen short. And the good news is that like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, we can make a choice to change our ways once we have been made aware of our sins, and God has promised forgiveness if we do. Even at the end of that angry speech about how much he hates our rituals because of our unethical behavior, God still ends with a promise of forgiveness: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow.”
God’s promise is that he will wash away the blood on our hands, offering us new life, another chance – over and over and over again. In our baptismal covenant, we promise to repent and return to the Lord whenever we fall into sin. Not if we fall into sin, but when – because, human nature not having changed much in 2,500 years, we know that we will. And we also know that God’s grace and mercy will be there for us every time, because God’s nature hasn’t changed much in 2,500 years either. Like the lover who ultimately forgives her partner because her love is stronger than her anger, so God’s love for us is stronger than God’s anger over the ways we are unfaithful. And that, my friends, is good news.
Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Planet Altered, Chattanooga
Today our urban ministry class visited two locations in Chattanooga, Planet Altered and the H*Art Gallery. Planet Altered is a self-defined "community creative arts center" that offers a fair-trade gift shop, an art gallery, and a community space room dedicated to art classes and, on Saturday afternoons, a non-traditional, non-denominational, artistically-guided Christian worship service. The H*Art Gallery is a gallery that exhibits art created by homeless people.
At Planet Altered, we met with founder Linda Sines, who said she felt led by God to establish this space for art and worship in the middle of Chattanooga. Although the driving force behind her establishment of the center is her Christian faith, she told us that most of the community doesn't even know that the center is Christian-based -- intentionally. Her goal is to reach out to "non-traditional" church-goers, and so she keeps the overt Christian imagery and language to a minimum -- billing herself instead as a "community center." The back room hosts art workshops and a program called Cafe Grants, a community gathering and soup dinner where artists are given an opportunity to talk about their art (painting, singing, etc) to an audience of 35 people from the community who each pay $10 for the evening, and the community votes on which artist to give the $350 from the evening to. Planet Altered hosts these gatherings once a month for five months (from October to February). But on Saturday afternoons, it hosts a worship service.
But as Linda will tell you, the worship doesn't look like your traditional church service. The main focus of the service is creating "worship art," communal art projects that the gathered community works on together. There are some readings from the Bible, but no set liturgy, and no music.
"We don't use music," Linda explained, "because people tend to think of music as 'doing the worship' for them. They go and hear a beautiful choir sing some music in a church, and they think that's worship. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to see what else could do the worship."
She showed us examples of some of the art they'd created in worship: three mask-like faces hanging above the coffee makers, painted in brilliant colors, that had been created the Sunday after Katrina, as a meditation on the passage from 1 Kings 19 when Elijah encounters God at Mt. Horeb (God was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the "still, small voice" -- or, more accurately translated, the "sound of sheer silence."). Or the rose created from coffee filters, emerging from a charred, burnt heart. (The group didn't believe the rose was truly made of coffee filters until I got up and looked closely at it and reported back that indeed, it was made of coffee filters.)
Linda kept using words like "experiment" and "facilitate" to describe the way she led worship, and I watched the faces of my seminary colleagues grow somewhat puzzled.
"But, so, do you have, like, a liturgy?" someone asked, trying to figure out how someone could possibly lead worship without a set structure and ritual.
"No," Linda said. "It's different every week. There's always the component of scripture reading, and an art project, and some kind of interaction with the community, and sharing of how God is moving in everyone's lives. But I don't plan the worship, per se. Sometimes I show up and I'm not sure what's going to happen. I think we get so caught up with planning in churches sometimes that we don't leave room for the Holy Spirit to do its work."
I looked around and noted blank or hesitant looks from many of my colleagues.
"So how do people know about the service?" someone else asked. Linda explained that it was largely by word of mouth, and that she did not advertise or list the service in any newspapers.
"But... why wouldn't you want to advertise? Why wouldn't you want people to know what you're doing? How are people going to know about it?" someone asked, looking consternated.
