As I stand before you, I am reminded of the last line of Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man:
“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you.”
It is important to tell you that I hope I will speak for you and with you, perhaps “on the lower frequencies,” perhaps not. I am also reminded of the fact that we are here, together, in our place of worship celebrating a liturgy. We are, as the architect Frank Lloyd Wright would say, “from within outward.” We are already where we need to be if we are to make sense together of what I am about to say.
Some weeks ago, I was asked by the rector and assistant minister if I would be part of a Search Committee that would conduct the year-long search for a new Organist/Director of Music at Christ Church. Then, earlier this summer, Susan asked me if I would be willing to preach on one of the Summer Sundays and perhaps talk a bit about worship, liturgy and music at Christ Church as the community enters into an important period of transition and discernment. So, in what I hope will be a very few minutes, I want to offer some things for us to ponder on this first Sunday in August.
The rubric for today could be “mindfulness in transition and change in tradition” and the importance of awareness with respect to music and ritual in our liturgy. Consider this:
The story is told about the Baptism of King Aengus and Saint Patrick in the middle of the 5th Century. Sometime during the rite, Saint Patrick leaned on his sharp-pointed staff and inadvertently stabbed the king’s foot. After the Baptism was over, St. Patrick looked down at all the blood, realized what he had done, and begged the king’s forgiveness. “Why did you suffer this pain in silence?” Patrick wanted to know. “I thought it was part of the ritual,” the king replied.
How’s that for “awareness?” or, perhaps we should say, “non-awareness.” Knowing our own tradition (s) as well as knowing who and what we are working with; knowing differences: this is what poor old King Aengus seems not to have known. (We will come back to this story later, so remember the point.)
As we go forward this year, we want to be mindful of tradition rather than traditionalism. Jaroslav Pelikan has a wonderful way of distinguishing the two terms:
“Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”
Pelikan is arguing that tradition is life, a living definer, that in tradition, the faith of the dead is alive, speaking memory. It is in and out of tradition that we must transition together, knowing full-well that change may be part of the process. Tradition helps make certain that whatever change might come, it will not be change for its own sake.
Here, then, are the specifics at hand. After decades of service in and to the Christ Church Community, John Binsfeld has retired. On this Sunday, August 2, we enter into a period of transition when we will be served by an interim organist and choirmaster. This day also marks the beginning of a year of discernment as the search committee takes on the critical task of finding a permanent replacement for John. In this process, we will want to think about and talk about what worship is at Christ Church, about what it has been and what we want it to be. We will also want to ask ourselves what it means to worship and this will lead us to examine what liturgy – “official public worship”—is at Christ Church and how we want it to be, given the special history of the Christ Church community. And liturgy leads us to music and music leads us to singing, one act of full participation that the congregation of a worshipping community can embrace. John Piper has written that “singing is the Christian’s way of saying: God is so great that thinking will not suffice—there must be deep feeling—and talking will not suffice; there must be singing.” Singing can carry depths and heights and intensities of emotion and prayer that recitation cannot. It may very well be, however, that the prayer of singing is still somewhat unknown to us. Should this be the case, we can turn to today’s readings for illumination.
In Exodus 16, we have a passage that may sound like a weather report but is, in fact, not about the weather. What is “weather” is really manna, the bread that rains from heaven.
This manna is the daily bread of the Lord, the Lord himself. The Old Testament asks “what is this stuff,” as the complaining Israelites did of Moses, for they didn’t know. (The New Testament question, as we see in John 6, is “Who is he” ? For us, of course, “he” is the Lord and the Life –the bread—that God gives us.) What this Exodus passage helps us understand is that we need to learn again and again how to ask questions and listen for the answers, how to listen to wisdom. More specifically, the passage instructs us to learn to know when to eat and how to recognize the food that is our daily bread.
In Ephesians 4, Paul tells us in no uncertain terms that it is time to grow up; time to recognize our gifts, those gifts given by God, and to become full adults in the Lord, growing up “in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” As always, Paul is demanding our awareness, that we recognize and listen to wisdom and that we do so in the Lord Christ. The gift of Paul—and the charisma of the liturgical year and its cycle of scripture readings—is that he seldom fails to connect the Old Testament reading with the Gospel passage.
In the Gospel passage for today, John 6, we find the confirmation we’ve been waiting for, that it was God, through Moses, who gave us the “bread from heaven,” the “bread of life.” It is the disciples who do our work for us by asking the Lord “to give us this bread always.” The Lord responds in that well-known last verse of the gospel reading, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
This is not light reading nor is it light listening. Even as individual people of faith in a community of faith, we continue to have difficulty understanding fully and accepting fully what is behind those words from The Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Even though we know, we still don’t know and we struggle to believe and practice that our daily bread is here, in this liturgy, this Eucharist, and that it is ours for the taking. Let’s put it another way. The Bread of Life is not in the life of the mind. The Lord, who is the Bread of Life, is not in our minds but in our hearts, our souls, and in one another. God is here, not there, in our minds
Now maybe we can have a greater sense of how important it is to embrace and be embraced by the Bread of Life and by the instrument of song, and to sing our prayers from our hearts and souls, to allow ourselves to be lifted up and have actually prayed what we have seen and heard and sung.
I have gone on for more than a few minutes, though I hope I still have given you some things to ponder. Let me conclude, then, by referencing Barbara Brown Taylor, the very same Barbara Brown Taylor whose book, An Altar to the World, will be the basis for the Christ Church Fall ’09 small group program on spiritual growth you have heard so much about lately. One of the reasons Barbara Brown Taylor is a theologian and I am not comes with this passage, a more concentrated and powerful version of what I have shared with you at much greater length.
When I hear people talk about what is wrong with organized religion, or why their mainline churches are failing, I hear about bad music, inept clergy, mean congregations, and preoccupation with institutional maintenance. I almost never hear about the intellectualization of faith, which strikes me as a far greater danger than anything else on the list. In an age of information overload, when a vast variety of media delivers news faster than most of us can digest—when many of us have at least two e-mail addresses, two telephone numbers, and one fax number—the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, which have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies. Not more about God. More God. (The Christian Century, 27 January 2009)
The ritual of worship, and the Lord God himself in the Eucharist, demand that we sing with our hearts and souls and not with our brains, and that we do so with full attention and full awareness, all the while quietly remembering the sharp-pointed staff of Saint Patrick and the “I thought it was part of the ritual” of King Aengus.