worship – Page 4 – Salvaged Faith

Going All In

Posted on February 26, 2012Leave a comment

This morning, as we enter the season of Lent, we do so with the book of Romans at our side. As a church, we believe we have been called to reflect the light of God and much of that vision that we have affirmed comes right from these verses in chapter 12.

So this season, this time in the wilderness, will be a time of exploration for us. We will dive deep into this chapter and discover together just where and what God is calling us to.

Today, we start with verse one – which Zoe read for us a bit earlier. I want to share it with you again from the Message translation:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. (MSG)

Take your everyday ordinary life…. Every moment, every second, every action… 100% and give it to God.

I want to share with you a prayer… and you tell me if you think this describes the kind of faith Paul invites us into:

Prayer of a Half-hearted Christian
I love thy church, O God;
Her walls before me stand;
But please excuse my absence, Lord;
This bed is simply grand
A charge to keep I have;
A God to glorify;
But Lord, don’t ask for cash from me;
The glory comes too high.
Am I a soldier of the cross,
A follower of the Lamb?
Yes Though I seldom pray or pay,
I still insist I am.
Must Jesus bear the cross alone,
And all the world go free?
No Others, Lord, should do their part,
But please don’t count on me.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him all creatures here below
Oh, loud my hymns of praise I bring,
Because it doesn’t cost to sing

We just finished singing, “I surrender all,” but so many of us… including myself… don’t really surrender all. We surrender some. We surrender on somedays. We surrender ourselves half-way… but not all.

In fact, many of us are like this dimmer switch up here. We waver in how much light we let out into the world. Our lights are not off completely – but neither are they shining at 100%, 100% of the time.

I did some research on how these dimmer switches work. Specifically the old style knob dimmer switches – where you turn the dial and the lights get brighter and dimmer.

It turns out what makes these switches work was something called a variable resistor. The resistor doesn’t conduct electricity well and in this design, the resistance is increased or decreased by moving the contact arm.

Right here, the arm is all the way on the right, and so it has to travel through all of that resistance to complete the circuit. As the charge works its way through, it loses energy, the voltage drops, and then the light is dimmer.

In this next image, the contact arm is at the top, and so there is about half of the resistor to go through and the lights are only halfway on.

In this image, there is very little actual resistor that the charge has to go through and all most all of the energy travels through the circuit and the light is fully bright.

(you can play with a flash version of these images here. Thank you to “How Stuff Works” for helping me with my sermon!!!)

Now… I find that these old styles of dimmer switches really help us to talk about our faith. You see, we put up all kinds of resistance in our lives. Just like the person in the prayer I read for you, we make excuses, we want to stay where we are, we think living out our faith costs too much. And on different days and different seasons, the amount of resistance we put up varies.

Some days we want to shine brightly and we are very open to God. We remove obstacles and barriers and let God’s love shine through us.

But some days, we throw every barrier in the world before God. I’m too tired. I’m too old. I’m too poor. I’m not going to listen, God.

What is amazing about these older styles of dimmer switches – is that no matter how much resistance we put up, and how dimly the light shines – it still takes a considerable amount of energy.

The input on the right side is at 100% power. That energy is being used to heat the resistor and then it is lost, dissipated, gone.

In the same way in our lives. God gives us everything. He is right there beside us, shining into our lives, calling us into his service. And every barrier we put up, every bit of resistance that we give, takes all of that God energy and it is used up, dissipated, gone.

When Paul calls us in Romans 12:1 to become a living sacrifice, he isn’t talking about dimmer switch faith… he is inviting us to throw out the resistor – and to let all of that amazing love and power and grace of God to shine through – 100%, 100% of the time.

In our weekly Lenten study this morning (and again on Tuesday night for those who want to join us) we are taking apart that verse piece by piece. But for this morning, I want to explore just what this means for our lives.

I think one of the best ways to understand this idea of going all in is to look at our gospel reading for this morning. As we walk with Jesus, we can see how he lived out this idea of a living sacrifice.

First of all, our passage starts with his baptism. As Jesus rises up out of the waters, the voice of God speaks – This is my son, the Beloved.

