The Liturgical Turn: Public Display of Worship

It’s easy to become overly connected to place.  It seems better to stay in Egypt instead of making the journey to the Promise Land because there’s a desert in between.   It’s easier because it’s comfortable, familiar, and controlled.  None of which are necessarily bad per se, but they can and most often do lead to complacency, which results in a liturgical solipsism that leaving one closed off to otherness. 

I’m speaking from experience.  Recently my church moved from a comfortable little chapel to the local YMCA.  Before, we gathered for worshiped in a comfortable, familiar, and controlled place, but now we’re in a place where it is anything but familiar. We have an hour’s worth of set up to do before the service and need to have everything out of the gym before noon.   The move itself was a planned move on the part of us in leadership in order in to move us from the edges of society closer to the heart of community happenings. 

Reflecting on the fact that we now worship in a community gymnasium is pretty exciting to me because it’s a great way to be missional and to let certain aspects of the nature of worship flourish which have a tendency to be forgotten.

Let me explain it this way (please forgive the possible stream-of-consciousness thought that may follow).  Sometimes, like the woman at the well, it’s easy to get hung up on where we worship (although important) and miss why we worship and what we’re actually doing when we worship.

Alexander Schmemann, in For The Life of the World, wrote that “it is only in worship that [humanity] has the source and the possibility of that knowledge which is communion, and of that communion which fulfills itself as true knowledge: knowledge of God and therefore knowledge of the world – communion with God and therefore communion with all that exists” (p. 120). Worship, according to Schmemann, is our essential relationship with the rest of humanity and shows the world to be essentially “sacramental” insofar as it expresses God’s “revelation, presence, and power.”  In other words, the world in essence is an “epiphany of God” and is expressed as such through worship. 

Because worship shows the world to be sacramental, we therefore need things of the world in our worship. Schmemann writes, “We need water and oil, bread and wine in order to be in communion with God and to know Him.  Yet conversely … it is this communion with God by means of ‘matter’ that reveals the true meaning of ‘matter,’ i.e. of the world itself.” (p.121).  In the liturgical act material things receive their true nature and destiny.  For example, it is in baptism that water fulfills its proper function. 

The Lutheran liturgical theologian, Gordon Lathrop, has a similar discussion of the use of “things” in worship.  In his book, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology, he notes that there are certain things that are needed in order to have a church.  People, he states, are the primary objects, because the church is essentially an assembly, but not an assembly for assembly’s sake.  He writes, “People gather around something, they gather to do something” (p. 87).  What they gather to do is to enact the faith, read the scriptures, and receive the sacraments. The tradition suggests that to ‘have church’ there must be water, bread and wine.  However, simply having these is not enough, they must be set in motion, used, and made to do something specific.  In a little longer passage he explains,“People do not gather at water only, but at a bath, and a bath interpreted by words and by other things set next to the bathing … People do not gather to a book, but to that book opened, read, and turned into current address to this assembly.  Nor do they gather to bread and wine or cup and plate, but to a meal, to the prayer and the sharing of food that make up common eating.” (p. 89).

Lathrop intentionally uses terms like bath and meal instead of Eucharist and baptism. He believes that these terms show that these are things set out in order to fulfill humanity’s needs.  Humans need cleanliness and they need food. They also need relationship and this is why Lathrop prefers the term “things”.  He tells us that things are not simply static objects that exist in an independent, self-sustaining manner.  Instead he draws on an Old Norse understanding of the term that defines things as “objects in relationships” (p. 90).  In this way people, objects, and words are all “things” because they all need others in order to simply be and they rightly become things when they are put to motion.

Lathrop also suggests that in the meeting (i.e. church), these things also awaken our imaginations by proposing to us that the world has a center. That is, Christ is our center and he forces us to imagine a world in which there is peace and not chaos.  This is important insofar as it directs our attention outward.  We come to the central things of the worship and they refocus us out to the world.

The central things of bread and wine suggest to the worshippers the fact of locality and community.  These things are made from things grown from the earth which are then harvested and made into something life sustaining.  There is a mystery here in that nobody caused the grains to grow. Therefore, the very existence of the grains comes not from human will, but from elsewhere, from God.  Lathrop suggests that the bread is made in order to be shared. Because of this, bread can invoke hope for a peaceful and ordered world.  It therefore points outward to the rest of the world in which people die because of lack of bread and gives hope, that when used within the meeting and blessed to become a sacrament of Christ, that one day it will be eaten at a feast in which in which all will be fed abundantly. 

Wine, in this way, as a part of that same blessing, suggests both feast and community.  Wine must be shared.  If hoarded and possessed as a commodity it only leads to drunkenness, which is a misuse of the drink.  However when properly shared, it brings joy to all and gives the community a sense of transcendence.  Lathrop explains that wine does more than just quench our thirst.  He writes, “The slight inebriation it causes can moderate our inhibitions, enable our communal speech, and encourage our shared joy.  It has come to be associated with a spirit of festivity; the psalmist calls it  ‘wine to gladden the human heart’ (Ps. 104:15).  But then we have a symbol of near-intoxication that suggests transcendence and communal hopes for a larger feast than this festival can contain.” (p. 92). Actually, I think he overstates the case, but I really like that quote!

