Browsed by
Tag: worship

Losing our religion?

Losing our religion?

Comments 4 comments

Still shop of beginning of ABC news story on US religious decline

Last month, ABC News broadcast a 10-minute report titled, Is America losing its religion? So, more than just a sound bite. It began with the story of a Catholic parish in Buffalo, New York, with a large building but an ever-shrinking congregation. It formally closed last summer and the property has been sold.

The reporter spoke with a priest with the title “Diocese Vicar for Renewal and Development.” Despite that title, this priest’s primary role seemed to be managing the closing of parishes too small to continue. In the past twenty years, he said, their diocese had closed half its congregations, and more closures were to come. This process was euphemistically called the “Road to Renewal.”

The report discussed how this trend was broad based and transcended denominations. Examples were given of evangelical Protestant and mainline Protestant congregations in similar straights. The now oft-repeated statistic was cited that less than half of American adults say they are members of a religious community, a dramatic drop from 75 years ago. The result: congregations by the thousands are closing every year.

When asked why all this is happening, the Catholic priest gave an unintentionally ironic answer. “We’ve become a culture that doesn’t need God as much as we think we do.” Well, I think I know what he was trying to say, and I think he is wrong. Not needing God isn’t the issue.

Several times in the report, religious leaders expressed the view that in turning away from religion, people were turning away from God. I would challenge them to support that conclusion. Surveys show that belief in God has remained steady, including among those who have left organized religion.

Personally, I know of many people who have stopped being active church members yet remain people of faith, often with serious spiritual practices and voluntary service activities. But just as important, the converse also has to be admitted. Namely, that churches have always had many members who were spiritually shallow and often did little more than attend worship services, aka “go to church.”

For churches today, that disconnect has finally become too wide to maintain and is at a breaking point. Increasingly, people with a deep spirituality are finding the institutional church irrelevant. They are no longer interested in maintaining buildings, serving on boards and committees, attending rote worship services, and the other routines of church life.

On the other hand, the people who belonged to churches out of habit and family tradition are also disappearing. The “whiff of religion” they received from church isn’t enough anymore to keep them involved. Or just as likely, their children who have become adults, see no point in going through the religious motions their parents went through. As to anyone considering joining a church, the seemingly unending parade of sex and financial scandals and the polarizing politicization of many churches are all big turnoffs.

Today, churches are often dominated by retirees who remember when churches were full and often the center of people’s social lives. They don’t understand why things have changed, or don’t want to understand. They ensure that the proposals coming down the pike year-after-year for “renewing the church” ultimately go nowhere because they don’t want the church to change. They like it the way it is. And as their numbers shrink, so do their churches. Last one out, turn off the lights.

Unfortunately, many of those recruited for church leadership roles, including clergy, hang on to the old church traditions. It was disheartening to hear this relatively young priest repeating the worn-out trope that people are leaving church because they are leaving God. He needs to get out more.

But that’s the danger of institutions: at some point self-preservation becomes their primary goal. And leaders are selected for how strongly they affirm that goal. Yet the point comes when even a sinking ship’s captain has to cry out, “Abandon ship!” and direct everyone into a lifeboat or to grab a life vest and jump. The ship of the church may not be at that point, but it’s getting close.

While those committed to the institutional church see a society skidding into spiritual darkness, I see plenty of evidence of spiritual vitality. We are certainly in a time of exploration where new language, practices, theologies, and philosophies are being tried out and tested. Much may seem strange to the traditionalists, and much will be discarded along the way. But as individuals and in groups, in person and online, people everywhere are actively searching for a spirituality that meaningfully connects their life, in all its dimensions, with the Creative Energy that is our origin and the source of hope and renewal in all our difficulties.

What options does the church have to respond to this new spirituality? I think this popular organizational maxim is as good as any: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

No more kings

No more kings

Comments 0 Comment
Actress Claire Foy trying on her crown in a scene from the TV series The Crown
Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II in season 1 of The Crown

This coming Sunday I am the guest pastor at a nearby church. At my request, I will be preaching on the Gospel text for Thanksgiving, Matthew 6:25-34, from the Sermon on the Mount. Officially this Sunday is Christ the King, which a while ago I decided to ignore. The following is a post I wrote a couple years ago to explain why I think creating Christ the King was a bad idea and needs to go. I will use a few of the points here to explain to my host congregation why they are hearing a Thanksgiving sermon, rather than one for CTK.

