Month: November 2014

The Tale of Two Calendars

November 29, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Myriams-Fotos / Pixabay

It’s the first Sunday of Advent and I hope we are going to light the candles again this year. There is something cool about doing something that has its origins in the Middle Ages. I recently re-read Desiring the Kingdom by Calvin philosophy professor, James K. A. Smith. In it, he says that rituals are very important because they shape who we are. For some reason, repetition affects us very deeply–on the level of our identity.

The Church Calendar

Advent is the beginning of the church calendar. It is a time of expectation. It commemorates the hope that God’s people had for the Messiah, but it also reminds us that we, too, are waiting for Jesus. The Advent season reminds us that we are people of expectant waiting–that this world is not all that there is and it’s not as good as it gets. There’s more, much more, in store for us.

Christmas Day, when we celebrate the Incarnation, is our next stop on the church calendar.   It is an incredible thing that the material world was visited by the transcendent God. God has bridged the huge chasm that separates us from himself.

Lent is a time for reflection, repentance, and prayer as a way of preparing our hearts for Easter. This is often accomplished by “giving something up.” The idea here is that some form of deprivation helps us to attend more deeply to the sin in our lives and our need for salvation. A keen awareness of these can make participation in a Good Friday and Easter Sunday services very profound.

These are just the highlights. The traditional church calendar celebrates the Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, the Ascension, Pentecost, the Assumption, and more. The annual remembrance of these events is a ritual in itself, and these have shaped the people of God for centuries.

The Church Calendar and Faith Formation

How might the rituals surrounding these important events in the church calendar have any formative influence on our identities? According to Smith, rituals aren’t just something we do, they do something to us.

When we celebrated these annual events, we understand ourselves as sinners in need of salvation; we know ourselves to wait expectantly for something better, and that this something better is the person of Jesus Christ; and we know that we are beloved. Our “knowledge” of these things is not on a cognitive level, says Smith. It is a knowledge that comes to reside in our bones.  It gets there, in the bones, through our rituals and practices.  Attending to the events of the Church year can be one of these rituals and practices.

Many Christians don’t really follow the liturgical calendar and are therefore not being shaped by it, but this does not mean they are not being shaped by rituals. There is another calendar that dominates our culture and it, too, is filled with repeated activities–it is the commercial calendar.

The Consumer Calendar

The commercial calendar does not begin with waiting, but receiving, immediately.

Christmas

Starting on November 26th, Christmas is the most important shopping season of the commercial calendar.  Where the center of the church calendar is God made flesh, the high priest of the commercial Christmas is Santa Claus who models a generosity that, for those of us without a workshop of elves, must be preceded by purchases.

Not only do we buy gifts, but we also buy wrapping paper and bows, ornaments to dress our trees and homes, and enough meat to feed a non-Western family for a year. Out national economy is dependent on these weeks (months) of spending.  And the day after we celebrate all our purchases, we go out (in Canada at least) to take advantage of the Boxing Day sales and buy more things.

Valentine’s Day

The next significant event on the commercial calendar is Valentine’s Day. We celebrate romantic love through the purchase of a card, roses, chocolates, and dinner with Champaign.

Easter, the 1st and the 4th of july

At Easter, too, we have a list of ritual purchases–if not Easter dresses, then certainly chocolate bunnies and eggs, and, my personal favourites, Peeps. The stores have sales to encourage our consumption on or around each of our national birthday holidays.

Back-To-School

And in August we engage in the annual ritual of Back-to-School shopping–not just for paper and pencils, but for a new wardrobe as well.  As soon as school starts the Thanksgiving and Halloween related products and sales are advertised, and then we arrive at American Thanksgiving.  This is the holiday where Americans give thanks by fighting over “door crasher” televisions.  This holiday is important to Canadians as well because merchants north of the border must offer Black Thursday Sales to compete with the American rock bottom prices that kick off the commercial Christmas season.

Rituals shape who we are. To which calendar do you most closely adhere?

[click_to_tweet tweet=”Rituals shape who we are. To which calendar do you most closely adhere? The Church calendar? The consumer calendar is adding new rituals all the time–Presidents Day Clearance Sale!? #ChurchCalendar” quote=”Rituals shape who we are. To which calendar do you most closely adhere? The Church calendar? The consumer calendar is adding new rituals all the time–Presidents Day Clearance Sale!?”]

The church calendar is down to about two events, and even then most Christians we are engaged in commercial rituals at the same time.

What is a human being? A beloved creature, helpless in sin, but saved by a loving heavenly father? Or a consumer that finds comfort an meaning in consumption? Even if we think (or even believe) it is the former, before long we will know deep in our bones that we are, in fact, the latter. This is the power of ritual.

A Case For an Explicit Liturgy

November 18, 2014 / / 0 Comments

pixagod / Pixabay

When I was in about grade 4, I was bored in church.

