© 2007-2008 John Thornburg
Worship: A Self-Emptying Response to a Self-Emptying God
For several years, I have had the wonderful opportunity to travel to a place called Lebh Shomea, a Roman Catholic retreat center 60 miles south of Corpus Christi, Texas on the Gulf of Mexico. Lebh shomea are the Hebrew words taken from I Kings 3:9 meaning “a listening heart.” The words are well chosen because Lebh Shomea is a community of silence.
Once you arrive and are shown around the grounds, there is no speech except for the brief conversation you have with the person seated next to you at the morning Eucharist. Meals are taken together in silence. The rules of the community call for simplicity. Make-up and jewelry are discouraged. Visitors are encouraged to use only the electricity which is required. All are encouraged to wear soft soled shoes, to close doors gently, and to set fans on the lowest possible setting to reduce noise.
When I arrived at Lebh Shomea for the first time in June of 1993, I was overwhelmed. I had never been to that part of South Texas, I had never been to a community of silence, and I had never voluntarily chosen to be in an un-air conditioned place in June in Texas for 5 days. My first few hours were filled both with wonder and with panic. On the one hand, within 15 feet of my dwelling there were flocks of wild turkey and families of white tail deer. There were birds I had never seen before. Despite the heat, the constancy of the breeze was glorious.
On the other hand, I struggled with a city dweller’s kind of works righteousness. “What must I do first?,” I asked myself. “Should I pray, should I read, should I go walking and commune with the created order?” I solved the immediate dilemma by choosing to sleep, even though I wrestled with the guilt of doing something as ‘non-productive’ as sleeping. It turned out to be the right thing, because God used my sleeping moments to assure me that if I would only be patient and listen for the guidance of the Spirit, I would know what to do. My initial panic gave way to an easier sense of what was ahead.
When I awoke the next morning, I felt some apprehension about going to Eucharist. I wondered whether I would be regarded as a disrespectful Protestant if I didn’t genuflect upon entering the chapel. I didn’t know whether the liturgy would have a formal or informal feeling. I didn’t know whether I would be expected to do or say anything. I didn’t even know whether I would be welcome to commune. If they were following Rome’s direction, I would not be welcome. I didn’t know how they would communicate my exclusion or how I would react to being excluded.
I entered the chapel. There was a cross on the wall made from two weather-worn pieces of wood. There were railroad spikes at each end of the horizontal piece of the cross, indicating the places at which Christ’s hands had been pierced. A crown of thorns was secured to the middle of the cross. The simple altar had a plain white cloth and two small oil lamps. A glass dish had a thick wafer and a simple piece of stem ware was filled one-third full of wine. There were no service books or hymnals on the chairs.
At the appointed time, the leader of the community, a tall, slender man with a kind face entered the building, went to the adjacent sacristy, put on a plain white alb and came back into the room. He faced the cross and bowed from the waist. He then faced us, making eye contact with everyone in the room one by one (there were about 10 of us), and then began to read from the service book which had been prepared for him by another member of the community.
His voice showed little inflection and his facial expression did not change throughout the service. He read the gospel lesson, and then said, “We invite you in faith to share with the person beside you something that struck you as you heard today’s lessons.”
I was gripped with fear. My usual place was standing where he was, being the one setting the scene, the one in charge of the drama. Now I was on the other side and I didn’t know what to do. I was so busy taking in the details of the room and the idiosyncrasies of the priest that I had hardly listened to the gospel lesson. I turned to my neighbor, the woman who had shown me around the day before; a woman who had lived in this community for over 20 years; a woman who knew this place like the back of her hand; a woman who had devoted herself to the life of prayer and contemplation long before I ever heard anything remotely like a call to ministry. She said how good God was to have made a day like that one and how good God was to have provided the scripture for our edification.