Recently I’ve been watching the latest (and next to last) season of The Crown on Netflix. The multi-year program is the semi-fictional account of the life and reign of the late Queen Elizabeth II. The center of this season has been the final marital breakdown and divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

The recurring themes of The Crown are the obvious ones. Questions like what role does a monarch play in a democracy, how can the ancient traditions of monarchy be brought into the modern world, and how do all the “lesser royals”, including the heir apparent, keep from going crazy when they frankly have so little to do.

Queen Elizabeth is portrayed as having some awareness of these issues but not much insight into what is to be done about them. Her husband and eldest son show more practical concern than she does (it was Prince Philip who made the case for televising Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation). Where Elizabeth is completely befuddled is knowing what to do about all the disintegrating marriages in her family. The resulting sorrow and heartbreak are the most moving parts of the series and an overarching sadness pervades the story.

I thought of all this as we approached the last Sunday of the church year, designated in many churches as Christ the King. I decided a couple years ago I would no longer observe this festival. Last Sunday was simply designated as “The Last Sunday after Pentecost” and it served as our Thanksgiving worship service.

Christ the King has been on the liturgical calendar for less than a century, in contrast with most festivals which are over a thousand years old. It was made a feast day by Pope Pius XI in 1925. Originally in October, it was moved to the last Sunday of the church year in 1969, which is about the time many Protestant churches adopted it.

Ostensibly Pius XI’s goal was to challenge the growing power of authoritarian governments. “Christ is the true king, not you,” in other words. But it was also the case that the Pope was in a long-running struggle with the Italian government to save some remnant of the Catholic Church’s once formidable political power. A short time later, Mussolini agreed to the establishment of the Vatican State, the postage stamp size “country” in the middle of Rome, ruled by the Catholic Church.

That part of the story is mostly forgotten now and was not even thought of when Protestants adopted Christ the King for their usage. Today, it is understood as a hope-filled look to the future establishment of God’s rule on earth, and a challenge to forces of domination by the example of Christ’s power of service and compassion, symbolized by the cross.

But as the adage goes, saying it doesn’t necessarily make it so. Words have meaning, and the symbol of “Christ the King” simply doesn’t communicate the laudable message intended by liturgical officials. “Christ the king” is not a biblical idea, for the obvious reason that the common understanding of “king” does not fit either the earthly Jesus or the risen Christ.

The Windsors are a pathetic last gasp of England’s centuries long monarchy. They retain the wealth and soap opera lives but now lack their ancestors’ power to use and abuse. Most of Europe’s monarchies ended in the violence of war or revolution. The few remaining kings and queens know their role is largely public relations, promoting tourism and national industry.

Presumably such kings are not what are in mind when thinking of Christ the king. But what then? Those revolutions (including our own) happened for a reason. Overall, kings have an abominable record. The ideal of just and benevolent monarchy lacks one thing: actual examples!

You can learn all you need to know about the Bible’s view of kings by reading the story in the 8th chapter of Samuel. Tired of their Judges, the elders of Israel come to Samuel demanding he appoint a king, like those of the countries around them. Samuel knows this will be a disaster and angrily describes the calamities that will befall them. But they won’t listen, and God tells Samuel to go ahead, give them a king, but don’t take it personally, “for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me”. The biblical saga that follows demonstrates again and again the truth of Samuel’s warning.

In the New Testament, Jesus never refers to himself as a king. His response to Pilate’s question if he is a king is basically, “you can call me whatever you want.” Even more telling is the story in John 6. After feeding the crowd with the loaves and fishes, they want to make Jesus king, but he runs away. Paul, writing earlier than the gospels, also never calls Jesus a king.

What is prominent in both the gospels and Paul is the phrase basileia tou theou, or “kingdom of God.” But for Jesus this is really a miniature parable in itself, and is the subject of most of his parables. The kingdom is at hand, Jesus says, it is in your midst, it is within you, it is spread upon the earth but people don’t see it.

This kingdom has no earthly equivalent but is an ironic, anti-kingdom, if you will. It is the end of all external rule, giving way to an internal and all-pervasive truth and life of the heart. Jesus and Paul both called it love, empowered by the Spirit.

