1 - Liturgical Storm Clouds

Liturgical Storm Clouds

IT WAS ONCE said of British Christians that they would be equally shocked to hear the faith doubted or to see it practiced. A similar point can no doubt be made about worship (the theme of the symposium in this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY). Most Christians would be astonished to hear anyone doubt the urgency, importance, indeed the centrality, of worship in the life of the church. On the other hand, it is probably true that many churchgoers would be equally astounded to participate in a service of worship that was done genuinely well. "A high school stage play is more polished than this service we have been rehearsing since year one," writes Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982). "In two thousand years we have not worked out the kinks. We positively glorify them. Week after week we witness the same miracle: that God is so mighty he can stifle his own laughter."

I

Annie Dillard may be correct that worship provokes divine mirth, but not everyone finds the current worship situation amusing. Not long ago a minister, recently retired, decided to take advantage of his new Sunday freedom by sampling the worship in other parishes. Traveling around the country in his motor home, he dropped in on churches large and small, high and low, urban and rural. He visited congregations of many denominations and of a variety of ethnic compositions. He came away from his journeys shaken and discouraged over the state of worship in the church. There was the occasional liturgical oasis, of course, but mainly he wandered in dry and waterless places. Sermons, he reported, were mostly either rambling and ill-prepared lectures or frothy chants of pious positive thinking; prayers were often uttered without theological thought or a trace of sensitivity to language. Frequently the whole of worship was conducted with a bland nonchalance. Even in those settings where there was some sign of electricity and energy in worship, it often tended to be frenetic, disconnected from thought or substance. In sanctuary after sanctuary, he claimed to have slogged through a miry bog of liturgical distress.

It is possible, naturally, that he was being too harsh in his judgments. After all, what the local flock finds moving and powerful may seem spiritless or trifling to a sharp-eyed liturgical critic prowling around in a Winnebago with out-of-state plates. Other voices, however, have

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been raised lately expressing a similar concern over the condition of the liturgy in our houses of worship. For example, Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman of Hebrew Union College in New York produced The Art of Public Prayer: Not for Clergy Only (1988), which is both a description of and a prescription for the widespread "worship pathology" and "worship dysfunction" he finds in churches and synagogues. Hoffman wrote this book "for Jews and Christians, Protestants and Catholics, for all who find themselves by habit or inclination in church or synagogue on holy days at least, and who wonder afterwards, given the utter failure of the proceedings to speak to their lives, why they bothered."

Perhaps the most provocative, and certainly the most entertaining, recent complaint about matters liturgical is Thomas Day's savage and witty Why Catholics Can't Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste (1990). Day is mainly aggravated by the shallower forms of musical experimentation in the modern American Catholic mass. In his view, "every trite, half-baked musical idea" has rushed in to fill the void created by the demise of the traditional music for the mass. As one of many cases in point, Day describes the melody of "One Bread, One Body," a new folk hymn he particularly detests: "'One bread (pause, gasp)-'one body' (pause, gasp)-'one Lord of all' (pause, gasp), and so on. It seems to be suffering from a debilitating case of emphysema." Day's liturgical lament goes beyond problems with the music, though, to the total style in which many parishes package and present their Sunday worship. "The result is... the McDonaldized liturgette, in which everything is squeezed down to the smallest possible proportions and served up in the shortest possible time, with a smile."

II

Even if one does not fully agree with liturgical critics like Hoffman and Day, it is still fairly clear that the worship life of many communities of faith needs some therapeutic attention. Geoffrey Wainwright, whose essay on the renewal of worship appears in this issue's symposium, maintained in Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life (1980) that worship "is the point of concentration at which the whole of the Christian life comes to ritual focus." The "whole of the Christian life" includes, of course, the theological and ethical dimensions of the faith, aspects that can be easily muted when liturgy is defined only as a "worship experience." The language of liturgy reaches its highest purpose when it enables people to adore God with their minds and their wills, as well as with their hearts.

The renewal of worship also demands that congregations acquire the necessary prerequisites to worship well. The picture of a congregation streaming into the meeting house carrying their Bibles with them to worship is for most "mainline" churches now a quaint portrait, a relic of the distant past. Any ministers who dared today to query the

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typical flock "How many have their Bibles with them this morning?" would be quickly classed as silly romantics, as closet fundamentalists, or as simply obnoxious. And perhaps they should. The point here is not to call for a revival of that custom, but rather to observe that behind that practice, taken in the best light, lay the notion that one does not simply show up for worship; one should come to worship somehow equipped.