Before we can even begin to think about being a living sacrifice, we have to remember God’s mercy. We have to remember what God has already done for us.

God has created us, claimed us, named us, called us and saved us.

Through Jesus Christ, we become the sons and daughters of God and we too hear the voice calling out – You are my beloved. You are mine.

God’s love and grace and mercy are flowing into our lives at full power. It’s there without us having to say or do anything.

But we don’t stop with the baptism. We don’t stop with our declaration of faith.

No, as soon as Jesus hears that voice, the Spirit of God whisks him away into the wilderness. There, for forty days and forty nights, he is tempted, the wild beasts surround him and angels take care of him.

Jesus didn’t try to plan ahead. He didn’t back an emergency kit. He didn’t give excuses for why he couldn’t go. He went and completely and utterly put his life in God’s hands.

We, too, are called to dependence. We are called to place our lives, our time, our energy, our resources in the hands of God.

This time in the desert – this time of living and holy sacrifice – is us taking away all of the barriers, all of the resistance. We relinquish control… because we trust that God will take care of us.

You see, this time in the wilderness, this act of living sacrifice ONLY works if we believe the first part…. That God loves us and forgives us and gives us life.

And then, after he had experienced absolute dependence upon God and let all of his temptations and resistance go, Jesus came out of the wilderness and went straight to work.

Placing our lives in God’s hands mean that all of that power is flowing directly through us… and we can’t help but shine.

Our worship and our service and our ministry are one and the same thing. In every moment of every day, we are responsive to where God wants us to go. We serve him. We let him shine through our hearts.

As Lent begins, we are invited to walk with Jesus. We are invited to enter the wilderness, knowing and trusting that the power of God is 100% behind us. And we are called to let shine.

Give up any resistance you might have in your life. Because of the amazing things that God has done for you already – trust him. Know that he will take care of you. Let go of your worries and your resistance and let him have your life. Then your light will shine brightly for all the world to see, 100%, 100% of the time

Excuse me, Pastor…

Posted on February 15, 20122 Comments

I make mistakes… Often.

The latest incarnation of mistakes came this past Sunday.

I have a lot of big ideas, but I am not always good at figuring out the details… how things will ebb and flow. And so, I set in motion a plan to help my congregation discern their spiritual gifts during worship.

We are embarking upon a study of Romans 12 – our theme scripture for the new vision for our church. It will be a Lenten study and will encompass worship, daily devotions, sunday school lessons, etc. But a big part of the journey will be to claim and to give over to God the gifts we have been blessed with.

So I found these awesome resources by Dan and Barbara Dick called “Equipped for Every Good Work.” We wanted as many congregants as possible to have the opportunity to discover their spiritual gifts before embarking on this journey.

Realistically, I knew that if I simply directed folks to an online resource, most wouldn’t do it. If I only offered it during Sunday School, I would miss a lot of people. If I sent it home, most wouldn’t bring it back.

The only way to let people know, “Hey, this is important” was to set aside time in worship to go through it together. I handed out scoring sheets and gave a brief introductory sermon and set out reading out the first of 200 statements.

Yes, two hundred.

In my head, it didn’t seem like a lot. I thought about how many words a typical sermon was and how short the statements were and thought it was doable. THOUGHT.

We got through 40 and I felt like people’s heads were spinning. We passed 60 and I could sense the tension in the room. We hit 80 and I looked back and saw a lovely woman near the back shaking her head back and forth.

“How are we doing,” I asked… and the woman kept shaking her head.

“We need to be done,” she replied.

I looked at the clock, and knew she was right. Between the pauses for answers and the repeating of some statements, there simply was not time. It was exhausting to think like this. And it was extremely foolish of me to think that we could get through the entire list in the time we had for worship.

“Good idea,” I said. We made peace with letting it go for now. We decided that we could either a) finish it the next week or b) let half way done be good enough and still use the tool next week to talk about where we are.