No image of “king”, whether from the past or present, could ever invoke such an astonishing mystery, the “good news” which Jesus proclaimed. “Christ the king” invokes confusion at best, if not an outright contradiction of Jesus’ message. Like most monarchs, it needs to go.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

Comments 8 comments
Storefront church
A storefront church in Toronto.

In almost any conversation about the church’s future, the elephant in the room, the thing everyone is aware of but no one wants to talk about, is God. Perhaps it’s because people take God as a given, needing no discussion, but I don’t think so. For some it may be that they would feel too awkward or embarrassed. But I think the main reason God is “off the table” is that people know it would open a can of worms. It would reveal that people are all over the map on who or what God is, and that few adhere to the church’s “official” position.

It’s been well over a century since the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead … and we have killed him.” Despite hysterical distortions by his opponents then and since, Nietzsche was basically reporting a historical fact: the notion of God common in the ancient and medieval world was no more. That God was “killed” by the creation of a science-based world that has no place for such a God. That God is now homeless and unemployed, since heaven has no place in the universe and the universe has no need for God to keep it going.

Are a scientific worldview and the idea of God incompatible? Well, yes and no. If God is a being in some extraterrestrial location called heaven, who intervenes in the operation of the universe and the affairs of humanity, then yes, you have to choose one or the other. And if you choose science, then no God. This, of course, is the fundamentalists’ assumption and the reason for their hostility to the modern world.

Yet most Christians (including most fundamentalists to a degree) want to have their cake and eat it too. They accept science and the marvels it has brought to modern life, yet somehow also want to keep a personal God existing somewhere out there. Thus, Christians live with their religion and their science-dominated daily lives in separate compartments, with interaction between them rare and, when it does happen, awkward, if not explosive.

Or at least, that’s how it’s been. For I think we have reached a tipping point where most people now find this an impossible and unnecessary juggling act. The one bond above all others which has held people to the church is finally dissolving, and that’s a belief in a theistic God, God as an extraterrestrial being somewhere out there.

I say both impossible and unnecessary because people are discovering that, despite the church’s age-old denial, there are other ways to understand and experience God. Furthermore, many Christians are discovering that within Christianity there have always been alternative viewpoints, expressed by the mystics but also more than a few theologians, not to mention countless ordinary clergy and lay church members.

The growing number of those identifying as “spiritual but not religious” is the most tangible sign of this movement. These are people who have abandoned the theistic deity of traditional religion yet maintain a belief in an essential spiritual and sacred dimension to life. As surveys have shown, many may still express a belief in God, but often this is not the God of the church’s creeds and doctrines. This is often a God of experience rather than of theological belief.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post called “God Has Left the Building” and discussed how spirituality is rapidly displacing traditional notions of religion like Christianity.

Spirituality is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, and of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

The biggest thing missed by today’s distressed church leaders is that the church’s decline is largely a rejection of worship and the theistic God worship is centered on. Shrinking worship attendance means that millions of people have realized that they can get along fine without it and its weekly reconnection to the God-out-there. This is the reason the pandemic lockdown was such a blow. Forced to stop their worship practice, many discovered they didn’t really miss it and found other things to do with that time.

The pandemic lockdown was a missed opportunity, for this was when the church could have recognized that worship’s time is over. As I go on to say in the post I quoted above, the problem with worship is the church’s problem with God. The theistic God in heaven, the “sky God” as he’s sometimes been called, or God as Batman as Sam Harris described him, swooping in to rescue us from disaster, simply doesn’t work in the world today. As long as it clings to such a notion, the church can’t say anything intelligible, let alone meaningful, about such a God.

As I have shared these ideas in various places and settings, I rarely if ever get any pushback. While some raised in the church still cling to its traditional notions, the vast majority of people, both inside and outside the church, have moved on. Yet the church has hardly budged. Especially in worship, its hymns, liturgy, prayers, creeds, and preaching still assume this yawning gap between God, reigning in heaven, and the world and each one of us.

Spirituality is the recognition that there is no gap. God, as Paul says in Acts, is the one “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Or as St. Augustine said, and many spiritual teachers have repeated over the centuries, “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” And as Meister Eckhart says, the man who 700 years ago spearheaded the greatest effort to redirect the church toward this orientation:

Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.

