Texts: Exodus 3: 1-6; Psalm 100
The Elements of Worship
Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise.
-Psalm 100
Most of you know that I’ve recently returned from Cuba as a part of my sabbatical leave, where I had the opportunity to witness some of the rituals and ceremonies practiced on that island by people of African descent, practices that now travel under the names of Santeria and Palo. If you were here last week, you heard me describe how those ceremonies are formulated, beginning with drums heard but usually not seen, somewhere outside of the ritual space. It continues with a spoken or sometimes drummed prayer directed toward ancient spirits, or toward the ancestors, after which songs of praise are sung toward various African deities. Most ceremonies last between two to three hours (those of you who get anxious after a mere hour in this space can count yourselves lucky!), and include an offering, opportunities to receive a blessing, and, if all goes well, a visitation from one of those African deities in the form of spirit possession, the moment in which Africa speaks. Sooner or later the ceremony draws to a close, though it was never clear to me why that happened – if the drummers got tired, or if a natural cycle of songs had concluded. Usually, when it was all over, food was served – a hearty soup, along with potatoes or plantains, and something sweet. After we had eaten, we thanked our hosts, said our goodbyes, and were on our way, often to another community, where another ceremony would unfold.
I considered it a tremendous privilege to witness these rituals, which had originated in Africa, had survived the horrors of the Middle Passage, and had been used to strengthen and fortify these communities through upheavals and disasters, and ordinary times as well. The ceremonies that are still conducted throughout Cuba are a treasure house for the study of how humans touch the sacred, in all of its complexity, in all of our multiplicity.
But witnessing the ceremonies of another culture, especially those that are as vibrant and colorful as Cuba’s, comes with a risk. We tend to find the practices of others exotic, and rather thrilling, such that a false dichotomy comes to be established: they’re interesting, while we’re a little bland; their worship is freeing, while ours is stultified; their practices are capable of sustaining them through great struggle, while ours simply blesses the status quo; they’re in touch with the sacred, while we’re locked in a kind of rigid formality. That’s one of the blessings and curses of travel: we tend to idealize what we see elsewhere, while downgrading what is familiar to us through the routine practices of our ordinary lives.
What I’d like to do today, and in the coming weeks, is to re-enchant our own practices here in this place. I wish to convince you that, like Moses, you too stand on holy ground. I wish to suggest, with the Psalmist, that there is something praiseworthy about our own weekly rituals, something worth celebrating.
I’d like to do so by initiating a thought experiment. Those of us who traveled to Cuba were a sympathetic and eager audience, eager to understand where it all came from, how it all worked, and what it all meant to participants there. What I’d like to imagine with you over the next several weeks is what this place might be like for a group of sympathetic and interested outsiders, eager to know what we’re doing when we come to the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme every week. Say that a group of people wholly unfamiliar with the conventions of Christian worship were bused into Old Lyme, and that they stood in the back videotaping our ceremony, and making notes. What, exactly, would they see? And then imagine if they asked you what it was you were doing when you walked through the doors of the meetinghouse. How would you reply?
Over the next several weeks, I’ll get at those questions by thinking about each element within our worship service, asking what it means, and how it might affect our lives, in small and imperceptible ways, and maybe also in large and life changing ways. The result, I hope, will be that all of us come to appreciate the significance and the depth of our own practices a little more, because there’s a powerful beauty in all that we do in our worship. It’s not to be dismissed, or taken for granted.
Today, however, I’d like to take a kind of panoptic overview of it all, saying a few words about worship in general, and what it means in the life of our community. The basic claim I wish to make is simple, and maybe all too obvious. But it bears saying. What’s more, it bears elucidation. It is this: our gatherings on Sunday mornings are the central, defining, governing feature of our life together. Everything we do as a faith community emanates from what we do on Sunday mornings. It’s all attached – to this. None of it floats free. I like to think of our many activities as a faith community as something like a solar system. Sunday morning worship is the sun, and all of our other ministries – from our global partnerships to the White Elephant Sale, from the pottery lessons to the Ladies Who Stitch – orbit around the gravitational field of our worship. Remove the sun, and all of the satellites floating around that sun begin to float free, drifting through space, unattached to a wider orbit or purpose.
