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Home > Resources > Interdisciplinary > Recent History of Christian Worship > The Last 30 Years > Transcripts The Last Thirty Years: What We've Learned along the Way
Seminar at the Calvin Symposium on Worship
January 26, 2006
Host: John D. Witvliet
with Albert Aymer, Nancy Beach, Brian McLaren, Eugene Peterson, Larry Sibley, Joyce Zimmerman
Afternoon: Theological Insights: Audio / Transcript
Speakers:
John Witvliet (at 0:00)
Joyce Zimmerman (at 2:14)
Brian McLaren (at 22:34)
Albert Aymer (at 31:57)
Larry Sibley (at 47:59)
Nancy Beach (at 57:12)
John Witvliet: I'm going to be inviting your attention forward. A couple of the tables will have to finish up in the next pause in the conversation, but we do want to switch gears into our afternoon topic.
We continue to follow the basic outline that is on page 2 in your set of handouts. During our time between lunch and a short afternoon break, we want to put a focus on a very intentional and explicit theological topic. In a recent conversation about worship that we had the chance to overhear at Calvin, a presenter made the observation about how frustrating and ultimately damaging it was that so few books about worship actually finally are books about God; about how many conversations happen about worship that don't explore the sheer beauty of God's character and the wonder of the Gospel. And so to very intentionally make sure that a significant part of our conversation is about the nature of the Gospel, and of course that's already permeated the texts this morning, but in even a more intentional way, the question is before us this afternoon: Over the past thirty years, what have we learned about biblical worship? About God's character? In what ways have we grown in our understanding and experience of worship? And then, for that matter, the other side, what aspects of a biblical vision for worship have been obscured or grown more opaque? What aspects of God's character have been de-emphasized? How would we assess theologically ways in which we've grown but also these things which have been obscured?
We invite Joyce to start the conversation this afternoon.
Joyce Zimmerman: Thank you, John. I would ask you please to turn to page 16 in your booklets. The Council was wonderful years for the Catholic Church. Immediately after the Council, I would say those were euphoric years. I was in my first teaching years. I began teaching high school math and science. Quite quickly after that the Catholic schools threw out all of the catechisms because they didn't work anymore, and no one wanted to teach religion because we were in such a flux, and so the nuns got to teach religion because we were told to do it and couldn't say no. So I went from teaching math and science to teaching high school religion, and talk about a baptism by fire. I like to say in Catholic circles, some of you will also understand the language, I will never see Purgatory. I taught sophomores for fifteen years, so I'm home free, folks.
We mistakenly thought when the Council closed in 1965 in all of the various committees and commissions were set up to implement the Council, that for liturgy what we really had to do was revise our rites and we were home free. All of our rites were revised by 1972. And when you think about it, that was six years we completely redid 500 years of history in the Catholic Church. Talk about naïve. So we revised all of our rites. We taught people how to do them, and we had a bigger mess than we had started with. We liturgists in the Catholic Church like to say we've done the adapting the Constitution on the Liturgy called for, but we've not even begun the work of renewal. In my more depressing moments when people ask me, when is the Church going to pull herself out of the mess we're in right now? I say, two hundred years. But, you know, two hundred years is a hand's breadth for the Christian tradition.
But there's two issues that I want to focus on that I think have been profoundly at the basis of renewal. We've only begun the work on these two issues, but as we look at these two theological issues, we will break open what the real work of renewal is. As you can see on page 16, I basically simply outlined them as Paschal mystery and participation. These are the two issues that John specifically in all the remarks I made today, he said make sure you hit those two.
Paschal mystery is something we need to experience before we can understand it. And no matter what denomination or tradition you come from, all of us in the very living of our lives, young and old, educated, not so educated, rich, poor, first world, second world, third world, whatever world, it doesn't matter. We've all had Paschal mystery experiences if we've drawn breath. Paschal mystery is simply the rhythm of dying and rising in our life. Not too much the dying and rising as discreet historical moments as happened to Jesus 2000 years ago, although surely at some point we will all physically die and some point we will be among those who enjoy resurrection. We need to take that Christ event, that Christ experience which happened 2000 years ago, and move it from something that happened then and all we do today is cash in on, and understand it to use Paul's Romans 6 as what defines our Christian life.