"God brings people here as they need to find it," Linda said. "We're not about trying to promote ourselves, but just about seeing where the Holy Spirit guides us."
Finally someone asked the elephant-in-the-room question: what the heck was this lady's religious background or affiliation? (She surely wasn't Episcopalian, seemed to be the underlying assumption.)
Linda told us that she was raised by missionary parents, in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, but that she considers herself a non-denominational Christian and she doesn't like the "arrogance" that is often manifested between different denominations.
I could almost hear a collective "hmmm" from the gathered group of future Episcopal priests. At a coffee shop later, some of my colleagues said that what Linda was doing was great for a sort of alternative space like she had, but it would "never work for Sunday morning."
I wonder about that, though. Why wouldn't it? Just because "we've always done it" this other way? Maybe it would work for Sunday morning for some people -- for people who aren't going to the traditional Sunday morning services we continue to have as an homage to the past?
Our class will be going back to Planet Altered later in the term to actually experience one of Linda's Saturday worship experiences. Unfortunately, that's the day I'll be running my half-marathon in Nashville, so I'll miss the group's reactions to whatever they experience. I'm hoping I'll be able to go back on another Saturday to experience it myself.
Hearing Linda talk reminded me of my experience with a Monday night interfaith devotional gathering hosted by a group of local Baha'is in Decatur, Ga. That gathering was an intentional sacred space where there was no agenda, but an open time of sharing scripture, song, and story from our various traditions. In many ways, it felt more holy and Spirit-filled than anything I'd experienced in an Episcopal liturgy -- with the exception of maybe a few moments at St. James's in Cambridge (my first Episcopal parish). I was reminded of how much I appreciate these kind of alternative spaces for worship and how boring and stifling I can find traditional, repetitive liturgy (in fact, it was for that reason that I left the Lutheran Church in which I was raised -- much of the worship there felt like empty ritual to me). Although I do feel a certain sense of "at home-ness" in the Episcopal Church, this experience of encountering someone doing something different and some of the obvious uncomfortability or uncertainty of my (future) priestly colleagues reminded me of just how "not at home" I can feel in this tradition as well.
At Planet Altered, we met with founder Linda Sines, who said she felt led by God to establish this space for art and worship in the middle of Chattanooga. Although the driving force behind her establishment of the center is her Christian faith, she told us that most of the community doesn't even know that the center is Christian-based -- intentionally. Her goal is to reach out to "non-traditional" church-goers, and so she keeps the overt Christian imagery and language to a minimum -- billing herself instead as a "community center." The back room hosts art workshops and a program called Cafe Grants, a community gathering and soup dinner where artists are given an opportunity to talk about their art (painting, singing, etc) to an audience of 35 people from the community who each pay $10 for the evening, and the community votes on which artist to give the $350 from the evening to. Planet Altered hosts these gatherings once a month for five months (from October to February). But on Saturday afternoons, it hosts a worship service.
 |
| The fair-trade store in the front of Planet Altered. |
But as Linda will tell you, the worship doesn't look like your traditional church service. The main focus of the service is creating "worship art," communal art projects that the gathered community works on together. There are some readings from the Bible, but no set liturgy, and no music.
"We don't use music," Linda explained, "because people tend to think of music as 'doing the worship' for them. They go and hear a beautiful choir sing some music in a church, and they think that's worship. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wanted to see what else could do the worship."
 |
| Linda talking to members of our class in the "back room" space. |
She showed us examples of some of the art they'd created in worship: three mask-like faces hanging above the coffee makers, painted in brilliant colors, that had been created the Sunday after Katrina, as a meditation on the passage from 1 Kings 19 when Elijah encounters God at Mt. Horeb (God was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the "still, small voice" -- or, more accurately translated, the "sound of sheer silence."). Or the rose created from coffee filters, emerging from a charred, burnt heart. (The group didn't believe the rose was truly made of coffee filters until I got up and looked closely at it and reported back that indeed, it was made of coffee filters.)
"But, so, do you have, like, a liturgy?" someone asked, trying to figure out how someone could possibly lead worship without a set structure and ritual.
