This past Sunday I went to church for the first time in months. I wanted to see what the new interim pastoral team (a retired married couple) at the nearby ELCA church was like. And it was the first Sunday of Advent, which is perhaps my favorite liturgical season. Though I didn’t really think of it this way, attending worship after a prolonged absence was also a good preparation for this follow-up to last week’s blog post.

The church I attended has gone through years of misery thanks to incompetent synodical and then pastoral leadership. When I first attended there while on vacation twenty-some years ago, it was vibrant and well attended. Today it is on life support. But while worship this Sunday was certainly improved from what it had been, most of the problems I experienced go beyond the difficulties of this one congregation.

In short, the hour-long experience just felt old and tired; nostalgic rather than enlivening. Being away for some time helped put the experience in sharp contrast to what I have been thinking and writing most recently. My personal spiritual experience and this worship service struggled to connect.

In the last years of my ministry, I became increasingly aware of how wordy worship services are. Words, words, words. Talk, talk, talk. Ears wilt under the assault. I know that traditional Christian worship has always had lots of words. But it occurred to me this time that the problem now is that the church has lost confidence in the ancient words of scripture and liturgy. As a result, it’s felt that more “contemporary” words are needed to explain the old words.

Sermons often fall into this category but so do the endless prayers, responsive readings, confessions, calls to worship, children’s messages, creeds, more prayers, benedictions, dismissals, and all sorts of liturgical revisions and updates. Rather than the church’s ancient texts being enlightened they’re simply buried, lost in the verbal avalanche. In the pews, eyes glaze over and ears grow dull.

After a short while what I craved most was silence. Yet the service seemed determined to let no moment go unfilled with sound and noise. And this, I think, highlights where contemporary worship falls short: it strives paradoxically to ensure that people not have a genuine spiritual experience; to not, in other words, experience God. Forgotten entirely is the wisdom of that simple verse in the Psalms, “Be still and know than I am God.” For modern religion that knowing is a matter of the head, but ancient wisdom knew that to truly know God was a matter of heart and soul.

What struck me most this past Sunday was how unprogressive so-called progressive Christianity is in practice. Again and again, our worship talk was about, and our prayers directed to, God as some divine being out there somewhere. The theistic God, in other words, which Frederich Nietzsche declared dead a century-and-a half ago. It is as if over three centuries of critical theology never happened. Worse, it is as if the modern discovery of east and south Asian spirituality and the rediscovery of Christian mysticism had never happened.

As the great 14^th century medieval mystic Meister Eckhart taught, God is not a being, not even the Greatest Being, but is the “ground of being.” This idea was revived in the 20^th century by the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and the Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton, among others. Yet in the following years it has fallen on mostly deaf ears in both communities.

Silence is avoided in worship because, if God is “out there”, silence only reinforces God’s distance and absence and our aloneness. To say God is the ground of being is the same as to say God is Spirit, as Jesus tells the woman at the well in John 4. Therefore, God permeates being itself. God is not somewhere but surrounds us and is within us and all creatures and all reality. As the Psalmist asks, “Where can I go and you are not there?”

Silence, as spiritual teachers around the world and over the generations have taught, is the most profound way in which we encounter God, the Supreme Self, Ultimate Reality. You would never know this from contemporary worship. The sarcastic observation that “God was made in man’s image” is basically true. And that’s okay, as long as we realize that’s who our gods are and that the True God is beyond words and concepts. This is why Eckhart said he “prayed for God to deliver me from God.” In other words, he wanted to be done with the God of doctrines and theology, images and ideas, and to know only the God who transcended all those things. This is the God we meet in silence.

It is tempting to say that religion needs to be tossed overboard, and it may sound like that’s what I’m advocating here. But I don’t believe that’s true. Rather, I think we need to let all the ancient religions be what we as modern people know them to be, without their halos and presumptions to eternal truth and authority.

We forget that is not how the writers of religion’s ancient texts understood what they were doing. Their words need to be listened to and pondered for whatever wisdom and truth is inherent in them, rather than what some external authority has declared about them. Even if we choose to call them “the Word of God”, they are never words of God.

Ancient words are often problematic if taken literally. Instead of using more words to “solve” them, we need silence in which to contemplate and reflect upon them, listening for their wisdom and spiritual truth. Ancient stories need to be read and heard as stories, as best we can with our modern minds and apart from whatever historical value they may or may not have. We forget that this is how their original hearers listened to them. As New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has said:

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

Christianity is in need of a major reset, even if the churches claiming to represent it are unwilling to do so. We are aware now more than ever of the enormous gap between Christianity and the man it claims as its founder. Why that gap occurred so quickly, and then grew over the centuries, is still a mystery. In any case, today it is the man Jesus that holds people’s interest and not the religion or institutions which claim to represent him.

Next time (I know, part three!), I’ll offer some thoughts on what I think a reset Christianity might look like. But it would also be of value to ask yourself what that might be. Share your thoughts in the comments, if you like. Gallup published the results of its latest annual US religion survey and, for the first time, those saying religion was important to their life fell below 50 percent. It’s time for a shakeup.

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