Читать книгу Proclaim! - Marcus George Halley - Страница 7
ОглавлениеThen the Lord said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is hardened; he refuses to let the people go. Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is going out to the water; stand by at the river bank to meet him, and take in your hand the staff that was turned into a snake. Say to him, “The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, ‘Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness.’ ”
(Exod. 7:14–16a)
SEWANEE, TENNESSEE, HAS BEEN HOME to me ever since I first entered the “domain” as a prospective student searching for an Episcopal seminary where I could complete my Anglican year. Years later, when the then dean asked me to return to be a part of a conversation on liturgical renewal, I jumped at the opportunity. At the point, I had served two congregations—one in Kansas City, Missouri; the other in Minneapolis, Minnesota—both of whom sought to renew themselves through a deeper engagement with liturgy. Though the two congregations represent two different contexts and histories, they were united in this reality: they were hungry for renewal, but woefully unaware of what renewal would require of community.
The first congregation—a large, established, traditional congregation in an affluent neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri—was doing “well.” They had a large budget, multiple clergy and lay staff members, and an average Sunday attendance in the mid- to high two hundreds. The leadership of church had developed the foresight to see a few years down the line and recognize that unless they did something different, they were about to experience a sharp decline. I was happy to come alongside them as an associate priest, to learn from and grow with them, and together we engaged in some innovative work around the margins of the community—creating small groups for artists with a worship- and community-building component. We also experimented with raising up a seeker community defined by question-asking that led to seeking the wisdom of the broader community. The system, like all systems, struggled when it came to substantial innovation at the heart of the community.
The second congregation—a small, scrappy congregation in Minneapolis—wasn’t always so small. In living memory, the pews were full and future was bright. The decline that brought the church to the place it currently found itself was swift. As the new rector of the congregation, I had conversations with many former members, and the message I got was that many of them fled the advance of liberal theology, or communal in-fighting, or had problems with my predecessor being the first female rector in the parish’s history. As the first black, openly gay rector in the parish’s history, I was clear many of them would not be coming back. For the ones who remained, they coalesced around the importance of liturgy in their communal life. By the time I arrived, the church was mainly a Sunday parish with little communal, missional, or liturgical life outside of Sunday mornings.
After observing for a few months, listening to where the Holy Spirit was alive in the community, I discovered that people were incredibly interested in liturgy and yet the worship life of the community felt stagnant. After a bit more inquiry, I located the problem—the community had engaged in a lot of revision around liturgy—swapping out different prayers and experimenting with different ways of using space—without deep, substantive formation in the prayer book tradition. The questions often asked by people involved with creating worship in the community were “what did you like” or “what didn’t you like.” It was a step of desperation, the result of an earnest desire to experience revival and renewal.
What I have learned from a few years of parish leadership is this: the revival and renewal many faith communities seek will require engaging the complex feelings that come with discomfort and dislocation. I’ve also learned that people seldomly volunteer to be uncomfortable. Despite the fact that discomfort is at the heart of the Christian story (“take up your cross and follow” sure isn’t an invitation to an all-inclusive spa), Western Christianity’s centuries-long alliance with power has managed to iron out our collective capacity for discomfort for the sake of God’s mission. In a time when Western Christianity is being asked to summon up the skills, resources, and capacity to engage this missional age for the sake of the gospel of Jesus Christ, we are finding it hard to show up and demonstrate resilience. I wonder how much of this is enshrined in the worship life of many faith communities. If the questions about the community’s worship come down to what we “like,” it is clear that we aren’t terribly interested in transformation and renewal. It might be that we are more interested in the status quo than we are ready to admit, at least out loud.
I took both of these experiences with me to Sewanee, Tennessee, as well as my own experience of a deepening devotional life framed by the Daily Office and other forms of Christian prayer. Though I am sure I said it clumsily, what I tried to say in Sewanee was this: whether or not we undergo prayer book revision, what we actually need is a dedication and commitment to a vibrant spirituality expressed both in public and private prayer. The way we worship in the Episcopal Church, with common texts that span centuries of wisdom and striving to know and be known by Christ—when expansive, transforming, and poetic—can support our journey to and with God. My own experience of coming to the prayer book tradition as one “thoroughly churched and spiritually starving” showed me that there was spiritual sustenance here, a way of life that, when engaged with intention and openness, can serve as a guide to a deep relationship with Jesus Christ. God knows it is not perfect. Nothing human is. Though much of the prayer book is lifted directly from the Bible, it is distilled through centuries of human minds grappling with the untouchable reality of God.