"No," Linda said. "It's different every week. There's always the component of scripture reading, and an art project, and some kind of interaction with the community, and sharing of how God is moving in everyone's lives. But I don't plan the worship, per se. Sometimes I show up and I'm not sure what's going to happen. I think we get so caught up with planning in churches sometimes that we don't leave room for the Holy Spirit to do its work."
I looked around and noted blank or hesitant looks from many of my colleagues.
"So how do people know about the service?" someone else asked. Linda explained that it was largely by word of mouth, and that she did not advertise or list the service in any newspapers.
"But... why wouldn't you want to advertise? Why wouldn't you want people to know what you're doing? How are people going to know about it?" someone asked, looking consternated.
"God brings people here as they need to find it," Linda said. "We're not about trying to promote ourselves, but just about seeing where the Holy Spirit guides us."
 |
| Art supplies storage above the large sink in the "back room." |
Finally someone asked the elephant-in-the-room question: what the heck was this lady's religious background or affiliation? (She surely wasn't Episcopalian, seemed to be the underlying assumption.)
Linda told us that she was raised by missionary parents, in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, but that she considers herself a non-denominational Christian and she doesn't like the "arrogance" that is often manifested between different denominations.
I could almost hear a collective "hmmm" from the gathered group of future Episcopal priests. At a coffee shop later, some of my colleagues said that what Linda was doing was great for a sort of alternative space like she had, but it would "never work for Sunday morning."
Our class will be going back to Planet Altered later in the term to actually experience one of Linda's Saturday worship experiences. Unfortunately, that's the day I'll be running my half-marathon in Nashville, so I'll miss the group's reactions to whatever they experience. I'm hoping I'll be able to go back on another Saturday to experience it myself.
Hearing Linda talk reminded me of my experience with a Monday night interfaith devotional gathering hosted by a group of local Baha'is in Decatur, Ga. That gathering was an intentional sacred space where there was no agenda, but an open time of sharing scripture, song, and story from our various traditions. In many ways, it felt more holy and Spirit-filled than anything I'd experienced in an Episcopal liturgy -- with the exception of maybe a few moments at St. James's in Cambridge (my first Episcopal parish). I was reminded of how much I appreciate these kind of alternative spaces for worship and how boring and stifling I can find traditional, repetitive liturgy (in fact, it was for that reason that I left the Lutheran Church in which I was raised -- much of the worship there felt like empty ritual to me). Although I do feel a certain sense of "at home-ness" in the Episcopal Church, this experience of encountering someone doing something different and some of the obvious uncomfortability or uncertainty of my (future) priestly colleagues reminded me of just how "not at home" I can feel in this tradition as well.
*Disclaimer: All "quotations" of people in this blog post are re-created after the fact from my (rusty) memory and are not meant to be taken literally as the EXACT words these people spoke. And my apologies to any of my colleagues whose expressions I may have misread during this class... this reflection may be more about my projections than anything else!
Monday, February 19, 2007
A brief reflection on liturgical worship
Note (1/22/10): I'm actually not sure when I wrote this particular paragraph, but found it saved in a draft post that I never published in 2006 during my year in Nebraska. I just picked an arbitrary date in February (since there were no posts for February) and posted it, retroactively.
Sunday, October 1, 2006
Praise Songs, PowerPoint, and... Episcopal Liturgy????
At the church growth conference in Grand Island in September, there was a lot of discussion about music. All the worship in the weekend was led by a praise band from St. Andrews in Omaha, and most of the songs were songs I had sung in the Evangelical communities in late high school and early college. This was slightly disturbing to me, because one of the main reasons I left those communities was that that style of worship wasn't spiritually edifying to me anymore and because of some of my disagreements with certain theologies many of those groups hold. I came to the Episcopal Church looking for an alternative, for something different, and now it seems that the "praise songs" are creeping in even to the Episcopal Church.