Churches measure their vitality by how many people are in worship, yet it is worship that is dragging down the church. It is like an addiction, a habit the church can’t let go of. That many people, especially clergy, would be astonished, and even outraged, at such an idea shows how difficult breaking this habit will be. They don’t see that culture is breaking that habit for them, as churches close by the thousands.

No doubt many repurposed churches will retain a regular community gathering, though hopefully called something other than “worship”. But here is the great learning opportunity: let members reexamine church traditions and decide how they can be reimagined and repurposed, or that they just need to go. What opens us to recognize God’s presence here and now? How do we recognize the holiness of this time and place, of everyone present, and of the world around us? And how do we tell the story of Jesus, not as the Son of God, but as a child of God who lived to show that this is the identity of every person?

For this, finally, is what a repurposed church is about: following Jesus as the revealer of our oneness with God, of our true nature as Spirit, of each of our beings as a unique embodiment of God’s own Being. In that light, much of what has passed for “essential” church life will fade away or be radically reimagined. The church will no longer proclaim the “story of salvation” as Christ’s deliverance of the world from sin. Rather, the church will be a place to “experience salvation” as the awakening to our true nature, revealed in Jesus’ life and teaching.

A repurposed church will be a place to learn from spiritual masters of past and present, whatever their religious label. Here people will be guided to follow the “pathless path”, which leads them to where they already are by discovering they have never NOT been apart from God, but only lost in their egoic mind’s delusions of separateness. In a repurposed church they will be supported in a journey inward, to discover both their true selves and the God who is the core of their being. As Meister Eckhart taught,

There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.

This may be the most difficult of the lessons a repurposed church must learn, but it is crucial. That after a centuries-long obsession with words—scripture, creeds, doctrines, theology, sermons, hymns, prayers, liturgy—God is not found in them. Rather, as Elijah learned at the mouth of his cave, God is in our silence. And in a repurposed church, silence will be its sacrament.

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Going Out of Your Mind

Going Out of Your Mind

Comments 2 comments

Young man sitting watching a mountainous horizon

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  It will not be like the covenant … that they broke…. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts…. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord.

This passage from Jeremiah 31 is like a peek behind the curtain. It’s slipped in by an unknown scribe to show the real point of Jeremiah’s futile saga. Jeremiah (like all the prophets) was doomed to fail from the start. Judah’s political and religious leaders were never going to listen to his call to repentance and to return to the Lord’s ways. Jerusalem’s destruction was baked into the cake.

In fact, this text, like others that pop up here and there in the Old Testament, blows down the house of cards that is the saga of God’s chosen people. The dramatic Mosaic “take off” story of the people of Israel, with the exodus from Egypt and the giving of the ten commandments and establishment of the covenant at Mt. Sinai, was always destined to end with a fatal crash landing. These texts are like a Greek chorus, helping the audience to recognize and understand the tragedy that is unfolding before them.

These few verses are the center of the book of Jeremiah and, in effect, declare the failure of the project of religion. Whether in the political form found in most of ancient and medieval history, or its politically independent form typical today, religion will never bring about its goal of creating a humanity in harmony with God, the One, our Divine Source. The “covenant”, the external form of people’s relationship with God, no matter how sincerely adopted, how cleverly written, how strictly enforced, will always fail in the end, will always be “broken”, as Jeremiah says.

So, what’s the answer? Is there an alternative? Formal relationships with God, whether chiseled on stone tablets, written on paper, or digitized on a computer drive will always fail. They make our relationship with God into an idea which, as with all ideas, eventually blow away like leaves in an autumn wind.

But neither we nor God are ideas. While its mythical stories and language sound antique to us today, nonetheless the Bible repeatedly gives priority to human experiences of God. The formulation of ideas about God always takes a secondary role. Yet the biblical religions have put their emphasis on concepts, expressed in theology and doctrines and enacted in rituals and liturgy.

When I was in seminary, I worked part-time in our library. With over a million volumes, it was the joining of three different Christian traditions and one of the largest theological libraries in the country. I later came to see it as symbolic of Christianity’s preoccupation with words: endless rows of centuries of dusty books, filled with words about God.

