Annual Meeting, 2011
You Are Called to Tell
the Story:
Restoring the Word to
Weekly Worship
J. Marty Luti
True
story: Sunday morning at a small Episcopal Church in eastern
Now
the detail about the slip matters, because after everything was over, the
ushers and some of the choir members got into a heated discussion about whether
the person in the wedding gown was a woman or a man, and the clinching argument
of those who said “man” was that no woman would wear a black slip under a white
dress.
In
any case, the bride appears in the doorway followed by two elderly members of
the congregation. They’d been getting into their car when the bride appeared at
the passenger side window and asked for a ride. When they’d responded, “But
where do you want to go?”, the bride had said, “With
you. Where are you going?”
And
so they all came to church.
And
now they’re here. The elderly couple slides into the back pew. Being life-long
Episcopalians, they quickly find the right page in the prayer book and bury
their faces in it. The bride, meanwhile, spots the choir, seated up front in
the chancel. The bride looks sideways at the ushers, then back up front at the
folks in the red robes. The choir’s just catching wind of what’s going on in the
back. Meaningful glances are exchanged.
Now,
there are two miracles in this story. Here’s the first one: Without skipping a
beat, the whole choir, all seven of them, squeeze together until there’s room
for the bride, who by this time is already halfway down the center aisle and
bearing down on them. It’s only then that anyone notices the spiky head of a
large, green, real live iguana that’s tucked into a side pocket of the gown.
The
bride and the iguana arrive at the choir stall just in time for the sung
responsive psalm, whose refrain that morning is a simple “Alleluia”, which the
bride belts out to the tune of something that sounds a lot like “I Got You,
Babe.”
Then
the second miracle occurs: By now it’s time to read the Gospel of the day, and
so, as happens in many Episcopal churches, the big red book that contains the
reading is carried high overhead halfway down the center aisle, accompanied by
candles, incense, and singing. Everyone stands up. And there, in the center of
the congregation, the Word of Life is proclaimed.
The
reading this morning is from John. The raising of Lazarus.
The priest begins the familiar story: Jesus hears that his friend is sick, but
takes his time going to see him. By the time he arrives, Lazarus has been dead
four days. His distraught sisters, Mary and Martha, have a hard time
understanding why Jesus didn’t come right away. Martha even reproaches him:
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.” But Jesus assures
her that Lazarus will live again. He says, “I am the resurrection and the
life.”
When
she gets to the place where Jesus asks Martha, “Do you believe this?”, the priest pauses for dramatic effect. Then she raises
her voice a bit and proceeds: “Do you believe this?” And the bride in the choir
stall with the iguana in her pocket and the black slip underneath a white dress—apparently
not knowing that one should not be paying close attention to a weird old story;
apparently not understanding that the proper way to hear the Good News is
passively; apparently not knowing that an honest response is not actually
required—jumps out of her seat and screams, “Yes, I do! Yes, I do!”
Now,
I’ve told you this story, the one about the bride, but I could have told you
another one about a 6-year-old who burst into tears at our morning service when
we read the story in which Jesus talks about hating your mother and your
father, and who thought that belonging to our church family meant she would
never belong to her own family again.
Or
about the time at the weekly evening jazz service when one of the wealthiest
members of the congregation, who’s also one of the most admirable Christians
I’ve even known, stood up to read with deep conviction that section from the
Sermon on the Mount about going one more mile and offering the other cheek and
giving away your coat. After the service one of the homeless men who attended
the service tracked him down just as he was putting on his cashmere overcoat to
leave, and asked him for it.
Or
about the day when one of the texts was that disconcerting bit from Acts about
how Annanias and Sapphira
dropped dead after lying to the apostles. When she finished, the reader said
what we always say: “This is the Word of the Lord!”,
and everyone dutifully responded, “Thanks be to God!”— except
one cheeky teen who said, “It is?”
There
are others stories, but these will suffice to make my first point. Or rather to
raise a first question: Is it an exaggeration to say that the addled, the very
young, the marginalized, and the impudent are the only ones left in and around
our churches who actually hear what
the Spirit is saying in the very bad and very good news of the Bible?
