On April 10, 2011, our Sunday morning worship was led by our children as they presented two puppet shows — both about living in this world well, even in the midst of trauma and difficulty. The first puppet show was about the Good Samaritan and the second about “good” clouds and “bad clouds”.
Here are some pictures from the rehearsal the morning before.
Category: Worship
Rosalie Chase
These Things Shall Never Die by Charles Dickens
The Bright, the Pure, the Beautiful
That stirr’d our Hearts in Youth
The Impluses to Wordless Prayer
The Dreams of Love and Truth
The Longing after something Lost
The Spirits Yearning Cry
The striving after better Hopes —
These Things Can Never Die.
The timid Hand stretched forth to Aid
A brother in his need
The kindly Word in Grief’s Dark Hour
That Proves a Friend Indeed
The Plea of Mercy softly breath’d
When Justice threatens nigh
The Sorrows of a Contrite Heart —
These Things Shall Never Die.
Let nothing pass, for every hand
Shall find some work to do
Lose not a chance to waken Love
Be Firm, and Just, and True
So shall a Light that never Fade
Shine on Thee from on High
And Angel Voices say to Thee
These Things Shall Never Die.
Waterbury lost one of those rare gems of a person when Rosalie G. Chase died last Friday. She was a free spirit, and full of life, even up to the end. And while we will commend her life to God’s eternal keeping, we shall not let her pass from our worlds, from our memories, for who we are, is in part, for having known Rosalie, having lived with her, having worshiped with her, having worked side by side, with her, laughing all the way.
Many of you, I suspect where surprised to learn, whenever it was you did, that Rosalie was not technically a member of this church, she was an Episcopalian at heart. Nevertheless, she became a loyal participant of in the life of this church, she worshipped with us when her health allowed her to, and she was a faithful member of circle II, even in her later years when her major contribution to the group was her presence and not so much the things she made or did with her hands. She was remarkably tolerant of a new preacher with different ideas. And though she quite likely turned off her hearing aid device, she always said that she enjoyed the sermon, even it it was prefaced, as it was on occasion with a serious twinkle in her eye, with the phrase, “I didn’t hear anything you said.”
Rosalie was born in the late summer of 1917 in Baltimore. She grow from a girl into a young lady there, was educated in nearby Reistertown, and met the love of her life — Stanley Chase. After the war they were married and drove from Baltimore to Blush Hill, where they stayed put for their rest of their married lives and raised their three lovely children, David, Carol and Jill, all of whom married. So Rosalie ended up with six children, to her delight, and then two grandchildren came into her world, and Rosalie become the quintessential grandmother. Rosalie’s health had been ever so slowly ebbing. Visits to the hospital and stays at the nursing home took their toll on her. But in the end, she died within in shouting distance of the Shingle Shanty where she lived most of her adult life, in the home of her daughter and in her sleep, peacefully.
Those are the bare stubborn facts. The barest outline. It tells nothing of her private world, nothing of that private world which contained elements of excellence and of tragedy and outlined something about her much more ineffable, a pure gem of that something, which we celebrated last Friday, July 30th in fine form. We told stories, we laughed. And when Eileen Harvey sang, “You Can’t Take That Away,” we cried. We laughed and cried, because we got a glimpse of a world that will no longer be, a world we will miss. A world that drew us to her, like bees to a flower. It was not just Rosalie that died, but a world that died.
And even while it was a world that died when Rosalie passed from our world, the world she meant to you and to you and to me, will not die with her death; she was bright and pure and beautiful, and she stirred our hearts and still does. She wakens in us, even now, the love that was neither saccharine, nor cynical, the genuineness that would not speak an ill word of another. The world she leaves behind is a better one. And for that we thank God.
Demythologizing Christian Education
- Image via Wikipedia
Adolf Harnack begins his 1895 lecture titled Christianity and History by asking whether it is legitimate to maintain the “indisoluable unity” of the historical fact of “Christ’s person,” with the church’s creed. His question, one hundred years later, is still a live one. How do we teach our children the stories of our faith without, on the one hand, being overly critical and ruining the stories’ appeal, but on the other hand without leading them down paths that years later we’ll have to lead them back up and around? The risk attending this Scylla and Charybdis is apparent — people are leaving the mainline Protestant church in droves. Research suggests that this loss is directly attributable to a misuse of power in the teaching ministry. By misuse, I mean the failure to change from a traditional and once effective practice in the face of concrete evidence of ineffectiveness and evidence from scholars that our stories need to be understood and incorporated in our religious life in a more complex manner than has been allowed in church school. As a result, modes of thought in adult years mature with great difficulty.
