Simply Waiting and Hoping

Text: Isaiah 2: 2-5

            In days to come the mountain of God’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. ³Many peoples shall come and say,  “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that God may teach us God’s ways and that we may walk in God’s paths.”  For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. ⁴God shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. ⁵O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!

“Come, let us walk in the light of God!"

Having recently made my first pilgrimage to the UCC’s equivalent of Mecca—our humble headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio—I was amused by yesterday’s UCC online devotional reading (http://www.ucc.org/feed-your-spirit/daily-devotional/pilgrimage.html). The writer,Quinn Caldwell, wondered half-seriously if maybe there should be a destination to which members of the United Church of Christ make a pilgrimage, a sacred place where all in our denomination journey at least once. If we could choose or create such a place, where would it be? he asked and then added, “And before you jump to a certain very obvious initial thought, say the following out loud to yourself to see if you can do it with a straight face: 'Jerusalem. Mecca.  The Ganges.  Cleveland.'" You gotta love a denomination with self-deprecating humor.

Most of the pilgrimages Christians make these days are virtual ones through scripture and imaginative prayer. We begin our hopeful Advent journey with Isaiah’s dream of the pilgrimage all humanity will one day make.  Of course, Isaiah set his hopeful dream on top of his holy mountain, Zion.  But he was visionary enough to imagine a time when ALL people would figuratively journey toward peace. His invitation to us is:

“Come, let us walk in the light of God!” 

Like those in Isaiah’s vision, we make our way to the House of God that transcends the schisms we create. Notice in today’s text that God’s house will be established on top of the highest mountain and all kinds of folks—people from all nations—will “stream” up to it (Isaiah 2:2).  While literal streams flow down a mountain, this stream of humanity is unusual. With great effort, it flows up, seeking God. We, too, are the kind of people who defy the usual way of doing things, who go against the flow.  Some of us today have traveled upstream to this particular house of God (we no longer believe there’s one literal high holy place where God resides) and we’ve done so with considerable effort.  Some of us arrived here after moving against the gravitational pull of more comfortable houses of worship that uphold popular cultural values we might question.  Some of us have made our way to this house of God despite unpleasant memories of Church Past.  Some of us have resisted the urge to rest at home after a stressful week.  For some of us it has been an uphill effort just to get dressed and find transportation to this house of God.

Isaiah said that after we arrive at the house of the God of Jacob, God will teach us to walk in God’s ways.  The spears of sharp words and violent theology and hurtful habits must be converted into tools that produce sustenance (Isaiah 2:4), and we’ll unlearn war. Note that it’s not enough to put down our spears. We also must convert them into implements for the common good.  We must not simply dispense with violence; we must work to feed the hungry, two mutually exclusive commitments, according to Isaiah and according to a UN report attesting to a sharp increase in malnutrition among children in war-torn countries. Here in the house of God I try to work for peace in my heart and my world with you at my side. 

“Come, let us walk in the light of God!"

But before we walk, we wait.  Sometimes the thing to do in this place is simply to be still, to be quiet.  Waiting doesn’t preclude action but it should precede it.  Our Quaker sisters and brothers regularly practice a kind of worshipful waiting I admire.  They gather and wait, and wait, and speak only when they have received enough light from God. What would it be like if we gathered one Sunday and simply sat in God’s presence and waited for the coming of the light?  What dreams might we dream together and how might our community be changed as a result?  Individuals and faith communities need to hit the pause button at times, not stalled by apathy or fear, but waiting in expectation that new light will show us the next steps forward.

“Come, let us walk in the light of God!"

I am surely biased, but I suspect preachers who are mothers have a slight advantage in the pulpit during Advent.  After all, Advent is pregnant with themes of, well, pregnancy, of waiting expectantly, hopefully.  Unfortunately, in the personal story I’m about to share, I can’t present myself as the exemplar of expectant waiting.