The way the inventory is set up, we were scoring for each category as we went along, and so getting half way through, I think we were able to still get a pretty good indication of where people’s spiritual gifts lie. It was a difficult process, and we didn’t do it perfectly, but I figure that getting through 5 questions for each spiritual gift is just as good as the much shorter 40 question inventory based on the same materials online. So we are going with it.

I’m extraordinarily grateful that someone was willing to step up and call me out. Just because I’m the pastor does not mean that I have everything figured out all the time. In fact, as my spiritual gifts demonstrate, I’m not good at organizing. I’m not good with the details. And I do need to be surrounded by people who are willing to look out for the good of everyone around us when I’m leading us down long and tedious paths.

I have to say, regardless of the length, the very idea of doing this type of spiritual gifts inventory had mixed reactions. Some people were really enthused by the idea and were looking forward to claiming what they had been called to. They were intrigued by the ways specific characteristics were lifted up. They wanted to know more. Others felt like failures. They didn’t like the idea of a “test.” I had tried to carefully explain that this is a way of discovering what we are good at and what we have been gifted at… that there were no wrong answers, but I’m not sure the message sunk in for everyone.

It is difficult to take a deep look at where we are spiritually. It is hard to be honest with ourselves about what we are not good at. We can tend to focus on our weaknesses and lament them, rather than celebrate our strengths.

This next Sunday, we had planned on talking about ways that our spiritual gifts can be used in the life of the church, but based on our responses, I want to dive deeper into what it means to be gifted… I want to help people to cherish the ways God has blessed them. I want to help them let go of the false notion that we have to be perfect at everything and help them to realize that is precisely why we have community – in order to fit our differently shaped puzzle pieces together and make the body of Christ.

I make mistakes. I make them often.

But thank God I am surrounded by people full of forgiveness.

And thank God that they call me out and give me a chance to rethink my plans and start again in a new and better place.

understanding ritual

Posted on July 2, 20111 Comment

Today I get to co-officiate my first inter-denominational wedding.

Well, that may not be completely true. There have been plenty of folks from different protestant and even different Christian backgrounds who have married under my authority. But each couple chose to go with the Methodist order and flow and style… their traditions weren’t so important, or different, that it made a difference.

But today’s wedding will be in a Catholic church, with a Catholic priest and I doing the ceremony. I’m preaching and reading and praying, and he’s generally presiding and taking care of the vows.

I have to admit that going into this wedding I wasn’t sure what to think. I have my own authority and traditions and ways of being that are being set aside for this particular ritual. In my church we don’t normally hold the gospel in such high respect and honor. In my church we don’t typically bow before the altar and the cross. It’s not better, or worse, it’s just different.

As someone who is outside of these traditions, they feel a little unfamiliar as I do them, but I am also hyper-conscious of why we are doing them. I understand the respect and honor and submission involved in these ritualistic acts. And that makes them beautiful to me. Yet I also understand that just as ritual acts in my own tradition become rote and familiar that we sometimes take them for granted and go through the motions without any remembrance of why we are doing them.

This experience makes me want to go back with an open eye and look at every action of our typical Sunday morning worship. When do we stand and sit? When do we make motions? What is the purpose of our acts of worship? And then to talk about them… To spend a few weeks or months, or maybe at least one Sunday every month reminding folks as we worship what we are doing and why we are doing it.

“Let us stand together as we hear the gospel to honor the words of Jesus.”

“Let us bow our heads together in prayer as we surrender ourselves to the power of God at work among us.”

“Let us sing with exuberant voices as we give thanks for these blessings God has given us.”

A few words make a world of difference. And they might be enough to jar us out of complacency and to truly worship.

potluck worship

Posted on March 19, 20112 Comments

A colleague of mine recently forwarded an email about potlucks and banquets. It was written by Dr. Ed Robinson, the president of MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, KS.

photo by: Gözde Otman

Dr. Robinson asks us if our worshipping experiences are more like banquets or potlucks. And by that he means: do you come to worship and wait to be served, or do you bring something to the experience and try what is offered by others? (You can read the full article here)

I think it is a fascinating metaphor for both our worshipping life and our experience as the church. Is the church a place and a program that meets your needs or are you an active participant with something to contribute? Are you being served or are you serving? Are you a person in a pew or a part of the body of Christ?