I was stunned. I felt like saying, “You’ve spent twenty years here devoted to prayer, and all you can say is that God is good?” I somehow felt that if you lived the type of life she had that every word out of your mouth would be so sublime as to be nearly incomprehensible. What I didn’t realize at the time was that what she said was so sublime that it was nearly incomprehensible.
I said something completely inane and clearly meant to ingratiate her. Blessedly, her facial expression did not indicate that she thought it was inane. I was just overcome with the setting and my own doubts about whether I knew God very well at all. I figured they all knew God a lot more completely than I did, and that made me feel uneasy, inadequate and envious.
After a homily that, contrary to Protestant custom, contained no jokes, no poems, and no personal allusions, we came to the Eucharistic prayer. As he began, the priest elevated the paten and chalice and looked upward and outward toward a point clearly beyond the room in which we were seated. As he moved through the liturgy, each motion was deliberate. As he broke the wafer, he held it aloft so that we could see light coming through the tear in the wafer. He served each of us by coming to our seat. As we ate our bread and then passed the chalice from one to another, I noticed that he had licked the end of his thumb and was picking up every crumb left on the plate, no matter how tiny. When the last person had drunk from the cup and brought it back to the table, he took a small vial of water and poured it into the chalice, swished it around, and then drank the water with whatever residue there was of the wine. He then put things in order on the table and we had the dismissal.
I left feeling several emotions. I was still feeling stupid and envious about the brief dialogue I had had with the woman who is a permanent resident. I was feeling curious about why I hadn’t had my ‘credentials’ checked before receiving communion. And I was feeling a mixture of envy and resentment toward this priest.
I was envious because even thirteen years into ministry, I was still struggling to feel completely comfortable with my administration of Holy Communion and here was a man who celebrated the mass every morning. I longed to feel the sense of ease that I imagined he felt. But I resented what I perceived to be his lack of passion. This feeling grew stronger over the course of the four days I was there. With the exception of the difference in the service book prayers and the changing nature of the homily, he did everything the same way each morning. He looked us in the eye the same way. He elevated the plate and cup the same way. He broke the bread the same way. He swished out the cup the same way. I found myself lying in my bed struggling with the difference between what I was experiencing in this new community and what I experienced in the more familiar worship setting of my own church, Northaven United Methodist Church of Dallas.
As I flew home from Corpus Christi, I thought about what had happened to me. I wondered how much of this experience to share with my parishioners. I wondered deep within how much I really understood about the act of worshiping in general, and the rite of Holy Communion in specific.
The first Sunday after my return to Dallas was a communion Sunday. It felt funny, especially after the intensity of my experience and the fact that we had communion daily, to even use the expression ‘communion Sunday’ (as if there are Sundays in which it is not desirable to have communion). I decided that there might be some people in the congregation who were struggling as deeply as I was about the meaning and purpose of Holy Communion, and so I gave a brief narration about my experience at Lebh Shomea. I said how wildly ambiguous my feelings were; at one point craving what John Wesley called “constant communion” and being very envious of the permanent residents of Lebh Shomea, and at another wondering how God could possibly be glorified in a worship setting in which, as far as my faith could see, nothing ever changed.
I also noted an enormous difference between the communion practice at Lebh Shomea and the practice at Northaven. Where the priest had gone to painstaking lengths to gather up every possible crumb, at Northaven the floor surrounding the communion area looked as though we were preparing to feed an army of birds. Crumbs extended all over the sanctuary as people’s feet tracked them everywhere.
The people appreciated the autobiographical portion of the communion service that day, and it led me to do two things; to return to Lebh Shomea, and to intensify my own search for the meaning and purpose of worship, and especially Holy Communion, in my life.
I returned to Lebh Shomea in January of 1994 and the moment I turned off the car, I knew I was home. I brought several books with me on the retreat. My experience from the first time at Lebh Shomea told me that I ought to be prepared for God to lead me in different directions, so I brought a variety of things. I brought several hymnals and some devotional books, a science fiction book and some recent work in biblical studies. [It’s interesting to realize that each time I have returned in recent years, I have brought fewer and fewer books. I think I’m slowly growing out of the tendency to think that God can only be found in books.]