Two months before our daughter was born, George and I traveled from West Texas, where we then lived, to visit my parents here in Mobile. We’d arrived late one night, tired from our long drive, and had left our suitcases sprawled open on the floor between the foot of the bed and one wall of the guest room.  When George, who was sleeping on the far side of the bed, got up in the middle of the night, he had to crawl over me to get out of bed.  I apparently slept through that.  When he came back into the bedroom, he was going to have to crawl over me again to get back to his side.  I did not sleep through that.  I could blame what happened next on our soon-to-be born daughter--or on a profusion of pregnancy hormones--or on the fact that I felt disoriented in a strange and unlit room.  Here’s what happened.  While I slept, the baby apparently kicked, hard, at the same time George reentered the room.  Still mostly asleep, I interpreted that internal kick as someone hitting me and at that moment noticed some man’s shadow looming over me.  I reacted, defending myself against this presumed intruder.  I kicked, flailed, and screamed.  Immediately, my poor husband was covering my screaming mouth, and in the next split second I was alert enough to know who he was –and what he feared:  my father used to sleep with a loaded pistol in his nightstand.  Immediately, George and I huddled together in terror with the sheets up to our chins like guilty children, wondering if my Daddy would barge into the dark room to rescue me, shooting the presumed intruder first and asking questions later.  We waited in the dark.  We waited.  We whispered to one another, “Should we yell out that everything’s OK?”  We strained to hear any approaching footsteps.  After a few minutes passed, we knew we were safe.  But we did have some explaining to do the next morning. 

I confess that, at other times instead of waiting for more light, I have reacted with the lesser-evolved reptilian part of my brain; I have rushed in when I should have held back or stood still or centered myself in God’s peace.  In the darkness of this anxious world, I have mistaken a loved one for an enemy. In times of change when the new world is not fully in place but the old ways are surely ending, it’s easy to panic or suspect evil intentions. Of course, we should not naively assume no one means us harm. Nor should we put our emotional health at risk by absorbing belligerence. But sometimes the best and simplest response in uncertain times is to wait and watch, to watch and hope. 

Hope is always the starting place for the coming of God into our lives and our world, because hoping allows us to receive the new and the good.  We will never see the good if we are not expecting it. 

“Come, let us walk in the light of God!"

I love the story of a rabbi who once asked his students, "How can a person tell when the night has ended and the new day is beginning?" After thinking for a moment, one student replied, "It is when there is enough light to see an animal in the distance and be able to tell if it is a sheep or a goat." Another student ventured, "It is when there is enough light to see a tree, and tell if it is a fig or an oak tree."

The old rabbi gently said, "No. It is when you can see another person coming towards you and recognize that person as your sister or brother. For if you cannot recognize in another's face the face of your brother or sister, the darkness has not yet begun to lift, and the light has not yet come.”  

“Come, let us walk in the light of God!"

While I am hopeful about an emerging Christianity, others see the new face of Christianity advancing ominously toward them.  Science and other world religions are already having a profound impact on how we worship and what we believe—and these changes frighten some.  Affirming attitudes toward LGBT people and the ordination of female clergy trouble many Christians. Some church leaders critique American capitalism and militarism and that discomforts other Christians. Some Christians are approaching other Christians in the darkness of changing times—and hailing one another as brothers and sisters—but are not being recognized as such. 

Christianity is complicated, but living in Christian hope is a fairly simple practice. Not easy. But simple. Our hope is not based on creedal statements.  Our hope is not contingent on proving that every word in the Bible is historically and scientifically factual.  Our hope is not determined by doctrine or clerical authorities.  Our hope is not tied to a list of statements to which we assent or language we police.  Our hope is that Ultimate Reality—call it “God”—is good, and Christians see that goodness best in Christ Jesus—his life and death and life again.  We have hope that love trumps hate, and that death has no ultimate hold on us. Jesus walked this hopeful way ahead of us. We don’t have to figure it out on our own.  We don’t have to figure it out at all—because we never will.  But we can glimpse what God might be dreaming up for us—as Isaiah did in describing peoples from all times and places converging together and streaming up a mountain as they beat their weapons into farm equipment. We inhabit this vision without dissecting it into literal pieces or projecting it onto some historical timeline. 

Hope is harder than we think—but simpler, too.  Hoping is not about creating a wish list and expecting the Santa God to fulfill it.  Hoping is an orientation to the future and a willingness to move forward into that future.