I wanted my congregation to experience the renewal I had experienced—a deeper commitment to Christ, a more vibrant devotional life, a deeper awareness of the hand of God at work in the world around us, and a conviction about the power behind the truth of the gospel—and I knew that the only way to do that was to pray. Often. I came to know intimately what Rabbi Edwin Friedman means when he talks about what it means for a leader to change a system. It is tempting to think that change in a system happens by the fiat of a charismatic leader, but I have found that the change in systems occurs when leaders commit to changing. When a community’s leaders—lay and ordained—make up in the minds to be different, the community will follow suit. As members of a community, we are ultimately only capable of changing ourselves and then inviting others to be changed as a result. The revival we seek must be cultivated in ourselves before it can ever be experienced in community.
I also picked up on something else. Our participation in public worship—however constructed—is unfathomably radical. It is a protest against the prevailing powers of this age that seek to dehumanize and degrade. Worship is a resistance against narratives of inescapable divisiveness, estrangement, isolation, and secularism. When we worship, whether we know it or not, we are representing the entire Christian community gathered across the world in storefronts, cathedrals, chapels, dorm rooms, and taverns. We are also connected to Christians who have gathered across time in catacombs, houses, in the desert, and on mountaintops. Public worship is a declaration of the reality of a new world, one that is all around us and constantly adventing upon us. When we worship God as a community of believers, we affirm our belief in the freedom of that new world and our freedom from the bondage of this one.
When we hear the story of the Exodus, we often hear God telling Moses to tell Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” What we miss is the statement connected to that demand, a statement that puts that demand into context. God tells Moses to tell Pharaoh, “Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness” (Exod. 7:16, emphasis added). This demand is repeated several times and is met with Pharaoh’s obstinate refusal to relinquish his control over the Hebrew people. At one point in the story, after the fourth plague, Pharaoh makes a bargain. He will allow the Israelites to make a sacrifice within the land of Egypt. Moses rejects the bargain, stating that the kind of worship that the Israelites are being asked to do would be “offensive” to Egyptians. Pharaoh comes back with another bargain: the Israelites could go outside of Egypt, but not too far. Moses seems to agree to this demand, but as soon as he leaves, Pharaoh changes his mind. He seems to know that there is something about this God of the Israelites that won’t be satisfied with momentary freedom. This exchange reveals something about the nature of worshiping the God of the Exodus—whatever else God seems to be concerned about, God is concerned about freedom. Social movements through history have shown us that once you fan the flames of freedom in the hearts of the oppressed, it may dim, but it will never be extinguished. Pharaoh knew this. Dictators and tyrants throughout human history have known this. Aware that the jig was up, God’s demand of Pharaoh by way of Moses changes after that exchange. “Let my people go, so that they may worship me.” God didn’t need to stipulate “in the wilderness” anymore because it became clear that to worship God was to leave slavery and oppression behind.
Looking back, I wonder if the transformation both churches desired—and I think might be desired across much of Western Christianity—can be found in understanding worship as the exchange of one world—one that is dying—for another—one that is being made new. The Exodus narrative teaches us that the worship of God requires a shift in location. It is difficult, impossible even, to authentically worship God while participating—even passively—in dehumanizing, oppressive, and violent systems. To worship God, we must be willing to stand outside of those systems, to see them for what they are, to see the ways they are doomed to destruction, and then, if we must reenter them, to do so with greater clarity about the ways the mission of God calls us to engage them. If this is how we understand public liturgy, then it can never simply be “the work of the people.” It has to be something more or else it is powerless to stand against the otherwise overwhelming tide of slavery that mutates and manifests in every generation.
The idea of liturgy as the “work of the people” was popularized during the liturgical renewal movement of the mid-twentieth century when churches became interested in expanding the voices present within the Eucharist beyond those called to ordered ministry. The wisdom behind this move is that worship is something we all do. Prayer and worship aren’t the sole possession of a few ordained people with the rest of us left only to passively participate as spectators. As our current prayer book rightly states, “The entire Christian assembly participates” in the worship of the Church (BCP, 13). Ruth Meyers astutely points out that although the purpose behind liturgy as “the work of the people” was to decenter liturgy as the work of the clergy of which the people are only spectators, “by not also turning our attention beyond ourselves to the need of the world for God’s reconciling love, continuing to think of liturgy as ‘the work of the people’ impoverishes our celebrations” (Missional Worship Worshipful Mission, 29).