It was very odd to sit in a conference room and listen to a praise band sing in between various parts of the Episcopal liturgy and to see the words to the liturgy projected on PowerPoint screens. The Episcopal liturgy on POWERPOINT??? I'm sorry, there's just some kind of cognitive dissonance there for me! At one point they even had incense going. Incense, priests in vestments... and... PowerPoint??!?!
Not that there's anything WRONG with PowerPoint, of course, it's just the associations I have with it from my past. I also realized that there's nothing really wrong with many of the songs I used to sing during that time period of my life... in many ways the theology found in them isn't objectionable to me, but I DO worry about using ONLY the praise songs from the contemporary Christian radio stations and whatnot (which is where they said they were getting most of their music).
So many of these songs used often in the Evangelical communities are highly individualistic, and focus almost solely on the majesty and grandeur of God, and paint Jesus as entirely divine, with little attention to his humanity (this may not be true of their theology as a whole, but it seems to be true of the songs). While all these things are all well and good, one of the things I really appreciated about the Episcopal Church when I first became involved with it in Boston was its focus on serving the poor and concern with social justice. At St. James, this theology was reflected in much of our music -- which was NOT all traditional Anglican hymns, but was also not contemporary praise songs either.
For an example of what I'm talking about, let's look at two different songs that could be sung in the context of a Christian worship setting. The first, "Prince of Peace," is a common praise hymn in Evangelical circles, and was one of my favorites when I was a part of one of those communities. The second, "God is in the daily struggles," is a hymn written by Pat Michaels, the music director at St. James Episcopal Church in Cambridge, Mass.
Prince of Peace
You are Lord of Lords
You are King of Kings
You are mighty God
Lord of everything
You're Emmanuel
You're the great "I Am"
You're the Prince of Peace
Who is the Lamb
You're the living God
You're my saving grace
You will reign forever
You are Ancient of Days
You are Alpha, Omega, beginning and end
You're my savior, Messiah, redeemer and friend
You're my Prince of Peace
And I will live my life for you
God is in the Daily Struggles
God is in the daily struggles
Of the poor and dispossessed;
Just as in the ancient stories,
signs and wonders still attest:
food and freedom, food and freedom --
God supplies them on their quest.
In the desert-land, as strangers,
powerless as refugees,
fleeing politics of danger
former slaves but newly freed --
bread for bodies, bread for bodies! --
God provided for their need.
Jesus lived among the poorest,
raising hope that all be fed
asking God to nourish wholeness:
"Give us now our daily bread."
Many thousands, many thousands
ate the feast that God had spread.
At the great commission dinner,
that this feeding ministry
might live on in saint and sinner,
Jesus said, "Remember."
(Feed the hungry, feed the hungry.)
"When you eat, remember me."
Still the poor are God's beloved,
still the poor are sign and key
showing Christians what is needful,
what God's realm is meant to be.
Hear the calling, hear the calling,
"Feed me now and set me free."
Now, if the example of these two hymns doesn't show you how strikingly different the theology presented in different songs can be, I don't know what will! The first song is entirely about God as other-worldly, as divine "king on high," and about the speaker's "personal relationship" with God ("my savior, Messiah, redeemer and friend"). It is about proclaiming all the things God (or more specifically, Jesus) is, and affirming Jesus's significance in that person's life. Now, I would argue that if Jesus truly is significant in one's life, that one's life should reflect the kind of scripturally sound calling and ideas represented in the second hymn. The second hymn is set to the tune of a traditional hymn (I can't remember which one right now), but with different words. So it's not exactly a "contemporary praise song," but it does bring a fresh take on a familiar hymn tune. Other songs we sang at St. James weren't even hymn tunes at all, but African praise songs or Asian-influenced music.
My concern, then, is that using these "contemporary praise songs" in Episcopal churches might lead to a theology that looks too much like "Prince of Peace" and not enough like "God is in the daily struggles."
