« Mission is Evangelism, Evangelism is Mission and Both Are Church. | Main | Wilderness as Holy Ground »
Our Building is a Holy Place, a Thin Place
By Riviera UCC | March 22, 2009
A sermon based on Matthew 18: 19-20
given at Palm Bay, FL March 22, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
A Sunday school teacher was teaching four and five year olds about Solomon’s temple and how when it was finished, the presence of the Lord filled the temple. Instantly the eyes of each child got wide and full of excitement.
The teacher soon discovered, however, that the source of their excitement was not joy that God had come to live in the Temple, but, rather delight at imagining a huge building filled with presents (gifts) from God! (Hodgin, Michael, 101 Humorous Illustrations for Public Speaking, 373.)
Almost ever Sunday we come in here and participate in worship in the presence of God thankful for that presence and all the gifts (the presents) God gives to us.
I never get tired of it! This place is so full of love.
Did you know that three years ago this week I first walked into this place and preached from this pulpit as a candidate for assistant pastor?
I remember it well Nancy and I fell in love with you all; and here in this space I experienced a very special place of worship where it was clear God was in love with people and people were loving God back in worship.
If I had to name just one word to sum up the theology of worship here, I’d sum it up with a word I think may surprise you: courtship.
Really.
Think about it.
The lighting, music, setting, sights, sounds and sincere and meaningful words in Christian worship are meant to make for romance between the Sacred and the secular.
When you get right down to it the goal of worship is to cause the gathered (as the Song of Solomon puts it) to “drink and be drunk with love” . . . the Love that is God.
In 2003 after over 100 years in downtown Melbourne, and over two years in a warehouse on Palm Bay Road this church moved into these wonderful facilities. Facilities on a gorgeous twenty-acre parcel of holy land.
As I mentioned during announcements we had a wonderful gathering here last night to kick off our fourth capital campaign. Our dinner last night had many components of a successful courtship ritual: food, fun, good company and love . . lots of love.
Our capital campaign is not aimed at paying day-to-day operational expenses; it’s aimed at paying for this building and the magnificent property it sits on. It is here in this space that we do all kinds of work and play every day of the week, but, best of all it is here that we enter our community and individual courtship rituals with God every Sunday– courtship rituals, we call worship.
The building, walls, lights, setting and sounds are primarily the product of past capital campaigns. The church planned for five such campaigns and we are on the fourth. The goal is to raise money to pay for this house of worship, this place of courtship, where weekly we have a love-fest with God.
I know that courtship may seem an odd term. For many centuries Christian theories of worship have focused on what has been praised as the “inner and outer homage to God as a token of awe and surrender.”
These theories tend to imagine the worshiper as a servant who bows in praise to God as a separate dominating master or sovereign who requires or desires such homage.
In the context of cultures where kings were bowed to, considered representatives of God, the patriarch of the country and the center of life, this model may have made sense to get the “love” of a King. But, that model is counter-intuitive from the perspective of Americans with a long history of repulsion to monarchy, and staunch individualistic notions of equality and personal notions of love. Consequently images of God as Love and God as a demanding royalty are difficult to reconcile.
Furthermore, love on any healthy level in our culture simply does not demand humbling prostration and praise. So it is particularly hard for many of us to imagine a God of love demanding such homage. While a worshiper may certainly be moved to humble homage and praise, it is okay to think that “worship is not about God needing praise” or demanding it.
Worship is needed, but not to garner God’s love –we already have it – rather it’s purpose is to try and create a place and time that we can best sense that Love. Since Jesus has assured us that “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them,” it would seem that all we have to do is gather together to sense the Love that is God.
But of course, it is not that easy. While Jesus certainly fulfills his promise to be present as Christians gather in his name, the gathered usually must still be wooed, and even coaxed, to be in the mood for God’s Love. Indeed, our standing date with God on Sundays may not end up always being the time and place we embrace, fall or even feel in Love with God.
Nonetheless God continues to court us everywhere and all the time, but, we can feel it especially as we gather in this wonderful house of worship we built to help as God “comes a courtin’ us”
If we think of worship as courtship, then the church worship team, the pastor, the music director, the office manager, the organist, the liturgist, the choir and the band can sort of be understood as a team of matchmakers who help bring people together with God for courtship.
The tools in our matchmakers’ repertoire include a number of sensory aids which couples in the secular culture rely upon for courtship. Seriously. We use flowers, candles, lighting, music, special space, and thoughtful words.
Worship leaders, of course, also rely on sacred tools, traditions and formulas for Christian worship which are not commonly found in secular courtship.
For instance, our pattern of worship typically follows a gathering with hymns and liturgy which often includes “[i]dentifiable, repeating, and remembered rituals and words . . . to reinforce and strengthen the worship experience.”
In addition, sacred words and messages relating to those rituals and words have long been shared among the gathered.
Furthermore, although the worship leaders have a role of matchmaker between God and the gathered, as one of the gathered they are also among the courted. But matchmaker is a fair image.
To put it simply, worship leaders are matchmakers between God and the whole of the gathered community, and they have at their disposal a set of combined tools, some known in the secular world to evoke love, others unique to the church community.