In the Western church, our baptismal theology is largely based in Romans chapter 6, where Paul says, "Do you not know?" And I find it quite significant that he asks the questions, "Do you not know?" That's the NRSV translation. Quite frankly, we don't. We don't. Do you not know that when you were baptized, you were baptized into Christ's death? Which means our very Christian living is about dying. Every breath we take is about dying, not simply looking to our physical death, although we know that our life diminishes from babyhood on, grows and diminishes. What I'm talking about is that self-surrender, that not my will but Yours be done. A demand so great on Jesus in the Garden that He did what none of us do to say yes to His Father, He sweat blood. Luke uses that image of sweat as blood I think not unconsciously. Because, for the Hebrew mind and Jesus was certainly in the tradition, for the Hebrew mind the seat of life is in the blood. Already in the Garden with His struggle to say yes, Jesus was giving His life. For each of us in our daily struggle to say yes, in our daily struggle to be faithful to our baptism, we are uniting with Christ in the Garden and are pouring out our life for the sake of the world. It is only in that dying that we can know life. It is only in the dying that we can know life. While it's true we will all enjoy the general resurrection when Christ comes again, the point of fact is, right now as we give ourselves over to God's will, as we give ourselves over to the good of another, in the dying is the life. Because in the dying - talk about countercultural, talk about prophetic - in the very giving of myself do I know the fullness of myself and it is only in the giving of myself that I can come to know the fullness of myself.
I often in my workshops, institutes and whatever, I'll get e-mails. All right, I got the dying down. When does the rising come? And my answer is, the rising is in the dying. The rising is in that practice. Thomas Aquinas calls conscience simply the practice of making right judgments. It is in the practice of saying yes to God's will, not mine, but Yours be done, that we already share in Christ's new life.
I'm going to ask what may sound like an odd question. And this one I do want you to put your hands up about. How many here have been baptized? You just flunked my first quiz. No one here has been baptized. Everyone here is being baptized. We Roman Catholics like to relegate baptism to a discreet service that happened for most of us when we were babies. I've had a lot of my sophomores say to me, "You know, I'm really angry with my parents." What did they do? "You know, they did that thing to me." What did they do? "You know, they took me to church when I was a baby and they said yes for me, and I'm really angry that they did that and let me say yes. Let me grow up and make my choice." And my answer to them always was, well if you don't believe, don't bother. They always came back with, "Yeah, but what if it's true?" What they missed is that their parents did nothing to them. Baptism isn't relegated to a ceremony or a ritual or a liturgy, as important as all that is. For those of you from denominations that practice adult baptism that requires a public adult commitment, you all know that's not the end, it's the beginning. Our baptism is an ongoing yes in our life, an ongoing entry into Christ's dying and rising, an ongoing commitment to pattern our life after Christ, which means if we pattern our life after Christ, it means death. It means dying every moment of every day. It means when John says we're going to start at 1:35 and we're out there still milling around talking, we've got to give up those conversations to come back in here. That's the dying. It's not about me, it's about surrendering to how God leads me in my life.