Prior to the task of Christian education, educators shall have dealt with the philosophical question that Harnack poses in his lecture. What constitutes credible and appropriate method and content? If claims of the religious can only be defended by force of assertion and will not bear up under intelligent analysis, no matter how accepted these claims are in the hierarchy of church history, should they be embraced and taught?
When all history seems to be a ceaseless process of growth and decay, is it possible to pick out a single phenomenon and saddle it with the whole weight of eternity? especially when it is a phenomenon of the past. Christianity and History, p. 18
Despite Harnack’s reputation among theologians today (he is either an unknown entity, or an object of scorn), Harnack has a subtle and important point to make. In his day and for a century after his death, Harnack was hugely popular and highly influential. He has been forgotten in recent days because a much less rigorous, much more mystical, but no more loving theology than Harnack’s has captured the fickle spirit of the church with Christian claims which need not be credible. In fact, it seems, the more incredible the claims the more compelling they must be and the more proof served up that assertions forcibly and persistently stated have the imprimatur of truth. Harnack would have none of this. But he was not simply a rationalist in the eighteenth century sense of that word, relying purely on “Nature and Reason” for guide in all things. History was history. Harnack instead wanted to understand that personality and development, two features of our faith in Jesus as the Christ, could not exist or be understood apart from history, but that these two elements of our life together could never simply be read as from a book.
I am well aware of the gravity of this assertion, and I am far from disputing the right of everyone to make it if he chooses [the right base one’s faith on historical detail]. If God would but rend the heavens and come down, that we might behold Him! — it is a cry that is often heard. But I know too, that it is not born out of the depth and strength of the faith which the apostle Paul describes, and that it readily falls under the utterances of the Lord: Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe. Great is the power of external authority in matters of religion; great is the power of signs and wonders; but only where their substance lies can faith and devotion find their ultimate assurance. Their substance is God the Lord; it is reliance on Jesus Christ, whose word and spirit are even today a witness to the heart of the power of God. Woe to us if it were otherwise. Ibid., pp. 59-60.
Can we teach devotion and faith to our children which both takes history seriously and yet does not load it with substance that is other than the ultimate assurance or conviction?
On May 17, we celebrated Christian Education in our church. Tom Stevens, our Christian Education Director preached. He celebrated the fact that we do things differently. It was the end of Tom’s first full year, and we have from the start, realized that to continue doing Church school like it was done to us, would not be helpful. No longer could we teach the story of Noah’s ark and not teach the critical apparatus that must go with it. Our children were applying the same lazy excuses that the opponents of Harnack’s critical theology applied in their solutions to the problem of History and Christianity: the more difficult it is to believe, the more proof it is of God’s hand in it. In our view, all that that kind of teaching could accomplish would be not to rock the boat, to succumb to the cultural anti-intellectualism and to take the intelligence of our children and their parents and fellow church goers lightly.
Tom preached using the text of the last Church School Unit on bread, saying:
In one reading the yeast is a poison, indicative of the evil men can add to another, while in the next reading it is a revelation of God’s spirit. This one ingredient, added in small amounts, can enlarge that to which it has been added. There is really no difficulty in understanding the concept. This is what we do everyday. This is what we receive everyday from others. And it is what we try to do every Sunday with your children. Add a little yeast, a little something that will grow inside of them – something organic and alive and yet completely benign until it has been fed with water and sugar and flour – unless, of course, it is tired and stale.
He goes on to say that while our expectations are humble, we do fervently hope they will see their faith and their devotion in it as an open door for their curiosity, intellect and heart.
We have no illusions that what our children take from us every Sunday will make them better people, per se, but we do have dreams that what we provide them will make them always feel welcome here and ready to learn, not just what we’re supposed to teach them, but whatever they wish, wherever they wish.
How have we done that? We have taken Harnack seriously and have taken seriously too the gifts of our members. We have said — let’s turn church school into an hands on exploration of our faith using the talents and passions of adults. Let’s interpret those passions in the light of our tradition with help from each other and with plenty of time to process those stories so that they become real and fun and not literal.
