The pastor of a nearby church once fired a 12 gauge shotgun in the middle of his sermon in order to get the audience’s attention. He fired blank shells so no one was in mortal danger but a shotgun —– in a sermon!
My thinking on this whole area of “relevance” and “contemporary liturgy” has changed so let me try to frame this issue against the backdrop of Mary and Martha.
For the past two thousand years or more people look at each new emerging generation and talk about how they are different in terms of their needs, hopes, dreams and expression. At least for the past century the response of the church has been to look at the changing generation and say “We must make liturgy relevant and make it come alive speaking to the needs of this new generation.”
They said this in 1890, in 1927 and in 1977. The church continues to say it and I have said it. But now I am wondering if this is the right direction to go. I wonder if making liturgy seem modern not only drains the power from the timeless symbols we encounter, but it also makes the modern contemporary worshipper unable to encounter God in their daily life.
As a line of argument sometimes it is useful to take each proposition to their absurd extremes. In the shotgun, contemporary, let’s-make-worship-meet-the-needs-of-busy-modern-people line of reasoning, where do we end up if we push it to the extreme? Worship becomes a kind of Ed Sullivan show (if you are old enough to remember that) or an American Idol. “We’ve got a really big show this morning folks …” The celebrant becomes a master of ceremonies. The audience sits in plush, reclining theatre seats. If the Lord ’s Supper is celebrated, the bread and wine come to the worshippers in their seats packaged in little sterilized plastic cups and pre-packaged sterile wafers. You leave church every Sunday pumped up, feeling good, knowing that prosperity awaits because you are a true believer.
At the other extreme, let’s walk through the doors of the monastery of the Society of St. John the Evangelist on busy Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The SSJE is a monastic order in the Episcopal Church. Although the brothers do incredible work ministering to the needs of the poor in the Boston area, they gather to pray five times a day starting at 5:00 AM. At 6:30 AM on weekdays they celebrate Holy Eucharist.
You close the heavy wooden door from the street and step into the stone building. The feeling is as if you had stepped into the 10th century. The light comes from candles or the stained glass windows high up on the walls. There is a hushed feeling of reverence and awe. You know that you are in the presence of something big, something powerful. The service begins and follows our 1978 prayer book. All of the music is chanted. Most of the service is chanted. The incense only makes the nearby altar appear hazy like the cloud that led the Israelites by day through the desert.
In chanting the psalms through the Daily Office and Eucharists, the brothers have read or chanted all 149 psalms several times a year. They know them by heart. One side chants up to the asterisk and the other chants the remaining half. The service takes place at a pace that would seem slow to us. When they break at the asterisk in chanting a psalm, the pause lasts for one full deep human breath – 2-3 seconds. Yet the responding line is begun simultaneously by the brothers without direction. They know exactly when to come in. Some authors have remarked that when done well, the simplicity of this kind of chant sounds like the breath of God. You literally become transformed with the beauty.
The small congregation walks to the altar rail to receive the body and blood of Christ. It is real bread and real wine from a common cup. The brother presses the bread into your hands and looks into your eyes. Together in that glance you offer up your weaknesses and insecurity to God who has sacrificed something precious for you.
This kind of worship at SSJE could have been done in 1549 or 1049. Yes the language changes a bit as we have observed this summer, but the timeless symbols of worship are powerful. When I visited St. Petersburg, Russia a couple of summers ago, I was captivated by the Russian Orthodox service in the same way as I was at SSJE. Although it was in Russian I knew exactly what was happening throughout the service. The only people attending the service fell into two distinct age groups: People over 80 who were introduced to the faith as children before the revolution. And young people 35 and under. One of the priests told me that this was basically the same service celebrated when Peter the Great founded the city in 1709. It was amazing to see how many young people were truly experiencing the liturgy.
If we have failed in our liturgy I am not convinced it is because we have failed to make it contemporary or accessible to young people and newcomers. I have observed that people of all ages and of all levels of faith development will flock to the real deal when they find it. They flock to the real deal NOT because they leave feeling pumped up or they think they will get rich because they believe in God. (Those are heresies by the way.) They flock because they have encountered something divine, something bigger than themselves, something mysterious. These are what some authors call the “thin places” in life where we encounter that which is holy or simply God. People leave profoundly touched and transformed.
As I work with people pastorally when life throws them a curveball, people seem to divide into two groups: One group has had repeated encounters of God in the thin places of their lives. They carry with them an abiding sense of the presence of God. They face the curveball with grace and holy confidence. The other group does not seem to have this sense of God’s presence in their lives. When the unexpected calamity arrives they are often filled with dread and anxiety.
Grace Church may never be the huge place out on the Bypass. Whatever size we become, God calls us to be the real deal. Our worship needs to enable the timeless, powerful symbols to work on people. As we grow together our worship should leave people powerfully touched and transformed. It takes time. It takes people and dedication. We will do it and when we do, more people will begin to develop their own sense of the presence of God in their lives.
I wonder if Martha might attend the big church with theater seats, shotguns and plastic wrapped Jesus. For now it seems to meet the needs of her busy life. But I have seen Mary a couple of times. Once I saw her at SSJE. The last time I saw her was in St. Petersburg. Perhaps we should invite both of them to Grace Church.