Or
to put it another way: How come only the bride stood up to make a profession of
resurrection faith when the text demanded it? Why didn’t the little girl’s
parents also weep at the radical Christian truth that only one family really
counts in God’s eyes, and it isn’t the nuclear one? Why is anyone surprised
when a homeless guy turns out to be Jesus? And why didn’t the entire
congregation rise up when Annanias and Sapphira got zapped, and admit the truth—that the Word of
God always has consequences, and that sometimes the Bible is very, very
strange?
Now,
I know that many people in our churches, including you, and sometimes even me, do hear and respond to the biblical word
every bit as personally and genuinely as the people in my stories do—we just
tend to do it less demonstratively. But it’s also true that for many others,
including you, and especially me, listening to the scripture being read in
worship is too often about as thrilling or terrifying or consoling or objectionable
or strange as listening to a recitation from the phone book.
Okay,
I’m exaggerating. Or am I? Maybe not so much.
People
who study these things propose lots of historic, cultural, generational, and
even moral reasons for the apparent spiritual disconnect many church-going people
have with the Bible today. I’m not going to talk about that sort of data. I
want to share instead some first-hand observations, things I’ve noticed and questions
I’ve been asking myself as I’ve visited churches over the last 3 years and
talked with many people and their pastors about what they’re doing in worship.
Let’s
start with this one: Maybe one reason some folks seem indifferent to the
biblical Word, or at least muted in their response to its impact, is that they
are not being given very much of it to respond to in the first place.
Now,
we’ve all been taught that one of the things that makes
Protestants Protestants is the centrality of the
Bible in everything we do; but when it comes to the amount of scripture read
publicly in weekly worship, one wonders. Since the mid-1960’s, after the
reforms of the Second Vatican Council, it turns out that Roman Catholics hear
far more scripture at one Sunday Mass than most free church Protestants hear in
a month of Sundays.
The
weekly standard in Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, and Episcopal churches is to
read one Old Testament text, one psalm, one passage from the epistles, and one
from one of the gospels. And when you mention this in a gathering of UCC clergy
(and I know because I’ve done it many times), and if you imply that there’s
something potentially fruitful about that classic pattern, some colleagues nod
their heads in agreement, but the majority react dismissively: ‘My people would
never stand for that.’ ‘It would make the service too long.’ ‘Mine would be
bored to death.’ ‘I was always taught that you shouldn’t read more scripture
than you are going to preach on.’ ‘They don’t understand the little they do
get, why pile more on?’ And, ironically, ‘That’s too Catholic.’
For
the last 3 years, I’ve done a rough survey of worship bulletins from randomly
selected New England UCC and American Baptist churches, about 45 a year. A full 65% list as a “reading” or “lesson” only one passage from
scripture. There may be other scriptural echoes in the service— verses
from a psalm used in the call to worship, for example, or in the words of
assurance after a confession; or a responsive reading of some kind—but in the
slot reserved for the formal proclamation of “The Word”, the scripture that
gets read tends to be slim.
In
some congregations, only a few short verses are read in that slot. And I wish I
could say that they are the verses that gave rise to the sermon, but more often
they are verses that have been hunted down and pasted in after the preacher has decided what the sermon will be about. The
sermon drives the reading and hearing of scripture, not the other way around.
(This sort of thing merits a lecture all its own, but that’s for another day.)
The
light serving of texts many congregations receive each week has a significant
“de-formative” impact on people’s growth in faith. As scripture itself reminds
us, “Faith comes by hearing. So how will they believe if they do not hear? And
how will they hear if no one proclaims it to them?” And if scripture is not
grounding and shaping people’s faith week after week, what is? If weekly
communal worship does not arise from a contemplation of scripture; if it is not
being shaped by the wisdom of scripture; if it is not imbued with the rhythms,
images and impulses of scripture; if it is not telling the story that scripture
tells in all its breadth, depth, complexity and challenge; and if scripture is
not permitted to speak for itself, and to speak at leisure, what are the influences that have taken
center stage? What is the story that is shaping our worship, if not God’s
own? What other images and impulses are
we moving to? What other vision of the way the world ought to be are we
imagining and rehearsing for?