As I was zipping my book bag, I felt led to throw in a book that was very central to me in seminary. That book is called The Risk of Love, by the British parish priest and theologian, W.H. Vanstone. I said to myself, “If this book moved me then, maybe it has something new to say to me now.” I’m glad I followed that prompting of the Holy Spirit, because the book gave me a whole new way of conceiving the meaning and purpose of worship in my life. It also gave me a new way of understanding and appreciating the way the priest at Lebh Shomea officiates at the Eucharist.
Vanstone begins the book autobiographically, speaking of the fact that he had been raised in the church and came to understand and appreciate its importance at an early age. His father was a priest in the Church of England and he admired his father’s steady administration of parish life.
Vanstone had a distinguished career at Oxford, and the honors he earned as a student would have led most to a career as an academic theologian. Instead, he chose the life of the parish priest. A time came in his career in which he was appointed to begin a new parish in a town in which housing developments were going up quickly. He was well loved and nicely situated in the parish he was serving, and so he had mixed feelings about this new assignment.
Over the course of several months, when he had a day off, he would travel to the town to which he was being assigned and walk about. He talked with anyone who was willing to stop and after a while he came to the difficult conclusion that it did not seem to matter to anyone whether there was a church in this community or not. The people seemed contented. There appeared to be no major problems of crime or poverty. The schools functioned well and the people seemed perfectly happy in the social settings they chose.
This caused Father Vanstone to ask the disturbing question, “What is the purpose of the Church, especially in a community like this?” Having been schooled in the classical theological tradition, he remembered the phrase so often used to describe the purpose of the church, namely, to live to the glory of God. As his work progressed, he became increasingly uncomfortable with equating such tasks as choosing paint colors with work done to the glory of God, and yet choosing paint colors was one among many mundane tasks that he and his parishioners had to do.
Here is the passage of scripture which convinced Vanstone that the purpose of the church needed a definition other than simply “living to the glory of God.”
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death- even death on a cross.“ (Philippians 2: 5-8, NRSV)
It was the phrase, “emptied himself“, that captivated Vanstone, just as it has captivated many other Christians. He reasoned that if Christ emptied himself of all ambition and all selfishness and made the ultimate gift of love to the world in trusting God even on the cross, then God must also empty Godself in the original creation and in the continuing process of creation. As over against many strains of classical theology which said that God was all powerful and, in essence, had a full tank of power for anything that might arise, Vanstone claims that God cannot be a God of unconditional love if God holds anything back.
In a stirring section of the book, Vanstone argues that the best way to define the love of God is by starting with what it is not. He says, “A deprived child, who apparently has never known the authenticity of love, will yet recognize its falsity. With love it is not as with food-that those who are hungry will be satisfied with anything. On the contrary, those who are deprived of love are the most demanding and discriminating in what they will receive. A child hungry for love is most quick to detect and reject condescension, bribery or manipulation when it masquerades as love. Though he has never tasted authentic love, he knows already the taste of what he needs.” (Vanstone, The Risk of Love, Oxford University Press, 1978, pp. 39-40)
He then names three signs of inauthentic love, theorizing that authentic love will be their opposites. The first sign is limitation. That which professes to be love is exposed as false if it is recognized as limited. He gives another name to limited love: kindness (OUCH!). “When love dies,” he says, “kindness often becomes its substitute-a substitute which, being recognized under the disguise of love, is thrown back in the face. When love is expected, no kindness, however lavish, satisfies...A locked room or a locked box will affront someone to whom, in the name of love, all the rest of the house has been made open.” (pp. 42-43)
The second sign of inauthentic love is control. For love to be authentic, it has to be activity for the sake of someone else. But if someone is under your control, they are not someone else; they are an extension of you. “How can you do this to me?” asks the parent, “I got you where you are.” Parents know in their hearts that every step of love is a step of risk. In each word of encouragement lies the danger of creating over-confidence: in each restraint the danger of destroying confidence. Says Vanstone, “Where the power to control appears in the guise or masquerade of love, we give to it, depending on the circumstances, such varied names as extended selfishness, manipulation, condescension, or, at the very best, courtesy.” (OUCH, AGAIN!) (p. 49)
The third sign of inauthentic love is detachment. If the problem with control is not regarding someone as being “other“, the problem with detachment is that we don’t grant other people real access to ourselves. If love is self-giving, then to limit someone’s access to our self is inauthentic. I guess I always knew that expressing gratitude or joy was a loving act, but it took me far too long to understand that expressing anger, hurt or resentment to someone can be a loving act. Sulking is the ultimate act of detachment. If I make you guess the way I’m feeling, you don’t have access to the deepest part of me. And if you don’t have access to the deepest part of me, you don’t have much reason to trust me.
