How the Prayers of Others Help the Worship-Challenged

Interesting reflection from Stanley Hauerwas:

The worship of God does not come naturally to me, as it seems to for some. I live most of my life as if God does not exist. Yet I know I would not have survived without the prayers of friends who have learned to pray the prayers of the church. My life depends on learning to worship God with those who have made it possible for me to go on. Through worship, the world learns the truth that is required for our being truthful about ourselves and one another.

Two key themes emerge in that paragraph: 

1. For many of us not so gifted, the prayers of others are necessary to sustain and shape our own prayers. 

2. Worship is about truth (see John 4:23-24). In worship we encounter the one who is the Truth, we hear both the good news and the bad news about our own condition, and we learn to be truthful by proclaiming the truth. 

In the end, it is because of the rough confrontation with the truth that we know we need the prayers of others.

The quotation is from Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), p. 159. Read more!

‘All Acolytes Are Pyromaniacs’

Fellow St. Barnabas parishioner (and Christian Century columnist) Rodney Clapp reports here on his life as an acolyte. He quotes his priest (and mine) as saying, “All acolytes are pyromaniacs.”

Despite the sound of its final syllable, the word acolyte has nothing to do with fire. It derives from a Greek word meaning path, modified to mean someone who follows—and thus referring to an assistant or helper. But as assistants in worship, acolytes do get to play with fire, and Rodney has exciting tales about smoking brooms sweeping up glowing coals.

Acolytes (who along with lectors and subdeacons later become minor orders) begin showing up in Christian records in the second century. But the practice of carrying two candles or torches in procession at the reading of the Gospel is not mentioned until the early 600s. Because St. Isidore of Seville says the candles were extinguished after the Gospel reading, Dom Gregory Dix thinks their use was at that point still utilitarian. But by the time the Ordo Romanus Primus was compiled about the year 800, the candles had taken on a clearly symbolic role. In the papal liturgy of the period, the candle bearers stood below the ambo steps, while the Gospel was read from above. The candles thus illumined nothing, but they symbolized everything: that the Gospel book stood for Christ.

Read Rodney Clapp's “My Life as an Acolyte.”
Read more!

Liturgy That Gives Rest

Today’s snail mail brought an envelope from Regent College theologian J. I. Packer. Inside was an article clipped from The Anglican Planet. It was titled “Liturgy That Gives Rest.” There was also a note in Packer’s hand commending its author, Julie Lane-Gay.

The article had many good things to say about the Anglican service: Its historicity gives it a “tried and trueness,” for example, and its use of the lectionary means that “old women in India, the Queen of England and surfers in Queensland—we are all on the same page.”

But the article’s main point was about its restfulness. That’s a point I resonate with.

Ms. Lane-Gay writes:

My first Anglican service was quiet and calm. Instead of feeling that I had to conjure up enthusiasm, I felt like someone had handed me an antique pillow to cradle my weary mind and soul. I didn’t have to think what to say.

My own experience was different. I wouldn’t have compared the liturgy to a pillow. But I felt the same relief that I didn’t have “to conjure up enthusiasm.” Conjuring up enthusiasm—and godly grief and glorious rapture and even stillness—all of that was part of what I had been exhorted to do in the religion of my youth, a religion that owed much to American revivalism.

That side of revivalism placed the accent in worship on my feelings. Revivalism fed off of a cycle of duress and release, and it required that I feel the right emotions as we approached the transactional moments of worship. When it came time to (re)dedicate myself to Jesus, the moment was validated or invalidated by my feelings.

The liturgy taught me that there was instead one great transaction. It happened on Calvary. In the liturgy, we celebrate and memorialize that transaction together—together as a local congregation and together with Christians around the globe, together with Christians throughout history and together with those who have gone on to glory. Fortunately, that celebration continues in spite of whatever feelings I may have because the great transaction was completed before I ever experienced my first emotion.

The liturgy “did the work of worship for me,” writes Lane-Gay. She discovered this when “after ten years of marriage, flexibility, and professional success, parenthood upended [their] lives.”

The liturgy took on a startling new role: it did the work of worship for me. I did not have to think up my prayers or create my own confession—neither of which I could have done in my sleep-deprived state. It took the pressure off me to evoke certain feelings. I rested in the liturgy; I sunk deep. … I could say the words just as they were printed, … and leave the rest to God. I did not have to cajole myself into being joyful or thankful or contrite. I could just show up at church, baby in tow, burp stains on my shoulder and participate.

Seven years and three more children later, she writes about being “able to arrive at church and fall into a structure far bigger than I.”

That bigness is what draws me to the liturgy. There’s a bigness in the church's liturgy just as there’s a wideness in God’s mercy.

The liturgy must be seen as part of God’s mercy. It is not the words that do “the work for me.” God acts toward me in the liturgy. That is why in Morning Prayer we often say a paraphrase of Psalm 51:15: “O Lord, open thou our lips, and our mouth shall show forth thy praise.” Without God’s help, we can’t even start praising.

