The image is from a sunny Lincoln Cathedral: an illuminated cross detail and light shining through the stained glass windows coloring one of the majestic pillars.

I’ve long believed that those who call Chicago the “Windy City” have clearly never been to western Kansas. There is a reason wind farms are popping up all over the place out here! And let me tell you, there is nothing quite so miserable as doing a funeral, striving to embody God’s grace, while reading from papers being blown by 30mph wind (on an average day — it often goes much higher!). Add in the fact that winter is still with us– try turning those pages with numb fingers!

And so a few days ago I tried something new: I presided over a funeral using my Kindle. I have to say, it worked remarkably well!

If you aren’t familiar with it, the Kindle‘s screen uses e-ink. It is a technology that is reflective, meaning that unlike most screens which shine a light in your face, e-ink looks just like a piece of paper. Of course it also brings the usual digital advantages, like enlarging the text at the push of a button.

My usual process is to customize the service on the computer then print it out. In this case all I had to do was prep the service in Google Docs then hit the “Share” button to email everything wirelessly to my Kindle. At first there were some formatting problems, but a few easy tweaks and it worked like a charm. The liturgy was beautiful and easy to read.

On the way to the cemetery (it was an hour and a half drive away) I was listening to a podcast that included a narrative from a pastor remembering a funeral he did in the 1920s. I glanced over at my Kindle and considered how times have changed.

When the moment came, God was there. It was 30 degrees out and windy at a cemetery in the middle of northwestern Kansas. The tent they had set up helped block the wind, but it sheltered the family much more than it sheltered me (which is how it should be!) But despite the cold wind it was a truly grace-filled moment. As I “tuned in” to God and to the family and friends of the departed, I changed a few things in the brief sermon and even juggled a few phrases in prayers as the Spirit moved me in the moment.

So, in the end, I don’t suppose it was so different than the 1920s. The difference is that unlike my predecessors, standing in almost the exact same spot on the same plot of land nearly a century ago, MY my pages were not blowing in the wind and MY numb fingers didn’t have to turn pages. The family didn’t know any different (I had the Kindle in its book-like cover so the device itself wouldn’t be a distraction) but I was able to dedicate less of myself to the logistics and more of myself to the Spirit.

What more could we ask of technology?

Jeff Slater is one of our young United Methodist clergy colleagues. He serves in Kansas, blogs at life | emergent and tweets as Qohelet. Ask him why he’s called Mr Universe…

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. Luke 4:1-2

As Lent begins, we have repented, and have been marked as a sign of our desire to lead a new life. There has been a recognition of our mortality; life will not last forever, new life will. The mistakes of the past will not determine our future.

Hungry for God, we stand face to face with the extent of the brokenness in our lives. Our thirst for control, power, and to prove something is stronger than we thought. The mark on our foreheads has already worn out, no longer visible, yet still at work in us. The Spirit is leading us through this wilderness. We are not alone!

How do we resist these ingrained tendencies and voices?

Jesus knew the rhythms of his religious tradition. He knew the words, movements and actions that had been time tested for generations. The saints that had gone before had made their mark, even to the present day.

Liturgy is repetitive — it has to be! In that repetition the rhythms and movement of the Christian faith become a part of of who we are, become the instrument of healing the deep brokenness. Dan Benedict says it this way:

In the Liturgy we know God and experience God’s power to shape our lives and move us from the old selves to participation in the new creation.  (Patterned by Grace, 24-25)

In some ways our participation in the patterns of the liturgical life mirrors Jesus’ wanderings in the desert where the pattern of his community’s worship life guided him in faithful response to the devil’s constant offers of synthetic life.

On Ash Wednesday we were invited to go on this journey. We carry with us the instruments that will guide our way: prayer, fasting, and giving to the poor. On this first Sunday of Lent we know that the liturgy provides us with the cadences needed for this transformative journey. Just as Jesus walked in the wilderness with the Spirit as guide, so do we. We are not alone, and I believe that in the end the pattern of our liturgical life paves the way for our continual encounter with the risen Christ.

As we begin this journey of Lent I invite you to hear carefully the rhythms of your community’s worship:
+ Where are the words that will help you fight off your deepest tendencies towards brokenness?
+ What are the songs, prayers , and movements that come to the forefront in the midst of our times of wilderness?
+ What patterns will pave the way to the risen Christ?

All my life I wish I broke mirrors instead of promises
Cause all I see is a shattered conscience staring right back at me
–Owl City, “Tidal Wave”

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t feel adequate to the task that has been set before me. I don’t think it is that I’m unmotivated, ignorant, or incompetent. The remedy isn’t motivation or inspiration, knowledge or a better grasp of the principles, skill training or workshops in my profession.

The problem is sin.

More specifically, the broken relationship between myself and God which infects and corrupts everything and everyone I touch. I see it as I struggle within my soul as I struggle to perceive and respond to God. I see it in my relationships as my lack of care, self-absorption, and failed intentions conspire to damage even those I love the most. I see it as I fail to act justly towards exploited creation and people.