There were a long sermon and long prayers and a whole bunch of singing and some recitation that held little meaning to me. It just kept on going and going, on and on. I remember thinking that if I knew where we were in the service, I might it would be easier to endure.

Since my father was the minister, I had an in. One Saturday, I asked him if he could write out the order of events in the upcoming service. He smiled and directed my attention to the familiar bulletin. One of the pages was entitled, “Order of Worship” and beneath this was written, in order, all the elements of the service. These included “Call to Worship,” “God’s Greeting,” “The Law,” “Call to Confession,” “Prayer of Confession,” “Words of Assurance,” “Congregational Prayer,” “Offering,” “Sermon,” “Benediction” with hymns of praise, adoration, repentance and thanksgiving, in the appropriate places. I had no idea that every service proceeded through the same elements each week.

The Call to Worship

The “Call to Worship” always kicked things off. A Bible passage was usually read, different every week, but they all communicated that we are sitting in church that morning, not because we decided to come, but because we responded to a call. The one who calls us to worship is none other than the Triune God. I’ve noticed that without this sense of calling, I can easily fall into the mistaken idea that my arrival signals the beginning of worship.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”A case for an explicit liturgy: Rituals and practices affect us on a deep level–they can shape who we are. When we weekly hear God call us to worship, we begin to learn that worship doesn’t start with us. #liturgy #worship” quote=”Rituals and practices affect us on a deep level–they can shape who we are. When we weekly hear God call us to worship, we begin to learn that worship doesn’t start with us.”]

God’s Greeting

It’s his house and as a host he greets us. The weekly repetition of this element reminds us that this building is not just bricks and mortar that we assembled and pay for with weekly payments to the bank. We were drawn in by God, and he welcomes us as host–in this sense, we are on holy ground. Lots of churches do the horizontal greeting, congregants to each other, but without the vertical greeting coming first, isn’t the whole experience flattened?

[click_to_tweet tweet=”A case for an explicit liturgy: Rituals and practices affect us on a deep level–they can shape who we are. When we regularly hear God greet us, we begin to learn that we are in His house, not He in ours. #liturgy #worship” quote=”Rituals and practices affect us on a deep level–they can shape who we are. When we regularly hear God greet us, we begin to learn that we are in His house, not He in ours.”]

Call to Confession

This is a weekly reminder that we are sinners and in need of forgiveness. It is followed by the “Prayer of Confession” which is an acknowledgment of this fact. The Good News is that these are followed with the “Assurance” that God forgives. The Catholics do this individually. When I was a kid, we did it collectively. Nowadays, we do this occasionally–usually with a song. Does it pass unnoticed those unfamiliar with liturgical confession?

Prayer

My new church is good at this. The church is open for prayer on some weekdays. There’s a prayer room and there is communal prayer and the elders do a lot of praying. Prayer is a strange activity when you think about it. We are talking to someone who appears to not be there. It is an enchanted activity.

Rituals and practices affect us on a deep level–they can shape who we are. When we weekly hear God call us to worship, we begin to learn that worship doesn’t start with us. When we regularly hear God greet us, we begin to learn that we are in His house, not He in ours. When we confess our sins and are forgiven, we learn the gospel. When we sing and pray to someone we can’t see, we believe it because we are doing it.

We don’t learn it in an intellectual sense. Very little of this occurs on a level we are aware of. Modern churches, like modern society, is very rational and emphasize knowledge and information with occasional forays into apologetics and worldview. These things are important, but our identity lives much deeper than these. Far deeper than the mind, deeper even than the heart. The Hebrew believed the soul was in the gut–that’s the level where we are shaped.

Worship services can shape us. Do you think they might be able to do so even more effectively with explicit liturgies?

This post was inspired in part by Desiring the Kingdom by James K. A. Smith. I strongly recommend it for church leaders.

 

Church and Enchantment

November 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

stevepb / Pixabay

When I compared the church services of the Christian Reformed Church with the Anglican, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Church, I didn’t understand why a graphic I found in a textbook said that my church, with respect to the presence of the Spirit within the physical elements of the service, was halfway between these older churches and the newer Evangelical denominations.

I figured the CRC (and other “mainline” church) was way more like an evangelical church than one of the big three/older denominations. I mean, I didn’t see a whole lot of the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit in and through the physical elements of a CRC church service.

Then I began to regularly attend a modern Evangelical church. I have begun to understand that chart. I can see the difference between my new church and my old church, and there are some things that I miss.

The Holiness of the Bible–the Literal Physical Bible

When I was a kid, there was a big Bible on the pulpit in the front of the sanctuary.   I now know that its position declared the centrality of God’s word, but even though I was very young, I got a clear sense that this Bible was holy in some way. This Bible was ever used; the minister always read out of his much smaller personal Bible. The fact that it wasn’t read added to the sense of importance, rather than detracted from it. It was as if it was too holy to touch.