Liturgy in its transformation of bread and wine, which we take and eat and drink and become what we eat and drink, some of us more than we'd like probably, in that act, liturgy is announcing to us and drawing us into what our very life is about. Because, as we present the bread and the wine and place it on the altar, we ourselves are placed on the altar. As the ancient fathers of the church knew so well and I love to quote St. Augustine on this on in his sermon 273, "Do you not know that when you take and eat and drink, you eat and drink who you are? When you say 'Amen', make sure your amen is true, for you say amen to who you are." Augustine, way back in the early fifth century, had an incredible insight that we're still struggling to learn today. That to participate in liturgy is to give ourselves over to the dying and rising rhythm of Christ's Paschal mystery. Not simply as Christ's mystery, but as Christ's mystery lived today in and through us. It amazes me that the liturgical movement, which John mentioned this morning, particularly with a Benedictine monk at * in Germany, *, popularized the notion of mystery, and specifically the Paschal mystery. Paschal mystery is mentioned in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, but I find it significant that in the forty-five years since the Council, in over forty-five years since the promulgation of the Constitution on the Liturgy, there has been no major work by a Catholic or Protestant on the Paschal mystery. I'd like to think we're running because we know what it challenges us and what we need to surrender to enter in. Any of you doctoral students out there looking for a topic, there it is. But you cannot write about what you have not lived.
Second insight for us Roman Catholics after the Council is participation. It's not insignificant that in paragraph 14 in the Constitution, I'd like to read it: "Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful, all the faithful, should be led to that full, conscious, and active participation in liturgical celebrations, which is demanded by the very nature of liturgy." Now place this in 1963 in the context of the Church, which for a thousand years the assembly had been onlookers. We were doing our devotional prayer and kind of received the grace. We even had a pecking order. The priest got the most, the altar boy got the next most, whoever the Mass intention was for got the third most, and the organist and choir got the fourth most. Those of us, by the time it got down to us in the pews, we didn't get much. To talk about full, conscious, and active participation is a major breakthrough for us Roman Catholics with that kind of a tradition.
For a long time, I thought full, conscious, and active were simply three adjectives where the bishops of the Council were really trying to hit home what was happening. It was only when I was asked to provide a commentary on paragraph 14 that I began to look at full, conscious, and active not in terms of three adjectives that are basically similar, but three adjectives that lead us in three ever-deepening ways into the mystery. Begin with active participation. For us Roman Catholics, we needed to emphasize active participation, because we have been so left behind. Just simply answering the responses with the altar boy was a major breakthrough even before the Council in the '50s. But when all of a sudden we are asked to sing and our whole repertoire of liturgical music was Gregorian chant in Latin, we sang and we had a whole flurry of Catholic composers who composed those early 1960s English hymns, which are unmentionable today. I was singing some of them for John last night. This was quite revolutionary for us. All of a sudden we have liturgical ministries in our church. Lay folks are lectors. Lay folks not only give out Communion within the liturgy itself, but finally are privileged to take Communion to the homebound and the sick, so they don't have to wait once a month when Father can come around, shove it in their mouths and leave in two seconds. We have a rite and right where these extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion can spend time with our sick and homebound and connect them with the parish church.
The active participation was essential. And as I've said, if you read the Constitution on the Liturgy, one interesting exercise is to go through the Constitution and look at what are the adaptations that the Church has already done that we can't forget about, and what are the undying liturgical principles that we need to read over and over and over again until they get into our heads. A good hint is most of them are in Chapter 1. We've done a good job in the Catholic Church on active participation. I don't know that we've paid enough attention to the next two. Active participation is essential. We cannot go backwards on that one. But it's not enough.
We also need what the bishops call conscious participation, and how I have interpreted that is early on the liturgy, and I personally think this is the role of the introductory rites, early on in the liturgy, we must make a conscious surrender of ourselves to the action of God. Liturgy is not about me, it's about God. And essentially I do early in the liturgy what Jesus did in the Garden, is hand myself over. I must consciously say yes to God, not only in my giving thanks and praise during the liturgy, but being open to then how God speaks to me and is present to me.
And that leads to the third, full participation. And I interpret full participation is the transformation that is proper to all ritual, occurs in our Eucharistic liturgy. What happens is, God, when we surrender, takes us and transforms us to being ever more perfect members of the body of Christ, ever more perfect members who can associate, identify with Christ in the Garden who says, "Not my will, but Yours be done." And all of this for the sake of the world. One cannot understand Paschal mystery unless one understands participation, not simply as engagement, as doing, as important as that is, but as self-surrender that leads to what God does in us.