I now understand something that I couldn’t understand a few years ago. I am very reserved with my anger, as my family and my former staff colleagues will testify. I grew up believing that expressing anger was very bad and should be avoided at all costs. But there was one setting in which I did not hesitate to express my anger; with fifth and sixth grade boys at summer camp. I could never figure out why, despite my occasional angry explosions, the boys still seemed to love and respect me. Now I know. In their own way, they trusted the fact that they were seeing the real me. They could tell they mattered to me because I was willing to risk the fallout of blowing up at them.
In the same way, a parishioner of mine who has keen insight into human personality didn’t quite understand why, upon my appointment to Northaven, I didn’t express any of the frustration that new pastors usually express when they are digging out from under the quirks of the former regime. At one point, she said to another parishioner, “Doesn’t he ever do anything but smile?” She knew that I had created some detachment in order to deal with the natural depression that comes with a major change. And she has always been the first person to thank me for being vulnerable with the congregation.
So, three signs of inauthentic love are limitation, control and detachment. Therefore, we can, according to Father Vanstone, extrapolate a definition of authentic love as limitless, precarious and vulnerable. Now, I’m aware that we have gone a little far afield of Sunday morning worship, but I hope to show directly why I have found this description of love so central and important.
I believe that the purpose of Christian worship is threefold:
- to open ourselves to the message that God’s love for us is limitless, precarious, and vulnerable
- to listen to, receive and digest this wonderful message morsel by morsel
- to respond to God’s invitation to the whole worshiping community to take this message into the world
It seems ironic to even have to think about opening ourselves to a such a liberating message. But maybe not. If you gain some advantage by making certain that somebody else is under your thumb, the Christian message is not good news. So worship turns out to be both revolutionary and counter cultural. Since culture always creates some kind of hierarchy, a message that says that God shows no partiality is the kind of nitroglycerine that the leaders of culture want to bury deep in the ground. Unfortunately, it is also the kind of nitroglycerine that many leaders of the church want to bury.
One of the ways in which limitation, control and detachment can all be seen in Christian worship is the tendency to use the length of a service as a leading criteria for what constitutes powerful worship. Too much mainstream worship is determined by the clock and not by the Holy Spirit. Forget Vanstone’s analogy of the one locked room in a house that is otherwise open. Some of our worship has the whole house locked up. We’re so frightened that something life changing will happen that we try to prevent it by discouraging personal testimony, by feeling that we have to get people in and out in an hour, and by treating sacramental moments like going through the drive-through at McDonald’s. God is wringing wet with sweat and dog tired from creating a world for us. We do not show gratitude for that kind of love by doing a baptism in 45 seconds.
It’s like we’re saying, “OK, God, we’ve got this amount of time, so do your stuff. Show us what you’ve got.” It makes worship leaders into referees. It’s like installing a shot clock on the front of the altar table. We’ve got 45 seconds to confess; 45 seconds to offer our prayers of intercession; 45 seconds to invite people to discipleship; 45 seconds to introduce the people who, having united with the congregation in membership, have made one of the most significant decisions of their lives.