And Christian hope is long-range.  Our DVD series “Painting the Stars” says that science concurs with Christianity’s assumption that the future bends toward hope. Evolution teaches us to take the long view.  Human history doesn’t always show progress.  Cosmological history, however, does disclose a universe making connections and creating life.  Death, deadends, and disconnections abound, but life and love prevail.

Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps America’s preeminent Protestant theologian of the 20^th century and a UCC minister, emphasized the role of hope in this way:  “Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. . . . Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”

If your highest hopes could be achieved in your life time and by you alone, you might be wishing instead of hoping. The work that gives us deep hope is also the work we must do in community. May you hope for more than something that will fit in a Christmas stocking.  Hope is simple. But hope is only realized over time and within a loving community.

“Come, let us walk TOGETHER in the light of God!"

Getting to Gratitude

Luke 17: 11-19                                     

¹¹On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. ¹²As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, ¹³they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” ¹⁴When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. ¹⁵Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. ¹⁶He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. ¹⁷Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? ¹⁸Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” ¹⁹Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

                               

There’s nothing like traveling to evoke feelings of gratitude  You can’t help but breathe a prayer of “thanks” while watching whales breach the waters off Alaska or while walking along Waikiki beach.  And there’s nothing like the discomforts and frustrations of travels to send you home grateful to be back in your own bed, back with familiar foods, back to family and friends.   

Literal and figurative journeys often teach us to welcome gratefully the new and appreciate the old and to be thankful in all the unpredictable movements of life.  “Thank you” is one of the first phrases travelers learn to say in a new country.  That’s because seasoned travelers know they must be prepared to receive the gifts of the journey with grateful hearts.

Today’s Gospel reading is a healing story told as a journey—with a necessary stop at gratitude along the way.  If you’d like to go on this journey with me and with ten lepers, you’ll need to prepare for the journey by silently rereading Luke 17: 11-19.  Notice how this story is crafted as a series of four movements—like a symphony.  Pay attention to the literal movements of characters.  Who is moving?  Toward what and why? 

Movement 1. The story beings in verse 11 with Jesus making the first move.  As the emissary of God, his action suggests that healing comes through God’s initiative—although, as we will see, healing involves our own participation. As the embodiment of God’s gracious spirit, Jesus the healer is moving toward Jerusalem to challenge the oppressors more directly, despite great risk to himself.  You and I already know that the traveling healer who “sets his face toward Jerusalem” will soon be crucified there.  But along the way he continues to teach and heal and bless.  He heals individuals, yes, but he does so in the context of a larger mission to heal harmful systems that injure the human spirit.

Movement 2.  Verse 12 introduces ten lepers.  Just as Jesus is entering an unnamed village, 10 lepers move toward him.  Significantly, they are meeting in the liminal land between Galilee and Samaria, Galilee being the Jewish region Jesus and his disciples hailed from, and Samaria the area inhabited by a people distantly related to the Jews but who were despised in ways that only people separated after an internal schism can be despised.   If there were any place on earth that needed healing, it was this in-between country.  But maybe you’ve discovered what has been true for me:  Sometimes the deepest healing happens in times of questions and uncertainty.  Sometimes entire groups of people are healed of prejudices and fears in places where the boundaries get blurred.  In such a place, 10 lepers call out to Jesus the Jew.  Are the lepers fellow Jews or Samaritans?  Since Jews and Samaritans alike treated lepers as outcasts, their religious and ethnic identity mattered not at all.  In keeping with the religious law and custom of the times, the lepers were permitted to approach a nonleper only so far. 

Keep in mind that leprosy then was not the disease we call leprosy or Hanson’s  disease today. When the Bible speaks of leprosy, it may be referring to any number of skin diseases, some very minor, that made one religiously unclean.  When a leper’s skin condition cleared, Jewish law said he or she could go before a priest to be declared “clean” again and reenter society.  As in the very first healing story in Luke’s Gospel, the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law, Jesus’s healings often emphasized restoring a marginalized person to the community more than curing an illness.