In its original Greek context, “liturgy” or leitourgia referred to the public work a citizen might do for the community, particularly in terms of a public works project sponsored by an affluent citizen to benefit the masses who were not as affluent. As Meyers points out, over time the word gradually assumed a more spiritual tone with it eventually coming to mean “service, whether rendered to God or to the community” (Missional Worship, 27). A truly Christian understanding of liturgy reaches its climax when we understand Jesus as liturgy. Jesus is God’s leitourgia for the sake of the world. In his self-offering, he was giving something to humanity that we desperately needed but had no way of getting on our own—reconciliation. If this is true, if sending the Son of God into the world for the sake of the renewal of Creation is God’s greatest “public works project,” then what might it mean to understand ourselves—our worship, our prayer, or lives of discipleship—as continued participation in God’s continued self-offering? What if every single time we gathered in Christian community to pray and worship, we also continued to make present the mystery of God’s love for our communities, for those in need of loving community, for those in need of reconciliation, for those whose lives are in desperate need of meaning? What if we became aware of the power that animates the Christian community and the grace that compels us to bear witness, not only to the resurrection 2,000 years ago, but to the pulses of newness that emanate from the empty tomb? What if worship led us to ask one question over and over again: how is my freedom in God, given to me by God’s own self-offering, inviting me to share that freedom with others by giving myself away for the sake of those I don’t even know?
We’d have revival.
In response to my community’s need for formation in the prayer book tradition, I invited a few members to read Derek Olsen’s Inwardly Digest. As a runner, I appreciated Olsen’s use of athletic metaphors for the discipline of prayer and worship. Like training for a 5K, developing a vibrant devotional life requires constancy and commitment, even when it becomes dull. “You can’t manipulate the Spirit,” Olsen writes, “and you can’t manipulate long-term formation. The point of a solid devotional practice is not momentary surges of emotion; long-term formation and transformation is measured in years and decades. Sometimes good and worthwhile devotional practices will inspire us—and sometimes they may feel more like work for long stretches of time” (Inwardly Digest, 17). Prayer and worship are boring sometimes and yet the transformation we seek requires us to push through, to remain dedicated, to keep our eyes on the prize. Moreover, the transformation we long for in the world requires us to remain steadfast in our work, continuing to make the love of God present in the gathering together of Christian community.
One benefit to understanding worship as God’s work within which we participate is the gift of the long view. We can’t expect instant transformation—either personally or in our faith communities. We are participating in God’s ongoing work of renewing and transforming Creation, work that has been taking place over the course of millennia. To the degree that we are transformed by the grace of God, we are microcosms of God’s ongoing work. Our private prayer and public worship are not only training us for this work, they are active and ongoing engagements with this work.
Never has this been more evident to me than when I was living in Kansas City, Missouri, when Michael Brown was shot. In the aftermath of the shooting, I found myself struggling to understand what it meant to be black in the United States. My faith in America’s ability to actually make true on its original promise of “liberty and justice for all” died next to Michael Brown, exposed for all the world to see on Florissant Avenue. My upbringing as a Baptist had taught me that my relationship with Jesus Christ was personal, that I “could go to God in prayer,” that Jesus was a friend, that “earth had no sorrow that heaven could not heal.” But I found my experience in a historically white congregation challenging to say the least. If the oozing wound of American white supremacy was mentioned at all, it was mentioned in overly simplistic terms. “We have to learn to forgive,” one white minister said, “only then can we achieve reconciliation.”
He wasn’t wrong, but it was tone-deaf for sure.
While reconciliation is the goal—and God’s mission—in that moment we were dealing with bodies in the street, a community in turmoil, and individuals experiencing an incredible amount of pain. Platitudes about loving your neighbor aren’t helpful when our society has grossly distorted neighborliness and often frames relationships across racial or any other difference as impossible and unequal. What we need is an intervention. What we need is a new framework for law enforcement that helps them dismantle the implicit bias taught to them by the dominant narratives of a racialized society. What we need is for black people and other people of color to be able to occupy public space without fear of running into the wrong police officer who either understands their role as judge, jury, and executioner or simply is so immersed in a culture that constantly sends negative messages about black people that they respond to a black person as an automatic threat, guilty of something until posthumously proven innocent in a court of law.