A simple evaluative technique I use in parishes is not whether they get the rite right. That's easy to evaluate; I can go down a checklist. Real evaluation of our liturgies, our worship in our parishes, can only be analyzed five, six, seven years down the line when we look at our corporate personality as a parish or a congregation and either do or do not see growth. If we do not see growth, we need to ask ourselves, what are we doing? If we see growth, then we have to thank God, because it's God's doing.
Brian McLaren: I want to get a little Pentecostal here and say, Amen! That was some good preaching, and I'm inspired and moved and instructed and helped by that very much. I don't feel I have very much of use to say on this question, especially after what I just heard. I just want to think about that for a few hours and days. As you were speaking about conscious participation, I thought about in the liturgy when we say, "Lift up your hearts; we lift them up to the Lord." That really is supposed to be that active sacrifice and surrender, I think at the beginning of our worship.
In terms of what I think we have gotten more clearly over thirty years, and what we have gotten less clear, here's a couple of things I would say. Well, one for each. What I think we've gotten more clearly, is that it's about us. In the sense that I think some of us remember, and maybe it's still this way in some of our churches, but where church was an institution and you were just supposed to show up and do your time, and get in, get out as quickly as possible. For me, it's like shopping. Get in, get out, spend as little as possible, and everything goes okay. But I think we're all beyond that now. That's something we've learned. Our experience of worship is supposed to be meaningful and enriching, and it's actually supposed to be a blessing to us. What went along with that, I think, is a realization that God is for us and that God is near and with us. God is intimate and imminent. To me, that's a very good thing.
What I think we've gotten less clearly is so obvious that it's just the flip side of that. It's about us, yes, but it's not all about us. And this is one of our great problems now in a lot of our evangelical and charismatic worship, it really is all about us. It's about what we do and what God does for us. Some of you may know, in the Vineyard churches that have been very involved in promoting the idea of the intimacy of God and the intimate experience of God in worship, there are an awful lot of Vineyard worship leaders who talk about the "Jesus as my girlfriend" approach to worship, or "Jesus as my boyfriend", which sounds blasphemous, and that's kind of what they mean. That Jesus becomes so intimate that it starts to feel a little squirmy. I think that is certainly the case in too many places, that what becomes less clear is the transcendence of God and the power of God. God is for us, yes, but God is also for the other, and God is for the poor, and God is for the people who aren't in church, and God is for people in other countries, and God is for our enemies. And sometimes, if God is for the other, than God may be even against us in some ways. And that is very, very hard for us to understand, even in churches that like to preach about sin, it's usually the sins that other people commit that we focus on the most. Really serious, self-critical, self-prophetic preaching, I think is maybe rarer now than it's been in a long time.
Along with this though, where this question interested me, is what do I think that we didn't get thirty years ago and that we still haven't begun to get very much now? This, I think, is a good question because I believe Lesslie Newbigin was right. He liked to refer to that statement in John's Gospel where Jesus said, "There are many things I want to share with you, but you cannot bear them. But when the Spirit of Truth comes, He'll make these things clearer." And Newbigin believes there are things we only learn about God and about the Gospel as we go forth in the power of the Spirit and engage in mission. So that, for example, when the church is still so segregated, but when racism was much more enfranchised in the church and it's still way too enfranchised in the church, but when it was even more thirty, forty, fifty years ago, especially in the white churches, where racism was, I think, now it's still widespread, but then it was even legitimized by quoting the Bible. There were things we didn't know about God in spite of all of our recitation of the Creeds and the rest, but then we move into reconciliation with people who are different from us that we actually learn something about God experientially that we couldn't have known in any other way.