The lepers call out to Jesus from the required distance, and they ask . . .  for healing, right?  No.  They ask for MERCY, not healing (verse 13). What a social outcast may need is merciful kindness.  “Have mercy on us!” they shout with one voice.  And Jesus responds. Jesus responds first by SEEING THEM. Maybe he saw the “clean” human beings they wanted to be.  Maybe their physical condition had already cleared but they’d been stuck in some old way of seeing themselves and needed someone to see them with merciful eyes and affirm their wholeness, their rightful place in society.  Maybe they didn’t know the social stigma that had dogged them for weeks or months or years—was not only the thing that defined them.  Maybe merciful eyes could see who they really were and merciful words could point them back home.  Maybe Jesus saw past their disease or maybe Jesus removed their disease or maybe Jesus SAW that they were no longer diseased and it was time for them to submit themselves to the priest for inspection—because sometimes religious authorities are the last to recognize when stigma has vanished. What seems clear is that the ten didn’t ask to be cured.  They asked for mercy.

Think of the healing WE can do as God’s emissaries if we can SEE people with merciful eyes and tell them who they really are and affirm them into wholeness.  Think what we as a church can do if we can look at one another—and name one another as CLEAN, despite our flaws—and SEE one another into wholeness.  That’s how healing happens. 

Think, too, about the instances when people whom society has declared religiously unclean must demand to be named clean.  “Go and show yourselves to your priests,” said Jesus then. “Go, gay and lesbian and transgender and bisexual people and show yourselves to your religious leaders and demand that your religion rename you as clean.”  “Go, people with mental illness and people in poverty and immigrants who’ve been labeled as 'illegal' and demand that the priests and religious leaders bring you from the margins into the center of society. Go. Be seen. Demand to be declared clean." THAT is part of healing, too.  

Movement 3 begins in verse 14, which says, strangely, “As they went, they were made clean.”  They were made clean AS THEY TRAVELED ON.  At this point it’s clear Jesus didn’t zap them into a state of cleanness.  It happened as they were on the way. Isn’t that really how life works?  We can pray that God will wave a magic wand and make us suddenly into a new and improved version of ourselves. But usually change happens as we go, as we act, as we try, as we move forward with life and try again and fail again and learn something and practice over and over how to be part of the human community.  As we go, we are being made clean.  You’ve known some folks who are sometimes not safe to be around.  These folks enjoy transmitting their toxicity to others. They really need a grown up “time out” before being certified as safe to return to society.  Maybe that’s what we do here each week. We journey away from life’s messiness and then are declared clean and certifiably capable of returning to our community.  So here each week we remember our belovedness and practice how to forgive flawed fellow travelers, how to share with others, how to give, how to thank, how to care.  Through the movement of our simple liturgy, we are being made clean: certifiably safe to be around others.

Remember when someone asked Maya Angelou if she were a Christian?  The poet/novelist responded with her own question, “Are YOU a Christian?” and the inquirer answered, “Yes!” to which Maya Angelou responded archly, “Already?” 

We are being made clean.  We are being nurtured into our belovedness.  We are being guided along this spiritual journey.  We are in process.

Movement 4.  The story might have ended there, with ten lepers leaping as if in some deranged Christmas carol.  But the fourth movement occurs with one, just one of the former lepers, realizing he has been made clean—and going back to thank Jesus.  The most important movement in the story is the pivot—back to Jesus.  It seems not an intellectual decision but a sudden change of heart. He praises God with a loud voice and thanks Jesus, wildly prostrating himself at his feet, no longer needing to keep a certain distance between them.  And it’s only then that the narrator, with dramatic timing, reveals what we should have already suspected was possible: this leper, now former leper, was a SAMARITAN, a person doubly marginalized.  He was the ONLY one of the ten who was a Samaritan.  And only he came back to say thanks.  How like Luke’s Gospel to use some outcast to illustrate the right way, the Jesus Way.

Why didn’t the other nine return to express their thanks?  Maybe for the same reasons you and I fail the gratitude test.  We’re often too busy.  We’re self-centered.  We’ve not made it a spiritual practice.  Maybe the Samaritan, being doubly marginalized, had the greater cause for gratitude.  We don’t know the reason for only one man’s return to say thank you.  Jesus, too, ponders this, as if he can’t quite believe the others’ lack of gratitude.

