Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Real Wine or Real Bread?

A new friend asked me, "Does your church serve real bread or real wine for Communion?" According to him, you can only get "real" bread (made with yeast) if you go to a church that serves grape juice. On the other hand, if you go to a church that serves real wine, then the bread is unleavened. I told him that at my two United Methodist churches we use real bread and grape juice. He said, jokingly, that he would join any church that has both "real" elements.

Unleavened bread in wafer form
In the UMC we will serve either kind of bread -- leavened (made with yeast) or unleavened (see photo). But the choice is not inconsequential, and there is a quite a history bound up in the difference. We're not sure when they started doing things differently, but certainly by the 11th century the Eastern (Orthodox) and Western (Catholic) churches were using different kinds of bread in Communion. The Eastern churches used (and still use) leavened bread, while the Western churches preferred unleavened bread. The Catholics have said that Paul warned believers to stay away from yeast (see 1 Corinthians 5:7), while the Orthodox have claimed that Paul said to use a loaf of "real" bread (1 Corinthians 11:23).

Each side also views Jesus' institution the Last Supper differently. Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote that Jesus celebrated the Passover with the disciples in the upper room on the night before he was crucified. He would have certainly used unleavened bread on that occasion. However, the Orthodox churches emphasize the account from the gospel of John, which states that Jesus and the disciples had this meal before Passover, probably using leavened bread. This difference in communion bread did not cause the big split between these church traditions. (I wrote previously about other differences that keep the churches separated.) But these different practices remain to this day, each side feeling like their way is the right way.

In some places in the world, bread (with yeast or not) and grape juice is hard to come by. So churches tap into local traditions and use the staples available to them, such as rice, sweet potatoes, and different kinds of fermented drink. Some people shared with me that they have celebrated communion with elements as "contextualized" as chocolate or pizza and Coca-Cola. (I wonder if that's going a bit too far in the effort to be relevant.) How is the risen Christ represented in your Communion celebrations?

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Stained Glass: Our Calling as Christians

Window by David Hetland
Trinity Lutheran Church, Moorhead, Minnesota 
This past week at Duke Divinity School we heard some great talks by English priest and poet Malcolm Guite. He read for us The Windows by George Herbert (1593-1633). Rev. Guite compared our lives to pieces of stained glass. 17th-century window-makers had more rudimentary technology than is available today. Back then one could make the glass very clear, but then it had to be thin and breakable. If the piece were thicker, then it would have inconsistencies causing things to look wavy. None of the pieces of a beautiful stained glass window are perfect, yet they allow the light in. Each of us is inconsistent and "crazy" and breakable and "brittle" in our own ways, but we are called to shine Christ in and through ourselves. In order to be colored (or annealed), each piece is heated in the fire so that it can be changed to the wishes of the maker.

Lord, anneal me and shape me into a part of your story, that my own unique gifts and skills can enhance the beauty of your light and life.

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
    He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
    This glorious and transcendent place,
    To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
    Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glory
    More reverend grows, and more doth win;
    Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
    When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
    Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
    And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Worship is an Acquired Taste

In the life of many American churches children are invited to leave the sanctuary at a certain part of the worship service. Often the pastor will dismiss a certain age group (usually before the sermon) to gather in another part of the building. Recently our Bishop called us to re-think this "tradition" and instead find ways that children can stick it out through the entire service. She reminded us that, "Worship is an acquired taste." In other words, worship not a "normal" activity, and it involves a process of acculturation similar to learning to a foreign language or culture.

Worship does indeed take some getting used to. The Nairobi Statement on Worship and Culture claims that some aspects of our worship should be counter-cultural. That means that when our liturgies and activities are true to scripture, then they will confront idolatries in our culture. One of the biggest idolatries in the US today is a need for constant entertainment. So if parts of a Sunday service are boring to a child, that's probably a good thing. James K.A. Smith is a philosopher at Calvin College who teaches that the rhythms of worship -- the ordering of its songs, prayers, readings, baptisms, etc. -- form us into better human beings. These week-in and week-out rituals actually change us and mold us into disciples of Jesus Christ, creating new habits and patterns of thinking. Worship can change our mindset and worldview, and that is why it is necessarily uncomfortable at times.

Photo from wikimedia.
Parents and pastors: let's find better ways to give our children a "taste" of worship. It will serve them well as they grow up. Why are there many Millennials who were raised in the church that have not continued as active adult members? Is that partly because we segregated an entire generation from our Sunday morning services, separating them from the rhythms and patterns of orderly corporate worship?

Saturday, February 15, 2014

Salt and Light

Photo of a dung fire in Mongolia
from Mike Chu on Flickr
Last weekend the Revised Common Lectionary included Matthew 5:13-16. The typical discussions of this passage mention salt as a taste enhancer and preservative. Several years ago John Pilch wrote about a different interpretation: salt is also used as a chemical starter for dung cooking fires. The landscape of first century Palestine would not have produced ample firewood, so the people of Jesus' time cooked over fires made of animal manure. One essential chemical ingredient is needed to make these dung cakes light up and burn: salt.

I have never seen another scholar make this claim about Matthew 5, but I really like this way of reading the passage. That's because the church doesn't exist primarily to make a bland world seem more flavorful, nor is it called to preserve the status quo. Rather, the church exists to set the world on fire. It is (or should be) a catalyst for change.

The cooking fire image creates so many great ways of understanding our role as Christians. Fire is linked to the power of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 2) and the presence of God (see Exodus 19). Jesus himself was said to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire (see Matthew 3). A cooking fire provides life itself through food production, as well as light and warmth. And a cooking fire doesn't burn out quickly. Rather, it burns steadily and faithfully for a long time.

How is the worship of the church preparing its members to be consistent and faithful witnesses that set the world on fire?