To me, what is interesting to ask then, is where does our vision of God begin to become enriched and changed? It's not a matter of losing something, but it's a matter of gaining something. Many of you are probably aware of the Catholic novelist named Walker Percy, a wonderful Southern novelist, one of my favorite writers in the world. He talked about how growing up in the South in the Bible belt, you can say, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus" so much that you could just as easily be saying, "Exxon, Exxon, Exxon, Exxon." Jesus ends up becoming a motto and the words almost start to lose their meaning. I sense that this is something that's happened in the circles that I've run in over the last thirty years, kind of evangelical charismatic circles. I'm going to offer a rather controversial understanding of this. I'm going to propose this not because I think it's true, it might be true, it's worth at least thinking about, and if you disagree with this, it's okay. You're probably right.
But what seems to have happened in a lot of very widespread American evangelical circles, is that the word "Gospel" has come to mean one theory of the atonement. Now, in Christian history, there have been five or seven theories of atonement, maybe more depending on how you count them. But one of those theories has become dominant in most evangelical circles, so that for many evangelicals, the word "Gospel" equals the theory of atonement. When that happens, a division of God that is most clearly given by that theory of atonement predominates more and more; alternate visions of God that might be highlighted by other theories of atonement are lost or are de-emphasized.
But one of the interesting questions is being raised and needs to be raised, and we may end up with the same conclusions, but we ought to at least think about the question is, is the Gospel primarily a theory of atonement, or is the Gospel about more than atonement? Is atonement part of the Gospel, but not the Gospel. This is what you said a minute ago that we want to cash in on something that was done a long time ago. This, to me, is part of this problem of the atonement-centered approach. That what we do is get together and celebrate that we've cashed in on the good thing Jesus did for us a long time ago and we become one of those gatherings of Saturn buyers who get together or Harley Davidson buyers who get together and celebrate how much they enjoy what they share. They appreciate this great car and we appreciate what we've gained. I don't mean to be disrespectful there, but what I'm trying to say is, what if, as we move ahead, we have to not lose atonement, not lose that one theory and hopefully get back the other four or five, but not lose that in any way, but broaden our understanding of the Gospel to larger categories.
One feature of this, and I'll stop with this, even in the importance, and I totally affirm the importance of our ancient creeds, but it's interesting that our creeds require us to confess that Jesus was born and then He died and then He rose and between His birth and death the teaching and life of Jesus don't show up in our creeds. I wonder if, as we move ahead, part of what has to happen is the actual life of Jesus and the teaching of Jesus have to become more significant in our liturgical understanding and what it means to worship and reflect on God. So that, the fact that Jesus ate at tables with sinners, is a very, very significant thing when we gather around the table. So that when Jesus taught about the kingdom the message of the kingdom has an awful lot to say about what happens when we gather. How would that change our vision of God and His ways? Those, to me, become interesting questions about the next thirty years when we all meet again.
Albert Aymer: I'm going to presume that it is perfectly all right to read a passage from the New Testament in this forum. And believe it or not, the passage I'm going to read is from the Apocalypse chapter 4, and the first 11 verses, so please bear with me.
After these things, I looked and beheld a door open in heaven and the first voice I heard which sounded like a trumpet saying to me, "Come up here, and I will show you what must happen after these things." Immediately, I became in spirit and behold, a throne standing in heaven and one sitting on the throne. And the one sitting resembles jasper and carnelian stones in appearance, and the halo around the throne resembles an emerald in appearance. And around the throne are twenty-four thrones, and on the thrones, twenty-four elders are sitting clothed in shining garments, and on their heads are wreaths of gold. And from the throne come bright beams of noises and thunder and seven lamps of fire, which are the seven spirits of God. They are standing in front of the throne. And in front of the throne is something like a sea of glass, like crystal in appearance. Before the throne and around the throne are four living creatures full of eyes in front and behind. And the first creature is like a lion, and the second creature is like a calf, and the third creature has the face of a human being, and the fourth creature is like an eagle flying. And the four creatures, each one of them having six wings are full of eyes round about and inside. And they say night and day without interruption, "Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty. The one who was, and who is, and who is coming." And whenever the creatures give glory and reverence and thanksgiving to the one sitting on the throne, the one who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down around the one sitting on the throne and worship the one who lives forever and ever. And they throw their wreaths around the throne saying, "You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and reverence and power, because you called all things into being and because they were created through your will."
