Of Culture and Arrangement

A few months ago, I was listening to a friend talk about his "weekend off." The church where he serves has a bluegrass-esque group that plays on the 5th Sunday of the month and this was a 5th Sunday.

"It would have been fine," he said, "if they wouldn't have chosen 'Siyahamba'!" I asked why he thought that way. He said something to the effect of it being blasphemous for an African song being played on a banjo.

Now, before I continue, I would like to tell another story. I think this will make my mind a little clearer.

A church I used to serve has a partner congregation in Tanzania where they give support in prayer, finance, and other gifts. One of those gifts is that the congregation in the US annually visits the Tanzanian churches, for there are many churches, but one congregation.

My musician friend, Kirsten, who leads the group goes nearly every year. Upon her return, I asked her about the music. "Oh, Sean, I wish you could have heard it!" she exclaimed, "It was so great!"

It turns out that they sing, without accompaniment, both songs from Tanzanian culture and more Western hymns. Apparently, they sang "Praise to the Lord, the Almighty," a favorite hymn of hers. There was percussion. Do you think she turned up her nose and said, "It's blasphemous to sing that song with djembe!"? No, she talked about how fun it is and a great way to bring the old hymn some life to people in a very different environment from Joachim Neander, who wrote the hymn.

Now, I know that these are two different people about two different topics. However, why is there excited about the use of native instruments in Africa, but disdain for the use of native instruments in America? Or another way to look at it: Why is it weird to play African music on an organ, but not organ music with a drum and choir?

I think part of being engaging and "relevant" in this day and age may not be getting rid of old music, but making it new again. If your context is guitars and banjos, go ahead and play African music. Honestly, it might not sound good, but try it and see how it works. If your culture is organs, go ahead and play "Siyahamba" on the organ and see how the assembly likes it. If your culture is electric guitars, please don't throw out all the old hymns because they are old. Let's just teach the faith with new some tools.

Would you ever play a song from Africa on a banjo?

Remembering Baptism

With Baptism of our Lord this Sunday (for lectionary-keeping churches), it’s a great opportunity to explore your denomination’s baptismal theology in worship, or simply explore the imagery.

If your font is movable, consider locating it near the entrance to the sanctuary to highlight the symbolism.

Consider placing bowls of water throughout the worship space and encouraging worshipers to trace the sign of the cross on one another with the water.

If your font is a bowl, consider using something larger in it’s place: an artificial pond, a kiddie pool, a claw-foot tub—what could you use to heighten the extravagance of the symbol?  Jesus was washed in the Jordan; how can you emphasize the large volume of water as a testament to God’s abundant grace?

Consider a rite of “affirmation of baptism” for the whole assembly, concluding with sprinkling the congregation with water from the font via an evergreen branch.

For Lutheran congregations, consider using the questions and answers on Holy Baptism from Luther’s Small Catechism in worship. The pastor could ask the questions and the congregation could take the answers, or vice versa.  Alternatively, you could read through it twice, with the congregation asking the questions the first time through, then answering them the second time through.  Or, recycle this again on Transfiguration Sunday to bookmark this season; for Baptism of our Lord, have the congregation ask the questions, and on Transfiguration have the congregation recite the answers.

Finally, brainstorm ways for worshippers to take this theme home with them.  How can they remember the significance of their baptism daily?  Is there something tangible they could take home, say, a seashell (traditionally used to pour water over the head of the baptized during the rite)?  The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

What does baptism mean to you?  How will this Sunday’s theme be significant in your own faith journey?

Name Above All Names

Yesterday, being both a Sunday and January 1, provided lectionary-abiding congregations with an option: to celebrate it as the First Sunday after Christmas or to celebrate the festival of the Name of Jesus, commemorating both the naming of the Christ-child and his circumcision on the eighth day after his birth.(Luke 2:21).

I suspect that most worshipers in so-called “liturgical churches” are not cognizant of the plethora of scriptural references present in the formal liturgy.  In light of this, and to connect this post to yesterday’s feast of the Name of Jesus, I offer a cursory look at the various times and ways in which the Name of God/Christ is invoked or simply referred to.