I think it's a mistake to think that just because the megachurches are herding in thousands of people every Sunday that we should just imitate what they're doing. Just because something is drawing in large numbers doesn't mean that there is any value to it. Now, I'm not saying there is NO value in what the megachurches have to offer, but I'm just pointing out an error in logic. Thousands of people might herd into a stadium to go to a Marilyn Manson concert, but does this mean that this is something we should imitate? Drawing in mass numbers of people does not necessarily indicate quality or goodness of an event or program. This is not to compare megachurches to Marilyn Manson concerts (That would be quite laughable!!), but just to say that as Episcopalians (and other "mainline" Christians), we should be wary of just running to follow the herds into what everyone else is doing simply because there are mass numbers of people being drawn into that culture.
Instead of focusing on and worrying about all the people who are attending megachurches (and not OUR churches) every week, we should focus on all the people who do not attend ANY church every week. Many of these people are turned off to Christianity precisely by the type of model offered in the megachurches; not everyone is drawn to that type of "entertainment" Christianity. Some people see it as inauthentic or may have had an experience where they were part of a huge, large church and then when the times got tough (like when they lost a family member or something), no one in the church even knew their name or were there to offer help, because instead of a community, they were just another spectator in the auditorium every week. Again, obviously this is not the case with ALL megachurches, but I have heard these kinds of stories from people and experienced some of these kinds of disillusions myself.
My point is that the megachurch model doesn't work for everyone. Instead of trying to imitate things they're doing, we should focus on how we as the Episcopal Church (and other mainline churches) can offer an alternative, a viable, welcoming and relevant alternative. Whatever you want to call us -- "mainline," "liberal," "progressive," "moderate" -- I think we have something to offer to the wider "catholic church" (lowercase "catholic," meaning the church as a whole, including ALL Christians of all denominations).
It was very odd to sit in a conference room and listen to a praise band sing in between various parts of the Episcopal liturgy and to see the words to the liturgy projected on PowerPoint screens. The Episcopal liturgy on POWERPOINT??? I'm sorry, there's just some kind of cognitive dissonance there for me! At one point they even had incense going. Incense, priests in vestments... and... PowerPoint??!?!
Not that there's anything WRONG with PowerPoint, of course, it's just the associations I have with it from my past. I also realized that there's nothing really wrong with many of the songs I used to sing during that time period of my life... in many ways the theology found in them isn't objectionable to me, but I DO worry about using ONLY the praise songs from the contemporary Christian radio stations and whatnot (which is where they said they were getting most of their music).
So many of these songs used often in the Evangelical communities are highly individualistic, and focus almost solely on the majesty and grandeur of God, and paint Jesus as entirely divine, with little attention to his humanity (this may not be true of their theology as a whole, but it seems to be true of the songs). While all these things are all well and good, one of the things I really appreciated about the Episcopal Church when I first became involved with it in Boston was its focus on serving the poor and concern with social justice. At St. James, this theology was reflected in much of our music -- which was NOT all traditional Anglican hymns, but was also not contemporary praise songs either.
For an example of what I'm talking about, let's look at two different songs that could be sung in the context of a Christian worship setting. The first, "Prince of Peace," is a common praise hymn in Evangelical circles, and was one of my favorites when I was a part of one of those communities. The second, "God is in the daily struggles," is a hymn written by Pat Michaels, the music director at St. James Episcopal Church in Cambridge, Mass.
Prince of Peace
You are Lord of Lords
You are King of Kings
You are mighty God
Lord of everything
You're Emmanuel
You're the great "I Am"
You're the Prince of Peace
Who is the Lamb
You're the living God
You're my saving grace
You will reign forever
You are Ancient of Days
You are Alpha, Omega, beginning and end
You're my savior, Messiah, redeemer and friend
You're my Prince of Peace
And I will live my life for you
God is in the Daily Struggles
God is in the daily struggles
Of the poor and dispossessed;
Just as in the ancient stories,
signs and wonders still attest:
food and freedom, food and freedom --
God supplies them on their quest.
In the desert-land, as strangers,
powerless as refugees,
fleeing politics of danger
former slaves but newly freed --
bread for bodies, bread for bodies! --
God provided for their need.
