Quiet Christmas

“Have a holly, jolly Christmas. It’s the best time of the year.”

     Maybe. But then again maybe not. It is hard to be the one who must admit to a less than warm heart and glorious good cheer as the whole world seems to be having its customarily wonderful, entire-month-of-December celebration. That’s the holiday where gifts are perfectly wrapped, children are perfectly behaved, and everyone who should be at the table is.

     Sometimes the stress overwhelms us. Sometimes the burden we assume when we seek to make everything perfect does us in. And sometimes – many times – someone who should be at the table isn’t. Death may have invaded in recent weeks or months or even years. A child may have become estranged from a parent. A marriage may have died. And no matter how much time has passed, something will always be not quite right.

     It was years ago during my seminary days that I first heard a pastor reflect on the need to acknowledge pain during the Christmas season. He was a wise man who understood the human heart. In fact, he understood the human heart so well that he left ministry near the end of his career in order to serve as a counselor at a state mental hospital. This wise man said he always devoted one sermon in the Advent season to the Christmas “blues.” Those who experience Christmas with a sense of loss and longing need to know they are not alone.

     It was much later that I learned of the tradition of offering an opportunity for worship that publicly acknowledges those struggles. Some are called a “Longest Night” service, taking place on the evening of the winter solstice just a few days before Christmas, literally the longest night of the year. Others are called “Blue Christmas.”

     The tradition at Seneca Presbyterian Church began just before my arrival. We have modified its format over the years. Now we call it “Quiet Christmas” because loss isn’t just death; it’s a loss of what was – health, security, friendship, relationship, confidence, even hope – trapped in the time before what is to be has been found. That hoping against hope is what Advent longing is all about. So we seek to make this opportunity for worship simply an oasis of quiet and calm amid the world’s chaos.

     We are offering this year’s Quiet Christmas service on Wednesday, December 16 at 5:30 p.m. The service will center on song, scripture, silence, and prayer. We will offer the sacrament of communion. We will also offer a time for personal, private prayer for healing. That portion of the service will be entirely optional. Within that option, three practices are possible for each person who seeks them.

     The first option is simple. It would be to express a personal concern and ask for a spoken prayer addressing that concern.

     The second is an option for the laying on of hands and prayer. Hands are placed on the person’s head or shoulders and these words are spoken: Spirit of the living God, present with us now, enter you body, mind, and spirit, and heal you of all that harms you. Those words are borrowed from the service of healing prayer held each Tuesday evening at the Abbey Church on Iona, Scotland. They affirm our belief that all healing comes from God and takes whatever form God deems best.

     The third option is new for me. It is anointing with oil. It was the practice of early Christians to anoint the sick and pray for healing. Oil was used to clean wounds and was considered to have healing powers. Throughout scripture, oil was also a sign of blessing and God’s favor when used to anoint kings and prophets. Its fragrance reminds us of God’s healing mercy. Yet it is a practice unfamiliar to most Protestants.

     When we gather on Wednesday evening, I do not know if anyone will seek this option. But as a pastor, it is my desire to make available any tangible way for my people to experience the presence of the Spirit and the grace of God. These practices are merely the means of conveying that grace, which is the true source of healing.

     My preaching this Advent season has been more somber, more “shadowy” than usual. The times seem to require it. That mood will change as we approach the Holy Night. It is my prayer that those who join in the service of “Quiet Christmas” will receive a gift of presence, peace, and hope that they can place in reserve for whenever it is needed. For the Christ child was born not only on Christmas Eve. He is born whenever we believe that, despite the longest night, the grace of God is from everlasting to everlasting.

               

Abiding in Hope

As I prepare for the fourth week of seeing worship through its senses, I’m finding the sense of hope elusive. Is that because it conveys the sense of wishful thinking and pipe dreams? I hope I win the lottery. Or is it because it is so essential to life that it defies definition?

Dictionary.com defines hope as a feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best, which seems rather positive until you glance at the example: to give up hope. Other options go on to define the reason we have this feeling, the thing or person that gives us this feeling, or a particular experience of this feeling. The verb form continues to exude hope: to look forward with desire or reasonable confidence; to believe, to trust. Synonyms are expectancy and longing.

No wonder the Wednesday night seekers spent most of their time asking questions about hope rather than nailing it down.

• What is the difference between faith and hope?
• Which comes first: hope or faith?
• Can we have hope without faith?
• Can we have faith without hope?
• Does hope bring you to God, or must faith come first?
• Is hope faith realized?
• Is faith hope realized?
• Is hope unrealized a threat to faith?
• When faith deepens, does hope change?

I’ll stop before your head starts spinning too much. I think you get the point!

         Here’s the definition that comes to my mind: Hope is a longing deep within us that is not in our power to achieve yet will not let us go, for to be without hope is to be without life.