The setting in motion of bread and wine is the space of the Eucharist.  Insofar as they are used for this purpose, their created destinies are brought to their proper telos.  The water, when blessed and used in baptism brings about the sacramental potential of the water.  It communicates God’s grace and places the person into the Body of Christ (church). In the same way, the bread and wine, when blessed communicates the body and blood of Christ to the one who is already the Body of Christ.  The feast makes community.

In the liturgy people use things and in the use of those things they are brought to their fulfillment as sacraments of God’s grace and revelation. This brings me to, Aiden Kavanagh, who, following Schmemann, says, in his important book On Liturgical Theology that this is what happens when God “recreates the World not by making new things but by making all things new.” (p. 50). In fact this is the task of the Church and what, he believes, ultimately happens in liturgy. 

Kavanagh has this great discussion in which he suggests that before modernity, cities used to be places of “transactions with ultimate reality.” They were places were ideas were formed and arts were made.  With the coming of secularization, the city became profaned because it was no longer seen in reference to the world.  The church he suggests offers a different view of humanity, the world, and the city.  Kavanagh suggests that the Church, because of its liturgy is the “central workshop of the human City, a City which under grace has already begun to mutate by fits and starts into the City-of-God-in-the-making, the focal point of the world made new in Christ Jesus.” (p. 42). In other words, it is both the Church and the world that have been redeemed by Christ.  The church’s task is that of reconciliation, which God did through Christ between Him and the created world.  Thus, Kavanagh criticizes the Church for moving beyond the center of the city where it can no longer witness to this reconciliation.  This is a thoroughly modern thing to do. 

Plenty of ink has been spilt criticizing suburban ecclesiology and I really don’t intended to follow that discussion here. But I do think that Kavanagh is right to suggest that the church was never meant to be abstracted from the center of the city.  Kavanagh shows that in its earliest stages, Christian liturgy began in the earliest hours of the day and carried on throughout the day, throughout the entire city.  It never stayed in one place, showing that the liturgy was for everyone.  It was a full public liturgy that was meant to show that the church in its liturgy “manifested in its deepest nature in the human civitas as the presence, the embodiment in the world of the World to come, of the Kingdom, of the new and final age. It was the church of Jesus Christ being most overtly itself before God in the world on humanity’s human stage.” (p.57). Kavanagh calls this the church doing the world.  That is, the church enacting the redeemed world, which doesn’t stay to itself, but shows the world that it too has been redeemed and therefore calls it to worship its creator and redeemer which it does not yet worship.

Although worship can happen anywhere, worship in a public gymnasium seems to be a great to live into the words of these guys; bringing the sacred into the common, or better yet, setting the common in motion to manifest the sacred.

Comments

[Steve Allison]

Many great thoughts here Eric. I was initially attracted to your post because, similar to you, our group meets in a school gym. We've been there 3 and 1/2 years now. The new building almost done. We split from an established church where most of the 300 of us had been for an average of I'd guess twenty years. The experience has revealed a number of things to me and I'd recommend it to anyone. There is a certain purity of purpose. It seems elemental. Starting over helped us to reevaluate why and what we do. We are not doing things necessarily because that is the way we have always done it. We constructed a worship service approach and it has evolved that seems to work for our group. There is still a heightened sense of joy and identity and energy.

[Eric Speece]

Steve,

Thanks for the comment. It's good to hear that others have found the same situation to be life-giving.

[Benjamin Lee]

I appreciate your thoughts on this issue and I think that liturgical renewal is one of the most critical conversations that the contemporary church must have.

I really like the observation that “the Church, because of its liturgy is the ‘central workshop of the human City, a City which under grace has already begun to mutate by fits and starts into the City-of-God-in-the-making, the focal point of the world made new in Christ Jesus.’” This seems to cut right to the heart of the conversation concerning the churches role in “public” discourse (as well as Milbank’s argument that the public/private category is a false dichotomy).

However, I wonder about the logic you employ in connecting the above observation with the move your church made into the YMCA. I’m not questioning the fact that this move is one way to embody the vision of the church as being the “central workshop of the human City.” But you began the article with what seemed to be different reasons and motivations. It seemed that you were arguing that such a move is a justified way to combat complacency. This makes me wonder what will happen when your current situation inevitably becomes “comfortable, familiar, and controlled”?

The main reason I bring this up is because it seems that before we talk about complacency, we ought to talk about the character formation that cultivates such complacency within its parishioners. Put another way, is our complacency the fruit of the contemporary culture’s infatuation with novelty, which then hinders our ability to interact meaningfully with the familiar and the mundane things that Gordon Lathrop highlights?