Preached on Sunday, July 11, 2010 by the Rev. Winton Boyd
For over a week, 5 of my 7 siblings, my mom and some Belgian friends and I had been bicycling through small towns in England. After a chaotic landing at Gatwick airport, the unpacking of bikes in the terminal, riding through London and finally making our way to the quieter countryside, we had spent several days riding small country roads, staying in youth hostels, eating at local pubs and enjoying one another. About a week into our 2 week journey, we road on to the beach in southern England. I don’t remember the name of it, but it was famous for having over 20 different colors of sand. Waves crashing, sun shining, we locked our bikes and strolled onto the beach, chatting, laughing, running.
Within moments, however, our behavior changed. Our conversation morphed into both silence and solitude, as we split up and walked mostly alone. Our bubbly spirits turned to awe. Our afternoon plan of biking another 20-30 miles was scuttled – for standing in the presence of the ocean waves with their deafening sound , the majestic beach, and the opportunity for reflection – we stood in reverence, amazement, wonder and delight. However we described it, we stood in the presence of a power and source more real than anything else we could imagine that June afternoon.
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Scott Russell Sanders, in his memoir, A Private History of Awe, writes, “on a spring day in 1950, when I was big enough to run about on my own two legs yet small enough to ride in my father’s arms, he carried me onto the porch of a farmhouse in Tennessee and held me against his chest, while thunder roared and lightening flared and rain sizzled around us. (I felt) the tingle of power that surges through bone and rain and everything.
The search for communion with this power has run like a bright thread through all of my days…I wish to follow that bright thread, from my earliest inklings to my latest intuitions of the force that animates nature and mind. In the world’s religions, the animating power may be called God, Logos, Allah, Brahma, Ch’I, Tao, Creator, Holy Ghost, Great Spirit, Universal Mind, Manitou, Wkan-tanka or a host of other names. In physics, it may simply be called energy… Every such name, I believe, is only a finger pointing toward the prime reality, which eludes all description. “(p.3)
Our lives, he suggests, or the journey of faith, is a continual effort to stay attuned to such “openings” – openings into the power, the hope, the animation, and the wonder of that force, that love. The potential of a faith community is that together we can discover and share these inklings, learn to trust them, share them, and respond to them.
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We continue our journey today through the summer series on the “Phoenix Affirmations” – a series of faith affirmations assembled in the last few years by some Arizona pastors and churches as an attempt to articulate a progressive Christian faith. This week’s affirmation is that we express our love in worship that is as sincere, vibrant, and artful as it is scriptural.
What I appreciate about this affirmation is that lifts up worship not just as a noun – not just as an event or a happening or a gathering of a church community on a Sunday morning – but also as a verb. As a noun, worship is a weekly event, a weekly gathering, an opportunity for music and prayer, sharing of community, preaching or listening to preaching.
As a verb, however, worship is a spiritual practice that helps us connect, or reconnect, with awe. The Grubb Institute in London – an applied research foundation working globally to mobilize values, faiths and beliefs as a resource for the transformation, healing and repair of organizations, people and society – has developed a theory of worship that says the primary goal of worship is to “lose ourselves.” When I taught confirmation – I often used this definition to help students and mentors think more broadly about the spiritual practice of worship.
In the context of a worship service, we might “lose ourselves,” in many ways…
We sing a song that moves our spirit, or a familiar hymn that brings us back to another moment in our life, allowing us to relive or remember – and for a few moments we “lose ourselves” in time and space;
We listen to the words or stories of a preacher, bringing us an amazingly personal question or an insight into our own life and faith. So lost are we in our thoughts that we may not hear another word of the service
We listen to someone we know, or don’t know stand to share a tender, vulnerable prayer of concern, and our heart leaves the particular moment as we feel a connection more basic than words.
We take the bread and the wine of communion among the familiar faces of friends and we are humbled, inspired and encouraged that we don’t walk alone in this world.
In giving of ourselves to these moments, we have also given of ourselves to something and someone greater than us – who Christians name most often as God.
While these moments may not happen every week; and while there may be other reasons we come to church, we hope they happen often enough…
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If we are honest, we can acknowledge that many people don’t come to church, in fact, because there is nothing awe-ful, artful, or vibrant that connects with them. This may come from bad experiences or lack of experience or even too much experience.