I went to church recently, for the first time since Easter. During the service I heard four Bible readings, multiple hymns, lengthy recitations of liturgy and formal prayers, and, of course, a sermon. My experience for that hour was words, words, and more words.

But this is exactly what this passage from Jeremiah says needs to change. Teaching people about God doesn’t cut it. Instead, the prophet says, rather than being taught about God with words people will know God by having God’s Word written on their hearts. God isn’t an idea to be taught and learned but an experienced reality within us.

What is the “heart”? Where is our deepest center? It isn’t our mind, with its endless stream of words and ideas, especially ideas about ourselves, called our ego. Our inner being has been called different things over the ages. Today it is most often identified as consciousness, our deepest awareness of our self and our being.

This is the true Self that is aware of our egoic self, aware of our thinking and feeling, but it is not them and is unaffected by them. It is, as Paul describes it, the source of the peace that surpasses all understanding. Christianity has said that it is Spirit, God’s own presence within us.

Religion is the quest to find and understand God. Spirituality, however, says God doesn’t need to be found but is already here, within and around us. God, as Paul is quoted saying in Acts, is the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.” In Galatians he says, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” In the gospel of John, Jesus’ last prayer for his followers is that they would all be one, “as you, Father, are in me and I am in you.”

The primary activity of religion is worship, directing prayers and praise to “the God out there.” In the spiritual life, the primary activity is meditation (in Christian circles often called contemplation or centering prayer), which opens us to our true Self and liberates us from the confusion and pain of our ever changing egoic self.

So, for example, in meditation we may still hear voices in our heads of self-judgement, anger, frustration, anxiety, relentless demands, etc. But over time we come to realize that those voices are not us. We, our real selves, are the ones listening to those voices, which, once recognized, gives us the freedom to choose how to respond to them, or (often the best course) to just ignore them.

I am not my mind any more than I am my heart or my lungs, which are all largely out of my control. Going out of my mind is not a path to insanity but, on the contrary, the path to my true self, the path to freedom and true peace and happiness. It is the path to God.

Today, religious language seems antique and much of it has been corrupted by centuries of abuse. About the time of Vatican II, one of the Roman Catholic church’s top theologians, Karl Rahner, said we should stop using the word “God” for fifty years since its meaning had become so distorted. The rise of the spiritual but not religious is due not only to a rejection of religious institutions but religious language, as well. For them, “religious-speak” is neither helpful nor meaningful.

But for those who remain within establishment religion, it is all the more important to see how, over the centuries, many religious texts and authorities have been well aware of religion’s limitations. It is a thread that runs throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition, especially among the mystics. For them, reality is not dualistic, requiring that we strive to span an enormous gap between us and God. Rather, the challenge is to awaken from our confusion and blindness to know our oneness with God and all that has been created.

One of those mystic authorities was the medieval German theologian, Meister Eckhart. His understanding of our oneness with God was clear and profound and still speaks to us today of the peace and joy of that experience.

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Fixing worship

Fixing worship

Comments 6 comments

woman sitting alone in a churchI have been to many wonderful worship services. I like to think I’ve planned and led a few. Overall, however, I would say the quality of worship is declining because churches are increasingly uncertain what worship is actually for. But that’s only a symptom of worship’s troubles.

For most of its history, worship is the basket into which the church has placed nearly all its eggs. The popular phrase “going to church” says it all. Worship is what church is about, this saying assumes. Further, it’s an essentially passive activity. You go to worship, you attend a service, like you go to a movie or attend a graduation. You are primarily a viewer of the featured event.

With the rise of popular culture in the 20th century, churches began to realize worship was losing its hold on people. They recognized that they needed to do a better job of “connecting with their audience.” The Catholic church substituted Latin for modern vernacular languages and Protestants gave up King James English for more modern versions. Music became more contemporary. To get people more involved, communion became more frequent. A new emphasis was placed on lay worship leadership.

All of this remained, however, within the context of worship as “spectator sport” because that’s what worship is. Even if you’re singing, reading, dancing, or giving a communion cup, you’re doing it for the congregation, the vast majority of whom walked in, took a program, found a seat, and then followed directions. Sometimes they joined in the singing or liturgy but mostly they watched and listened to what was going on up front. Which is what they expected to do when they came.