I happen to love food. And I love potlucks even more. I’m not sure that you can be a good methodist withoutloving these two things! So, it’s probably obvious where I fall and where I encourage you to land in the choice between a banquet church and a potluck church.

But how do we turn our churches into potlucks? How do we encourage folks to bring something to the table? (or the sanctuary?)

First, I think we need to create opportunities in worship for folks to be active. Participation in a responsive liturgy is not enough. We need to ask people to get up, move around, think, respond, speak, and do things in worship.

This can be scary for churches that are accustomed to stand and sit worship. But what I have found is that people are hungry for the chance to be stimulated mentally, physically, and spiritually.

In my own congregation, we have interactive worship every so often. It is never something that is forced upon folks; people can stay seated if they want to. What is important is that whatever we are doing directly is related to the message for the day.

One of the first pieces of interactive worship we used related to the Lent 1 text from Genesis in cycle B. As we remembered God’s promise to Noah after the flood – we affirmed, as a congregation, that we are blessed by God. We proclaimed that God desires not the death of a sinner, but that we all repent and live. We celebrated that God promises to be, and has been, with us through the storms of our lives.

Our youth group prepared the canvases by painting them red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Then, following a brief mediation on the texts, I invited people to come and paint on these canvases signs of God’s promises to us. We remembered how God has shown us grace and mercy. We wrote words of hope and life.

Those canvases still hang at the front of our sanctuary.

Second, worship needs to connect with the congregation on a deeply personal level. It is not enough to simply preach a sermon that talks about the world around us – it needs to apply to what they are daily struggling with.

I have borrowed and adapated resources from a number of different locations, but one of my favorite sites is creativeprayer.com. One Sunday for worship, we talked about the sins in our own lives and used this idea for confession with sand. All around the room we place 2 gallon buckets filled with sand and handed each person a brown paper lunch sack. As we wandered around the room, we read the questions above each bucket and if that applied to us, we put a scoop of sand in our bag. They got heavy. It was a personal journey for each of us – and yet no one could see how much we were carrying. It was between me and God.

Near the end of worship, we took those heavy bags and we laid them before the cross. It was one of the most powerful worship experiences we have had in our church, because the message hit you personally. You carried the weight of your sin to the cross and left it there. Literally.

Third, the voices of the congregation need to have a space to be heard in worship.You cannot participate if you are not allowed to speak, to sing, to respond, to question.

While we don’t do this every Sunday (and sometimes I wonder, why not!), every so often our worship takes on a form of lectio divina. We ask folks to reflect on the scriptures and to share with one another what they think. There are other days when I ask folks to respond with their own questions. Even hymn sings provide the opportunity for individuals to share their favorite music and why it is a meaningful selection from their own experience.

I have also realized that there are some people who will never speak up during church. They don’t feel comfortable in front of large groups. I have attempted at various times to engage in The Roundtable Pulpit: Where Leadership & Preaching Meet sessions where a small group of folks help me to reflect on the text for the coming week. Those questions and ideas are then woven into the sermon. It provides an opportunity for voices other than my own to be heard and included. I love the concept, I have just had a difficult time getting a diversity of people to show up for the weekly gatherings.

Just as we have fantastic cooks in our local congregations, so too do we have people who are gifted in word, song, dance, creativity, passion, experience, and dedication. Just as we celebrate the good eats that come to the table when we feast together, so too should worship be a feast to God with all people offering together.

Why we are singing Christmas carols this Advent…

Posted on November 30, 2010Leave a comment

There have been a number of interesting conversations going on around how we keep Advent and Christmas.

Taylor Burton-Edwards has suggested that what we actually experience is something more like Admastime… leaving the “vent” and the “Christ” out of it completely.

In the time that I have known what Advent was… and I have to be honest that it wasn’t really until seminary days that I started keeping Advent… I have been a stickler about waiting. I like the build-up of the moment. I think that the liturgical seasons and the calendar create a sense of movement and energy and emotion that is captured in this quote by Frederick Buechner:

The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.— Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark, pp. 2,3

While we are always, and every moment waiting for the coming of Christ… we forget. We forget the longing. We forget the tension. Advent reminds us. It reminds us that time is of the essence. It reminds us to wake up and to be ready. It reminds us that any moment might be the moment.