Let me say that I think this translation was made by a person, she is an ordained deacon in the United Methodist Church, who works at my seminary teaching some aspects of worship and hymnology. The four things I want to share with you come out of the sermon she recently preached in chapel. And it came out of a certain concern we had in chapel about various types of worship and how a seminary community that is comprised with about 55% African Americans and 45% Caucasians can worship together every day we have classes.
John's question for this session is, what have we learned about biblical worship that we didn't see as clearly thirty years ago?
The first thing I want to suggest to John is that we learned that there is more to God than our human minds can comprehend. There's a whole lot more to God than our human minds can comprehend. What I find rather striking in this passage from the Apocalypse is the way in which the seer uses simile after simile to describe the One seated on the throne. A voice like a trumpet. The One seated on the throne looks like jasper, looks like emerald. Looks like no animal on the earth or no creature on the earth. Nothing on the earth is like the One seated on the throne. There is an awesome uniqueness about the One sitting on the throne. I think one of the things that is striking in our understanding of worship and liturgy today is the fact that God is beyond our human comprehension. We cannot comprehend God in God's totality. God is so much other than our ability to comprehend God.
The second thing is this. Because God is so much more infinitely more than our ability to comprehend God, then when we approach God in worship, we ought to approach God with the best that we have, and the best that we can afford, and the best that we can do. And even when we have brought the best, we still have to turn around and say of the best, filthy rags. Forgive the poverty of our worship, is the way it is expressed in one of the former liturgies of our church, one of the prayers. Forgive the poverty of our worship, the formality of our prayers. No language is adequate to address this One who is so much greater than anything we can comprehend.
A third thing we learn looking at this passage from the Apocalypse it seems to me about God and worship is that in worship, God accepts sights and sounds. Organ music and piano music and rhythmic music like the drums this morning, and the guitar, and the dancing, God accepts sights and sounds. Many colors, as well. In other words, I like to think of it as God who looks at the world that God created and says, "You know, this is good. This is really good." Somewhat expects us to bring some of that real diversity into our worship of this same God. That fascinates me. It just absolutely fascinates me.
I said four things? Let me go to six.
The fourth thing is this. From this passage in Revelation as from Isaiah chapter 6. God is to be the focus of our worship, not ourselves. You know what distresses me? When I hear well-intentioned people say, "I'm not going to church because I'm not getting anything out of it." I say, "Good! Try going next time and giving God something, and then if you try to give God something, you may get something." The part of our prevailing culture.by the way, I told John, I kind of missed that second question this morning because I had six things I wanted to say. And he said, "You should try to sneak them in somehow." But I'm not sure I can sneak them in because he is now on a different topic. But you know, we have made worship something that makes us feel good, how we feel. People come to worship to feel good. They don't come to worship to offer something to the One who is worthy of our worship. We are so used to thinking of church as what suits our taste. What are our preferences? Our music? Our translation of the Bible? There are some folk who don't believe that you should use any other translation of the Bible than the good old King James Version that Paul himself used. It is about us. So much of our worship is about us, and so little about God.
Which brings me to the fifth thing I want to say. Worship is our gift to God, who gives so much to us. I wish I had time this afternoon to tell you how generous God has been to me, but then it would need more than the time you have this afternoon. It would go into the middle of the night, and probably in the wee hours of the morning I would still be talking. One of the reasons why although I don't pastor a church, even when I'm sick, in fact the other day, I'm struggling a little from double vision, some of you probably don't want to have double vision. It's interesting when I told some of my friends I'm having double vision, one person said to me, "Oh, I know lots of pregnant women who have double vision." And I became very concerned. It's a terrible thing to have. I guess it's kind of nice if you're pastoring a small congregation. But I guess I've got to this stage in life, [Eleazar] Merriweather here, he probably knows this. He's known me a little bit. The other day they diagnosed me as having prostate cancer. I have an elder and younger brother, two sisters who live in London, England, and they were more upset than I was. And they couldn't understand how I took it all, in fact, for me it was interesting stuff. Because there is a God who is so infinitely merciful to me. And during my double vision when my doctor said I should not drive, the one place he could not keep me from going to on my own was to church. I just had to go. And even when I go and feel dissatisfied this Sunday, I still go the next Sunday because I'm not going because of the preacher. I'm going because of a God who is so infinitely good to me, and to whom I cannot thank enough. The first hymn in the British Methodist hymnal is "O for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer's praise." One tongue for me is not enough. Not two, not three, not ten, not twenty. Thousands, because I don't have enough time to tell Him "Thank you, God." Our worship is to be focused, it seems to me, on God.