All the time I was a parish pastor, one of my primary objectives was to “improve worship.” In my last years, however, I came to realize that such efforts were putting lipstick on a pig. Better worship changed nothing. More specifically, it didn’t change people.

Since at least the 4th century, Christianity has been largely a passive activity. That was its appeal: it was simple. Be baptized, go to church, believe a few things about God and Jesus, make some effort to be a good person, and you’re in. The church was a carrot-and-stick institution, wielding the threat of hell and dangling the promise of heaven to keep people coming. Worship was the main place that wielding and dangling took place. It was there that you got your ticket punched to eventually be admitted to the main event “upstairs.”

With the advent of the modern world, that scenario went into a long, steady decline. The carrot and stick stopped working. Worship became a feel-good act of nostalgia, supplemented with some contemporary entertainment and self-help advice. Coffee hour and potlucks became as much of a draw. Now, though, few remember or long for the church of yore, and thousands of congregations close in the US every year.

To cut to the chase, religion assumes an enormous gap exists between God and humanity. There are many explanations for why this is so (“original sin” is the most notorious), but it is religion’s job to bridge that gap for us. Worship is essentially an endless reiteration of the story of Jesus as the “gap-bridger.”

Spirituality, on the other hand, assumes that we are actually one with God, but we are blind to that reality and do not experience it. Here the culprit is our identification with an illusory separate self, created in our mind, often called the ego. This is the mask we wear, our persona (the Greek word for mask), which is actually hiding our true being. In Christian terms this is God’s own Spirit. It is our sense of “I am”: silent, imperturbable, and eternal. It is what Paul describes as “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It is God’s own being incarnate in us.

This is why Jesus says that we must lose our life (ego) in order to find it (spirit). It is the essence of Paul’s experience of the risen Jesus, described in Galatians 2:

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

Unfortunately, power brokers in the early church drained these teachings of their spiritual content and twisted them into a legalistic framework of sin and forgiveness. Jesus’ death ceased to be a metaphor and model of the ego death we must all undergo and became instead the God-required atoning death for human sin, whose benefits only the church could provide.

In the gospels, Jesus is the human face of God. Early on, official church teaching added and he is the only human face of God. But there are plenty of stories that contradict this. For example, Jesus says both that he is the light of the world and that we are the light of the world. Why do we hear so much about the first but little about the latter?

In the closing parable of Matthew, people are judged for how they treated “the Son of man” when they encountered him in the poor, sick, hungry, naked, and imprisoned. Jesus also says the kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed because it’s already here, within us and all around us. And Paul challenges his readers, “Do you not know your body is a temple of the holy Spirit?”

In its ancient and indigenous forms, worship renewed and celebrated people’s experience of the sacred in their lives and in the world. The church needs to rediscover that tradition. To do so, it will need to get rid of its carrots and sticks once and for all. It will need to drop the notion that people are coming to find God and realize instead that God arrives with every person who walks in the door.

In poetry and prose, spoken and sung, worship must find new words (and rediscover old ones) that open people’s eyes and hearts to the eternal spirit that surrounds and fills them. But just as importantly, worship must enable the most profound experience of sacred being, which is silence. For only in silence do we realize that we are not the ego’s endless chatter and thoughts. Only in silence do we recognize our true nature as boundless awareness and eternal peace. In silence, we know ourselves as God’s own spirit. Even the ancient Israelites are directed in the Psalms, “Be still and know that I am God.”

 

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Why worship?

Why worship?

Comments 10 comments

Church interior with people sitting in pewsMy last blog post crossed what would traditionally have been a theological “red line.” I came out, in essence, as a (qualified) a-theist. As I said, I do not believe in a divine being existing someplace “out there.” In the context of the Trinity, I rejected “God the Father” as an ancient concept that makes no sense in the modern world.

And what was the response? Silence. Well, mostly silence. I did get a few positive comments but nothing in disagreement. No one unsubscribed. One person made a donation. But the truth is that a statement which through most of Christian history would have been viewed as heresy, with possibly dire consequences, got nods of agreement or, perhaps, yawns of indifference.

Now I know that my audience is not a representative sample of the population or of Christians. Certainly, some Christians reading my post would have a fit. But I think it’s significant that this group of mostly mainline Protestant and progressive Catholics were open to what I said, either as a new idea or as confirmation of something they already believed. I don’t think they are unusual.