In other words, unattached to the activity of worship, all of our other activities lose a crucial component of what makes them work. Without the gravitational field of our Sunday gatherings, they simply become the activities of a town community center. In truth, that’s what many churches have become – a cluster of good and worthwhile activities, but unattached to any wider sense of transcendence, dislodged from any larger theological claims about the world. Don’t get me wrong – community centers are great, and I think there’s a lot of overlap in what churches do. I actually wish there were more centers for community engagement in the world. But absent that sense of transcendence, absent the sun around which we orbit, then we lose our basic identity as a people. I think that’s when a lot of churches begin to disintegrate.
That insight about the centrality of worship brings to mind another insight, one that seems to run counter to all I’ve just said. It’s this: for many people in our culture, and for many people in this very community, it’s the satellites, all the other things we do besides Sunday worship, that provide the point of entry to our community. Truth be told, for a good many among us, worship can often feel like an impediment to participation in a community like this one. For some, it feels too formal. For others, it feels archaic, trapped in an earlier time that doesn’t translate into the realities that most people are facing today. For still others, the words and concepts of worship hint at some unflattering aspects of religion, and of God – that there could be a being somewhere who needs to be told, again and again, how wonderful and majestic he is, and that that same being somehow requires the loyalty and love of his people – or else! We know that kind of power. We’re caught up in a national crisis because of that kind of power. The point is that many people rightly sense that the worship of such a being psychologically conditions many people to participate in similar forms of authority elsewhere in their lives – in the way they run their households, in the way they run their businesses, and in the way a government might operate. Sensing that, many thoughtful and wise people wish to steer clear of any form of worship, for fear that it will steal away some of their most precious critical faculties. And so worship becomes a stumbling block, rather than an invitation to a fuller existence.
And yet, there continues to be, for many, a yearning for some kind of spiritual connection, despite that aversion to worship. Those are the folks that find their way into this community by volunteering at the Food Pantry or participating in the Tree of Life, who work with the Crosby Fund or who love Tribal Crafts, but don’t find their way to church on Sunday mornings. I get that. We need a lot of different entry points into our community. We need many doorways, and they don’t all have to lead to the same place. Still, I always hold out hope that those satellite ministries will wind up leading here, to the central feature of our common life. Because each of those satellites grew out of, and orbit, the claims, and the story, that we rehearse in this space week after week.
Human beings are nothing if not storytelling creatures, and one of the great benefits of gathering in this place every week is that we get to tell and retell one of the most powerful stories about the world that I happen to know. That’s one of the things I would tell our observers about what we’re doing here. We’re reminding ourselves of the most powerful story of all.
What is it? Well, the story goes something like this: that fundamentally, everything within the world was birthed into goodness, including and especially human beings. That’s the affirmation of the first chapter of the Bible: the world isn’t damned, and human beings aren’t rotten to the core. Surveying the world, God saw that it was good, and studying human life, God saw that it was very good. But that’s just the beginning of the story.
That very same goodness is marked by need and desire, which are themselves a part of the goodness. But that need can and does lead to tragic decisions, and those tragic decisions can have unintended and harmful consequences that spool out across countless generations. In fact, that basic goodness can sometimes become so marred, so tarnished, in individuals and in whole cultures, that it’s hard to remember that something good was ever there. It’s what the old authors meant when they talked about the fall, and sin, and evil. Somehow, we become alienated from the best parts of ourselves, and in that alienation, we unleash incredible damage. Those too are an important part of the story. But that’s not the end either.
Not content to abandon the world to its worst impulses, that original, divine power finds ways to remind humans of their sacred origins, and of their capacities for gracious and redemptive life. Sometimes that reminder takes the form of a legal code, that helps to organize and bind a community together. Sometimes it takes the form of wise or judicious teachers, who remind us of truths too easily forgotten, about our obligations to one another. Sometimes it takes the form of clarifying or overwhelming events that remind us of what we most value. And sometimes it takes the form of sacrificial love, as it did in the story of Jesus, when an individual gives his or her life in order to bring people to their senses, to persuade them that there exists in the world a powerful love that overcomes the worst alienation imaginable.