And lastly, not finally, the sixth thing I want to say. This sixth thing follows me, is that our emphasis in worship should be on God and not on the method. The method is important, but let us be careful that we don't let the method itself to become the god.
Larry Sibley: What have we learned about biblical worship that we didn't see clearly thirty years ago? I think at the heart of this is a new awareness of the presence of God in the assembly. Thirty years ago, Gordon Lathrup was just beginning to focus his attention on this in his writing, which is part of the background for that Nairobi statement that you read. So, thirty years ago we didn't have that voice and other voices that are making that clear. But that's helped us to move from a culture of four walls and a sermon or a class with songs, in other words, a kind of instructional model for what we do in the Sunday meeting to a realization of God's presence in the midst, where we gather in His presence around the means of grace. One of my happy discoveries in the last few years is how that concept of the means of grace functions in the Lutheran and Anglican and Calvinist traditions. In Presbyterian circles, that's crystallized in a shorter catechism in question 88, where the outward and ordinary means by which Christ communicates the benefits of His redemption are the Word, sacraments, and prayer. So this is the work of Christ in the assembly, the Word, the sacraments, and prayer, what He does through them. That's how the presence is realized. Sometimes we talk about God's presence either eloquently or stumblingly. Just how is that presence known? Where is that presence? How is He present in the assembly?
Well, in these means that He has chosen to use, these outward ordinary means, this bread, wine, this water, and these words we use, reading them and contemplating them through the help of a sermon, responding to them with our words of prayer, sung and spoken. Very ordinary things, but of course, turned to extraordinary use. When John Calvin thought about how God communicates Himself to us, he latched onto a medieval idea and developed it a great deal: accommodation, how God accommodates Himself to us. Because of course, if He came to us raw, we would disappear immediately. We would be overcome and destroyed as Isaiah began to sense in Isaiah 6. So God, as Calvin put it, is like a nursemaid that lisps to the baby. He uses the ordinary things that we use in order to communicate to us, so He uses these ordinary words. There are very few specialized words in the Bible. Mostly the ordinary ones that you see in a newspaper, but they are turned to extraordinary use to tell us, to show us God's character, and the bread, wine, and water that we use all the time. That's how the presence is realized in the midst.
I was thinking this morning during Duane's message as he was preaching, about God is with us, God is with us. Well, how that comes to great clarity is when He is present in the assembly in this bread and wine. So maybe we ought to make this symbol much stronger than we usually do. A large loaf of real bread, a flagon of wine, and be generous with it, rather than.and flowing water rather than a damp hand on the baby's head, because that's how God is present. That's one thing that has become clearer through the liturgical renewal that has run through all of our traditions, God's presence in the assembly.
So we've moved away in many places from a kind of decision-based meeting where it's all about us and about us being the source as the reality as we make a decision. Francis Mannion, a good Catholic author, in an article that was first published in Worship and then now collected in his new book, Masterworks of God, talks about the deeper level of this human centeredness that many of us have put our finger on, where the individual rather than the institution or the tradition or biblical revelation is the locus and origin of meaning and values that these things come from the individual. Robert Bellah and his associates in Habits of the Heart pointed to something similar, that the individual has the primary reality and the society is the derived or artificial construct. So a kind of personal instead of ecclesiastical source for belief. God is a kind of inner voice, but it's really me. So then, worship is useful only to the extent that it serves as a guide to the discovery of inner reality of personal realization. That, of course, is not something new to the twentieth century. It goes back to Descartes. I think, therefore I am. And to Kant's sovereign subject that makes meaning, makes reality. But moving away from that to a realization of the presence of God.
