Christ on a Bike

remembering the passion

One of my least favorite things about Holy Week is the way that the days between Palm Sunday and Easter get sort of lost in the shuffle — incidentally, those are the days that are still a little more complicated/interesting than the typical hosanna!- and trumpet-filled Sundays.

So I asked to participate in the Maundy Thursday service where I work. Apparently their Good Friday service is basically a concert every year, so on Thursday there's a service that starts with the Last Supper and ends with a tenebrae crucifixion sequence. I was pretty apprehensive... I mean, those days get short shrift anyway! Why shorten them even more by squishing them together?

There was a hymn ("Go To Dark Gethsemane") that marked the transition. While we were singing, the clergy stripped the Communion table, the altar girl took the purple hangings down from the pulpit and lectern, the ushers extinguished the candles along the center aisle, and the clergy removed their purple stoles and sat down in the first pew.

There was the standard reading from Matthew – singing – turning out lights process. But the candles that each of the readers put out? Advent candles, arranged in a circle minus the wreath part. Same candles and everything. So cool! I love the bookending of the story like that. Jesus comes, we light candles, Jesus leaves, we extinguish them.

And then at the end, when all the lights are out and the bell is tolling, and the congregation is sitting there in this tense state (described in my mind by a sustained, dramatically discordant violin chord), and the head-altar-guy picks up the Bible, in the pitch dark, and slams it shut. As it said in the program, to echo the closing of the tomb and the departure of the Word.

I was really pleasantly surprised. I'm a big fan of involving multiple senses in worship, and of ritual objects. Generally I'd say the more the better, unless it's done poorly. But they really pulled it out! All of the actions and "drama" were really coordinated and made very clear points. The transition from the cozy upper room into the chaos of the arrest and crucifixion was visually explicit (which is something that can be lost when they're on separate days). And I thought the actions around the tenebrae section were really powerful and added a lot. All while staying in a fairly traditional liturgical format!

If one of the most formal churches I know can use symbolic action and movement in a new and effective way, there is some hope! It is possible to make a service like that into something moving and meaningful. It just takes some work....

do not be conformed!

I'm taking two worship classes this semester (both wonderful), and tonight I just finished reading a few chapters from Dan Kimball's Emerging Worship. Now, I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of stuff I disagree with him on theologically, but man!

I am really inspired by the idea of completely new and different gatherings (worship services) that actually draw my folks in. (By "my folks" I mean people about 18-35, maybe punk rock, maybe artists, maybe philosophers, maybe activists, maybe homeless, maybe Buddhists...) Well, I've always been inspired by that. Imagining those gatherings is sort of what got me into this whole seminary thing in the first place.

I grew up going to a lot of punk shows in church basements around the de/pa/nj area. I think maybe once I went to the same church twice; all the other times, kids broke stuff or defaced something or cursed out the wrong person, and the church stopped hosting shows. What would it be like for a church to host a show and for the pastor to be there? To be giving out water or something? Man, I would do that at my church just so I could go to shows all the time! And what if I made up some flyers (properly hand-lettered and xeroxed, of course) inviting people to come back on Sunday?

Well, of course I'd have to have a cool enough service for them to come to. Free food would have to be involved. Vegan chili? And plenty of fellowship (by which I mean hanging out), and maybe reading some Bible together. Singing. Maybe making art sometimes? What would you want in a worship-type gathering?

The other day I led a chapel service at school with a group of artists I'm involved in. One of my friends had written a song on Romans 12:2, "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect," so we picked that as our theme. Our thinking was, well, what are the patterns of this world? Hm, war, violence, racism, greed.... those are things we should definitely not conform to as people of conscience.

We picked out a bunch of photos from newspapers and magazines that we thought depicted some of those things. One of us put them in black & white and blew them up fairly large (and grainy and beautiful). We arranged the space with circles of cushions on the floor and a few groups of chairs around tables, each group with a picture in the center. After various ways of thinking about the scripture and the photos as they were, I invited everyone to imagine/discern a new pattern that could transform the old pattern. BUT: we imagined with our fingers and tempera paint.

I was amazed to see what people came up with. People did very different things, but every group really did transform their image. One group had an image of a morgue in (I believe) Iraq, and they very simply drew a person giving the bereaved man a hug, and wrote things like "God's child" and "love" over the bodies. Another group had a picture of the rubble from the recent building explosions in nj, and they completely covered over the image with an explosion of color, bearing their fingerprints.

It was really beautiful to watch. People really got into it, talking to one another and playing together, in varying degrees of solemnity. Even the fact of having people sitting in groups immediately makes a difference — people come in and sit together and talk to one another! Being able to engage different aspects of their bodies and brains was also really effective.

What kind of worshipping community can we create when we actually engage each other? As our full selves? Why has traditional worship come to be so boring? Seriously, even when I'm helping to lead one of those services, I find myself yawning. Is that what we should be getting out of worship?