But that’s still not the end. Because having been persuaded by those teachers, those events, or those extravagant acts of sacrificial love, we’re invited to participate in it all, this great drama of cosmic reconciliation. I’ve often said that what we do in our worship is actually a rehearsal for everything that unfolds in our lives beyond the walls of this place. Here, we’re invited to imagine what a life of flourishing might actually look like. Beyond the meetinghouse, we’re asked to enact it – in our treatment of other people, in the kinds of policies we support, in the ways we spend our time and money, in everything. This is the rehearsal, where we learn our lines, and block our scenes. The real performance, though, occurs in your houses and in your places of work. Worship, then, is a pedagogy for the rest of our lives.
That’s part of what I’d say to those visitors, lined up with their video cameras and notebooks. We’re storytellers, and we’re here to tell that story again and again, the better to live it out in our day to day existence. Each element of our worship is designed to help you do just that – from the prelude all the way to the benediction. Have you ever thought about it that way? Have you ever considered that the order of our services are telling a sacred story, following a pattern that unfolds in a very deliberate way? It is, you know. None of it is happenstance, or arbitrary. It’s trying to persuade you that that sacred story – about your goodness and the goodness of the world, about the loss of that goodness, and about its recovery – is deeper and truer than so many of the other stories we tell about our lives.
This is an overview, and so thankfully I don’t have to say everything about worship today. But there’s one more thing I would tell our visitors. I would say that this thing we do, our worship, is also about getting us in touch with our own hearts. Some of you may remember Karl Marx’s famous statement about religion – that it is the opiate of the masses. But no one remembers the line that follows. Religion is the heart of a heartless world, Marx says. That’s the part that I would offer to our hypothetical guests. In our worship, we learn to become the heart of a heartless world. I don’t need to tell you how necessary that is. It’s so easy to get caught up in ourselves. It’s so easy to buy into the myth of self-sufficiency and entitlement that our culture sells us. Here in one of the wealthiest towns, in one of the wealthiest states, in the wealthiest country in all of the world, it’s so easy to get trapped behind the walls of our own privilege. We gather to be reminded of a different way. We gather to have our hearts cracked open, to remind ourselves of the hearts that beat within us, connecting us to people and to creatures who, on the face of it, seem wholly unlike us. Our hearts tell us otherwise.
To put a finer point on my answer, when our guests asked what it is we’re doing here every week, I would tell – what else? – a story.[1] It concerns a mother who learns, as far too many mothers have, that there had been a shooting at the school her son attended in Kentucky. Upon receiving the news, she prayed, “Please God, not my child; and if my child, please may he live.” When the mother arrived at the school, she learned that indeed, her child was among those who died. The medical personnel on site asked the painful questions about donating the child’s organs, and the anguished mother agreed.
Months later, the mother learned the identity of the person who had received her son’s heart. She contacted him, and they visited and talked and wept and talked some more. As the mother rose to leave, she made an unusual but understandable request. “Could she please put her ear to the man’s chest and hear her child’s heart beating, giving life?” She does so. She hears it beating.
That’s what we’re doing in our worship. In all of the woe and ecstasy alike that life can deliver, we’re laying our head upon the breast of the world, discovering there a beating heart that gives it, that gives us, life. That’s what we do when we worship.
But perhaps something else happens as well. Despite our failures, despite our clumsiness, perhaps we, as a worshiping body are the ones in whom the heartbeat of God’s own child continues to beat. Perhaps the church, this church, is that upon which God on occasion bends down in order to listen for the heartbeat. I like to imagine that there is joy when God does bend down, and discovers there is indeed a place where the heartbeat of his child may still be heard. May it always be so in this community of faith.
[1] A story that took place after the school shooting in West Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997. Found in a sermon from Eugene Bay, in the self-published volume A Sower Went Out. See pages 188-89. He in turn learned of the story from a sermon preached by John Buchanan at the Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, on Nov. 2, 2003.
