Reorienting Protestant Worship
We recently attended a nearby church. It was very pleasant, positive, and Progressive (signaled by the prominence of rainbow banners). They are doing almost everything "right," and attracting an active congregation. There were some signs of liturgical cluelessness, like how they snuffed the "eternal" peace candle at the end of the service. But they had a nice mix of new and old hymns, anthems from Godspel and Africa (with a drummer). The minister wore a black academic robe with a green stole and delivered a coherent sermon on lectionary texts. It was not all that different from services I used to organize myself, truth be told.
But the thing I missed was... God. The service was all about us. I find this to be characteristic of Protestant worship these days, generally. A few weeks ago I went to a very conservative Presbyterian church, and I observed the same thing. We have scrubbed our worship of anything remotely numinous, mysterious, awe-inspiring, transcendent, or holy. It's very bright, friendly, informal, and chatty. We sing and pray and talk about our feelings, our needs, our desires, our joys and concerns. Everything feels designed to cater to our preferences. Everything is dumbed down to make sense to people today. We do worship "lite:" tastes great and less filling.
Christian worship, from its Jewish beginnings, brought together synagogue and Temple. Protestantism, no doubt reacting against the medieval Roman Catholic going overboard with the latter, and taking 2 Kings 22-23 with a vengeance, always emphasized the former. Our sanctuaries even look like synagogues, with the central pulpit and lack of imagery, with all attention on the Book. We don't have anything we are willing to call an altar, and even the Communion Table seems extraneous a lot of the time (since we've reduced the eucharist to once-a-month). We intentionally come to church mainly to hear something. These days it seems like we want most to hear from ourselves.
We have largely lost the Temple sensibility, with its humble submission before the Great Mystery. Without recognizing or admitting it, we pray like the Pharisee in Jesus' parable, congratulating God for having the foresight to create us. Who would ever depart from a Presbyterian service convinced, like Prince Vladimir's emissaries in Constantinople a millennia ago, that they had experienced heaven? Our services are so this-worldly we can't lift our eyes above the horizontal.
Many of our services even lack a Prayer of Confession or Wholeness, and certainly have nothing approaching a Kyrie where we collectively ask for God's mercy. "Supplication" isn't even in our liturgical vocabulary anymore. We pray for benefits: health, justice, peace, guidance, comfort in sorrow. We give thanks for our lives, environment, and situation. We might ask to be made more forgiving, compassionate, generous. But we are less and less comfortable praying to be forgiven. We are slow to articulate our own guilt, complicity, accountability, and grief over what we have done or not done. We simply do not stand in awe of the living God, let alone in the phobos that is the beginning of Wisdom, Sophia. We have no sense of God's otherness or majesty. No inkling of God's wildness.
I am not advocating escapism, but encounter. I don't seek the transactional, but the transcendent. Worship of the living God should be revelatory, apocalyptic, and, well, dangerous. I used to say a prayer in my heart before rising to deliver a sermon, asking for the miracle that God's Word be delivered through me and that I not be destroyed in the process. Perhaps I should have said that out loud. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul talks about the Lord's Supper in a way completely incomprehensible to us. "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the body and blood of the Lord. Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For all who eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment against themselves. For this reason many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world."
A lot going on there. Apparently, some in Corinth were treating the Lord's Supper like an informal potluck appended to the service. The very idea that unworthy participation in the Sacrament could have negative health effects or even be lethal is beyond our capacity to imagine. Ironically, this formed the core of early Presbyterian views of the Sacrament. John Knox's eucharistic prayer had basically the Words of Institution and a long and dire warning against unworthy participation.
The idea that worshiping God is supremely consequential, indeed, the most consequential thing a human can do, is foreign to people thoroughly marinated in the flat, disenchanted, secularism of Modernity. Jesus says that people called to God's banquet may still be rejected if they fail to dress appropriately for the occasion. I wonder if the proper attire for entrance into God's Presence isn't awe and humility. If we come into a worship service as if it is all about us, assuming our own privilege and acceptance, convinced that what matters is our convenience and comfort, designed to appeal to my personal taste, that this is "my church"? Well, a lot of our churches are "weak and ill, and some of [them] have died." And now we can worship at home in our pajamas on Zoom while looking at our phones and eating pancakes....
In our worship American culture collides with the Kingdom of God. Our superficial, trivial, temporary, and commodified culture meets Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Eternity. Wendell Berry suggests that resistance to the secular Machine means we "every day, do something that won't compute." At its heart, worship itself does not compute; to the Modern world it is indistinguishable from superstition, a waste of time based on ignorance. That's why we have to work to make it "worthwhile" according to the valuations of the world. We have to make it entertaining, educational, inspirational, and motivational, a place for making social connections, for inspiring activism. People need to know they will "get something out of it." We want to feel their time was well spent. Like any manufactured product, worship must be thoroughly domesticated and made consistent and predictable. That's what "computes," that's what has market value, that's what we feel good about.