But we do understand the consequence of the Samaritan’s gratitude.  Because the story concludes with this amazing command and explanation from Jesus: “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

More than one commentator has noticed the final word in the story.  It shows us the thankful Samaritan leper was the only one who was healed or “made well.”  Yes, all 10 were “made clean” but only the returning Samaritan who gave thanks is healed or “made well.”  The Samaritan’s journey brought him to a place of gratitude.  And although the other nine were declared clean and restored to their community, there was another level of healing available to the one who got all the way to gratitude.   

The story suggests that you can’t stay in the same place and experience healing.  You have to move forward.  But perhaps you don’t reach your fullest healing until you have experienced deeply in your heart and expressed genuinely to another your profound gratitude. 

We can go home again, but we can’t return home completely healed if we’ve not found gratitude on the way. 

PRAYER. 

God Who Sees Us With Merciful Eyes, help us to stop for gratitude so that we can experience full healing.  AMEN               

What Theological World Do You Inhabit? An Interactive Sermon With Prayers and Communion

Text:    Luke 21: 5-6       

                     

⁵When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, [Jesus] said, ⁶“As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

In last Sunday's scriptures, the prophets and Jesus were critiquing the ways people worshiped.  In today’s brief verses from Luke we hear Jesus predicting the destruction of the lavishly adorned Temple, the locus of Jewish worship. According to the writer of Luke, Jesus foresaw that even the ancient, imposing Temple was ephemeral—and as Jesus will intimate later in the same chapter, institutions are especially vulnerable during periods of social upheaval.

We, too, live in a time when the demise of religious practices and institutions are widely predicted.  Every day another article announces that Christianity is dying, that 8,000 to 10,000 church doors will close this year in the U.S., that the Millennials are leaving the church in droves, that more and more young adults identify as spiritual but not religious and fewer and fewer Americans attend religious services, that one in five adults have no religious affiliation and nearly 1 in 3 adults under 30 are religiously unaffiliated.

Why, you might have wondered, would anyone START a new church in such an unpropitious climate? Isn’t that as foolish as starting a local newspaper or buying a Blockbuster franchise these days? 

IF you insist on starting a new church in Mobile, Alabama, surely you’d be smart enough to know that only conservative Christians are still interested in church.  Surely you’d pitch your church to folks who want assurances that the Bible has clear answers for all life’s questions and then you’d provide those answers.  Surely you’d craft an invitation to people that sounds welcoming but would make certain people wonder if they’d really be included, which would then insure that you could exclude some while only seeming to include everyone.  Surely you’d have a normal (that is, male) pastor and use words and images that reinforce a patriarchal culture.  And surely you’d create emotionally charged worship services pulsating with praise band music and MC’d by a charismatic young preacher.

Oops.

Instead, you and I have set out to offer a liberal and liberating Gospel to Mobilians.  Consider this diagram in which the horizontal axis represents people in our community who self-identify as nonreligious on one extreme and highly religious on the other.  Intersecting that axis is a vertical line running from highly progressive to highly conservative:*

                                       PROGRESSIVE

                                                  I

                                                  I

     NOT RELIGIOUS -------------- I------------ RELIGIOUS

                                                  I

                                                  I

                                     CONSERVATIVE

In 2009 the first participants of Open Table were drawn mainly from the few nonreligious progressives in our city, represented in the upper left quadrant. Although progressive religious people (upper right) would have been in some ways our ideal target audience, most “religious” people are already active in church and my aim was not to siphon off members from existing churches.  Instead, I felt that some nonreligious folks might still think of themselves as spiritual, and perhaps some nonreligious progressives might value a community working toward social transformation together.  I also thought current Christian theology could be translated in ways that made sense to postmoderns. I certainly wasn’t setting a trap for nonreligious progressives out of a desire to save someone’s soul.  I just believed there were people with a religious-y zeal for changing the world and spiritual impulses to fuel them, and I thought these people might be surprised to hear ways Christian theology—influenced by science and other world religions—was evolving and expanding. I pitched Open Table to the very people who were least likely to darken (or brighten!) our doors. I welcomed religious progressives, of course, but I thought my primary audience would identify as nonreligous/spiritual and progressive.  And our earliest members came from this section.