However, in a cultural context where participation in organized religion is less and less of a given; and where the demands on our time from other things is greater and greater; we are forced to ask, why is Sunday worship important? In what way is gathering as a community with the hope that we may “lose ourselves” or experience “awe” compelling or important? How does gathering for worship help us the rest of the week? Is there any connection between what we experience here and the rest of our daily lives?
Because liturgy, another way of saying worship, is literally, “the work of the people,” – how we attain awe-ful spiritual connections in our gathering together is by definition an evolving practice. Not only is it unlikely to look the same today as it did 30 years ago – because we don’t look the same and don’t have the same needs – it needs to have constant input. Our Adult Faith Formation ministry is looking at sermon or worship talkbacks this fall – giving us a chance to dialogue together immediately after a service. I, and your other pastors, are always open to your thoughts and insights regarding worship.
That being said, let me explore with you a bit about what makes for vibrant and inspiring worship and why it is important.
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1. Weekly worship involves community – not just a community of choice but also a community of faith and diversity. Twice in the last couple of months, people not currently part of this congregation have told me how much they wish they had a community like this. A community that exposes them to the diversity of life, a community that walks with them through the years and many life changes, a community that loves them for who they are not what they do or what they look like. While there are too many listless and boring churches in the world, there is little else that can – when lived well – replace the power and potency of a community of faithful people in our lives.
While statistics bear out that people who are part of organized faith communities are healthier in many ways –they are less lonely, their marriages and partnerships are stronger, their children are more stable – we know this in more intangible or anecdotal ways. We know for ourselves, and others, the potential for loneliness and isolation. A community can’t solve that completely, and our engagement requires effort on our part – but most of us need others to hold ourselves accountable to the lives we want to live, the values we seek to espouse, and the relationships we want to honor. With so many opportunities for involvement or engagement, participation in a congregation has multiple avenues for offering compassion, a sense of purpose, a lived reality of hope.
I have reflected recently with other colleagues that most of us under appreciate the power of a loving congregation in a child or teenager’s life – whether that young person be well adjusted, struggling, gay or lesbian, from a stable or broken home. I know this because I know how difficult it is to erase the damage of a judgmental community or a community that has rejected a young person. Just as it is difficult to erase the negative effects of a bad community experience, it is almost impossible to calculate the power of an affirming, loving, and awe introducing community – AND a community that has a purpose greater than itself.
2. Just as important, authentic community worship understands and celebrates that there is a fine line between vibrant, artful expressions of awe inside a building and the same outside a building. An authentic worshipping community doesn’t pretend it owns the market on awe; rather it seeks to bring the natural world and its power to amaze and overwhelm us into the sanctuary; and it seeks to affirm that the sanctuary – the sacred space of the Holy One – exists all around us. It was significant to me that when our building committee began engaging architects over a year ago and asked them about their “green philosophy” – two of the three firms began by stating that an important way to become ‘green’ is to blur the lines between the inside and outside world – with light, windows, air movement. Enhance our greenness by enhancing our appreciation of what is outside while we are inside. The ultimate expression of this – which wasn’t feasible or practical but was totally engaging – was to create a wall in this sanctuary that would allow for worship to happen inside and outside simultaneously. In the same way, we seek to tap any and all vibrant artistic and musical expressions we can in worship and in our live together.
2. Exposure to the spiritual practice of worship gives us the tools to find awe, and to “lose ourselves” in our daily lives of school, work, relationships and facing various challenges. The more we experience and appreciate awe in a community of other worshippers, the more readily we can sense the possibility of what Sanders called “openings” in the everyday, the mundane. The more exposure we have to open hearted vulnerable prayer by others, the more likely we will know how to turn to prayer in the situations of our lives. The more we experience music as a transforming spiritual experience, the easier it will be to tap that source within ourselves in other situations. Our friend and frequent collaborator here, Elaine Kirkland, often says that worship is practice for life. Worship in a community setting on Sunday morning isn’t designed to be the pinnacle of our week – but rather than collaborative act of attending to mystery, relishing community and inspiring awe – all as prelude for those same things each and every day.
What this means of course is that worship by definition is participatory and active; it is not a spectator sport nor is it passive. But that makes sense because it prepares and supports us in living the fullest life possible.
May we open ourselves to that mystery, offer ourselves in humility and love to that One behind all mystery and awe.