• invocation. “In the name of the father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen”
• Preparatory prayer for confession. “Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open…though Jesus Christ our Lord.”
• Prayer of confession. “Most merciful God…For the sake of your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us. Forgive us, renew us, and lead us, so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your holy name.”
• Absolution.  “In the mercy of almighty God, Jesus Christ was given to die for us, and for his sake God forgives us all our sins.  As a called and ordained minister of the church of Christ and by his authority, I therefore declare to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
• Apostolic greeting. “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
• Kyrie.  “…let us pray to the Lord.  Lord, have mercy.”
• Gloria. “Glory to God in the highest and peace to God’s people on earth. Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father. […] Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father. Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us; you are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer. For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father.”
• At the conclusion of the readings. “The word of the Lord.  Thanks be to God.”
• Announcement of the gospel.  “Glory to you, O Lord.”
• Conclusion of the gospel.  “Praise to you, O Christ.”
• Nicene Creed.  “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty…We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father…We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified…”
• Prayers of Intercession.  “Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.”
• Sharing of the Peace.  “The peace of Christ be with you always.”
• Sursum corda.  “The Lord be with you; and also with you. Lift up your hearts; we lift them to the Lord. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God; it is right to give him thanks and praise.”
• Preface.  “It is indeed right and salutary that we should at all times and in all places give thanks and praise to you, O Lord, Holy Father, almighty and everlasting God…”
• Sanctus.  “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might.  Heaven and earth are full of your glory.  Hosanna in the highest.  Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.  Hosanna in the highest.”
• Words of Institution.  “In the night in which he was betrayed our Lord Jesus took bread, and gave thanks; broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying: Take and eat; this is my body given for you.  Do this for the remembrance of me…”
• Lord’s prayer.  “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”
• Agnus Dei.  “Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world.  Have mercy on us…”
• Nunc dimittis.  “Now, Lord, you let your servant depart in peace…”
• Aaronic blessing.  “The Lord bless you and keep you.  The Lord’s face shine on you with grace and mercy.  The Lord look upon you with favor and give you peace.”
• Dismissal.  “Go in peace. Serve the Lord.  Thanks be to God.”

This, in my opinion, is the joy of the formal liturgy of the Church catholic. It is easy, in the spirit of cultural accessibility, to start pruning the liturgy of it’s formalness and “Christian-ese.”  But the danger is one of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, pruning so severely that the service is left with little to no invocation of the name of the God we are there to worship.

You have a name; I have a name.  We get anxious and embarrassed when we forget someone’s name, knowing that names are important, part of that person’s identity.  To forget someone’s name makes us feel as though we’ve forgotten them as a person, that we’ve not considered them important enough to even keep track of who they are.  The name of our God should be no less important, no less impersonalized by monikers like “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” and the like.

The centuries-old liturgy will have none of that, as evidenced by it’s constant invocation of the name of Christ.  To that end, the feast of the Name of Jesus is one we celebrate virtually every Sunday.  Paul calls Jesus the name “that is above every name” (Phil 2.9).  Peter preached to his captors that “there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4.12).

Christ’s name is central to our faith and to our worship, and no visitor to such worship should leave wondering who is being worshiped or even why.

Growing Older

One of my favorite hymns is this one, penned by hymn writer William Gay:

Each winter as the year grows older,

we each grow older, too

The chill sets in a little colder;

the verities we knew seem shaken and untrue.

So even as the sun is turning

to journey to the north,

the living flame, in secret burning,

can kindle on the earth and bring God’s love to birth.

This day, New Year’s Eve, is where Christmas meets Advent again—not Advent in the liturgical sense, but a secular one, our pregnant waiting for the new year to come in.  We make new year’s resolutions; we gather with friends and family to watch the ball drop at midnight.  Our culture has ritualized this time of new beginnings, of welcoming in the new year.

But, as the hymn text above reminds us, another year means we’re another year older, a reminder of our mortality.  Still, the fact that days have been getting longer for over a week now as the sun makes its annual journey back to the north is a reminder of the renewal of life, the cycle of death and resurrection that we easily gloss over in holiday festivities.

As churches await Epiphany on January 6, these twelve days of Christmas become difficult for us to wrap our liturgical heads around.  What do we do in this time?  How do we continue to celebrate the birth of Christ while the rest of the world has moved on to celebrate the new year?  There are no easy answers.  Perhaps this is where worship must come home with us as worshipers:

O Child of ecstasy and sorrows,

O Prince of peace and pain,

brighten today’s world by tomorrow’s,

renew our lives again; Lord Jesus, come and reign!

As we celebrate the new year, let us also continue to celebrate the One who makes all things new.  As we welcome 2012, let us welcome anew the One born to us in the fullness of time.  As we make new year’s resolutions, let us remember the One who makes alive by killing, who brings death to the old self and resurrects the new.

May your new year be filled with God’s richest blessings.

A Case of the Bah-Humbugs

I’ll admit it.  Part of me is glad Christmas is over.  Sure, part of me laments the demise in our Western culture of celebrating the full 12 days of Christmas.  But there’s a part of me that finds Christmas to be my least favorite holiday in the church year.

Yes, there’s the over-commercialization, and we would do well as churches to fight against it.  But that’s not why I tend to dislike Christmas.  For me, Christmas is irksome because it tends to come across as dripping with sappy sentimentalism and nostalgia, focusing way too much on the cute little baby in the manger.

Don’t believe me?  Well, when was the last time you saw a Children’s Good Friday pageant?  When was the last time your congregation clamored for singing just one Easter hymn during Lent?  Easter just doesn’t have the same emotional pull that Christmas does.

So what’s a congregation to do?  I have no answers, only questions.  How can we take Christmas deeper than just sentimental trappings?  How can we involve children in more meaningful ways than simply throwing them onto a stage to sing our favorite carols, or dress them up like angels and wise men?  Is baby Jesus really what Christmas is all about?  Making a big to-do about the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger may be missing the point.  After all, it’s surely not insignificant that only two of the four gospels record a birth narrative. Is there not more to Christmas that we can focus on?