In a culture where worship is often thought to be largely a matter of affect, it is not always easy to convince congregations that they should become equipped for worship. Many churchgoers would be startled to hear that they might be expected to bring anything to the sanctuary other than a scrubbed face, an occasional check for the offering plate, and an hour of free time. Deepening worship, however, requires growth in special skills and knowledge, such as the ability to use a working theological vocabulary and an expanding memory of the main contours of the biblical story. This means that the linkages between worship and Christian education should be strengthened. In fact, one good way to understand Christian education is as preparation for and reflection upon worship, a definition that may not gather up everything that should be said about the educational ministry of the church, but one that surely gets at the heart of it. This also implies, among other things, that children need to be active participants in worship, not for sentimental reasons, but because it takes much time to acquire the craft. The notion of keeping children away from the sanctuary until they are "old enough to appreciate the worship experience" ignores the fact that long before worship is an experience it is a way of behaving, an ethic, a pattern of life that demands training and discipline.

III

Strangely enough, though, the place to begin the renewal of worship may be with what is called "presidential style," the way in which the clergy and other leaders conduct the liturgy. I say "strangely enough" because the trend in much contemporary liturgical reform has been precisely in the opposite direction-shifting attention away from the chancel and the official leadership and toward the pew and the people.

It is true, of course, that the prime energy of Christian worship should occur in the nave, not the chancel, and Kierkegaard's famous image (worship as a drama with God as the audience, the people as the actors, and the clergy in the wings whispering stage directions) has often been aptly invoked to support this view. What is often overlooked, however, is that the empowerment of the people in worship is best supported by a leadership style that exhibits gracious and loving strength rather than by a liturgical leader who works overtime to become a vague pseudo-enabler or who abdicates leadership altogether by displaying passivity or helpless neutrality.

Many clergy are simply unsure of what role they should play in

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liturgy. They know that the model of authoritarian preacher/priest lifted high above the people is obsolete and inauthentic, but what model stands in its place? Some sadly have chosen the role of liturgical emcee ("... our next hymn is surely one of my favorites, and I hope its one of yours, too...") or spiritual cheerleader ("Good morning!... I can't hear you!... Good morning!"). Thomas Day again describes yet another recognizable model of liturgical style: a certain "Father Hank" who attempts to call attention to himself by supplementing the liturgy with personal touches (such as "the hands above the head posture, like Superman about to take off"). In private moments Father Hank describes his model of liturgical leadership as "his joy in the Resurrection coming out." But Day indicates that "even his best friends discovered long ago that what is really coming out is his joy in being Father Hank."

What is needed is the kind of leadership whose qualities are named by the title of Robert Hovda's manual on presidential style: Strong, Loving, and Wise (1976). Last Christmas Mendelssohn's "Elijah" was performed at Lincoln Center by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Westminster Chorus. The evening was a triumph; the orchestra was splendid, the chorus richly resonant, the soloists exciting. Particularly impressive, though, was conductor Kurt Masur. Although he had been called to the podium on only a few weeks notice to replace the late Leonard Bernstein, Masur was firmly and confidently prepared. He knew the power of the text; he sensed the promise of the moment, and his body conveyed a joyful excitement over being a part of this event. He took gentle command of the musicians, not as a way of flexing his authority but in order to summon from them their best gifts. When the audience responded to the performance with a standing ovation, Masur beamed toward the singers and players and then moved his hand over them in an arc of blessing, a benediction. He was in all ways the leader, but his every effort was in support of the others, his every gesture toward the faithful interpretation of the text of "Elijah" and the total musical event. Ironically, it was his very willingness to lead with such firm compassion and alertness that finally directed the attention away from himself. We did not ultimately have an evening of Kurt Masur; because of Kurt Masur, we had an evening of Mendelssohn.

So it is with the conducting of worship. When those who lead worship have a true sense of holy place and sacred purpose, it communicates to all who participate. When the leaders of worship are truly aware that they are in the presence of God, it shows. When the leaders of worship are alert to the profound grace and deep joy of worship, it shapes their every action. Consider, for example, those lay leaders who serve the elements of the Lord's Supper in a typical low Protestant service of worship. The way they move in unison out to the pews, eyeing each other warily to make sure that their movements are perfectly synchronized, marching in lock step back to the communion

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table-one would get the impression that they were prophets of the God of Symmetry. What if someone simply told them to forget the precision drills and the mirror-image choreography and instead to think of themselves as dispensers of the hospitality of the table of Christ? The body language would change in response to this new sense of place and purpose. They would reach toward the neighbor with patience and kindness, offering with welcome the bread and the wine, communicating the grace of the Lord's table, more concerned about the people they were serving than about getting to the back pew at the same time as the server on the opposite side of the sanctuary.

A gentle strength, a loving respect for the congregation and their gifts, a willingness to be faithful to the text of the liturgy, a sensitivity to the rhythm and to the poetics of worship, a disciplined preparation, the power to receive and to bless the offerings of others, and the wisdom of knowing that the center of worship is neither the leader nor the congregation, but God-these are the elements of the kind of leadership that will encourage the renewal of the church's worship.

Thomas G. Long