When worship loses its bigness, the sense of God’s mercy also contracts. But when we join our voices with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we also know instinctively that the quality of God’s mercy is not strained.

* * *

Read Julie Lane-Gay’s full essay here.

Public domain image of 1596 Book of Common Prayer via Wikimedia Commons.
Read more!

Review: The Urgency of "Ancient-Future Worship"

Almost 20 years ago, I met the late dean of historical theologians, Jaroslav Pelikan, at a conference at Carthage College.

“Do you know what you evangelicals need?” Pelikan asked me.

“What?” I said, taken aback by his forthrightness.

“You need to stop being so Jesus-centered.”

I was too stunned to say much.

Seeing my confusion, Pelikan explained: “You evangelicals need to be more thoroughly Trinitarian.”

That was the extent of our conversation, but I’ve been thinking about it since that 1991 encounter.

If I read Bob Webber’s posthumously published Ancient-Future Worship (Baker, 2008) correctly, I believe Bob would agree with Pelikan.

Pelikan did not, of course, mean that evangelicals should actually talk about Jesus less, love him less dearly, or follow him less nearly. Pelikan meant rather that we should regard him in his proper context as the second person of the Holy Trinity. If we forget to understand Jesus in his Trinitarian context, we forget the cosmic purpose of Jesus’ incarnation and we collapse God's grand mission in Jesus into one or another form of religious individualism. Jesus came to save me from my sins, yes. But the mission of the Trinity is to restore and renew the entire creation to fellowship with the divine community of love.

In his latest volume on worship, Webber moves into this Trinitarian territory.

The book is subtitled Proclaiming and Enacting God’s Narrative. God’s narrative begins before the creation and stretches infinitely into the future of a restored creation. In worship, my own narrative—my story about the genesis of my troubles and my renewal of hope for a life freed from failure—should never become the narrow frame into which we squeeze God’s story. Rather, our stories are to be caught up into God’s story and find expanded meaning there.
Evangelicals—indeed most Western Christians—think about the biblical story like this: Creation, Sin and Fall, Cross and Redemption.

But in some of the church fathers, there is a different framework: Creation, Incarnation, and Eschatological Re-Creation. Webber turns especially to the second-century bishop Irenaeus and his theology of recapitulation to underscore this way of framing God’s story. (If you need a quick refresher on the theology of recapitulation, see my October 2007 blog post “What’s the Fuss about Recapitulation Theology?”)

If the middle term of our three-part story is Sin and Fall, the focus is on us, the problem-makers. But if the middle term is the Incarnation, the focus is on God, the problem-solver. In chapter 4, Bob's hip-pocket history of “How the Fullness of God’s Story Got Lost,” he writes about the neglect of the Word in medieval Western worship.

By the late medieval period the service of the Word with preaching was infrequent. The Mass was generally reduced to the eucharistic prayers. Because the Word was dropped and the focus [of] the Mass centered on the death of Christ, the whole story of God was not proclaimed in worship. The story was reduced to the death of Christ, his suffering, and the salvation that was brought through the sacraments.

The Reformers tried different correctives to this hypersacrament- alism. But the Reformation liturgies retained one thing that distinguished them from the ancient church: “Worship now places greater attention on the individual’s condition before God. The vision of God to reclaim the whole world and redeem all flesh and matter through the victory of Christ over sin and death scarcely appears.”

Webber's purpose is to get us to reclaiming this larger vision. He does this by

* showing us from early church texts that the renewal of all things in the Incarnation and the restoration of all things through Christ’s victory was the common theme of early church worship.

* asking us to be Old Testament Christians as well as New Testament believers. This requires that we know the Hebrew Scriptures as background to the New Testament, but it also demands that we imitate the apostles by reading the Hebrew Scriptures as foreshadowings of what would happen in the Incarnation.

* calling us to stick to the basics of worship—Word and Table. We must especially resist the idea that music is a fundamental element of worship, as many contemporary evangelicals have come to believe. Music can play an important role in worship, but unlike Word and Table, it is not of the essence. When people seek the presence of God in music, writes Webber, rather than in the Word or the Table, the accent shifts to the activity of the self in worship ("I will praise you," "I lift your Name on high," etc.).

* inviting us to return to the ancient patterns of prayer that frame our petitions in the light of what God has done. Because this kind of prayer arises out of God's story, it does not grow out of our own needs of the moment or those of our friends. Thus we remember to pray "for the whole state of Christ's church and for the world." If God has demonstrated his love for the whole world, we can do no less than to pray big prayers for the whole world.

Ancient-Future Worship is a grand summing up of Bob's increasingly urgent word to the church. His message is not optional. The breadth of the church's vision and the scope of its mission depend on understanding the mission of the Trinity as it seeks to restore and recreate not just us but the entire cosmos.

Read more!