So Ash Wednesday has become something good for me. Lent is an exciting time of year now, neither oppresive nor scary. Why?

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Repent and believe the Gospel.”

The liturgical act of ashing and these words spoken over each & every person of faith assembled gives me new life. Bizarre! But it couples together three central truths of Christian faith in word & sign.

“Remember that you are dust”
We are created. Not a one of us made ourselves, or even asked for it. In this, we are in solidarity with every single person in the world, every part, plant, and planet in existence. And our creation was neither accidental nor malevolent but out of love.

“and to dust you shall return.”
We are mortal & finite. The lives we have will end, like everyone else. Even our works & sub-creations will cease. I love Percy Bysse Shelley’s famous sonnet “Ozymandias” for its expose of our arrogance and pride. The other side of this is that our sin will also cease. Our brokenness, failures, and pain will end as well.

“Repent and believe the Gospel.”
And the good news comes now, that the stuff in between belongs to God as well. What Jesus does in life, death, resurrection, and ascension means we are chosen by God. “Christ is God’s never-changing Yes.” We are never out of God’s love: so our responsibility is to respond. Repent. Believe.

So I love this time in the liturgical calendar. Not because I get to abuse my body, or buy my way into God’s good graces, but because all my effort-full facades are revealed for the shams that they are. And I can truly turn away from the idol of self-sufficiency and rest in God’s impossibly unbounded love.

Being a pastor makes this sense of failure & responsibility stronger. Maybe that’s why I like Owl City’s “Tidal Wave” so much [Listen on blip.fm]. It evokes all of my frailty and failure, the shattered conscience staring right back at me. But then…

Then I was given grace and love
I was blind but now I can see
Cause I’ve found a new hope from above
And courage swept over me…
The end is uncertain
And I’ve never been so afraid
But I don’t need a telescope to see that there’s hope
And that makes me feel brave

May faith, hope, and love find you — and me — when we least expect it…and give us the courage to follow God’s lead, during Lent and into the “world without end.” +

This image was taken in January 2006 at Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire, England. The road winding alongside a stone wall until it disappears into the horizon suggests the kind of journey which the Church undertakes at this time.

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The task of the assembly is a task of polarity: make the center strong, the symbols large, the words of Christ clear, and make that center accessible, the circle large, the periphery permeable.
Gordon Lathrop, Holy Things (132)

I am unabashedly smells & bells: I love Gothic cathedrals (and all churches that look like churches), incense, candles, stained glass, beautiful icons, exquisitely rendered crosses, well-chiseled prayers, and sites which reek of holiness.  Give me a vestment or church supply catalog, and I’m in hog heaven. I’m a nerd–so I like history, oldness. “You are here to kneel/Where prayer has been valid” writes T S Eliot in his Four Quartets, as if to directly address me.

And I love liturgy. I grew up in a United Methodist congregation that didn’t do a lot of formal, out-of-the-hymnal prayers…but when they did, it was done well. I could recite most of The Great Thanksgiving by the time I graduated from high school, including the puzzling formulation, “delivered us from slavery to sin and death” (why would Jesus deliver us from slavery to sin and death? Didn’t seem like much of an upgrade)–the weakest point in an otherwise exceedingly well-written Eucharistic prayer. Four collegiate years’ worth of Sundays were spent at St Paul’s United Methodist Church in Houston, which featured a nearly-Anglican service at “Houston’s Cathedral” and a choir which would sub in for Westminster Abbey’s when they went on summer vacation.

My father, a lifelong Methodist, taught me the importance of literature, history, philosophy, science–engaging the world with a sharp and practiced intellect. My mother did as well, all the while strongly resisting joining our Methodist congregation, in part due to her love of old-school Baptist practice and theology; it was from her teaching and example (Susanna Wesley-like) that I learned so much about what it meant to embrace the call to follow Jesus with your whole life. Liturgy — whether in childhood or at St Paul’s or even singing early in the morning alongside the monks of St John’s Abbey one summer — wasn’t opposed to this dynamic, passionate, wholehearted pursuit of the Jesus-life; it complemented, advanced, and deepened it.

So I continue to be amazed at the resistance and opposition to basic liturgical practices in the church. I’m less surprised to find it among my college students…but am equally curious as to why they would embrace so many new, adventurous, challenging things in their lives and fail to give the same consideration to what might be truly transformational.

Gordon Lathrop’s seminal Holy Things calls us to consider what a difference might be made in the life of all these communities of Jesus followers if we were to give a strong and open liturgy a real try. In an attempt at in-house apologetics, please consider the following ways in which we might broaden and deepen faith individually & communally.