So maybe what I am looking for is useless worship, an utterly pointless experience that does not compute, something with no immediate redeeming social value at all. Something risky that costs me everything from which I gain nothing. Something that might kill me. One quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer that continues to challenge me since I read it in 1972 is when he said that when Christ calls a person he bids them "come and die." "Yes!" I remember my 17 year-old self exclaiming at that.
Bonhoeffer introduced me to a consequential Christianity. It's a life and death thing. Worship is a life and death thing. In the Bible people can die if they fail to approach God with sufficient respect. We should come into the sanctuary roughly as we would approach a shining ball of plutonium, or an unleashed lioness. "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God" (Hebrews 10:31). We should feel a need to surround ourselves with protective gear, like the Earth's atmosphere filters deadly solar radiation, converting it into the source of life.
Over the centuries the Church developed some practices designed to prepare us for the awesome encounter with holiness. Most of these were offloaded by Protestants centuries ago. We didn't see any biblical warrant for them... but they also were not convenient or useful for existence under the individualistic consumer culture then in formation. So in our self-righteous iconoclasm we largely ignored if not ridiculed them. They became superficial marks of our smug differentiation from Catholics. Among these were making the sign of the cross, kneeling, the imposition of ashes, venerating icons, bowing, anointing with oil, silence, splashing with Holy Water, burning incense, fasting, celebrating saints' days, addressing Mary, performing prostrations, making pilgrimages, praying at certain hours, offering blessings, respecting relics, and of course, sharing in a ritual purporting to be eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus. All of these are scandalous to most Protestants and coincidentally to Modernity. They don't compute. They don't produce material profit for anyone. We mock some of them as idolatrous or self-flagellatory.
Some things we did retain, like Sabbath-keeping and Psalmody, corporate confession and prayer. We kept only those Sacraments Jesus specifically authorized, often in a very stripped-down and thin form. (I once witnessed a Presbyterian baptism in which the water was barely more than a rumor.) Most of all we cherished Scripture and sought to shape our lives by it.
All such spiritual practices are inherently counter-cultural. Yes, they can be done by rote, reflex, and habit, without consciousness or meaning. But done with intention, they make tangible a break with "the world." They don't compute. They separate us from a domination system that demands we live by craving money, attention, and power. Instead, through them we humbly draw closer to God and God's Kingdom. They testify to our need to dwell here in humble awe and gratitude for a universe charged with the immense grandeur of the Creator.
The early Church understood that it had to convey catechumens out of a Roman culture based on exploitation and violence, and into something very different and contradictory to it. It required a journey of turning from a counterfeit and exploitive source of meaning to the real One. Sadly, we have no such sense today. The very idea that we have somehow to separate ourselves from American culture or Modernity generally in order to enter into God's holy Presence would gain almost no traction even from Progressives. I mean, a minister can thoroughly exhaust her political capital just getting the US flag out of the sanctuary. But the idea that our baptismal renunciation of "all evil and its power in the world" means non-participation in our particular manifestation of empire? Good luck. Maybe the real reason we eschew those spiritual practices is that we know not only that they don't compute, but that they counter-compute. They would cost us our success, our reputation, our wealth, and our influence. They would make us look at least weird and at most like a mortal threat to the powers-that-be.
Increasingly I believe the ultimate center of Christian worship, the place we most need to appear which is also the most dangerous place of all -- our Holy of Holies -- is the Lord's Table. Karl Barth placed the Table at the center as the place not only of Eucharistic celebration but also of Baptism and preaching the Word. The Table is the place of our transformation, which is to say, our death... and the birth of Christ within us, the emergence of our true nature.
We come away from the Table, having been fed by the Lord's Body and Blood, as different people. We resist the collapsing order by living lives informed by the spirit and teachings of Jesus Christ, whose body we are. We emerge to embody the good news of a different world being born among us. We anticipate and inhabit that new world by feeding, healing, forgiving, liberating, and welcoming all, beginning with those judged by society as the least. This is all the fruit of our transformation which happens when we encounter the Holy One in worship.
Maybe if we act like God is holy our bodies will remember. Maybe if we go through the motions of spiritual practices, rather than waiting for our egos to be convinced about their efficacy and value, it will resonate with something, some wonder and awe that persists in the created matter of which our bodies are made. Maybe if we repeat words we don't fully understand or agree with, and remember stories we long dismissed as quaint fables or erased in a fit of deconstruction... maybe if we actually let ourselves feel something, something real, something infinitely bigger than ourselves, something beyond our ability to grasp and know... we will find ourselves finally known, finally forgiven, and finally home.
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