I will not soon forget an experience in which God showed me the importance of allowing the Spirit to work. I received a phone call from the family of a prominent public radio reporter who had just died from complications related to the AIDS virus. They had called several churches in town trying to find a church in which to hold their brother’s funeral. They had been turned down at each one. I said that my congregation was happy to host the funeral.
When I met with the family to make the service arrangements, I said that, because I had not been personally acquainted with their brother, I would not pretend that I had known him. What I suggested instead was that the worshipers be allowed to create the eulogy. This way, I said, a fuller picture of the man’s life and faith could emerge. The family was a little nervous that such an event could get out of hand, and that someone might use the occasion as a soap box. I said that that was certainly a possibility, but that it was worth the risk.
When it came time for the community-created eulogy, I invited people to speak, and I sat down. One hour and fifteen minutes later, the last person to speak sat down, and no one was looking at his or her watch. Nothing was more important at that moment than to be doing exactly what we were doing. God was dripping wet with sweat and dog tired from helping this family cope with their brother’s death. God was exhausted, and this particular community cleared the decks and paid attention to the limitless, precarious and vulnerable love of God poured out in this reporter’s life and poured out to this grieving family and poured out to this confused and grieving collection of radio reporters who had trouble dealing with things that went beyond the facts. They heard, received and digested the love of God, and IT WAS WORSHIP.
I am not suggesting that worship has to be hours in duration in order to be worship. I am only suggesting that when the clock is in charge, then we are worshiping the God of control and detachment, not the God whose love is limitless and precarious.
Another way in which limitation, control and detachment are experienced is through patronizing the worshipers; by acting as though certain subjects are off limits so as to spare their feelings. I’m not advocating walking into the chancel each week with a pastoral hatchet looking to set the heathen straight. But the harder we try not to step on people’s toes, the more we will crush their souls.
I will never forget a worship planning session I attended early in my ministry. The senior pastor was outlining what his plans were for the sermon and then he opened up the discussion for our suggestions for hymns and other service elements. One of the other staff members flipped to the psalm assigned for that Sunday and read a few verses in case that prompted some ideas. “Let’s not read the psalm this week,” said one of the staff members. “That’s a depressing one, and no one wants to come to worship to be depressed.” I won’t forget that, because the staff member who made that comment was me. I have since come to think differently.
Obviously, no one comes to worship in order to be made more depressed. But the fact is that on any given Sunday, there are any number of people in the congregation who are depressed. There is always someone who is having a Psalm 88 kind of day:
“You have caused my companions to shun me;
you have made me a thing of horror to them.
I am shut in so that I cannot escape;
my eye grows dim through sorrow...” (Ps. 88: 8-9a, NRSV)
I do not believe that the God who loves precariously and takes enormous risks in creating us with free will is best served when we withhold certain scriptures because we want to control the mood of the worship service.
If I feel a deep conviction about the immorality of weapons of mass destruction but decide not to preach about disarmament because there are people in the congregation who work for a defense contractor, I am exercising control over them. I am manipulating them to think I am something I am not. That is neither precarious nor vulnerable. It is controlling and detached. It is a lie and an insult. The harder we try not to step on people’s toes, the more we will crush their souls. The gospel is both comforting and offensive and we do not serve our congregations well by omitting the offensive parts of the gospel. The gospel message is that life is precious and extraordinary, even though it is hard. People know that life is hard. So why is it that we decide that they’ve had enough of that during the week and don’t need any more of it on Sunday? The biggest gift we can receive on Sunday is the gift of knowing that God is dripping with sweat and dog tired from standing by us all week long, and is still there on Sunday. The more honest we are, the more we will be able to feel real joy and give heartfelt praise.