I hoped to have access to religious conservatives, since that is by far the largest demographic group in our culture, but I knew my own journey from conservative evangelicalism to Christian progressivism took years.  I knew people in the lower right quadrant would have to be especially hearty and patient to hang with us long enough to “get” us and get something from us.  Also, since including LGBT folks in our faith community was a nonnegotiable for me, and since most conservatives in our culture do not affirm LGBT people (though that’s changing!), I thought we’d be unlikely to attract many from the lower right quadrant. But in some ways I was wrong about that, and I’m glad I was.  (As far as I know, we have not attracted anyone who is anti-religion and conservative.)

Open Table’s first participants probably labeled themselves as liberals or progressives, though I must apologize for using unhelpful and divisive labels to make a point.  Many had left the church years before because Christianity had become a list of fourteen impossible things you had to believe before breakfast—instead of a path of peace, of way of compassion, a yearning for the More.  I was gambling that even in Mobile there would be people who might love being included in a faith community that loved and lived the big questions, hungered for the challenge of a more expansive theology, longed for companions for the journey, and hoped to include folks that others might exclude.  Many of our founding members were surprised to find themselves back in church and some were embarrassed to tell friends and family where they were spending their Sunday evenings. That first group of Open Table participants appreciated finding a haven for progressives in an overwhelmingly conservative culture.

Once Open Table began advertising, we reached new folks whom we were thrilled to include and love—but who had different backgrounds and needs and expectations of church and ways of reading the Bible.  These new members were less interested in rethinking Church and reimaging God—and were more interested in finding a safe and supportive faith community. 

I kept assuring the first group that they really could ditch the dogma and stretch their concepts of God and appreciate the Bible’s metaphors and exercise their faith through political protest.  Then I had to assure the second and subsequent groups that we truly are a Christian communion and our bottom line is Jesus’ bottom line: loving God and neighbor.  Perhaps that is when we started becoming a real congregation rather than a single interest group, because the labels couldn’t contain us and the layers of diversity continued to be peeled back to expose the hard but rewarding work of community formation.

Recently I’ve dusted off a book from seminary titled Worlds Within A Congregation: Dealing With Theological Diversity.[i] The author, W. Paul Jones, pleads for what he calls “internal ecumenism” (20).  As you know, ecumenism is the call to Christians of different denominations to find common ground.  But Jones is saying that in every congregation there are people with diverse theologies who have to learn to talk a common language and work toward common purposes.  He even believes that theological diversity within a particular congregation is not only normal but should be celebrated and encouraged.  To better understand our own lens on the world and to appreciate others’ differing theology, we'll consider Jones' five basic theological worldviews—which account for many of our worship preferences. 

His book contains a 62-question inventory that helps readers recognize their own theological worlds. But because of limited time, we’re going to cheat.  I’ll simply describe these 5 world views and ask you to spend some time deciding which of these categories best captures your primary theological view.  Later we’ll divide into groups and experience prayer in a way that might be most comfortable to persons in that particular theological group. Paul Jones believes that the more you’re aware of the variety of theological perspectives in your church and the clearer you are about your own “theological foundation,” “the less threatened [you] will be by others’ theologies  (21). 

These five theological worlds are not mutually exclusive, of course.  You may visit all of them from time to time, but you might identify most strongly with one or two.

Let me walk you through the 5 theological worldviews.  Note that this is not a list of what you believe and which doctrines you ascribe to.  After reading about each of the worldviews, you’ll move to the prayer station assigned to your primary worldview and follow the directions for that prayer station. Your group will conclude with a small group communion experience.

5 Theological Worlds

 (Descriptions of the world and the liturgy are from Jones, pp. 145-150. The interactive prayer activities are mine.)

1.   Your theological world: Your journey is from isolation to unity.  Key question: Where am I?  You have feelings of separation or longing leading to mystery, unity, and peace. 

The liturgy of world one:  Best experienced in an atmosphere of mystery, with a taste for candles and receding shadows. Sacred experience touches the outer edges of knowing and being.  Even a quiet, darkened, peaceful room will do. Liturgy is valued more for its poetry than its concepts.  When leaving, the worshiper wants to have experienced centered silence, periods of timeless peace with a promised wholeness.

Your prayer:  Sit comfortably before the unifying Christ Candle, noticing the movement of the flame or your own breathing.  Recall that the oxygen that fills your lungs also feeds that flame. Let your gentle breathing be your prayer.

