You are welcome to use parts of this sermon, but if you do, please attribute them properly!
I
am not going to ask for a show of hands indicating which of those pieces of
music that I just played you found most appealing, in the sense of being most
worshipful. There will not be a vote on
which one helped you feel closer to God or which one expressed the gospel
message to you more clearly or which one felt more authentically spiritual or
religious to you. That is not
important. What is important is the
difference between them.
The
first one you heard was a Gregorian chant, which is a musical style sung that
was the basis for the liturgy in medieval churches and cathedrals. Even today, you will often hear the chanting
of psalms in monasteries throughout the world – most of the time with no
accompaniment – and certainly not with an organ. Unaccompanied
chanting was church music until about 200 years ago when congregations
began to sing hymns mostly composed for organ instead. Until that time, chanting was the foundation
of all that felt spiritual and real – and then that blasted organ came in! Change!
The
second song you heard was a fusion of musical genres including rap that was composed
as part of a project at More Than Twelve, a Pentecostal church in Vancouver,
BC. More Than Twelve is less than 10
years old and has way more than 12 at their weekly worship Sunday afternoons, which
begins with a potluck supper in a coffee-house atmosphere followed by a decidedly
non-traditional prayer and preaching service in the same setting.
The
More Than Twelve congregation consists of a lot of the marginalized folks in
Vancouver – the homeless, recovering addicts, people who had turned away from
the church years ago but have found their spiritual home at More Than
Twelve. However, not only the
down-and-out find their way there. There
are others as well, one of whom recently bought a building to house the
burgeoning congregation. They all find the rap, the visual projection, and the
charismatic nature of the service to be deeply spiritual and real. What? No organ?
That’s not church! Change!
You
see, what is worshipful to one person is dull, boring, loud, and even
irreligious to another. What is a song
that one person thinks ”everyone” knows is a song that is far from the
experience of someone else. I used to find it mildly amusing as your
pastor when people would talk about the music in our hymn supplement as songs
that we should sing often because “everyone” knew them.
However,
for me, growing up in a staid New England congregational church set down in the
New York suburbs, why, I cut my teeth on the Pilgrim Hymnal, and the only songs
I knew from the hymn supplement were “Amazing Grace’ and “This Little Light of
Mine,” the latter to a different tune – and not because I sang them in church.
Now
I have shared this personal anecdote with you – along with the chant and the fusion
rap – to remind you that there is no one “right” way to do worship. Jesus never set down standards for how to
praise God. In fact, in virtually all of
the stories we have about Jesus in a religious setting - the synagogue or
temple - someone’s nose is put out of joint because of what he says or does.
Worship
is “right” – not when it makes us feel good – but when it impels and motivates
us to go forth in Christ’s name to serve and love one another. Worship is “right” when it transforms us,
when it – dare I say it - changes us.
You
see, in the end, God is all about change.
In the end, the Gospel message is all about transformation – remaking
the world through establishing peace with the earth as well as with those that
inhabit the earth, transforming our relationships through forgiveness and
reconciliation.
“Behold! I make all things new,” God proclaims. Now, that might sound awfully scary, but be
assured that the only thing that does not change is God’s eternal willingness
to share in this great adventure with us – “abide with me…O thou who changest
not, abide with me.”
A
Lutheran pastor once responded to a blog post by writing: “The
church always exists first for those who haven’t found it yet. (Otherwise), it
risks becoming what our bishop has called “a country club with a religious
flavor.’ In other words, according to
this blogger, the church – and worship – are first and foremost not about us who are already
seated here this morning.
Worship is not about our comfort
and our needs. Worship is not
about escaping the often fearful and always complicated world outside these
four walls. And worship is certainly
not about being transported back to the 1950’s for an hour when life
seemed so much simpler – and then being disappointed when the preacher does not
lead us down that particular rabbit hole.
Worship is about challenging us – and
anyone who might walk through our doors – challenging us to find the strength
and the courage to allow God to transform us.
Worship is about equipping us – and anyone who might walk through our
doors – equipping us to go forth into the world as really and truly and
authentically Christ’s disciples. Church
is not like what it used to be in America.
Change!
Scottish
hymn writer John Bell talks about any experience working with a church in
Glasgow. Every Wednesday, he and his
colleague “met with a group of twelve people who were committed to discovering
relevant directions in worship for that parish. One night (he writes) we
divided into two groups. Group A had a large piece of paper headed
"Doctor's Surgery." Group B had a large piece of paper headed
"The Kitchen." We gave the groups a half hour to write down all the
changes that had taken place in their area in the past fifty years.
The
difficulty was getting people to stop. Anecdotes flew about how women used to
get up at 4:30 in the morning to light a fire in an outhouse in order to do the
week's washing; now they put it in the automatic. People joked about how coffee
had once meant 50 percent chicory, 45 percent sugar, 5 percent coffee essence;
now everybody used the 100 percent genuine filter variety. People mentioned the
changes that have enabled a busy parent to rustle up a dinner of microwaved
convenience foods in a matter of minutes.
In
the other corner, people were comparing old-fashioned medical remedies that
often made the disease worse than better. They were extolling penicillin, heart
bypass operations, and improved prenatal care.
When
the groups came together with their lists, we evaluated them. We went through
the changes one by one and asked which had been resisted or were deemed unwelcome.
There were only two or three on each chart.
Then
(Bell writes) I put up a third piece of paper headed "Church." And
together we noted all the changes that had happened in the church in the past
fifty years:
•
New translations of the Bible
•
New hymnbook
•
Use of instruments other than the organ
•
Family services
•
Ordination of women elders
•
Ordination of women ministers
•
Increased range of vestment colors ... and so on.
