From First Thessalonians:
We have been approved by God to be entrusted with the message of the gospel, even so we speak, not to please mortals, but to please God who tests our hearts. As you know and as God is our witness, we never came with words of flattery or with a pretext for greed; nor did we seek praise from mortals, whether from you or from others.
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – 1 Thess. 2:4-6 (NRSV) – December 4, 2012.)
I would like to have a word with the clergy, music directors, musicians, choir directors, altar guild mistresses, sacristans, choristers, Sunday School superintendents, lay readers, acolytes, and a score of others about all the things many of us are doing to get ready for Christmas.
I’m sure that you, like my colleagues and me, are planning liturgies, choosing music, decorating sanctuaries, casting church school pageants, rehearsing anthems, laundering vestments, practicing readings, learning how to swing thuribles, and doing dozens of other preparatory tasks as the special events of the holiday loom every closer. Your looking forward to your Sunday School Pageant, to the Christmas Cantata, the Christmas Eve Family Service, the Midnight Mass, or whatever the “big event” may be in your congregation. You’re hoping, expecting that there will be a large turnout of appreciative people, probably many who only show up at Christmas (or maybe also at Easter), but you’re really hoping that a big crowd of parishioners will be there.
Last Sunday evening my parish’s choir did a wonderful job of offering a service of Lessons and Carols. It was the shorter version of that model of worship: six lessons each followed by a hymn or choral offering. Other music included a prelude, a couple of additional hymns at the beginning and end, an offertory anthem, and a postlude. A chanted vesper responsory and a few chanted collects were thrown in for good measure. The music was beautifully performed. The six readers of the lessons had obviously practiced and all read very well. Members of the choir had provided, and some non-choir volunteers had laid out, finger food and snacks for a reception in the parish hall following the service.
Barely 40 people attended. Not even a quarter of the Nave was filled. Those who attended all praised the choir’s, the officiant’s, and the readers’ efforts; they said it was a lovely experience. A couple of people said something to this effect, “It’s too bad more people weren’t here.” The spouse of a chorister was rather more critical and wondered why everyone had even bothered with all the planning, all the rehearsals, or the offering of the service when so few parishioners turned out.
Why? Paul directly answers that question in this bit from his first letter to the church in Thessalonika: “We [do it], not to please mortals, but to please God.” We do it for an audience of One.
A service of worship has many of the elements of a dramatic presentation or a musical concert, and much of the preparation we do for worship is the same as is done for those sorts of events. In many ways, worship is a drama . . . but in one important way it is very different. There is no difference between performer and audience; there is, in fact, no human audience. Every man, woman, and child who participates is an actor, not an observer.
For generations the church has acted as if these were roles of worship: The worship leaders (clergy and liturgical assistants, choir, liturgical musicians) are the performers of worship; the congregation is the audience; and God is the prompter of worship, i.e., God tells the worship leaders what to do. My favorite theologian-philosopher Soren Kierkegaard in the 19th Century wrote that that was all wrong. In corporate worship, he suggested, the people should be the performers, the worship leaders are to be the prompters, and God is the audience.
It doesn’t matter that only a few people turned out for the service of lessons and carols, or for any service. If we do all these things we are doing, all the liturgical design, all the musical rehearsal, all the polishing of silver and decorating of the church, and no one shows up on Christmas Eve but ourselves, it will not be for nothing. We do what we do, not to please mortals, but to please God.
So clergy, music directors, musicians, choir directors, altar guild mistresses, sacristans, choristers, Sunday School superintendents, lay readers, acolytes, and the scores of others doing all the things we are all doing to get ready for Christmas . . . do them to the best of your ability. We are doing them for the audience of One.
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Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
I know I’ve read this bit of Zechariah before, but I don’t think I’ve ever paid any attention to it. This morning, the image of parents “piercing” their own children who happen to be prophets and that of “the wounds I received in the house of my friends” really hit home! Strife within families and between friends is here the recompense paid by God to false prophets, but it seems to be the lot of the prophet, the priest, or the ardent advocate in any age. I am reminded of Jesus’ quoting Micah to the effect that “your enemies are members of your own household.” (Micah 7:6; cf Matt. 10:35-36 and Luke 12:52-53) Speaking on behalf of God or any god or any cause is never easy; it leads to misunderstanding and conflict – just look at what happened in many families during the recently passed political campaigns.
Do you ever wish someone whom you respect and admire hadn’t said what they said, because what they said is so hard to explain to someone who doesn’t respect and admire them, and what they said just sounds wrong, even to you? Then you know how I feel about the last response of Jesus in this conversation with Peter!
Today is the last Sunday after Pentecost called “the Feast of Christ the King.” A relatively new feast on the calendar of the church, it was instituted by a 20th Century pope and originally set in late October as a response to the Protestant celebration of “Reformation Sunday” on the Sunday closest to October 31, the anniversary of Luther’s posting on the Wittenburg chapel door. The latter, I would suppose, started with the Lutherans but has spread throughout American Protestantism; I know of Presbyterian, Reformed, UCC, and Methodist churches that mark it. I know of no Episcopal congregations that do so. Episcopalians did take to Christ the King, however, and since Paul VI moved it to the last Sunday of the Christian year, every congregation I’ve been a part of has celebrated it. With the adoption of the Revised Common Lectionary, it is now an official part of our tradition.
There are two passages of Scripture that I always think of when vestries or other church governing boards begin to discuss a vision for the church’s mission and ministry. One is the King James version of Proverbs 29:18a – “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” – the other is this passage from Habakkuk. I really like the image of the vision being written so large that someone running by can read it and make sense of it; the church’s vision needs to be as big, expansive, and attention-getting as a billboard.
This story of the woman seeking her lost coin follows on the heels of the parable of the lost sheep in which the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to seek the lost one. That story is much more familiar and, I suppose, is more popular because of romantic notions of some emotional bond between sheep and shepherd, supported no doubt by those lovely Sunday School images of Jesus carrying a lamb on his shoulders. As we modern (and now post-modern) 21st Century urban Christians have moved further and further from agrarian reality, those romantic misconceptions deepen and the less-palatable aspects of the parable’s metaphor are forgotten.
Perhaps among the most familiar words from St. John’s apocalypse, “Blessed are they who are invited to the marriage feast of the Lamb.” They are used as a fraction anthem or invitation to communion in many churches. But in this brief passage from Revelation, the most powerful image for me today is the angel saying, “I am a fellow-servant with you and your brothers and sisters.”
Chapter 50 of Ben Sira’s book is a description of a temple liturgy led by “the high priest, Simon son of Onias.” (v. 1) It is filled with poured-out wine, sumptuous vestments, the shouting of priests, the blowing of trumpets, the people falling on their faces. Not the sort of ho-hum run-of-the-mill worship service one finds in most Christian churches these days.