In the seven months since we moved, I have been to a church worship service six times, the last on Easter Sunday. The two nearby congregations my denomination don’t work for me at all. There are a few churches of other denominations I like, yet after worshiping at them I haven’t felt any real desire to go back.

After I left their services, my reaction was that they were just too much. Too much what? Too much talk, mostly. Paraphrasing the emperor’s criticism of Mozart in Amadeus, there were just too many words: hymns, prayers, liturgy, readings, sermons, and assorted miscellaneous commentary.

In the last years of my ministry, my goal was for a Sunday service to not last more than forty-five minutes. This past Advent, I attended an Episcopal service which lasted an hour and forty minutes! I couldn’t help but think of Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 6: “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.”

Increasingly I have wondered, “What is worship for?” Traditionally, Christian worship has been very theistic. Its various actions have been directed towards the God-out-there: praise, prayer, confession, lament, etc. Creeds and hymns usually presume a theistic God.

More recently, however, worship has become increasingly directed towards the congregation, with a wide range of entertainment and self-help components, plus the clergy’s inclination for chit-chat (yours truly included). The intention is to make worship personal, relatable, relevant, accessible, casual, etc. All of which is an admission that traditional worship is now failing most people.

So, what should worship look like if, as I wrote last week and I think many people intuitively believe, God isn’t “out there” but right here, within us and all around us? If, as Paul is quoted to say in Acts, God is “the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being”? Let me use again a quote I cited in a recent video. It’s from the story in John 4 of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. She asks Jesus whether the Jewish temple or the Samaritan one is the right place to worship. Jesus replies,

“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, … when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.”

What does “in spirit and truth” mean? From the rest of John, as well as from the other gospels, I don’t think Jesus has in mind anything to do with sitting in a building in rows of seats, focused on the action on a stage up front. In fact, this story is the only place in the gospels where Jesus actually talks about worship, and in its traditional sense, he essentially dismisses it. Jesus shows little personal interest in worship and rarely, if ever, directs anyone else to worship.

Traditionally, worship was done for God because presumably that’s what God wanted. Nearly everyone worshiped at their local congregation because that’s what you did. You might have opinions, pro or con, about the minister, the building, the music, etc. but it had nothing to do with deciding whether or where you were going to worship. Today, as I said above, the focus is on what the congregation wants. Where people worship, or if they worship at all, is very much dependent on what they like and whether they are “getting anything out of it.”

There is a story told about a medieval stonemason creating an intricate carving for a high and inaccessible space of a cathedral. He was asked why he was putting so much work into something no one would see. “God will see it,” was his response. He was almost certainly sincere but I can’t imagine anyone having such an attitude today.

To “worship in spirit and in truth” is much like Paul’s admonition to “pray without ceasing.” It isn’t about reciting prayers, performing rituals, or attending a weekly event called worship. Rather, it is a life stance, an attitude, an orientation. It is to live with a constant awareness of the sacredness of life: of ourselves, of every person, and of the world around us. This is the meaning of spirituality.

There are, of course, what are typically called “spiritual practices” which help develop and maintain such an awareness. Their purpose is not to “please God” but to awaken us to God’s presence within us, as us, and all around us. Meditation, or contemplative prayer, is usually seen as the basic and essential practice for spiritual awareness. But again, rather than something to be done, most spiritual teachers agree that ultimately meditation becomes simply part of who we are and how we are present in life.

Traditional worship is not about this. Worship is about fulfilling a religious task. In worship, some may experience moments of spiritual awareness, but they are not assumed or expected. Nor is it assumed that worship will lead to metamorphosis, to transformation, which is what both Jesus and Paul mean by salvation. It will not awaken us from the illusion of duality and separation to the fundamental truth of our oneness in God with all creation.

In a recent church newsletter, the pastor said that the single most important reason their church existed was to provide the space and time to worship. I have no doubt many or most pastors believe this, as do many of their churches’ remaining members. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people share that interest, and for good reason.

Today, people don’t want to go through religious motions but to know spiritual truth, as Jesus says to the woman at the well. They want to know “the peace that surpasses all understanding,” the silent sacred presence that is at the core of our being. People no longer want to imagine a God out there but rather, they want to know the God within.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.