2.   Your theological world: Your journey is from oppression to liberation.  Key question: What can be done?  Feelings of anger and frustration lead to vision, commitment, focus. 

The liturgy of world two:  You are uneasy with mystery, silence.  You want to hear prophetic, challenging declarations and calls to action.  Rather than a vision of transcending differences, World 2 people must enter boldly into the cleavages of good and evil, rich and poor, working for a new earth here and now. The worship space would have pamphlets, posters, bulletin boards, and sign-up sheets.  (Or the worship space might ideally be a park where the homeless gather for food, and holy communion is the peanut butter sandwiches the church blesses and shares with the hungry ones.  See Rev. Jerry Herships' ministry with AfterHours Denver.**)

Your prayer:  With the paper and markers provided, create protest posters for a cause your group chooses and as a way to pray for justice.  Choose the slogans on your posters thoughtfully, prayerfully.

3.   Your theological world: Your journey is from insignificance to belovedness. Key question: Who am I?  Feelings of emptiness and invisibility yield to feelings of belonging, assertiveness, self-realization. 

Liturgy of world three:  Worship is a warm, gentle family event with lots of story sharing, lots of affirmation, nurture. The mood is upbeat.  Worship has happened for world 3 people when they leave feeling “I was fully myself today.”

Your prayer:  In your small group, let each person tell a story about a worship experience that he/she has had.  This might be a positive or negative experience.  Offer thanks for opportunities to come together for spiritual nurture.

4.   Your theological world. You journey from failure to acceptance. Key question: Who or what can restore me?  Feelings of guilt, conscience give way to feelings of being accepted, adopted, claimed, forgiven. 

Liturgy of world four:  Worshipers believe confession is good for the soul and prefer scriptures and sermons about repentance and forgiveness which rest upon Christ’s atonement.  Favorite hymns are the “I” ones because salvation or spiritual growth is primarily an individual rather than communal experience.  “I once was lost, but now am found, twas blind but now I see.”

Your prayer: Reflect on the events of this day.  Recall words you’ve said, thoughts, behaviors and interactions you’ve had, things you have failed to do. Write on a slip of paper provided something you regret doing or not doing. Now try to regard that imperfect act or attitude in the way that the Divine Source of Compassion might.  Imagine a loving voice speaking forgiveness to you.  Now burn that piece of paper and give thanks for God’s grace that lets us learn from the past and move forward into a fresh future.

5.   Your theological world: Moves from survival to integrity. Key question: Can I make it?  Key feelings: Being overwhelmed and weary give way to feelings of strength, hope. 

Liturgy of world five:  The music of blues and jazz captures the mood of this world.  The prayers of the people that rise from the week’s pains and struggles are crucial in worship life of group 5.  And the prayers focus on asking for strength to endure.  The music helps worshipers to let go of the pain. Just as life itself is often without much pattern, the worship service just flows, is not rigidly structured.

Your prayer: Write collaboratively some additional verses to “We Shall Overcome.”  When several verses have been added, discuss in your group what these additional verses mean to you, maybe sharing a story from your own life to explain why you wanted to add a particular verse. Then sing together these two original verses, below, and the new verses you’ve composed.

We shall overcome, we shall overcome, we shall overcome some day.

Oh deep in my heart, I do believe.  We shall overcome some day.

We shall live in peace, we shall live in peace, we shall live in peace

some day.

Oh deep in my heart, I do believe.  We shall live in peace some day.

SHARING IN HOLY COMMUNION

At the sound of the chimes, the groups will conclude their prayers of different types and someone in each group will, in their own words and maybe with help from the group, relate the story of the last supper Jesus shared with his followers.  Pause for a silent prayer of thanks for the life of Jesus that lives on through us.  Then share the bread and cup at your prayer station with one another in whatever way you wish.

---

[i] Jones, W. Paul.  Worlds Within A Congregation: Dealing With Theological Diversity.  Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000.
* I borrowed this diagram from a recent discussion session of UCC clergy and laity meeting for Extravagant UCC in Cleveland.
** See an example of such a ministry at https://www.facebook.com/pages/AfterHours-Denver/100700400022534 .

.