In need of healing and compassionate community, I attended an event organized by local community activists in Kansas City just a few days into the firestorm that was enveloping Ferguson, Missouri. A few community organizations had joined together to organize a march and protest in Mill Creek Park, just across the street from a major shopping district in the city. The entire event was powerful as the black community and antiracist allies from across the region joined together to grieve the ongoing assault on black bodies and to find a way to organize to continue the monumental task of dismantling racism from the institutions of our communities.
I couldn’t find solace in Christian community, so I found it in the street. The Holy Spirit is known to stir beyond our gates called beautiful.
I was particularly moved when an elder from the community, a black woman with her hair styled in long, salt-and-pepper locks, stood up on a platform, grabbed a megaphone, and apologized to the younger activists and participants. “We are sorry that we didn’t teach you the truth about our struggle. We were afraid we would give you a too-small view of the world and we wanted you to soar. But what we did was allow you to believe that this wasn’t possible, that the hatred some folks have for you—just because you breathe—died a long time ago, when it didn’t. It’s here and y’all are dying.”
I didn’t even know I needed to hear those words and yet, as I stood in the middle of that field, buzzing with activity, somber and mournful, her words washed over me like an ocean. That moment personified the old hymn:
There is a balm in Gilead,
to make the wounded whole.
There is a balm in Gilead,
to heal the sin-sick soul.
(Lift Every Voice and Sing, hymn 203)
I don’t remember leaving that action with any plan, any organizing strategy, any idea of how were going to walk together differently as a community in the wake of the extrajudicial killings of Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland, and Akai Gurley, and . . . and . . . and . . . , and yet I walkedawayholdinga bit more hope than I showed up with. That a community dared to assemble to grieve together in public, to love one another publicly, and to hold each other up gave me that hope.
I also left that gathering feeling empowered. Even though I was standing in a field—an indistinguishable face in a field of hundreds—I left feeling more seen then I had felt in weeks, or months, or years. A few days later, moved to action, I picked up the phone and called a congregation in Ferguson, Missouri, and asked their priest a simple question, “What do you need?”
“We need backpacks and school supplies. When the unrest dies down, kids will need to go back to school, but parents are afraid to go out to buy supplies.”
“Got it.”
With just a few days to organize, I sent out a few e-mails and mobilized my congregation and a few neighboring ones to donate school supplies. The local news even ran a story on it. Parishioners and folks in the community who couldn’t make it to the local stores to buy supplies came by my office with checks and cash. “Get what you need,” they said.
I don’t remember the quantity of backpacks and school supplies I collected. I do remember that it exceeded my goal. By the time I loaded up my car to take the donated supplies across Missouri, they filled the trunk, backseat, and passenger seat. I remember feeling secure and powerful as I drove down Interstate 40 from Kansas City to Saint Louis, like in this small, simple action, I had resisted the narrative that hopelessness and powerlessness are inevitable realities in the face of white supremacy, like I get to make choices about how I exist in the world and I can choose to use power in a way that seeks the well-being of another.
And all because I felt seen.
That action in Kansas City was not only a way to train us for the work of dismantling racist, white power structures across the institutions of our communities, but it was an active participation therein. We gathered to learn to love each other by loving each other, to learn to stand with one another by standing together, by learning to hold each other up by holding one another up in moments of grief. This was on-the-job training, not an antiracism training in the sterile and controlled environment of a seminar room. We were live and in living color and I left empowered.
The way we worship God should not make us feel invisible and nameless, not if we believe that we worship a God who knows each of us by name and calls us “beloved.” Although we are swept up into the relentless current of God’s love in worship and prayer, we do so, not to escape this world with all its joys and pains, but to better understand ourselves and our place in this world. If devotion to Christ is an active participation in his work of reconciliation and liberation, then we should flow out of our closer encounters with Christ in the direction of freedom.