And
how will worship that is in some senses unscriptural
have the wherewithal to do what worship is supposed to do, namely, make of us,
over time, a biblical people; stamp
us over time with a distinctively biblical character, and keep before our missional eyes a distinctively biblical vision of the
world? In other words, if not from scripture read persistently week after week,
season after season in our assemblies, then from where are we drawing our communal
identity? If Scripture does not
clarify it for us, someone or something else will, and maybe it will be the
very things scripture demands we stand against.
It’s happened before, too many times to count.
In
many churches, the reading of scripture is not only dishearteningly brief, it is also increasingly irrelevant as scripture.
One can see this in the way it is often separated from the sermon in the order
of worship. You still see, for example, a lot of worship orders in which the
sermon is kept for the very last thing. The scripture on the other hand has
been read earlier, or in some cases, it’s been sprinkled throughout the
service. There’s no attempt to present the biblical witness and the sermon as a
unified act. This is one way we are teaching people that the Word we read is
only tangentially related to what a preacher has to say.
In
one UCC service I recently attended the one short text of the day was separated
from the 20-minute sermon by no fewer than five other worship elements,
including a children’s time, a ceremony honoring Boy Scout leaders, the
offering, anthem, and pastoral prayer.
By the time the sermon rolled around, I’d pretty much forgotten what had
been read. And so when the preacher began her sermon by saying, “As Jesus says
to the Pharisees this morning…” I thought, “Oh, was
that this morning he was talking to
those guys? I was a lot younger then!”
When
scripture and sermon are not connected in one unified act of proclamation, the
sermon is unduly privileged over the biblical Word, and it becomes harder and
harder to grasp that the reading of scripture is, or ought to be, a focal
point, a main event, of worship. As important as it may be, in the end the
sermon is in a sense properly understood as the scripture’s partner—its
continuation, reception, elaboration, and (we trust) its wise application.
But
even if the scripture and the sermon are kept together within the same zip
code, it still doesn’t mean that we regard scripture as a ‘main event.’ One of
the clues to the importance we assign to the public reading of scripture
relative to the sermon is the way we routinely pray more for the preacher and
his sermon than we do for the reader of scripture and the hearers of the Word.
You know what I’m referring to? The preacher comes to the pulpit and begins her
sermon with a prayer, often this one: “O Lord, may the
words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart (or ‘of all our hearts’) be
acceptable to you, my rock and redeemer.”
What’s
great about this practice is that we get to hear one more bit of scripture—this
prayer is, as you probably all know, the final verse of Psalm 19. But what’s
problematic about this practice is that it assumes we need divine help and
favor for a faithful delivery of a sermon, but need no such help or favor for
the reading and hearing of the scriptural Word. This is not to say that a
preacher doesn’t need prayer, especially if she’s been up all Saturday night
trying to finish the gosh darn thing. But the reader
of the text and the hearers of that Word are equally in need of divine
assistance, because what’s being read and received is the revelation of a great
mystery of unaccountable and unfathomable mercy—and the promise is that if the
church comes to it wide open to take it in, we will, at least potentially, be
made new. Reading and hearing scripture
in the Sunday assembly is an act with consequences.
To
be able to listen with wide open ears of faith, to be able to grasp what we are
hearing with our hearts and minds, and to be moved to enact and embody what we
are hearing in lives of discipleship—these are gifts and capacities that
require divine initiative and support, and so we need to ask for grace so that
our reading and hearing is not a presumptuous or a temerious
act.
In
the order of worship, the “slot” our Reformed forebears traditionally reserved
for asking for God’s help was not before the sermon, but before the reading of scripture;
and the prayer (called the prayer for understanding or illumination) they
inserted in the liturgy was meant to encompass both, because it recognizes them
as one unified act.