That is a hard state-of-mind to embody for our whole lives. It sure seems like the Thessalonians tried. They stopped everything to wait for Christ to come, and Paul had to gently remind them that they still had to work and eat and go to school. Life must go on… and yet the waiting is still in the background.

So I relish the minor keys of Advent. I find peace in the longing. I find hope in the reminders that soon and very soon Emmanuel will come. It is such a contrast to everything that skids out of control around us. And then, since I made everyone wait… we have a grand old hymn sing the Sundays after Christmas and into Epiphany.

But this year, I caved. I gave in. We are singing Christmas carols this Advent.

It was something I struggled with… but in the end, this year it felt right.

We are using the “Life-Giving Christmas” materials from the UMC & Rethink Church. And as contrived as “Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love” might be… I think the materials are really helping us to move to a different place this year as a congregation.

Advent for me has two tasks: to prepare us for the birth of Christ (which we celebrate as Christmas) and to prepare us for the second coming of Christ… the end/beginning of it all.

What I have found is that quite a few of our Christmas carols actually do allow us to take both of those things seriously. Sunday, we sang “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and really focused on the last verse:

O holy Child of Bethlehem, descend to us, we pray;

cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmauel! (UMH #230)

That longing for the Savior to come is the same today as it was in the days of Mary and Joseph. The child has been born and still we wait. And now that we have used that song in church… now that we have talked about waiting for THE hope of the world… perhaps when the song comes on the radio, or begins playing in the mall… the gears will shift just a little bit, the chaos will be jarred, the spirit will speak, and we will pause to wait.

Hope… that next year things will be different

Posted on November 28, 2010Leave a comment

Keep awake! Get ready! Prepare yourselves!

These are the words that fly at us from the scriptures on this first Sunday of Advent.

But get ready for what?

Light? Dawn? The son of Man?

Yes. Yes. And Yes.

Get ready for the hope of the world…

Will you pray with me? (adapted from Thom Shuman)

Lord of all:
you are as close to us as the breath in our lungs:
helping us to treat everyone with honor and respect;
healing us with serenity in these days of stress;
taking us by the hand to walk us home to the kingdom.
teach us all we need to know,
if we will but open our hearts, and listen to yours.
Help us to quit working the night shift in sin’s sweat shops,
but to dance in the Light of Advent joy.

How many of you have ever had a bad day? What about a bad week? Or a whole year?

Life is downright tough sometimes. It is unfair. It is cruel. We finally find the job we have been searching for, and then our spouse gets laid off. A misunderstanding destroys a friendship. Natural disasters wipe homes off the map. Children go hungry. And sometimes in the midst of all of the problems that we face in this world… the trials and the tribulations… it feels like God turns his back towards us.

And so, sometimes, in our frustrating times… in the days that seem without hope… we turn our backs on God.

We look for salvation in every place but the right place.

We look for things that will make us feel better – we self medicate with drugs and shopping sprees.

We turn towards the darkness and yell at it for being so dark.

And we continue to feel alone, and empty, and lost.

Have you ever been there? Yelling at the darkness? Do you know how much energy it takes to fight with something like “darkness”?

When I think back on the tough times that I have been through in my life… and as I have listened to folks share their own stories… the thing that finally got them out of the rut, out of that dark place, was that they woke up.

Whether or not the situation changed, they woke up. They started living their lives differently. They took stock of what was really important. They stopped being mad at the dark and started trying to let their own light shine.

It seems contrite to say that there are two ways of looking at world – either as a glass half-full or a glass half-empty… but maybe it really is as simple as that.

Either the world is a place of darkness or it is a place where the light of God dwells…

Either God has abandoned us or God is working out a plan of salvation.

Either Christ’s work is done or soon and very soon the Son of Man is coming…

Can you hear the difference in those statements?