I also left wondering about the ways I might leave a gathering of Christian worship feeling this same way. We gather, we claim space as holy, we listen and respond to scripture, we tell truths about ourselves and receive God’s grace for the places in our lives where we are prone to wander, we share peace, and we make Christ present in bread and wine before sharing in the banquet of the kingdom of heaven. How do we do all of this and leave lonely, bitter, unmoved, ungracious, and overwhelmed by the brokenness of our world?
Is it because we think we are in a training in the controlled environment of a seminar room?
I was teaching a newcomer class once when a question about the Holy Eucharist came up. “What are we doing in the Eucharist?” someone asked. “Like, what is happening in that moment?”
“We’re rehearsing for heaven!” someone blurted out.
They weren’t wrong, but it wasn’t the whole truth.
“When we share the bread and the wine, Christ is here, right now.” I said. “We don’t have to wait until death to share the gifts of the kingdom of God. It comes near to us when we gather, when we share, and when we go.”
Our prayer and worship aren’t seminars in controlled environments where we talk about God. When we pray, we are coming into intimate, close relationship with God through Jesus Christ. And don’t let us dare to gather in community. That’s where it really goes down. Jesus tells us about the power of assembling in Christian community. “Truly I tell you,” he says, “if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matt, 18:19–20). This statement echoes an excerpt from Ecclesiastes where the teacher says, “Though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Eccles. 4:12). There is power in numbers and something very real happens when we dare to gather in community and recognize Christ in our midst.
I long deeply for community, especially community that is bigger than itself. Understanding Christian community as subversively powerful and purposefully understated has reshaped my relationship to Christ and his Church. As we navigate the shifting tectonic plates of rapidly changing religious landscape, I have gained solace from the realization that we never need armies to accompany the gospel. We never need wealth, and power, and prestige to aid in our evangelism. All we need is a heart keenly aware that the Son of the Living God is present here, that this community gathered in humility around prayer and sacrament is the vanguard of the reign of Christ, that we are actively participating in the tearing down of oppressive power structures by affirming the sovereignty of God over every earthly power.
This message is clear in Exodus, but that message got lost somewhere in the centuries.
The moment the Roman Empire found out that there was a benefit to co-opting the community of disciples gathered around the Risen Christ, the message of movement began to become distorted. Before long, armies bore the cross of the Prince of Peace into battle, killing others in Christ’s name. This only grew worse as the faith spread and more and more people in power took on the name of Jesus Christ without committing to one of the principles of his movement—love. Soon, the message of Christianity was almost indistinguishable from warfare, colonialism, and oppression. All over the world, the Cross of Christ wreaked havoc among unsuspecting peoples and cultures. Far from being a movement of perpetual liberation—a never-ending Jubilee—the community of faith around Jesus of Nazareth became a principality, a power-broker, the very thing the reign of Christ came to dethrone.
And yet—by the sheer power of the of the Holy Spirit—the message of the Crucified and Risen One still managed to be told and lived. By mystics in deserts, monastics in communities, slaves deep in the woods of the American South, the earth-shattering truth of Christ continued to be proclaimed and shared. These individuals and communities fell in love with Jesus Christ and—against all odds—preserved a faith that had been distorted beyond recognition by the allure of power and wealth.
As a young disciple of Jesus Christ—one who will likely be alive to see the Church in the West forced to reform itself—I actually believe that we are being given a gift. Our wider culture, having discovered it no longer needs us to be an avenue of power, is tossing us off to the side. We no longer have pride-of-place in the public square, Sunday’s aren’t just for church anymore, and most people are apathetic to the Church. All we are left with is Christ and, to borrow from C. S. Lewis, the one who has Christ and everything has no more than the one who has Christ alone (C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, 34).
In short, we are set up for revival.
The Pentecost story tells us that in the days immediately following the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, the disciples were trapped in a cyclical pattern of locking themselves in rooms. They had just experienced the greatest trauma of their lives coupled with witnessing something so wonderful, they struggled to find words to speak about it. They were afraid of sharing the news of the resurrection, afraid of openly proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ, and uncertain about their future. They went through the formalities of ensuring the future of the movement by electing Matthias—the Church is very good at formalities—but deep down, there was a deep, saturating fear.
And they dared to gather in the real world. They were just waiting for something to happen.