Saturday, February 8, 2014

The Great Litany and the General Thanksgiving

Prayers written by others can help add variety when our own prayer life gets bogged down and repetitive. There are many great ones to borrow from: the Jesus Prayer, any number of Psalms, the prayers found in our hymnals, and of course the Lord's Prayer. Here are two that may be new to you:

The General Thanksgiving
The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) gives us The General Thanksgiving (on page 101). Whether you are starting or ending your day, these words are great reminders of why we should give thanks to God:

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we your unworthy servants give you humble thanks for all your goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all whom you have made. We bless you for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for your immeasurable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we pray, give us such an awareness of your mercies, that with truly thankful hearts we may show forth your praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to your service, and by walking before you in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with you and the Holy Spirit, be honor and glory throughout all ages. Amen.

The Great Litany
My friend David Taylor recently blogged about The Great Litany, also found in the BCP (pages 148-153). (It's a bit long to paste into this post, but click here to go to an online version.) A litany is a form of prayer in which the entire congregation responds in unison to a petition read by a worship leader. The responses used here are in an older form of English. You can update "We beseech thee to hear us" to something like "Hear our prayer." Try it out at the link above. It only takes 3 minutes to read straight through, but you could spend hours by stopping and praying for the people and situations these requests will bring to your mind.

You can also sing The Great Litany. Charles Wesley wrote a hymn based on this prayer. It did not make it into the hymnal, so you will have to go online to read the words to Jesu, Show Us Thy Salvation. (You can sing it to the tune associated with Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.) Here is the first stanza:

Jesu, show us Thy salvation,
In Thy strength we strive with Thee,
By Thy mystic incarnation,
By Thy pure nativity;
Save us Thou, our New-Creator,
Into all our souls impart,
Thy divine, unsinning nature,
Form Thyself within our heart.








Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Saying the Creeds in Worship

Icon of the First Council at Nicea
image from wikipedia.org
One way to make a worship service meaningful is to include a corporate affirmation of faith. On most Sundays at my churches we say the Apostles Creed, but we use some others from time to time. These statements remind us why we meet together at all: it's all about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. (See 1 Corinthians 15:12-34.) Saying the creeds reminds us of that central truth, even if the songs, prayers, or sermon on a given Sunday don't explicitly mention all those historical events.

The creeds connect us to other Christians across the world (the church universal), and they also connect us backwards through time (the church apostolic). If your church says the creeds regularly, it can be easy to forget how intentional the words are. Many of us don't realize that the biggest rift in the Christian church is (partly) over three words in the Nicene Creed: "and the Son." Christianity Today recently profiled this issue, centered around the words that make up this clause known as the filioque . This so-called Great Schism between the Greek-speaking eastern (Orthodox) church and the Latin-speaking western (Catholic) church is usually dated to a 1054 smackdown between church leaders in the city of Constantinople. But the filioque clause (and the use of yeast in communion bread) had been causing problems between the western (Latin) and eastern (Greek) churches for centuries prior to that. Finally events in Constantinople (today Istanbul) during the Fourth Crusade (13th century) broke the church apart into the Catholic-Orthodox division that remains today.

Although relations between these two branches of the church have warmed a bit in the past few decades, the use of the extra words in the Nicene Creed continue to hinder reconciliation. This should remind us that the words in the creeds matter, and that's why we say them. They reflect what we believe, including important assumptions about how God exists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Pete Seeger (1919 - 2014)

Image from npr.org
A giant in the life of American music passed away this week. Pete Seeger's exceptional musicianship touched almost every corner of this country. Some of his songs made other artists famous: "Turn, Turn, Turn" -- based on a passage from Ecclesiastes -- was recorded by the Byrds in 1965. In the PBS American Masters episode about him, Pete said: "I see myself as a planter of seeds." (Go to about 48 minutes into the show.) He references Jesus' words from the parable of the planter. Pete hoped that some seeds of his influence would sprout in fertile ground. He did indeed plant folk music in the minds and hearts of a generation of Americans.

Since he was blacklisted from TV, Pete spread folk music by performing at children's camps and college campuses. He wasn't allowed to go through the media to create change -- instead he did the difficult work of making face-to-face encounters and organizing from the grassroots. He sang "This Land is your Land" while picking the banjo and sitting on the floor with children. Would he have had that much influence if he had a weekly TV or radio show? Maybe the government was doing us all a favor by forcing him to get out with the people. That generation who learned his songs later grew up to run the country's schools, companies, and government. (I remember singing Little Boxes in music class in the 1980s, a song he popularized decades earlier.)

Pete had a special interest in the diverse musics of the world. His group the Weavers sang "Wimoweh" -- a song with African influences. (See video clip above.) He also touched the lives of many ethnomusicologists, who were just launching the Society for Ethnomusicology in the 1950s. (Anthony Seeger, Pete's nephew, is a past President of the Society.)

His music also crossed racial barriers. Seeger's version of "We Shall Overcome" caught fire in the civil rights movement. If you sang this song last week during MLK Day, you have Pete to thank for some of the verses.

Many remember Pete Seeger as an anti-war folk singer with ties to the Communist Party. (That's the angle the Economist took in its tribute to him.) Less remembered is the fact that he served in the US Army during WWII, or that he broke ties with the communists in the 1940s. The American Masters episode showed that the folk music scene in the mid-20th century included a mix of interests: peace, labor, anti-consumerism, civil rights, and various streams of activism. Many of those leaders are now working in the mainstream of society, and almost all of them were inspired by Pete and his music. Even though he had to work from the margins, there was no doubt that he loved his country. There is a great clip around 58 minutes into that American Masters episode: Pete is called a patriot by none other than Johnny Cash.

Rest in peace Pete.

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