Are we going to live as a people of the light?

Or are we going to let the dark overcome us?

That is our choice.

That is why the prophets and the apostles cry out – Keep Awake! Get Ready! Prepare Yourselves!

Stop living in the darkness, they keep saying: Let us walk in the light of the Lord!

Let us put on Christ, let us trim our lamps, lets get ready!

Sounds great… but how?

First to live in the light of hope, we need to stop living in the darkness. We need to let go off everything that bogs us down and drains us. In the words of the apostle Paul: we can’t afford to waste a minute, we must not squander these precious hours of daylight in frivolity and indulgence, in sleeping around, in bickering and grabbing everything in sight. Get out of bed and get dressed!

I want you to take a minute and think about one thing that you can do differently this Advent season as you prepare for Christmas. What something that you can do that will renew your hope and your faith… instead of depleting your energy and your bank account? Maybe instead of spending all day on Saturday shopping for the perfect present, you will take some time next Saturday morning to have coffee and devotions with someone you have not spent time with lately… Whatever it is – Talk for a moment with someone near you about something you can do to “Wake Up!” this season.

Second: We have to remember that living in hope isn’t something that we have to do alone.

We all know Pollyannas and Susy Sunshines in our lives… people who are perpetually happy and optimistic. And sometimes their hopefulness is a little annoying because it doesn’t seem real, it doesn’t seem possible.

I’m not asking you to go out and look at all of the bad things in the world and pretend that they aren’t there.

Instead, to live in hope, means that we surround ourselves with people who can help us find a way out of the darkness.

When folks have a tough time, one of the first places they turn is the church. And that is because we are known for our love and our generosity. We are known for our compassion. We are known for being a people who let our light shine.

So when you are having a tough time – when you are having a hard time finding hope – then turn to those people around you who can hope for you. I know that we are a bunch of proud, do-it-yourself, hardworking midwesterners… but sometimes you need to be able to say, I need help. What better place to turn when you have no where else to go than to the people of hope?

And when you are able – you can in turn be hope for others.

We don’t do this very often, but this morning, I want to pass around our special offering basket.

There are a number of people in our community who need an extra bit of help right now. They need to see a sign of hope that next year can and will be different.

A number of our community funds are low and it is hard to give everyone the kind of assistance they need. But you can help. You can remind others that they are not alone this Christmas. You can be hope for someone through your giving right now, right here.

Lastly, to live in hope, we need to keep God at the center of it all. We need to keep the word and the path in front of us. When we take the time to seek the light of the world– then no darkness that comes will ever be able to put that light out.

I want to invite our children to come back up here and to bring their papers.

We talked about hope and transformation earlier and I asked them to help me out this morning. So they took these white sheets of paper and colored on them with white crayons.

And we wrote HOPE on these pages, didn’t we. We drew things that brought us hope.

We put the HOPE of Christ first… we put God first… so let’s see what happens when dark and cloudy and stormy times come.

(painted the white pages with white crayon with dark water based paint)

*gasp* what happened?

All of that hope keeps shining through, doesn’t it! All of the stuff that we thought was hidden and hard to see is there! And none of this darkness can take that away, can it?

Hope is sometimes hard to see. It is sometimes hard to imagine what a difference it can make in our lives. But I know that it has made a difference in my life… and I want to share with you the story of a young woman in Africa who lives in hope.

The Liturgy of Iron Chef America

Posted on November 14, 20104 Comments

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of cooking shows. What can I say, it is hibernating season! Time to add the layer of fat for winter =)

Needless to say, I’ve seen my fair share of episodes of Iron Chef America lately. And as Alton Brown and Kevin Brauch and the Chairman lead us through the competition, I found myself saying their lines with them!

photo from: foodnetwork.com

There is something much different going on here than the formulaic structure of a sitcom or a drama with a problem that must be solved and the inevitable lightbulb moment about 35 minutes into the 42 minute arc. No, what I realized is that Iron Chef actually has created a liturgy to lead viewers through the experience.