Now the counter movement, worship as therapy, of course just intensifies that human centeredness. And that's where the presence of God and a sense of the presence of God in the assembly has actually been weakened and lost as it has been intensified in other parts of the Presbyterian tradition, as we've gone after the latest gimmick and misappropriated the good things in the seeker service wisdom and just intensifying this as a great therapy session, so it's gone both ways. But I really rejoice in the way I see churches moving towards a stronger sense of God's presence and the means of grace.
Nancy Beach: I would just like to comment that our theology is formed largely through the music that we sing, the lyrics of the music that we sing. Obviously, there's a lot more to worship than just the music, but I observe this very closely. I have two daughters, age 13 and 16, and young people especially sing things over and over and over again. Currently, I know just about every lyric to "Wicked" -that's their latest thing, the musical "Wicked"; they know every lyric. But when they're singing songs of worship, it strikes me as a mom that their view of God, their view of faith is largely shaped by the words that they sing. Now some of you are in traditions where you are personally the gatekeeper or selecting the music for a given Sunday. Others of you are like our church where there are actual churches making these choices and choosing from among contemporary music choruses, hymns, whatever you're selecting from. I agree with Brian, there are a lot of pendulum swings in the last thirty years. Some of it is wonderful that we do know God as more intimate and as our friend and all of that, but if you watch the lyrics, it got to the point where that was pretty much all that we were hearing and we lost the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the otherness of God. I think that's something we have to pay attention to all the time. We can't assume that just because you get another CD on your desk, or frankly even in the hymnals, that all of the theology in the lyrics of those hymns or choruses or whatever you're choosing from necessarily would be theology that you would agree with in your church. So, in our situation because we are making those choices, first of all, we do that as a team. It's not a one person decision, because that's a pretty big decision. If we're going to introduce a new song to our congregation, a group of several of us, including, I want to stress, non-musicians, listen to that music, because we're looking at it from a lot of angles. First of all, we're looking at its lyrical integrity. Is this true? Is this scriptural? Does it take our congregation more in one direction or another? That kind of thing. Then musically, obviously we're asking, frankly, the non-musicians like me want to know, is it singable? Because a lot of the stuff, frankly, is really cool for musicians, but the rest of us are lost and can't follow it. Is it excellent? That's a great question too.But getting back to the lyrics, I would encourage songwriters among us and those in the Christian community to recognize their incredible responsibility. I agree there aren't enough songs about certain things. A song came along, I can't remember what chorus it is, but there's one that talks about that our church sings lately, that talks about when we dance upon injustice, I don't remember what song it is. But Brian, it is one of the few songs about that, and I can feel the energy in the room because somebody wrote a song that gave us an opportunity to express something that our church needed and wanted to express, and it's very rare among all the choices that we have. While I agree and celebrate the fact that we are increasingly more aware of the intimacy of God and the fact that we can go to Him with our struggles, etc., I am always watching that pendulum and saying, yes, but are we reverent? Are we aware of His otherness? Are we teaching that well to our children? So, if you have a role of any kind, whether as a pastor or a worship director or whatever your role might be that selects the words that your people are going to express, and that includes Scripture, of course, and any other time that people are going to participate, that is a weighty role. And I urge you to watch for trends in your community, in your faith community, and say, are we bending too far in a given direction? Is there a healthy diet here? Is there a balance here? If a person from another planet who didn't know anything about the Christian faith landed in your community and spent a year there, how healthy and fully dimensioned would their view of God be in singing your music and all the rest?
So that's what I'm concerned about, and I'm especially concerned about in the more contemporary churches that are using mostly new music, because I do think it's not as balanced as it needs to be.