Retrieving worship. Mostly when worship comes up in places like this blog, it’s the style of worship that’s on hand: worship wars, as they were once known. Where I lived, in the Christian Reformed Church, the wars were mostly about songs. Should one sing exclusively or, at least, mostly from hymnals? Or should the church be moving on to the kind of songs presently playing on Christian radio? These recent worship wars reprised the worship wars at the founding of the CRC denomination, when it was psalms versus hymns, the Dutch psalter versus the American hymnbook. We get passionate about such things, but that’s not what this piece is about. I have in mind less the style of worship—you have your preferences; I have mine—but what worship does. How it works. And so, I’ll begin with an ordinary moment in an ordinary worship service, a favorite moment of mine, a moment when for me what worship is reveals itself. 

Walking Back

My favorite moment in the liturgy is entirely non-liturgical, even though I worship in liturgical churches. It’s the moment when, having just received the eucharist, the worshipers make their way back to their seats. I watch their faces. Just this past Sunday, in a place unfamiliar to me, as I watched, the congregation streamed by me. An elderly woman, face care-worn, lined, singing softly the last lines of “Let Us Break Bread Together”: “When I fall upon my knees, with my face to the rising Sun, O Lord, have mercy on me.”

Another worshiper comes by with trouble written all over him, pondering whether he should have gone forward at all. Did he deserve Jesus? And after him, a woman from the choir singing full out, broad smile in her welcoming eyes, sure she had met Jesus. A couple then, two men, coming from different places in the sanctuary, holding hands as they walked back to sit together. And on they came, one after another, each having encountered Jesus at the altar, most transfigured by the experience. Some troubled. Some comforted. Some sure. Some not so sure. As I watch, I the lump in my throat grows large.

When we had regathered in our seats, the congregation began singing Rory Cooney’s “Canticle of the Turning” In that moment we became a resistance movement. “My soul cries out with a joyful shout,” the song begins, “And my spirit sings of the wondrous things that you bring to the ones who wait.” 

It’s Mary’s song as we have it in Luke, Hannah’s song as we have it in 1 Samuel, the song in one way or another sung by women throughout history, and now in our singing of it it becomes our song, our plea:

My heart shall sing of the day you bring. 

Let the fires of your justice burn.

Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near,

and the world is about to turn!

The song turns strangely contemporary:

From the halls of power to the fortress tower, not a stone will be left on stone. 

Let the king beware for your justice tears ev’ry tyrant from his throne.

The hungry poor shall weep no more, for the food they can never earn;

There are tables spread ev’ry mouth be fed, for the world is about to turn.

Though the nations rage from age to age, we remember what holds us fast:

God’s mercy must deliver us from the conqueror’s crushing grasp. 

This saving word that our forbears heard is the promise which holds us bound.

’Til the spear and rod can be crushed by God, who is turning the world around.

And always again after every verse, the chorus:

My heart shall sing of the day you bring. Let the fires of your justice burn.

Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near, and the world is about to turn!

“Kingdom of God,” Jesus called it. Kingdom of God, then and now, is political. As we sang, we thought of poor people denied SNAP benefits so the country can afford tax breaks for billionaires. We thought of masked ICE agents inflicting cruelty on migrants desperately trying to start a new life in a new land. We thought of people losing health benefits by the millions. We thought of all the way the notion of a nation has been lost in greed and grift. We thought all that and more. And we sang together, “The world is about to turn.”

We didn’t know entirely what we were singing. Did Mary know what she sang? Did Hannah know? But we, like they, believed. We believed that the kingdom is at hand. And for a moment, in a quite miraculous way or, we became that kingdom. In that small congregation for that moment we were not black or white, gay or straight, immigrant or native, male or female. We were one in Jesus. We were an enactment of the gospel.

And this is worship, it seems to me. In worship the gospel is enacted. It is of course more than that, but this seems to me central to Christian worship. We invoke the God who comes to us in Jesus in words and song. We read the scriptures, those strange disorienting words. We reflect on the scriptures and our lives. We meet Jesus in the eucharistic meal. And we are transfigured from the people we were when we walked in the door to a new people singing new songs, the vanguard of a new age.

It fades, of course. Worship is not permanent, this side of heaven. The witness of the moment fades as we go into our week. But we remember and return, week after week, again and again to enact the gospel, to be kingdom of God, if only for that moment.