Perhaps you disagree with me.  Perhaps I’m just venting frustration, but I think these questions deserve real thought on all our parts.  How does your church stay countercultural in the face of the holiday season?  Does your church hold a “blue Christmas” service to minister to those for whom Christmas is not filled with “good tidings of great joy?”  Or what about an end of the year healing service?  What other ways might congregations transcend the trivial during this time?

The Participatory Church

I stumbled across this blog post by Steve Knight over at Knightopia. In it, he quotes Eric Weiner in a recent New York Times op-ed piece:

“We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.”

Knight argues that this movement is already here, with such people as “Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, Rob Bell, Shane Claiborne, and Peter Rollins (among others)” leading the way.  Going on, Knight challenges worship leaders across denominations to consider this idea of “participation” seriously, pointing out that many churches do things to people rather than inviting them to participate in the doing.

I’m a bit torn by all of this.  Part of me sees the Church throughout history, at its most faithful and life-giving, as just this sort of thing: engaging people, inviting them, making room for them, being “interactive” and “experimental.”  In other words, there’s nothing new under the sun in his assessment—this is what the Church, at its finest, simply does.  Good liturgy is truly “the work of the people”: it is participatory, interactive, experimental.  Good liturgy also flows into mission, sending people out into the world to be Christ—how much more interactive can you get than people feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, healing the sick, etc.?

On the other hand, part of me disagrees with the assessment of Knight and one of his sources, Dr. Bolger that we live in a “participatory” culture shaped by the internet.  At least in my experience—and therefore this is purely anecdotal evidence—the context of my ministry has been rarely a culture of participation.  It’s more like pulling teeth to get people involved.  It is a small fraction of people who actually sing in worship (assuming they even show up for worship) and truly interact with one another in the ways that would truly transform the world were they to do so.

In the book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah writes about Joe Gorman, a dedicated volunteer in Joe’s community of Suffolk:

"As a traditional American patriot, Joe Gorman deeply cherishes the American ideal of freedom, even though in many ways it is precisely the ideal of freedom that makes his dream of a united Suffolk family impossible to achieve. The success of Suffolk's family spirit depends, as he has discovered, on the willingness of a few people like himself to volunteer freely to sustain community life with their own efforts. Yet he recognizes that very few people in Suffolk are willing to undertake the burdens of sharing community life, and that a man like himself is therefore likely to become exhausted, repeatedly finding himself the only volunteer."

The sort of participatory culture required for the Church to engage the world in a “ministry of reconciliation,” as the apostle Paul wrote, requires the sort of hands-on, in-the-trenches work that the internet culture tries to avoid: people shop online so they don’t have to deal with real people in a store; people give offerings to missions so they don’t have to volunteer at the soup kitchen; congregations hire full-time staff to do the work of ministry that would otherwise require the coordinated efforts of laity.  In other words, the culture of participation needed by the Church is, I would contend, incompatible with the participatory culture shaped by internet and technology, one characterized by privatization..

To summarize: I think the Church, at it’s best, is precisely what Weiner wants—straightforward, unencumbered, intuitive, interactive, experimental, participatory.  It has always been that in one form or another.  But the culture around is is not one that can support the sort of corporate work ethic that the Church requires, a disparity that I suspect will only continue to worsen.

Perhaps you have a different take on the issue.  If so, please share it!

Waiting in Anticip...ation

Here we are: the first week in Advent. With Black Friday madness fading in the memory, we're reminded still that the busy holiday season is upon us. In Year B, the weeks of Advent transport us from themes of watching and waiting (week 1); to preparing ourselves, our families, our community, and our world for Christ (week 2); to joining John the Baptist as a living proclamation of Christ’s coming (week 3); to assurance that God is truly at work in the world (week 4). As we prepare to tear open our gifts on Christmas, may we also find ways to prepare our hearts, for God promises to “tear open” the heavens and come down (Isaiah 64.1; Mark 1.10).

What does your Advent look like? Perhaps your songs may be in more minor keys than usual, tempos may be slower than usual, and the energy and excitement may be less intense than usual. To those for whom Advent is a foreign concept, this shift in the affect of worship is all part of the rhythm of life as it is lived out in our worship. To some, this may seem dry and lifeless, but these value judgments prevent us from embracing Advent for what it is: a time to reflect, to slow down, and to prepare. As any good musician knows, the rests are just as important as the notes. Advent prevents the Christmas season from overtaxing us. If we simply charge ahead into Christmas at full throttle, we will be burned out before we ever get to the celebration. How many of us really maintain the joyous holiday spirit for the full 12 days of Christmas that last until January 6? I don’t know about you, but some years, by the time December 26 rolls around, I’m ready to turn off the Christmas music, box up the decorations, and burn the tree!

Advent calls us to a different way of living, one of patience, confession, and personal reflection. Watch for Christ. Prepare for Christ. Proclaim Christ. Live Christ.