INTENTIONALITY

First of all, the kind of liturgy of which I speak is intentional. It puts the worship of the holy & blessed Trinity at the center. You cannot help but notice it in the apostolic blessing that begins the service of worship or in the structure of the prayers. This is not a rock concert, academic lecture, sales pitch, or town hall meeting. It is explicitly, attentively, determinedly a gathering in the name and presence of Jesus Christ to worship Almighty God and be made into a new creation by the power of the Holy Spirit.

It is also intentionally Biblical. It centers around that Word which exists before each of us and calls us before we even have ears to hear. The liturgies that have stood the test of time are ones in which nearly every word is lifted from some part of the Old or New Testament. This ought to be an embarrassment to any church that calls itself Biblical, that even speaks a lot about the Bible,  but doesn’t actually get people to speak anything from Scripture, nor shape their emotive-intellectual-spiritual lives through the Word. And it is not just one sentence or line or verse is read when it comes time to hear the Word explicitly. No, multiple readings are the norm, from all parts of the Bible…on their own merits, not just as a pretext for the sermon. I don’t want to belabor the point, but this intentionality is at odds with the haphazard and reflexive nature of Christian belief and discipleship today.

PATTERN

A rich & vibrant liturgical practice, despite re-tracing patterns, is neither ecclesial brainwashing nor repetitious boredom.  It is an invitation to engage the Gospel message with our whole selves. Pattern disavows rigidity and lockstep enslavement to a particular rule or structure. But it also avoids the illusion of spontenaity (which so often degenerates into inane ) which plagues so much of our worship. More than this, a robust and timeless liturgical pattern avoids becoming stale because it is rich enough to engage us at different times of life. We are different each time we present ourselves to the liturgy, and can therefore find new meaning in old words and sign-acts.

My wife has invited her congregation to begin using the Prayers of the People (as found in the Book of Common Prayer [PDF link], for instance) instead of the usual Methodist practice of the Pastoral Prayer. So my 4 1/2 year old son Ben has begun hearing that pattern of prayer when he worships from Sunday to Sunday with them. He’s quite adept at sensing when prayers are needed in the outside world, so when we were stopped on the freeway by an accident on the way to school a few mornings ago, he led us in prayer as the ambulances and wreckers whizzed by on the shoulder. At one point he said, “We pray for those who are hurt, sick, or in any kind of trouble…” which of course is verbatim what he hears on Sundays at Christie’s church. He not only had solid words to pray, but he also knew when it was appropriate to use them…and he meant them with all his heart.

The paradox which Lathrop invokes seems to me that the stronger we make our prayers, the higher we raise up clear symbols, then the more open we can make our assemblies, both for outsiders to enter in and for us to carry out into the world.

I’ll continue these reflections shortly, but would like to hear what you think so far. How can we best convey the Biblical character of God in worship? Is there such thing as “unpatterned” worship, and–even if it exists–is it possessed of greater virtue than a patterned liturgy? And come back to Liturgical Nerds for more thoughts on liturgy, especially how it might relate to the evangelical, catholic, formative, and participatory character of church.

We are excited about possibilities for the upcoming year. We’re especially looking forward to our Lent series, which this year will focus on the mystery of Christian Initiation: catechesis. This will be anchored by some guest bloggers, most notably Taylor Burton-Edwards OSL, Director of Worship Resources for the General Board of Discipleship of the United Methodist Church.

We’re still looking for field reports on innovative, contextualized, tradition-catapulted-into-contemporary-situations worship; the first of these will be coming up at the end of January, on a baptismal liturgy for firefighters…in the firehouse!

If you are interested in writing for LN, please contact us at liturgicalnerds [at] gmail [dot] com or hook up with us on Twitter @LiturgicalNerds — we look forward to this new year together, in the holy name of Jesus Christ:

Almighty God,
whose blessed Son was circumcised
in obedience to the law for our sake
and given the Name that is above every name:
give us grace faithfully to bear his Name,
to worship him in the freedom of the Spirit,
and to proclaim him as the Saviour of the world;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Collect for the Naming & Circumcision of Jesus from Common Worship

A reading from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 11 (NRSV):

A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

Eternal God,
in the stillness of this night
you sent your almighty Word
to pierce the world’s darkness with the light of salvation:
give to the earth the peace that we long for
and fill our hearts with the joy of heaven
through our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen!
[Collect for Christmas Night from Common Worship]
]]> http://liturgicalnerds.net/2009/12/24/merry-christmas-from-the-liturgical-nerds/feed/ 0 expatminister http://liturgicalnerds.net/2009/12/22/christmas-liturgical-banner/ http://liturgicalnerds.net/2009/12/22/christmas-liturgical-banner/#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:36:18 +0000 expatminister http://liturgicalnerds.net/?p=196 ]]> Just in time for Christmas (though don’t put it up before Thursday!), another web banner that will let you share the Christmas spirit for all TWELVE days. Remind your visitors that Christmas isn’t just a day, but an entire season. Proclaim the centrality of Christ’s Incarnation all the way up until Epiphany. Whether your Christmas is happy or merry, share the news on your site or blog!

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