I think the connection really stood out to me this past week because we are talking about the liturgy in the Disciple Bible Study I am teaching. The prior week, we discussed the giving of the law and the ten commandments… but then comes the instructions for worship, the setting of festival dates, the prescriptions for proper worship and proper attitudes. As our lesson pointed out, God gave us the law, and then gave us the liturgy, the worship, the practice that would instill those values into our lives, the method to overcome who we are and to purify ourselves.

Instrumental to this process is the liturgy – the work of the people – the litany of words and actions that create the worshipful experience.

There are many churches these days who frown upon liturgy or deny they have one. And yet, any time we create a structure for our worship, we have done so. Even if it’s four songs and a message and some more songs, it is still a liturgy.

I think in many ways, the liturgy invites people to participate. It provides the script for the activity. It tells you what you are supposed to do when. It creates insiders and outsiders. When you know the words, when you know the actions, you are a part of what is happening.

So every Sunday, when we gather to worship and begin with a call to worship, we are inviting participation. As we recite together the Lord’s Prayer, we are building community. When we sing together the Doxology, you know who is in and who is out. When we pass the peace, we invite others into that experience. And a good church provides ways for those who are new to learn the liturgy so that they, too, may participate.

I think we get so wound up about whether or not folks will understand what is going on in worship. We try to make everything really simple, dumb it down to the lowest common denominator. But in doing so, we forget that the liturgy is meant to be lived. That it doesn’t become a part of your life the first try. That you have to sit with it for a while, experience it, and in time, it becomes such a part of your life that you can’t exist without it. As I have experienced at the bedside of folks with dementia – when all else fails, Psalm 23 or the Lord’s Prayer is still there.

The first time I watched Iron Chef, it seemed a little cheesy, a little overdramatic. However, just because I wasn’t a part of the in-crowd the first time didn’t mean that I couldn’t watch or learn. And learn I did. I learned the liturgy. I know what the Chairman is going to say. I know the rules that Kevin will present. I remember how Alton will lead us into the verdict. And now when I need a break, I turn on food network, and I can join in the experience and it feels like home.

Does our worship invoke the same feelings? Does it invite us in with familiar words? Does it instill in us a sense of rhythm and direction? Does it ask us to participate? It should.

it causes me to tremble…

Posted on June 6, 2010Leave a comment

Day two of our annual conference has completed. We have voted on exactly 7 items of legislation. And we have celebrated and praised and prayed and remembered and sung and danced and ate and hugged and sat and walked and listened.

Some brief highlights for me so far:

“Hi, I’m Fred.” Our “priest” for the conference introduced himself and welcomed us into a spirit of worshipful work and I truly have felt this particular time of conference has felt different because of it.
advocating for young adults at our legislative section and dreaming up possibilities for community college ministries
Rev. Doug Ruffle’s challenges to be a sign, a foretaste, and an instrument of the Kingdom of God…
crazy fast and delicious dinner at A Dong
even though clergy session was inhumanely long – it had a wonderful spirit to it as we gathered to worship (thanks clergy band!) and celebrate the ministry we share… and have good conversation about itinerancy
ordination!!!!!! being surrounded by family and church members and friends, the weight of all of those hands upon me, the feeling of the bible underneath my fingers, singing with joy
the reminders throughout the day of the gift of the scriptures: Bishop Kulah talking about Jesus expounding the scriptures; Barbara Lundblad’s take on radical love enfleshed in John’s gospel (love that bends down, that reaches beyond, that puts people before rules, that is here in this moment, that renews itself as soon as you think it has ended); Bishop Job sharing what a day, a year, a decade’s worth of living in the word can do for our lives; a friend’s amazing rendition of a song from the musical Philemon during prayer;
the Rethink Rock video
the voices of young adults who stood to speak out of love for what they care about on the floor.
sharing deeply with one another truths about things that have hurt us… so that we might give them over to God.
our conference artist’s work… and the poetic description of what God is sharing with us through it. The idea of being baptised into the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ being symbolized by a font filled with shards of glass… of chairs of hospitality inviting us to take our seat… the challenge that being radically hospitible brings… of the chair on the cross being an invocation – asking for God to enter our lives.