When I was about five years old, I entered the sanctuary with some other children. I felt compelled to gaze at the power and mystery represented by the Book. I’m not sure how it happened, but while I was looking, the water glass tipped and spilled all over the Bible. Although very young, we all knew the seriousness of this act and bolted from the church.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”I remember when the pulpit Bible was not treated with reverence just because it contained the revelation of the Most High God, but because it was more than just a physical thing–it was an enchanted object. #enchantment #worship #holiness #EnchantedObject” quote=”I remember when the pulpit Bible was not treated with reverence just because it contained the revelation of the Most High God, but because it was more than just a physical thing–it was an enchanted object. “]

Just a few weeks ago, I was visiting with a seminary classmate of my father’s who recounted a time when he was a young guest pastor at a mainline church. Before he started to preach, he closed the pulpit Bible and arranged his noted on top of it. Following the service, he was chastised by an elder of the church who informed him that that Bible had been sitting open on the pulpit for over 50 years. It had never been closed.   Now on one level, it is ridiculous to take offense at the closing of a book, but on another level, this book was clearly far more than a composite of paper, leather, and glue.

At my new church, we recently had a guest speaker who was asked about the differences between our western churches and those of India where he grew up. He offered several differences; one of them had to do with our treatment of our Bibles. He said that in India, the Bible would never be placed on the ground and we do in Western churches and homes.

In my new church, there is no pulpit Bible, actually, there is no pulpit, just a music stand. Most people, including me, read the Bible on an electronic device.  Many of the people who do bring a physical Bible, place them Bibles on the ground when they sing.

The pulpit Bible of my youth was not treated with reverence just because it contained the revelation of the Most High God, but because it was more than just a physical thing–it was an enchanted object.

There aren’t too many enchanted objects in our churches anymore.

Is this a problem?

Spiritual Mysteries in Worship

November 1, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Skitterphoto / Pixabay

When I was a university student, I came across a graphic in a textbook which put the major denominations on a continuum from Roman Catholic/Anglicans on the one end, to the “Evangelical” churches on the other.

I can’t recall the exact wording, but my recollection is that the continuum compared the degree a denomination was open to the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit in and through the physical elements of the sacraments. The mainline churches, like the Christian Reformed Church to which I have belonged since birth, was right in the middle.

Spiritual Mysteries in the Sacraments

At the time, I was puzzled by this.  I didn’t understand exactly how my church was at all open to the movement of the Holy Spirit in the physical elements of the sacraments. It was nothing like the Greek Orthodox, Anglican and Roman Catholic worship services I had attended over the years. These services were full of mysterious objects and activities that I didn’t understand and I definitely got the sense that the physical elements of the sacraments were infused with mystery and power.

Then I started to attend an Evangelical church.  It has a strong emphasis on biblical teaching and a contemporary style of corporate worship.

I now understand that continuum in the textbook.  In the Modern Evangelical churches, the sacraments are strictly human activities.

  • Baptism is an external sign of a decision to follow Jesus.
  • Communion is a meal of remembrance; participants remember Christ’s death on our behalf.

In the Greek Orthodox, Anglican and Roman Catholic expression of these sacraments, God is active in some very specific ways.  In the church of my youth, God was also active, but the explanation as to how, was a little less specific.  The sacraments were cosidered a neabs by which we receive Grace.

The Call to Worship

I once went to a Greek Orthodox on a Sunday morning but hadn’t bothered checking when the service began, so I got there about an hour and a half too early. Although the pews were completely empty, there was a lot of activity behind the heavily iconic screen in the middle of the sanctuary.

The priests were chanting and praying and doing things with the Bible and candles and incense and I don’t know what else. What struck me was the lack of an audience. Adorned in their priestly vestments, they were going through all sorts of complex ritual and there was no one there to see it.

Or was there? It’s interesting that as much as we talk about God being the centre of worship in our Protestant churches, our rituals suggest otherwise. In the churches I’m familiar with, the worship starts when the congregants show up and not before.

The Physical Space of Worship

Besides meaningful interactions with God and preparing themselves for their role in the service, I think the Greek Orthodox priests were also engaged in activities that prepared the physical space for worship. It makes some sense that you can’t just have people walk into a place and start worshiping the Almighty, Triune, Creator God.

I was thinking about the space of worship in the church of my youth. Back then it was called a “sanctuary.” I know that the worship space in many churches today is called an “auditorium.”

Labels make a lot of difference. A sanctuary is a sacred or holy place. An auditorium is a place where you hear things. Notice how the first suggests the presence of the holy and the spiritual in the physical space, where the second places an emphasis on human activity; humans making noises and hearing them.

I’m glad my new church doesn’t call the space we gather for corporate worship as “the auditorium.” But what about the sense of holiness for the space in which we worship?

I wonder if we have gone too far in the last 500 years.

 

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