We
prayed such a prayer before reading the Samaritan woman’s story last evening in
worship. Maybe you remember:
Spirit
of the Living God,
turn on the light of God’s truth
and wake up our hearts
by the Word we now declare.
In
ancient pages let us find fresh life,
fresh hope, and fresh courage
for witness in your world.
In
Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Now,
let me be clear about this ‘prayer for understanding.’ We pray for
understanding because the wisdom of God’s Word is different from human wisdom,
and therefore it’s hard for finite hearts and ‘common sense’ to grasp it. But we
don’t pray for help because scripture is “hard” in an academic sense. This is
an important distinction, because another reason many people react passively to
scripture is that they think scripture is for the pros. It’s
archaic stuff from a holy book you can’t expect to understand, or maybe you
aren’t even supposed to understand.
Which is why you tune it out until they’re done reading so you can focus on the
sermon, because that’s when, if
you’re lucky, someone is actually going to talk to you, and you might get a
nugget to take home with you, something that connects with you and applies to
the way you live your life.
This
sense that the proclaimed Word is beyond the reach of your basic regular pew
potato comes in part from the fact that for the last few generations, Bible
study and preaching have been dominated by the historical-critical method. This
scholarly approach to the Bible has persuaded us that we will only really
understand what we’re reading if we know a lot more than we do now about the
historical context and the literary forms of the Bible.
And
in a way that’s true. If you’ve ever had new light shed on some story of
scripture from a footnote that explained the use of the slingshot as a weapon
of war in the age of King David, or from a Sunday School teacher who told you
that a stone water jug of the kind that confronted Jesus at the wedding in Cana
could hold as many as 30 gallons, you know that ‘knowing things’ can really be
a boon to understanding what’s going on in these sacred pages.
But
knowing stuff about the Bible is not
the only way to know the Bible. It could even be a misleading and deceptive way
if it allows us to think of scripture as a nut to be cracked by intellectual
effort instead of as revelation, an
illuminating, graced, and saving story, that we
receive from the hand of God’s grace. Or if it leads us to think that the ‘real
meaning’ of the text is somehow embedded in scholarly information about the
text, and not in a devout, expectant, and subjective interaction with the
simple reading of a given passage, a reading guided by the Spirit in
open-hearted hope that we will be met in our reading and hearing by the living
God.
Our
hearing of the Word is undoubtedly enhanced by historical-critical study, and I
would never discourage anyone from making it a routine part of his or her
approach to Scripture. The more you can know, the
better. But I am continually chastened in my own life-long study by this realization:
No one has ever been healed or saved or sent because they knew that if you were
buying a sheep in Jesus’ time it might set you back a couples
of drachmas. Conversion and transformation happen instead when, over time and
by grace, we befriend the Bible; and
when, like the best kind of friend, it tells us the truth about ourselves, as
that truth is reflected in its vast array of stories of human joy and pain,
struggle and anguish, sin and death, horror and loss, and the unimaginable
reach of divine mercy.
But
even if we were all first-class scripture scholars, and even if we loaded up on
prayers for illumination, we might still have a hard time understanding what’s
being read to us in worship because oftentimes scripture is read so poorly.
There are splendid exceptions, of course; but everyone here has experienced
disappointment, frustration, and confusion when a reader stumbles through the
text obviously unprepared, or speaks too fast or too quietly, or reads the Word
of Life as if it were a toaster oven manual, or reads it so expressively you
think you’ve wandered into a class on method acting; or has such a disturbing
voice that no can bear to listen to it, or … insert your own examples.
In
the history of Christian worship there was a time when ‘reader’ was a
designated liturgical role requiring a license and a kind of ordination.
It still is in some parts of the Christian Church. I’m not suggesting we revive
the formal office of lector as such, but I am suggesting that the role of
reader is such an important one for the health and well-being of the church
that it deserves a lot more attention than it gets in the local setting. It
requires intentionality, and that, of course, means time; and in many of our
congregations we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded by the Devil that we
don’t have any. Which is just what old Scratch hopes we’ll conclude, because he
knows what can happen when we make time to discern the gifts of the
congregation, spot folks who have a talent for reading or who may develop one, call
them to this ministry, and support them in it. The last thing he wants is for
the Word to come alive, because when the Word is a living, active Word, all
bets are off!
