A ministerial musing as the congregation gathers for Sunday worship. Here they come, some in trendy finery, others in casual chic; some happy with the week's work, others weak with the task of making a living; some brimming with confidence, others dragging in defeat; some on fire with a spark of the divine, others doubting even themselves; some to lift voices in song, others content to study the lines silently; some committed to save the world; others seeking to save themselves and get through one more day; all engaged in the tragic joy of being, living and having to die; all seeking a vacation from the burden of finitude.
A Unitarian Universalist minister trying to lead worship is a bit like herding cats; it really can't be done. Each cat - or congregant - has this fierce independence. To presume to lead such a miscellany of people in worship is preposterous. Yet I do it Sunday after Sunday. I suppose I just don't know any better. And perhaps you don't know any better either.
Why do we do it? Perhaps because, as world religions scholar Huston Smith put it in a 1997 Chautauqua lecture, "We are living intolerable lives." He was pointing to the stresses and strains of modern life; a lack of consensus in communal values; a vague sense of something missing from our lives. Perhaps it is loss of the divine, perhaps loss of community, perhaps some undefinable emptiness.
We have at least a faint sense of going to church to find that something, to fill that emptiness, to become a better person. But as Albert Schweitzer once said, "Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car." Yet here we are.
We worship here - we celebrate life. Many ask what do Unitarian Universalists worship - that strange collection of theists and atheists, Christians and humanists, pagans and pantheists? Many come with an understanding of worship as a transitive verb - it must have an object, and that object is God - whatever each of us may mean by that word. There are others, however, who understand worship as an intransitive verb - without an object - simply an expression of awe, reverence, gratitude for being.
In 1928 the British Parliament was called upon to authorize a new prayer book for the Church of England. In the course of the debate somebody got up and said, "Isn't it sort of ridiculous that this secular legislative body should be asked to rule upon the affairs of the Church because, after all, there are many atheists among us?" And another member got up and said, "Oh, I don't think there are any atheists here. We all believe in some sort of a something somewhere."[1]
I believe both kinds of people - those who worship God and those who simply worship - can find meaning here in what we do, because I believe the sense of reverence is more important than its object. Worship can be understood as the "reverent relation to the sustaining forces of the universe" - a sense of awe and wonder at the cosmos; gratitude for the graces of living; comfort for being in a caring community, inspiration to leave here better than we came. These are our common aspirations no matter our theology. They enable us to live with our finitude.
I am convinced that despite our different theologies when we come here we make a miracle - people of vastly different theologies together in common purpose. The fact that we differ is not an impediment to worship - rather it enhances it as we seek to discern the meaning of word and gesture even when we are not comfortable with it. Spiritually, it is the same motion. I believe that the whole is greater than the sum of its part - we individuals create here a worshipping community. It is a miracle.
We begin our worship together by the Act of Affirming Community - community not only with each other but also with the natural world, with our human history, with Ultimate Reality itself - as Isaiah did in the temple. We ring our chimes and light our chalice to inaugurate what I call in lighter moments - a kind of "spiritual salivation," we anticipate something meaningful. We seek not to be saved but to be transformed.
Our Prelude is not "walking in" music to cover the sound of our footsteps - it is rather music for silent meditation, contemplation. Our Call to Celebration welcomes each and every one of us to this hour out of all hours in the week when we set aside precious time for the work of the spirit.
Our Time of Greeting is a welcoming ritual by which we grasp the hand of our neighbor in greeting and share our spoken names. No one leaves without making contact with at least one other human being. There is a spirit of generosity and warmth in what we do - a welcome respite from an often cold and impersonal world.
Our Song of Celebration gives musical expression to our joy at being here in this time and in this place with this people. Most of us are familiar with the struggle of the rational and the emotional as some of us do not sing with gusto because we are reading ahead in the text to be sure we agree with the words. But the words are poetry, symbols of religious faith, not creedal statements. And while I notice not everyone sings, I also note even some of the most skeptical among us do sing with fervor. Its fascinating to watch. My unique vantage point observing congregational singing reminds me of a ditty:
"There were three little birds in a wood,
Who always sang hymns when they could;
What the words were about
They could never make out,
But they felt it was doing them good."
In our Affirmation of Community we move on to Welcome and Announcements - perhaps the most controversial element in our worship. Why? Some believe the parade of speakers has no place in worship and disrupts the service. There are times when we get carried away. But I include them in our liturgy because they remind us that our community is created not just on Sunday mornings, but lives on in people and programs and projects during the week.
Our Congregational Reading is a unifying statement of what binds us together as a people. We are here, not to believe alike, but to walk together in religious living.
From the exuberance of affirming community in all its many forms, we change pace by Embracing the Limits of Life. Intellectually, we know there are limits; we are finite, contingent creatures. Emotionally, we have a much harder time dealing with those limits. Here we acknowledge the inner universe which centers our lives. Here we come to get what has been called "A god's eye view of ourselves - in religious imagination we project ourselves into the role of cosmic observer and critic, contrasting what we want to be with what we are. We may not, with Isaiah, think of ourselves as persons with unclean lips, but we do see ourselves in perspective.
I think of a bedraggled man in a cartoon who is holding up a sign as two well-dressed young women walk by. One says, "These day's everybody's so wishy-washy." The sign reads, "Repent, or at least acknowledge that mistakes were made."
And we know we have made them - each one of us - some large and consequential, some small and trivial. In our finitude we face the "radical uncertainty of life."[2] Plan as we do, we know life is messy. Strive though we may, life does not always turn out the way we want. That is what it means to be human.