The End of the Story: How the Dismissal Can Shape Our Worship

In the 16th century, humanistic scholarship opened up the Scriptures anew and upstart scholars challenged the Church’s traditions by their fresh reading of the Bible. Part of their debate was over the meaning of the Mass, and particularly what happened in the re-presentation of Jesus’ sacrifice in the consecrated bread and wine. That disagreement not only split the nascent Protestant movement from Rome, but it divided the reform movements from each other.

Medieval Catholic teaching set the agenda for the discussion, and the Reformers responded out of necessity on that point. But what if liturgical Christians looked at the the Eucharist) through a different lens? My friend Greg Pierce has recently published a book that does just that with the liturgy (The Mass Is Never Ended: Rediscovering Our Mission to Transform the World, Ave Maria Press, 2007).
If you want to understand a familiar story, consider how it ends. Then look back and see how various plot elements point forward in clear or obscure ways to how things will turn out. The “end of the story” for liturgical Christians is the dismissal, when the deacon or priest says, “Go, the Mass is ended,” or in more contemporary rites, “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” The congregation responds, “Thanks be to God.”

What can we mine from that brief exchange about the purpose of Christian worship? The word mass did not always refer to the entire order of worship. The original Latin phrase (Ite, missa est) literally means, “Go. It is the sending-forth.” That in turn raises the question of what we are being sent forth for.

The term missa simply means sending. But to Christian ears steeped in the language of the New Testament, there are clear echoes of passages such as “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21) and “As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:18). We are part of God’s mission to the world. And when at the end of a liturgical worship service we are sent forth, it is precisely as part of God’s mission to the world and as representatives of Christ.

For Greg Pierce, this sending into the world is a sending into the world of work. (Greg has made spirituality in the workplace the focus of his efforts at ACTA publishing.) Work is what most of us do—whether paid work or the unpaid variety that improves and eases the lives of families, friends, fellow citizens, and strangers. So the various parts of the worship service must strengthen us and prepare us to do that work in Christ’s way. The sermon, which is supposed to help us hear God’s scriptural voice speak more clearly, had better not stop short of application to daily life. Saying the Creed together should be understood as assuring that we are all on the same page before we take up our mission for another week. The prayers should, of course, praise God, but they must also address our world of work. Communion is receiving strength for the task, because Jesus himself is the food and drink that sustain us on our kingdom-advancing mission.

Has Greg gone out on a limb by trying to view Christian worship through the lens of the dismissal? It doesn’t sound very Catholic (at least to Protestant ears).

Not really. On the back cover of his book, Greg has reprinted Pope Benedict XVI’s comments on the dismissal: “These words help us to grasp the relationship between the Mass just celebrated and the mission of Christians in the world. ... The People of God might be helped to understand more clearly this essential dimension of the Church’s life, taking the dismissal as the starting-point” (The Sacrament of Charity, 51).

The Mass Is Never Ended is a quick read with short chapters that leave you wanting more. It is therefore a good stimulus to help us think about whether the way we conduct and participate in worship really does help us in our task of advancing God’s kingdom in our daily lives. The book is written in a simple style to encourage Catholic lay people to think about their public worship as preparation for their daily work and to think of their daily work as an extension of their public worship. But non-Catholics and non-lay people need to be encouraged to think along these same missional lines.

Now, go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

Read more!

A Good Book on Worship Is on the Way

I’m back on the blog.

The demands of the December holidays sapped my blogging energies—what with all the fun family stuff and the church music demands plus an early January trip to frigid Orange Park, Florida, to speak at the opening convocation for the new term at Bob Webber’s graduate school of liturgics, the Institute for Worship Studies.

The weather was colder in Orange Park/Jacksonville than it was in Chicago, but the trip was worth it: The students and faculty I met were mighty impressive. Check out IWS’s newly refurbished website.

* * *

Speaking of worship studies, here’s a new book to watch for. I just e-mailed Paraclete Press an endorsement for Mark Galli’s forthcoming book, Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy. According to the publisher’s website, the slim volume of short essays is “for those who find themselves attracted to liturgy but don’t quite know why.” The book is due to be out April 1.

Here’s what I sent to Paraclete:

Genuine worship raises our sights above ourselves. It sets us into a community—past, present, and future. It fits us for God's mission. Above all, it brings us face-to-face with Jesus and trains us to play our role in his story. Much that passes for worship these days misses all of this. But Galli gets it decidedly right.

And here’s what I have to say to you about my friend Mark Galli. He’s a learner. In this book he talks vulnerably (as we said in the 70s) about the lessons he needed to learn and how he learned them in the school of life. Those same lessons, he shows, are taught us on a regular basis in the liturgy.

Take, for example, chapter 4, where he writes about courting and marrying his wife—only to discover that what he thought was a shared passion for theology was only a passing interest on her part. How do we get to know “the intimate Other” in marriage and in worship? Abandon romantic illusions, says Mark, both about your spouse and about God. At least when it comes to God, the liturgy helps us to face reality—and the real God (like the real wife) turns out to be both more challenging and more satisfying than the imagined one.

When the book rolls off the presses, be sure to get a copy.

Read more!