Jesus lived among the poorest,
raising hope that all be fed
asking God to nourish wholeness:
"Give us now our daily bread."
Many thousands, many thousands
ate the feast that God had spread.
At the great commission dinner,
that this feeding ministry
might live on in saint and sinner,
Jesus said, "Remember."
(Feed the hungry, feed the hungry.)
"When you eat, remember me."
Still the poor are God's beloved,
still the poor are sign and key
showing Christians what is needful,
what God's realm is meant to be.
Hear the calling, hear the calling,
"Feed me now and set me free."
Now, if the example of these two hymns doesn't show you how strikingly different the theology presented in different songs can be, I don't know what will! The first song is entirely about God as other-worldly, as divine "king on high," and about the speaker's "personal relationship" with God ("my savior, Messiah, redeemer and friend"). It is about proclaiming all the things God (or more specifically, Jesus) is, and affirming Jesus's significance in that person's life. Now, I would argue that if Jesus truly is significant in one's life, that one's life should reflect the kind of scripturally sound calling and ideas represented in the second hymn. The second hymn is set to the tune of a traditional hymn (I can't remember which one right now), but with different words. So it's not exactly a "contemporary praise song," but it does bring a fresh take on a familiar hymn tune. Other songs we sang at St. James weren't even hymn tunes at all, but African praise songs or Asian-influenced music.
My concern, then, is that using these "contemporary praise songs" in Episcopal churches might lead to a theology that looks too much like "Prince of Peace" and not enough like "God is in the daily struggles."
I think it's a mistake to think that just because the megachurches are herding in thousands of people every Sunday that we should just imitate what they're doing. Just because something is drawing in large numbers doesn't mean that there is any value to it. Now, I'm not saying there is NO value in what the megachurches have to offer, but I'm just pointing out an error in logic. Thousands of people might herd into a stadium to go to a Marilyn Manson concert, but does this mean that this is something we should imitate? Drawing in mass numbers of people does not necessarily indicate quality or goodness of an event or program. This is not to compare megachurches to Marilyn Manson concerts (That would be quite laughable!!), but just to say that as Episcopalians (and other "mainline" Christians), we should be wary of just running to follow the herds into what everyone else is doing simply because there are mass numbers of people being drawn into that culture.
Instead of focusing on and worrying about all the people who are attending megachurches (and not OUR churches) every week, we should focus on all the people who do not attend ANY church every week. Many of these people are turned off to Christianity precisely by the type of model offered in the megachurches; not everyone is drawn to that type of "entertainment" Christianity. Some people see it as inauthentic or may have had an experience where they were part of a huge, large church and then when the times got tough (like when they lost a family member or something), no one in the church even knew their name or were there to offer help, because instead of a community, they were just another spectator in the auditorium every week. Again, obviously this is not the case with ALL megachurches, but I have heard these kinds of stories from people and experienced some of these kinds of disillusions myself.
My point is that the megachurch model doesn't work for everyone. Instead of trying to imitate things they're doing, we should focus on how we as the Episcopal Church (and other mainline churches) can offer an alternative, a viable, welcoming and relevant alternative. Whatever you want to call us -- "mainline," "liberal," "progressive," "moderate" -- I think we have something to offer to the wider "catholic church" (lowercase "catholic," meaning the church as a whole, including ALL Christians of all denominations).
Worrying too much about the success of the megachurches or trying to imitate them will only stifle our God-given role in the world, I believe, of being a different voice to the faithful. We need to turn our eyes outward to those who are not within the fold and not try to reach out to the same segment that the megachurches have already "cornered the market" on, so to speak. Sure, there are thousands of people attending megachurches every week, but there are even MORE people who are not attending church at all and who are not a part of any kind of meaningful faith community. I think we have a way of being Christian that is different and may offer them a place where they feel they can truly fit in and find an experience of God and God's peace and forgiveness. And isn't that what we're ALL after, mainliners and Evangelicals alike? Do we really want to sacrifice that possibility for outreach by mindlessly mimicing someone else's model?
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