This past Sunday the pastor at the church we attended far from our home congregation steered away from the lectionary readings we had heard earlier—a particularly powerful collection of words from the Bible. I had hoped he might address the texts. Instead, he made an oft repeated claim about worship. He said that we gather for worship to receive the proper training for what we do as Christians during the week. Worship in this view is primarily instruction. The sanctuary is a classroom for the Christian life—the individual Christian life. The real Christian life is outside, on the street. 

I understand this idea. In my many years in the pulpit, I’ve said much the same thing from time to time. But it’s quite wrong. Worship is not preparation for life; worship is life, new life in Christ. Worship is not preparing us for something we do later in the week; worship is what we do, and we live in the expectation that when, as the song has it, the world turns, all of life will be worship.

Retrieving Worship

Even now, in a world fallen into despair, worship happens. It happens in a variety of churches. It happens when the official theology of the church seems inadequate to bear the weight of worship. It happens with praise choruses and hymns and Gregorian chant. It happens in churches that follow the order of the mass and churches that seem to follow no order at all. Worship of the kind I just described happens in many places. Congregants are transfigured into the image of Christ; the kingdom of God emerges, if only for a moment. But, still, worship can be lost. We must always be about the work of retrieving worship. Nothing we do as Christians is more important.

Worship is lost when it becomes about something else. Often what it becomes about is us. I’ve attended services in which the songs are almost entirely about our troubles. I’ve noted congregations of people who by the standards of the world are wildly successful singing song after song about their needing to be rescued from the terrors of the world. And in their singing,  invoking a God who is always on their side, whatever side that might be. Our God reigns becomes our God will stomp on whoever gets in our way. It’s not, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,” but “Lord, rid me of my enemies.”

This among other reasons is why worship, regardless of the style it effects, needs to be scriptural and sacramental, two things that worship in evangelical churches often lack. Scripture needs to be read, scripture from every part of the Bible. And scripture needs to be allowed to stand by itself. In too many evangelical churches these days scripture is not trusted to stand on its own. It’s not read; it’s woven into the preacher’s words, so the preacher can frame the scripture, give it the preacher’s spin. It’s not incidental that this goes against the spirit of the Reformation. In the Reformed churches in which I grew up, the scripture stood in judgment on the preacher’s words. Did the preacher correctly divide the Word of God? Now, scripture is often subordinated to whatever the preacher thinks. The congregation is not trusted with the Word of God. Too dangerous, perhaps.

So if we are to retrieve worship and thereby retrieve the church from its disastrous plunge into right wing politics, scripture must be read for itself. The churches I attend use follow the lectionary. The lectionary has its own issues. Parts of scripture are overlooked. But at least in such churches every Sunday passages are read from the Old Testament, the New Testament epistles, and the gospels. And a psalm is recited or chanted. The preacher’s words are given less importance than the words of the scriptures. The scriptures disorient us, challenge us, accuse us, assure us, and give us words for our thinking. They bring to us the God of Israel and the church, not the God of contemporary politics.

And in addition to the scriptures, if we are to retrieve worship, worship must always be sacramental. In sacramental worship, Jesus is not someone we talk about; Jesus is our host, the one who welcomes us and meet us. The sacrament changes the orientation of worship. In Protestant worship, too often, we talk about grace, but in the sacraments, grace is enacted. We receive from the hand of Jesus the bread and cup. In that inchoate way of sacraments Jesus is present to us.

And sacraments require proper framing in the liturgy. For the eucharist, the words of Jesus are crucial: “Do this for the remembrance of me.” In evangelical churches I have attended, the sacrament often is appended to the sermon and then framed only in a word or two from the preacher: his (usually it’s a him) often poorly thought-out words. If worship is to lead us to Jesus, the sacrament Jesus gave to us, it must be framed in the story he himself enacted and presented in his own sacramental words. Only then does the sacrament stand free of the preacher.

In both of these, scripture and sacrament, we decenter the preacher. Worship is not about the preacher. I say this as someone who has spent his life preaching and who loves the pulpit. Preaching has its place. But too often the preacher becomes a replacement Jesus. And the politics of the preacher replaces the kingdom of God. And the church becomes a movement to preserve whatever the congregants want preserved. Instead of kingdom of God, we become kingdom of those who agree with each other. And, then, we find ourselves on the wrong side of history, for, as the song has it, “The world is about to turn.”

Clay