And
when I asked which of these changes had been resisted or resented, it was every
one.
The
curious irony (Bell notes) is that when it comes to food for the body or
medicine for the body, we are keen for the most recent development. We want our
bodies well nourished and healthy. But when it comes to food for the soul, we
want bread that might be stale and medicine that might be long past its sell-by
date.”
And
yet, God is all about change. “Behold, I
make all things new.” Bell goes on to
say: “We need to grasp one salient and explicit truth, witnessed from Genesis
to Revelation: No one comes in contact with the living God and remains the
same.”
Look
at Abraham and Sarah. She becomes
pregnant at the tender age of 90, and he is pulled out of retirement to birth a
nation. And Moses? He goes from being a shepherd with a
stammering speech impediment who happens to encounter God in a burning bush to courageously
leading his people out of slavery in Egypt.
As
Bell writes: “This is the gospel of
Jesus Christ—nothing, no one shall ever be the same. Christ will not molder in
the grave. The irreversible sting of death will not destroy him. The shut tomb
will not silence him. It's either change or die . . . so he moves through
death, from being a corpse into being a body fully resurrected.
And
if we live in the light of the resurrection, we should not demonize or despise
change either. We need to embrace it. Otherwise . . . otherwise ... we become
like Lot's wife. She stands out in the
Bible as one of the people who resisted God's call to move, to change. She was
so connected to, so tied to the past, to the way things used to be, to the
place where she felt comfortable,” that, well that she was left behind as a
pillar of salt.”
John
Forbes, pastor of Riverside Church in New York, coined the 75% rule. A church is vital, he said, if people like
what is going on 75% of the time. The
other 25% that they do not like is what the person sitting in the next pew
needs even as you abhor it.
You
see, that is the other thing about worship.
It is not a solitary experience but rather an expression of a faith
community – in our particular case, a very diverse faith community. We come from a huge variety of spiritual
backgrounds and experiences. We span a
wide spectrum politically and theologically.
We
are like the weather in Maine. What is
it they say? If you don’t like the
weather now, come back in an hour? If
you don’t like worship this week, remember that someone who is as much a part
of this church family as you are did, so come back next week.
We
have been blessed this year to have an opportunity through our Vital Worship
Grant to try some new ways of worshipping, to explore the deeper and richer
meaning of worship, and to talk about what makes worship a vital experience not
only for us as individuals, but for us as a community – as well as for those
folks who have yet to walk through our doors.
Oh,
I know that some of you do not like the painting on the shutters. Some of you did not want to come to the St.
Lucia service because, well, because you really did not know what it would be
like.
And I know some of you will choose
not to support our Wisdom of the Elders Service and will not like other
upcoming programs and events. But, hey,
some of you do not like the fabric that is often on the altar either and the
black birds in the trees during Lent.
And
that is fine. Your opinions are
respected here because I know they are deeply held. However, your dissatisfaction is only really
fine if you have reflected on and struggled with just why those black birds or
those shutters make your skin crawl.
Is
it because all of these things are different?
Is it because these changes do not fit your mold of what worship should
be, of what you think this sanctuary ought to look like? Or - are you trying to figure out – as we all
are – how ritual and tradition fit in with God’s declaration that all things
are made new?
I
want to conclude with another quote by John Bell, whom I am excited to say will
be visiting with us for a weekend in May as part of our Vital Worship
Grant. John writes, “What is true is
that for (Jesus) worship was a transforming experience. Wherever
he was in a synagogue or the temple, some people were blessed and others were
livid. This is a simple statement of gospel truth, borne out from the time he
preached in his home synagogue, through the instances where he healed in holy
precincts on the sabbath, to his pardoning of an adulteress which happened in
the temple precincts.
When
people say they want to keep their traditions, I have to ask whether that is
the same as the liberated Hebrew slaves wanting to avoid entering the Promised
Land. There is a Back-to-Egypt Brigade in every congregation which cannot
seemingly cope with the fact that we are no longer illiterate 17th century
worshippers who need to be spoon fed by the only educated man in the parish; nor can they appreciate that the only
constant about tradition is that it changes. God calls us to be signs of
the coming kingdom, not a theme park dedicated to an ecclesiastical past….We
all have to ask what has to die that God might bring other things to life. That
is the question for those who believe in the resurrection. It did not happen
without a death.”
The
Bible begins and ends with change. In
the beginning, God’s Spirit rolled over the deep, sparking creation – something
emerging from a void. God started with
zero – nothing – and ended up with everything.
As theologian Frederick Buechner wrote, “Perhaps more than for anything
else, God is famous for calling something precious out of something that
doesn't even exist until God calls it.” Change!
And
in the end, God proclaims, “Behold! I
make all things new.” And Buechner
continues, “In other words, there is zero again, and out of it God brought a
new heaven and a new earth.” Change!
And
in between, there is us, struggling to make sense of it all. As your pastor and as project director for
our Vital Worship Grant, I am not bent on change for change sake but rather am
committed to change for the sake of enriching and deepening the spiritual life
of this faith community – and anyone who might walk through our doors –
enriching and deepening our spiritual life through our worship together. My prayer is that, through worship, each one
of us will become a more engaged follower of Jesus and that over time we will embrace
the notion that, as John Bell noted, no one comes in contact with the Living
God and remains the same – and that needs to extend to worship as well.
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church U.C.C., Raymond, Maine