The creators of Disney World fashioned that place with one central goal: to help people forget where they came from; to overwhelm people with visual stimulation in order to make them feel they are in a totally different reality. The purpose of worship is to help people remember where they came from; from the arms of a Creator so loving that the Creator leaves no problem abandoned and no evil unredeemed. If we don’t talk about the hardest and deepest realities of life, it’s like leaving out the part of the world in which the Creator is sweating and toiling the most. When we talk about that Creator with integrity and passion, and really allow ourselves to be open to the Spirit, we will glimpse a totally different reality; not the Magic Kingdom, but the realm of God.
Another way in which limitation, control and detachment can be experienced is when we are inattentive to the passages in people’s lives. I was doing a workshop in a local church a few years back on the subject of rituals other than baptism and holy communion. I suggested to the group that just as we have ceremonies to receive people into membership, we ought to have ceremonies to send people to their new destination when they are leaving for any reason.
Right after I said that, I noticed that one of the women in the group was crying. When I looked her way, she felt she should explain why she had begun to cry. This is what she said, “When I came to this church, I felt very welcomed, and the people worked hard to help me feel at home in this new place. But it wasn’t until you said what you did that I realized how important it would have been to me to have been sent from my old church.” I asked if she could add to what she had already said, and she continued, “I had lived there all my life, and it was very sad for me to leave. It just would have been so comforting for them to say that they had the faith that God was preparing a new church home for me in Texas, and that they would be my church home until I found a new one and that they would be praying for me until I found one.”
Our faith is in a God whose love is limitless, precarious and vulnerable. When we come to the close of worship, we must not just leave. We must be sent, whether the pastor speaks the sending word on behalf of the whole community or whether we speak the word to each other. When we have relatives or other esteemed guests in our homes and they prepare to leave, do we just leave the door ajar and let them go? NO (at least not if we’re on good terms with them!). We say things like:
—“Travel safely.”
—“Let us know that you got home OK.”
—“Hug the rest of the family for us.”
When we are about to leave worship, a time in which we have attempted to listen for, digest and receive the news that God is dripping with sweat and dog tired from loving us, what could be more appropriate for us to turn to each other and say, “Hug the rest of the family for me and I will for you too.” Hug the rest of the human family; the family all around your church, the family in your city that includes folks who are starving for authentic love because they’ve seen all too much kindness and courtesy. When we leave worship, it’s got to be with the understanding that we are sent to hug the rest of the family.
Now I return to my recent trip to Lebh Shomea. Was my experience of the holy communion different on my second trip? Did I regard the priest in a different light? YES to both. On my second trip, I took delight in the priest’s celebration of the Eucharist because I could now understand that there are different ways to be passionate. I went the first time thinking that passion was a matter of vocal inflection and dramatic gesture, of constant eye contact and personal touch. Now I see that passion is a matter of vocation. The priest’s passion is seeking the sweaty, dog-tired God through prayer and helping others to do the same. Though I do not know his reasoning for certain, I perceive that he conducts the service in the identical fashion each day so that the worshipers look for what the new thing is from the loving God, rather than looking for what clever new phrase or gesture he has used.
God used a place, a book and the Holy Spirit to pour out love on me. I believe that God became completely exhausted in the process, and risked the possibility that I would speak without complete understanding or sensitivity, and for that I am very grateful.
Morning glory, starlit sky, soaring music, scholars’ truth,
flight of swallows, autumn leaves, memory’s treasure, grace of youth:
Open are the gifts of God, gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony, love’s endeavor, love’s expense.
Love that gives, gives evermore, gives with zeal, with eager hands;
spares not, keeps not, all outpours, ventures all, its all expends.
Drained is love in making full, bound in setting others free,
poor in making many rich, weak in giving power to be.
Therefore he who shows us God helpless hangs upon the tree,
and the nails and crown of thorns tell of what God’s love must be.
Here is God: no monarch he, throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love, aching, spent, the world sustain.
—W.H. Vanstone (United Methodist Hymnal, #194)