            The word hope occurs 149 in the Bible – at least that’s what my NRSV search brings up. Surprisingly, the occurrences are just about evenly divided between the Old and New Testaments. It tells me that hope in its greatest manifestation is theology and not psychology. Which brings me around to another inversion of sorts: worship must sustain hope; hope is not possible without worship.

            As we gather for worship this Sunday at Seneca Presbyterian Church, we’ll look at hope for our lives, hope beyond our lives, and hope for the world. It just may take us on a journey through all of scripture. I hope those who gather will leave with hope renewed!

The Truth of Our Lives

We are now at the third installment in our contemplation of worship through its senses. First we allowed Jacob to introduce us to awe – that unexpected moment of holy encounter when we are caught up in something far bigger than ourselves and it brings us to tears and to joy and to worship.

Next we allowed Babette and Jesus to invite us to the feast – the one we are reluctant to enter because we simply can’t believe it is OK to indulge the delight that is God’s grace. This third week draws us deeper into truly sacred worship. If we trust God and know the goodness of God, then we are drawn into the truth of God and into the truth of our lives.

            As we gather for worship at Seneca Presbyterian Church this Sunday, we will allow David, Bathsheba, Uriah, and Nathan to invite us into truth. The story is the classic tale of lust, power, and conquest when the great King David, the apple of God’s eye, succumbs to the illusion that kings can take whatever they wish, including another man’s wife. Sadly, it is a story that lives on in so many ways even today. But unlike the stories of our world, God’s truth entered this one. When confronted with his sin, David confessed his guilt.

            Where can we go to honestly and safely confront our guilt? When we worship, we talk about sin. We even confess it. We use someone else’s words. Sometimes we confess the sin of others, trusting that we can bring that truth before God on the world’s behalf. In our tradition, we pause for a moment to confess privately our own sin before God. Then we always hear an assurance of pardon. Is that all it takes?

            When the faithful Wednesday night seekers entered this story, we asked if we could be honest – brutally honest – about our lives within the embrace of sacred worship. Can we name our true sins? Can we confess the struggles and the contradictions we are forced to encounter as we live out our lives in a world that does not always honor God’s way? If we succumb to the world, is it a sin?

What if we are forced to charge a customer with a less than stellar credit history 30% interest on a car loan? Is that sin or just good business? What if I say “no” to the habitually homeless man who comes asking for grocery money – for the third time in as many months? Is that sin or tough love? Should a Christian walk away from a job mining coal that blasts away 400 vertical feet of a mountain, strips the mountain of its coal, and leaves behind its mess?

Did we come up with the answers? No. Our dilemma was even more basic. Can we even talk about those challenges without judging and without preaching? Or is church the place for our Sunday best, leaving our real lives outside the walls? 

The question remains: if we cannot speak the truth of our lives in church, where can we? 

The Nowhere Place

We have begun a season of discernment related to worship at Seneca Presbyterian Church. We anticipate some transitions in leadership (for very good reasons) for our contemporary service, so we are using this time to contemplate the best options for us and especially for the community of faithful persons who worship at that service. We want our decisions to thoughtful, wise, and far reaching, rather than simply what is the most expeditious solution to the immediate challenge.

We have gathered a team and charged them with making the recommendation. That team is starting out with a time of study and reflection. Each member of the team is bringing his or her experiences in worship to the table, and I’m grateful for the diversity they represent.

In light of that study, and at the beginning of the long season of ordinary time, I will devote the Sundays of June to a sermon series on worship. I’m using a book by Don Saliers as my springboard. It’s called Worship Come to Its Senses. The book is actually a series of lectures where Dr. Saliers focuses on “the sense of awe and mystery, the sense of delight and spontaneity, the sense of knowing and being known by God truthfully, and the sense of hope in a confusing and violent world.” I appreciate his approach because it says worship can happen in a variety of styles, with different music, and in widely different spaces and still be genuine if it honors the presence of the holy as experienced through these four senses.

            For this Sunday, we will be attentive to the sense of awe. It is the proper starting point. All varieties of worship are meant to bring us into an encounter with God, an experience of the holy. Scripture offers us many places to turn for a story that will ground our understanding of the shape of holy encounter. We could look toward Moses and the burning bush, Isaiah and his vision in the Temple, Paul and the road to Damascus, or Mary and her angelic visitation. I’ve chosen someone a bit more like us. Jacob was a scoundrel, a cheat, and a liar. He knew life on the run. He loved one woman passionately and worked fourteen years in order to have her. He was his mother’s favorite son and then played favorites with his own sons, and knew the grief it brought.

            Jacob fell asleep one night in the middle of the desert, and when he did, he met God. He heard God’s claim upon his life and God’s promise for his life. His encounter with God changed him. Encounters like that can change us too. It is why we worship – to meet God, and be made anew.

            We’ll examine a portion of Jacob’s story this Sunday when we gather for worship at Seneca Presbyterian Church. It’s found in Genesis 28:10-22. We know God will be there. We’ll try to be ready for the holy encounter.   

