God in All Places: Worship as Revelation, Response, and Resacralization

This weekend, and again at the Wednesday Worship celebration, we will be using a U2charist. This decision was made with theological intent. This long blog entry explains some of the intent. It is my hope that as one of your pastors you will think about your own understanding of the role, structure and intent of worship.

In 2003, Rev. Sarah Dylan Breuer, an Episcopal priest came upon the idea of using music by the rock band U2 in worship. She called it a U2charist. This has been both praised as innovative and as a way to reach new people and criticized as heresy. A U2charist can challenge our understanding of worship- but challenge can be good. We will be asked to participate in worship with music that is not found in any major hymnals. Before offering a U2charist in our community, I’d like to outline what I understand worship to be and why a U2charist fits into this. A U2charist allows us to deepen our understanding of worship and practice Romans 12 living.

Worship happens for a reason. Among the important outcomes of worship are facilitating an encounter with God, calling us to faithful living, and creating a unique community. Worship facilitates an encounter with God through revelation and response. As such, worship needs to be communication—a multi-sided conversation. Sometimes this happens through the means of grace, the ways God reaches out to us. Means of grace are very diverse, relating to the diversity within God’s revelations to the world. God’s means of grace are limitless, they include human embodiment, symbols, images, and sound. Means of grace are times when God’s invitation to relationship is communicated. Our relationship with God is a response to God’s invitation for relationship as presented in the various means of grace. Worship, and the components of worship, can be means of grace.

Worship is also a response to God’s revelation. Worship is a time when God’s vision and movement in the world are celebrated, it is a response to God working in the world. Response is present when the community sings, prays, and makes decisions to re-order their lives. It is in this reordering that praxis—right practice, right living—has the potential to occur. Right living should permeate all areas of life—worship does not just change what happens to a person when the person is worshipping.

Worship also has the power to create a unique community. This is a community that as it grows together begins to have their own sense of “ortho,” what is right. This includes both orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It becomes a community where there is accountability to living rightly. This community may begin to develop an understanding of God’s vision for the world, and begin actively working to make that vision a reality. In Wesleyan communities, the vision should be guided by perfection in love. In so doing, the community can become a community of disciples for the transformation of the world.

Community worship facilitates encounter with God, calls to praxis and forms distinct communities through gathering the people together, bringing an encounter with God’s words, and sending people into the world. The community gathers in corporate worship with a specific agenda, to intentionally encounter God. When that encounter is at its best, it will include both revelation and response. As the community gathers they prepare for the encounter, setting their intention and opening themselves to the revelation of God. The encounter with God’s words is when the means of grace often take place. As people are sent in the world it should be as changed people, ready to practice their faith as guided by the revelation of God. Again, it is a conversation. People must participate in worship, not merely consume it.

Worship must extend beyond corporate, community worship. There are models throughout history where life and worship merged and blended. It is actually only in the modern period that the sacred/secular split occurred as it became possible to envision a space without God. Worship today must become a resacralization of the world, of everyday life. This is not to say resacralization as to make something sacred, but rather resacralization as finding the sacred that was there all along.

Hence, the U2charist. Gibbs and Bolger put it well when they write, “When people bring their culture to God in worship, then that experience extends to their daily lives when they are away from the community. These “secular” worship expressions become reminders and clues of God everywhere.” Romans 12 offers a similar way of looking at it:

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. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (Romans 12:1-2)

Here, living in the world means everything has the potential to be sacred worship. (The NRSV actually calls it “your spiritual worship” in Romans 12:1.) We cannot blindly accept culture. By looking for the sacred that is already present, we may be surprised to see how frequently it actually turns up! By bringing something that is “secular” intentionally into worship, we can allow people to see the sacred in it. When they encounter the event, or person, or idea, or thing in their everyday walking around life, they see it as something new- reminders and clues of God everywhere.

Often worship is limited to one hour on a Sunday morning. I want to challenge the community to expand that definition. This is about more than recognizing diverse worship styles as actual worship—though Christ Church has done an awesome job with this. Rather, this is about looking for encounter with God and changing one’s life based on that encounter. Where can this happen? If we believe that the sacred/secular split is indeed artificial, then daily, Romans 12 worship becomes a more tenable goal.

notes
U2charist,” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U2charist. Date of Access, 28 November, 2007.
I say “their own” to honor that faithful communities can reach diverse conclusions on things such as orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and the Vision (Kingdom) of God.
Bolger and Gibbs write, “Beginning with William of Ockham and John Duns Scotus in the fourteenth century and accelerating with Rene Descartes in the seventeenth, the modern period created a secular space and relegated spiritual things to the church.” Eddie Gibbs and Ryan K. Bolger, Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005.), 66.
Gibbs and Bolger, 76.
Romans 12:1-2, Message paraphrase, Eugene Peterson. (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 2003.)

A Front Row Seat

I have a front row seat for the event of the season in the Historic Southwest Neighborhood. Literally seconds ago I just saw the final wall come down in the College Apartments. A cloud of dust (probably laced with lead and asbestos) is now being sprayed down by someone with a fire hose. The fence they set up will have to be re erected-- part of the building protested its demise by crushing the fence. It's odd how in our modern day, a bulldozer (any 4-year old could probably tell me the exact term) is still used to take down a building. Its movements are positively prehistoric.

How many lives has this building touched in the years it has served as a gateway to Rochester? How many builders put in nails-- by hand-- to keep it standing? Four days of work and it is torn down.

Watching this I think I understand a little bit more about the destruction of the temple in 70 CE. This week's lectionary text is from Luke, and reads,

When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ‘As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’

I feel sad watching this building come down. Just imagine how, probably about 45 years after Jesus was talking about the destruction of the temple, the people would have felt when Rome actually did destroy it? The temple's construction was a work of the community, each person putting in their own work, using their own gifts. If even the temple can be destroyed, how fragile is anything made by human hands?

I realize these thoughts are all a little jumbled. My brain is probably addled from breathing in the dust.

Biblical Hebrew

I know just enough Biblical Hebrew to be dangerous.

Earlier in the week I had to pick a word summarizing the theme for the day at the 11:15 service. Looking at the Psalm reading (Psalm 119:137-144) I saw the word "righteousness" in the same passage as "faithfulness." I immediately got excited because the word hesed is translated as both faithfulness and righteousness. I went ahead and plastered hesed on the top of the worship bulletin. Hesed is a great word because it also means loving-kindness.

My whole plan had been to link God's faithfulness with our faithfulness and stewardship.

Then, later in the week, I got down to the word/text study and learned this passage doesn't have hesed at all! It has tsedek, which is only ever translated as righteousness or justice. A great word, but the hesed on the top of the bulletin doesn't fit into the text at all.

I believe with integrity to the text I can say the author sees God as desiring our faithfulness and faithfulness will produce a life that is really lived.

At any rate, as the sermon has developed Zaccheus has become more and more a central figure. And I am reminded (yet again) of the importance of thorough preparation!