And
so he tries a different tack, awakening in some congregations a stubborn
‘democratic’ bias against singling people out because of gift or merit. This is a way of thinking that wants to
protect the purity of congregationalism from the onslaughts of elitism. In this
view, anyone and everyone who steps up and volunteers should be welcome to
read, ready or not; and if as a result of this lack of discrimination the
reading isn’t all that good, well, that’s just the price you pay for being
inclusive and welcoming. I find this baffling—not to mention unscriptural, for Scripture
says that the Spirit bestows gifts differing
to us all, and that the church depends for its vitality and faithfulness on the
right people with the right gifts using them in the right way at the right
times for the right purposes in the right spirit of gratitude and generosity.
So…
having heard all this, and regretting that we don’t have time for one or two
more musings and observations, about the Scripture in our worship, let me make
some suggestions, by way of summary, of some things you might think about
doing, going forward:
1.
Read more scripture in worship, not less. Gradually expand to at least two texts
each week so that God’s people can hear scriptures from both testaments with
regularity. If you are the preacher, don’t fret that you may not be able to
touch on both in your sermon. Allow other elements of the service to echo the
reading you are ignoring—we can “comment” on scripture in so many ways—hymns,
confessions and assurances, prayers of praise and thanksgiving….
2.
Lead the congregation in prayer for illumination before scripture is read
publicly in worship, so that with God’s help, we may read and hear the Word
expectantly. No matter how difficult or lovely, painful or consoling the text,
teach people to expect to meet God in what’s being read. Anticipate something more, and sometimes you will receive
it.
3.
Increase opportunities for Bible study outside worship (many different
kinds—academic and devotional, individual and group). Bible study outside
worship is a natural complement to serious efforts to make the story come alive
in worship.
4.
Discern God’s gifts and call people to use them for the up-building of the
church through the public reading of scripture.
Be spiritually prepared to say no to some who lack this gift or do not
show signs they can develop it, or who are not seeking to read for the right
reasons. Then train readers. Even good readers need training so that scripture
is delivered with all the grace and expressive care possible, thus enabling
people to hear God’s word as if for the first time, every congregation should
have some way to help gifted people grow in their role as readers of the Word.
8.
Bring creativity, reverence, depth, and joy to the public presentation of the
texts in the service. (Almost all the workshops of yesterday and today address
this challenge. I trust you are learning a lot and will get great ideas to try
out.)—communal readings, dramatic readings, readings with sung refrains and
interspersed responses, use of media of every kind; as well as more reverent
and celebratory treatment of the book itself, after the patterns of our
forebears who even adorned their service lectionary and carried it in jubilant
procession to the place from which it would be read, often in the center of the
congregation.
NB:
Not all creativity is useful: need to discern together in each context a set of
local guidelines and some standards of appropriateness/some way to help people
avoid making “creativity” or relevance or humor an end in itself. The end
should be a love for scripture and for the God revealed in scripture, and the
desire for a more subjective interaction with it.
9.
Restore the ancient art of knowing by heart, through rumination, pondering, and
memorization of texts. Nothing ushers a congregation more swiftly into the love
and delightful savoring of God’s story than a communal commitment to learning
some scripture by heart. And perhaps even telling it the same
way.
10.
Finally, every day get down on your knees and thank your Maker that the
church’s book—this stupendous, complex, rich, vexing, infuriating, stunning,
true book we call the Bible—is not
what so many Christians have been misled to believe its is! It is not a
textbook of interesting if arcane material; not a guide to moral living meant
to make us better persons (as if God cared about that self-seeking enterprise);
not by any stretch a settler of social issues and political arguments, since
even the Devil can quote scripture and still frequently does; not a book merely
of exclusively private devotion either, but the book that norms and keeps the church
true to the God who saves, inspiring constant awe and unending gratitude—the story
of that God’s life with us and for us; a story to be continued….