Regardless of the tools, all successful matchmaking involves more than making a connection for love. It also involves transformation. Somewhere between entering the room set up for romance and leaving the room change hopefully occurs. Two beings are closer than they were before.
In worship that somewhere is one or more of the special moments that hopefully open up as a result of happenings in church.
Unlike romantic human love, the transformation that occurs during the successful courtship of church worship involves not just individuals, but the community as well. It is common for people who pass through such moments with others to develop a special bond. . . a bond that transcends all social distinctions. Red, Yellow, Black and White we become precious in each other’s sight.
This special bond can be found amongst those who have shared similar experiences in church worship.
Such bonding is present in church communities that share common symbols, rituals, words and space.
Transforming worship not only bonds participants to one another, but to God – which is the main point.
Marcus Borg calls the locations of these connections where the reality of the visible world and the reality of the Sacred meet “thin places.” He writes:
“They are places where the boundary between the two levels becomes very soft, porous, permeable. Thin places are places where the veil momentarily lifts, and we behold God, experience the one in whom we live, all around us and within us. “
Borg goes on to note that there are both secular “thin places” such as nature, music and art; and religious “thin places,” including worship. Borg says:
“Worship can become a thin place. Indeed, this is one of its primary purposes. Of course, worship is about praising God. But worship is not about God needing praise . . . Rather, worship has the power to draw us out of ourselves. Worship is directed to God, but it is in an important sense for us. . .Worship is about creating a sense of the sacred, a thin place. “
Liturgy has been modified over the years to reflect cultural changes so it could be better understood in the context of gathered’s culture. Just as the notion of God as a cosmic sovereign demanding bended knee and lofty praise makes for an image of a loving God that is difficult for present Americans to imagine and embrace, so too it is hard to create thin places in our cultural without use of things we are otherwise familiar and comfortable with.
You can see our efforts in this building with two services; one that reflects a more traditional worship and another than reflects a more contemporary style. One style may work better for some than others to facilitate human and Divine courtship.
A professor of mine at seminary (Rev. Tim Carson) noted that there are seven goals for worship, this courtship, that I am referring to this morning:
1) “create sacred space and liturgy where the Holy is experienced,” 2) “reclaim participation of the whole people of God,” 3) draw on “that which is old and new,” 4) “reclaim the use of powerful images,” 5) “take the context of the culture seriously and engage with it,” 6) “reclaim the place of communal rituals, “and 7) “connect the gathered pilgrims to the Great Mystery and to one another, sweeping them toward a future of hope.”
Each Sunday we try to meet these goals in a number of ways, including trying to retell the old, old stories through the “lens of [this] congregation” and by using multi-sensory aids, including words, symbols and our senses. And the only limitation to such aids is our creativity and the effectiveness of its use in creating a special space, that “thin place” where God and people meet.
God’s courtship requires current context and creative concepts to cultivate sensory connections.
The members of this church in 2003 completed the building of just such a place. Riviera United Church of Christ in Palm Bay, Florida, where you now sit.
This building is where we are wooed and where we worship and where we meet God through the thin places it and we and God provide.
All-in -all it is a wonderful building. Plenty of room, good acoustics, decent audio and video equipment, solid roofs and walls and very comfortable chairs with good views of what is going on. A half dozen years down the road it’s still a top of the line place to meet and worship and enter and into courtship with God.
Don’t get me wrong, God will court us anywhere, Jesus will be wherever two or more gather in his name, but here in this building we have a very nice house of worship. It’s well worth another capital campaign to support, and, of course, it has for six years served this congregation and God very, very well.
You know how you can tell? Our worship and our courtship have been successful. We are in love with God here!
In this holy and sacred place we can “drink and be drunk with love,” the Love that is God. The love that is in each and every one of you.
The presence of God, and the presents of God, fill this place.
AMEN
ENDNOTES
[1] Song 5:1
[2] 1 John 4:7
[3] Robert E. Webber, Worship Old and New (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 29
[4] Cf., Marcus Borg, The God We Never Knew, (San Francisco: Harper, 1997), 68
[5] Marcus. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: Harper, 2003), 157
[6] Isa 54:9-10; Eph 1:7; Titus 2:11; 2 Thess 2:16
[7] Matthew 18:20
[8] Timothy L. Carson, Transforming Worship (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2003), 54
[9] Ibid. 5-12; R. Webber, Worship Old and New 41-49; Bradshaw, Jones, Wainwright and Yarnold, The Study of Liturgy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 210-212, 223-244
[10] Ibid., 60
[11] Ibid., 61
[12] Ibid., 42
[13] M. Borg, The Heart of Christianity, 155-156
[14] Ibid., 156-157
[15] T. Carson, Transforming Worship, 14-20; R. Webber, Worship Old and New, 95-107
[16] See, M. Borg, The God We Never Knew 62-71
[17] T. Carson, Transforming Worship,40-42
[18] Suzanne Rolen, Spectrum Worship Workshop, Eden Theological Seminary January 13, 2004.
[19] Ibid.
COPYRIGHT
Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.