            

Glory to God

This Sunday at Seneca Presbyterian Church we will be celebrating worship. We will welcome David Gambrell, an Associate for Worship from the Office of Theology and Worship of the Presbyterian Church (USA) - our "mother" denomination. David is coming to introduce a new hymnal that our denomination is publishing entitled Glory to God. In the weeks to come, we at SPC will be deciding if this hymnal can be a tool for deepening our experience of God in worship.

Our choir will be singing one of the selections from the new hymnal that may be new to us. It is "Here in This Place" by Marty Haugen, sometimes called "Gather Us In." I once had the privilege of meeting Marty. It was at a spirituality conference at Montreat - our denomination's conference center in western North Carolina. My ministerial duties at the time were focused on education. The conference was introducing Way to Live - a book about spiritual practices for teens. That feature was my motivation for attending the conference, but I came away with so much more.


Marty was the musician for the conference. Because our group was small - about thirty - we had a wonderful opportunity to get to know him and experience much of his music. He offered us a concert devoted to the hymns and songs he has composed across a lifetime, but it was actually more of a sing-a-long than concert. As he introduced his songs and then led us in the singing, I was drawn to the depth of his theology and to his melodies. But most of all, I was drawn to the person who spoke so eloquently of the place of music in worship. After the concert, I thanked him for reminding me that the music of worship is the sung prayers of the people. His reply was, "No, thank you."

Ask any theologian from any Christian tradition and they will define worship/liturgy as the "work of the people." When we gather to worship God, we see the congregation of God's people "at work." We engage in practices that have formed and nurtured faith for centuries. We welcome each other in God's name. We praise God. We pray to God. We confess our sins. We receive God's forgiveness offered to us in the name and by the power of Jesus Christ. We hear God's Word and then seek to understand and live it more deeply. We affirm what we believe. We pray for one another. We dedicate our lives to serve God as disciples of Jesus Christ. And we sing.

The role of the worship leaders - pastor, liturgist, choir - is to help the congregation do its work. Yet  too often they are the ones perceived as the workers - or even worse, the performers. That can be especially true with music. The worship leaders who are musicians - for us our organist and choir and band - do offer to us the gift of their talents. They work hard and prepare well in order to offer that gift. Listening to them with the heart of faith deepens our faith. I once had a seminary professor who said frequently that just listening to St. Matthew's Passion was an altar call for him. So the music of worship is often the sung prayers of the choir and the organ -  and the guitarist and the drummer and the keyboardist. But if that is how we perceive the primary role of music in worship, we shortchange ourselves.

For in the end, it is what we do that draws us most deeply to God. And that includes singing, on pitch or not.

I'm looking forward to learning more about our denomination's new hymnal. I am anxious to see how Glory to God can serve us by offering the workers of worship - the congregation - greater opportunity to deepen our faith. Because when we sing, we praise God; we confess our sins; we affirm what we believe; we seek to understand and live the faith we profess. We do all that in concert - in melody - with all those who worship with us. And that, my friends, is a gift to God.

Lessons and Carols

Coming this Sunday to Seneca Presbyterian: a service of Lessons and Carols! It has been our tradition in the past several years to include this service on the third Sunday of Advent. Once again, we highlight the ministry of music in worship, and once again we owe a great thank you to all our musicians in the chancel choir and the hand bell choir. We especially thank their leaders: Emmalyn Frye, choir director, Stan Hinton, organist, and Martha Holleman, director of the hand bell choir.

So... what do you know about the tradition of Lessons and Carols? Here are some facts:

• The tradition comes to us from Kings College in Cambridge, England.
• It began in 1918 as a way to add new vitality to Anglican (The Church of England) worship.The tradition has continued ever since. If you have access to a NPR station around 10:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve, you should be able to listen in to a live broadcast (traditionally beginning at 3:00 p.m. England time). 
• The service tells the story of our faith through the reading of nine biblical lessons, beginning with the fall of humanity in Genesis, continuing through the promise of the Messiah in Isaiah, and culminating in the birth of Jesus. Each lesson is followed by an carol by the choir or a hymn sung by the congregation - or both.
• The service traditionally begins with the singing of "Once in Royal David's City." The first verse is always sung as a solo by a member of the boys choir and for many has the effect of announcing the advent of that holy night. In order to avoid undue anxiety, the selected chorister isn't told until just before the service begins. Can you imagine what it must be like to get that last minute "nod"?

The Anglican worship tradition is "high on liturgy." Our Presbyterian/Reformed worship tradition is high on preaching. Too often, we think of that choice as either/or rather than both/and. Because John Calvin was such a educator, we Presbyterians have always placed great importance and emphasis on the sermon. Sometimes that leads to thinking that liturgy is just a bunch of dead words in a dusty book. Yet for me, traditions and words that have been spoken across the ages by thousands upon thousands of faithful worshipers have great power to lead us into the presence of God.

What do YOU think?