I consider the Spoken Meditation to be the equivalent of a pastoral prayer in a more traditional service. I write meditations as a spiritual discipline. They grow out of my week in this congregation. The themes emerge out of my work among you - sometimes one of you has inspired them in some way. Occasionally, they grow out of a particular experience. For example - my favorite meditation, "Be Gentle," grew out of a verbal altercation in coffee hour over a conflict in church scheduling.
Other meditations grow out of a birth, or a death, a marriage or a divorce, out of an experience with nature or with this community. I dig down in myself as deep as I can to find what is there - and that I share. The Silent Meditation is your opportunity to do what it is you do - pray, say the Lord's Prayer, meditate, do Zazen breathing as I do - or simply enjoy a rare moment of quiet in a noisy world. This silence enables us to "overcome the tyranny of the urgent which is the enemy of the important."[3] Meditative music allows us to continue in this mode.
Our Joys and Sorrows has become an integral part of the service, when members of the congregation can speak of the deep matters of their lives - reaching out when in need of support, celebrating when needing to share our joy. We do this in the mood of prayer and reverence separating the trivial from the significant.
From this reflective mode of learning to live with our finitude, we enter into "Proclaiming the Possibilities of Life." Our faith has an optimistic bias. No matter what the situation, there is always possibility. We seek to keep hope alive no matter what. Drawing on the whole human heritage of scripture - sacred and secular - we seek out the finest expressions of human possibility no matter the source. We are part of the living tradition of humanity. Worship is our attempt to "keep open some breathing holes for the human spirit."[4] In the end the prophet Isaiah was hopeful and returned to the world transformed.
South African bishop Desmond Tutu once said that the church should be an audio-visual of the way the world should be. In our life together and in our life in the wider world we should embody that Beloved Community of which we speak and sing. In worship we bring our best selves to seek the loftiest in the universe.[5] Music punctuates this possibility.
And then the congregation is prepared for the fourth act of worship, "Focusing on the Issues of Life," the sermon. Here is a personal confessional when one finite human being seeks to lay bare the soul and speak his or her own truth into the whirlwind of human existence.
It's a bit like "The Family Circus" cartoon given to me recently, in which a little girl whispers to her littler brother in church as the minister moves from altar to pulpit: "This is the part he gets to make up by himself."[6]
Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, "Too often in their church, people adopt an attitude of the theater, imagining that the preacher is an actor and they his/her critics….Actually, the people are the actors on the stage of life, the preacher is merely the prompter, reminding the people of their lost lines."
What an intriguing theatrical image! What the preacher tries to do is to lift up some issue of the human condition and remind us of the values we cherish; challenge us to live up to them; point us in directions we want to walk. But we are the actors in this liturgical drama - it is our lines - and our lives - that in the end count.
We end our celebration with a "Commitment to the Service of Life." The Offering, far from being a pragmatic intrustion, is really a symbol of the voluntary nature of our faith - we come and give of our own free will. The Offertory Anthem during the Offering lifts our spirits and sends us forth invigorated. The Closing Words attempt to summarize what it is we have done together. The Postlude provides opportunity to reflect on our experience of the morning. We extinguish our chalice and ring our chimes to conclude our worship, but to begin our service to the world.
We realize that to be is to be for others. Worship is not about cocooning - not about retreating from life. It is a vacation from the burdens of finitude - not a retreat from the responsibilities of living. We welcome the respite from the everyday burdens for a precious hour, knowing full well we will return to them.
However, we will return as different people - perhaps not dramatically different - but different because we have been together - celebrating our good fortune at being alive in such an age - embracing the limits of our lives by acknowledging our mistakes, vowing to do better - proclaiming the possibilities of our lives with a hopeful bias - rehearsing our best lines - the values to which we aspire in our better moments - and, in the end, with the prophet Isaiah responding to what life asks us, "Who will go for us?" by saying to all who will hear, "Here am I, send me."
Whatever it is that happens we are not quite sure. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said of the spiritual, we "can't see it, but it changes things." The change may not last forever; we will return here again and again to be transformed - to be changed. We know the old story of the preacher who was chided because people could not remember what he said this week, to say nothing of last week. He responded by asking what his interrogator had for dinner last Sunday and the Sunday before. Though we cannot remember it, we know that without it we would be less than we are. One hopes the metaphor holds.
I have talked and walked you through what we do on a Sunday morning and why I think we do it. However finite we are, we need this spiritual vacation from the burden of finitude. We need to be reminded of the lines and lives we cherish.
A ministerial musing as the congregation leaves after Sunday worship. There they go, some in laughter and others in tears; some eager to face the new day and week, others just a bit less fearful than they were;
Some are sad but know that at least their sadness has taken them to the deep places where strength is found;
Some celebrating life with zest, knowing that while today is full of joy, they know they need strength to face the hard days that are sure to come;
Some are encouraged to find the holy in the homely every day; others are unable to pronounce the name of holiness , but feel that there is a something more in human existence without which we could not live;
Some are now ready to take on the powers and principalities of this world in the name of justice; others know how hard it is, but are encouraged to keep working though the outcome is ever in doubt;
Some fly high on wings of joyful song, others find deep roots in their inescapable suffering;
Some still wonder at the meaning of it all, and others are now filled with confidence they can get through this day, and another and another.
"Sunday morning calm takes over
Resting, life is sleeping from the last week's rush
In sleep comes back the mosaic of the days
With work, with clatter
Nobody has time to think
Finally, Sunday.
But, too lazy to think
So just rest and rest
You have to put together the mosaic of next week."[7]
That is why we do what we do - all on a Sunday morning - our vacation from the burdens of finitude.
return to main page