When 110 of them were altogether, the Holy Spirit came and blew them into action. Peter preached a sermon so powerful that thousands of people were brought into the body of Christ. The Church was set on a course that day that—though it may have stumbled over the centuries—it remains on to this very day. We are the Church of Jesus Christ, a mystical extension of his body in the world, called to go where he went, say what he said, and hang out with the folks he hung out with—the misfits, the outcasts, the struggling, the lost, the lonely, and the hurting. If prayer and worship bring us close to Jesus, it should bring us close to those who are suffering. If is isn’t, we might be guilty of idolatry, worshiping a projection of ourselves instead of worshiping the “stone the builders rejected.” My experience shows me that idolatry is seductive because fidelity to the living God actually requires something different from us than we are wont to give. That might explain why people are so apt to walk away from faith the moment they are asked to behave differently. When we’re used to doing whatever we want with divine approval, being told that God might require conversion feels like death.
And that might just be the point.
Jesus tells his disciples that those who would be his disciples are to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him. This is nothing short of an invitation to die—die to a world that is itself dying in order that we might be born anew in a world that is coming. Personal prayer and public worship are part of that process, bringing us close to the consuming fire of God and giving God more and more of ourselves to refine and purify.
Our worship and prayer is also something else. When we pray individually or worship in the context of Christian community—whether we use a set of texts or not—we are not only swept up in God’s liberating love of the world, we are swept up in God’s very self. That we are referred to as the “body of Christ” throughout much of scripture is neither accidental nor inconsequential. When we pray and worship, we become aware of our connection to Jesus Christ who is at the same time “one with the Father.”
When Jesus’s disciples came to him, seeking wisdom on how to pray, Jesus tells them, “When you pray, say ‘Our Father . . .’” At face value, referring to God as “Father” represents a particular ancient worldview where men were seen as the “fountain of life,” which has since been debunked by modern science. Setting aside for the moment the patriarchal effects of the word, the analogy is meant to draw a distinction between “Creator,” which assumes that what is created is fundamentally separate and disconnected from the creator, and “Father,” which assumes that what is begotten is fundamentally connected to the parent, even if that begetting is through adoption.
The analogy goes deeper than this, though. By inviting his disciples to refer to God as “Father,” Jesus is inviting them into a deeper, more profound, more intimate relationship than simply “Creator.” Jesus didn’t come merely to make us better. Jesus came to make us new. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes that,
a world of nice people, convinced of their own niceness, looking no farther, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save. For mere improvement is not redemption . . . God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. (Lewis, Mere Christianity, in The Completely C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, 170)
Understanding Lewis’s use of “sons” and “men” as patriarchal language that reflects his time, words that within his context would have been understood to be inclusive of all people, his thought here is powerful. Jesus invites us into intimate relationship with him so that we can share his intimate relationship with his Source, the “Fountain of Life” from whom all things come. As the prayer book outlines, prayer is simply “response to God” whereas Christian prayer is “response to God the Father, through Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit” (BCP, 856). The distinction is key. To pray—publicly or privately—is to take on a new identity, to walk in a new world, and to affirm a whole new set of allegiances and perspectives.
At its heart, our desire to pray to God in private or worship God in the context of Christian community is Jesus’s very desire to commune with the Father. To pray as a Christian is “to let Jesus’ prayer happen” in us (Williams, Being Christian, 62). It is finally saying “yes” to the desire that is present in each of us that otherwise manifests in workaholism, greed and acquisitiveness, and busyness, namely, the desire to fill the God-sized hole in each of us, the parts of ourselves that need that which is beyond us to give us meaning.
We might like to think that it is something more than this, but our worship—whether set rites and rituals or not—is to God as a boat is to a raging sea. It is the only thing keeping us afloat in the middle of what would otherwise overwhelm us and yet, as scripture narrates for us in the story of Peter’s brave journey on the sea, sometimes simply settling the spray of the crashing waves is not enough. Sometimes, we must step outside of the boat and allow the love of God to lap at our ankles as we wonder what in the earth we’ve gotten ourselves into. Other times, when the storm is fierce and frightening, all we have to do is remember who is in the boat with us, that God is not only expressed in the crashing waves, but also in Jesus asleep in the prow.
People who are hungry for revival need only pay attention to the ways the Holy Spirit is alive and active in our world and the ways in which our communal worship, though deceptively tame, is actually holding us afloat amid the powerful and overwhelming tide of God’s grace that is transforming our world before our very eyes.