So when the children arrived after their summer break, in September expecting to go to church school class again, they were instead met with a 10 week unit on creation in which some of the tools of interpreting scripture were introduced. The group read various translations of the creation stories. Individuals had their own version for the whole unit which they compared with others. They compared that religious story with the scientific story of creation and evolution. They began to join Christianity with History. And they did some creating of their own when the performed a Creation Opera for the congregation.
Their next block of the year was spent with an artist (Denise Rundle) talking about the fascinating story of the daughters of Zelephehad (Numbers 27). The children absorbed this story of the unfair treatment of women by making a quilt — an ancient form of resistance story. Again, they learned a story of the bible without having to swallow anything that they didn’t already understand. This is not to say they did not learn things, or that the teacher was irrelvant to their learning — only to say that we teach best when what we teach is always already known — but perhaps not vocalized, realized or even cognized. The Christian story is a story of the re-cognition of the power of the love of God.
The final unit of the year used bread as its hook to understanding the church’s concern with hospitality and with creating and nurturing good people. They learned the story of passover and connected that story with the power of yeast to transform. They made and ate the unleavened bread before Easter and the made and ate leavened bread after Easter. The power of resurrection become the power of to liberate a people from slavery which was visualized in the unleavened to leavened bread.
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Maundy Thursday
Christians are those who remember the story of Jesus within the community of the church, in and for their own time and in their own lives. — Nicola Slee
Join us on Holy Thursday for our own remembering of Jesus and Jesus’ victory, even in death. We will share a potluck meal together, and theologically enact the events of that night. We will gather for worship in the dining room at 6:00, share a ritual meal together and witness a play, reenacting that night.
When Jesus gathered his disciples together to celebrate the feast of the Passover in Jerusalem on the fateful weekend of his arrest and execution, he did so following a tradition that has had Jews remembering, around a ritual meal, their deliverance out of Egypt. It is hard for us moderns to understand what this means exactly, but the gathering of family around the Seder meal was not just a remembering but an actual participation in, the exodus. As the family recited the passages from the Haggadah, they spoke with urgency in their voices because they were actually preparing to leave. When the ate bread, they ate unleavened bread because they had no time. What is interesting, then, about these seder meals is that the time/space continuum is somehow collapsed and the events of the past are now witnessed firsthand. In a second century liturgical handbook, the families were instructed: “In each generation, you shall regard yourself as if you personally had been taken out of Egypt.”
When Jesus gathered his disciples together in that upper room, he implied that they should continue doing this, but that now they should understand their gathering to be an expression of the victory of Jesus against imperial forces — forces that would act in unjust ways in an attempt to protect and perpetuate their power. Those forces, he had already testified in word and deed, would be impotent to the power of love and their unjust actions would be met with a continued confidence in a life lived with God.
Our play this night ends with this line from Mary Magdalene: “I will never betray his truth. Maybe that’s what love is.”
Please join us for a evening of fellowship and worship in a new key.
Brave New Worship World
Without an organist or a choir director, we find ourselves in a position that some might consider unenviable. The question that I want to consider in the next few weeks and months, is less the specific question “Who shall we have at the helm of our music program?” And instead the more general one, “What do we want our music program to accomplish so that the person or persons we hire might be able to lead us where we think we should be going?” I hope that our unique position can be viewed by all of us as an opportunity to take the time we need to be reflective and patient as we consider these important questions. In other words, if all we need is a musician or two, this is not so difficult and we could be moving to hire shortly.
Above all, the question I pose to us requires some serious thinking about what worship is. I think that while most of you recognize that that is my training, and my job, you also recognize that it is your community and your life. We do not subscribe to the kind of church that says, “Take it or leave it.” Because our theological sense is much more emergent, much more dialogical, or disputational (see my sermon for March 22) our worship patterns are not set in stone even while they are rooted in a rich tradition. I like what Jazz musician and worship leader, Bradley Sowash, thinks worship is. He borrows from the only instance of worship in the Gospels of which Jesus seems to approve and thinks worthy of repeating.
Now while Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table. But when the disciples saw it, they were angry and said, “Why this waste? For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.” But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me. By pouring this ointment on my body she has prepared me for burial. Truly I tell you, wherever this good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” –Matthew 26:6-13
About this passage, Mr. Sowash writes,
This woman’s singular act of adoration demonstrates that effective worship integrates creativity, extravagance, understanding, originality, and spontaneity in a manner that is both personal and participatory as well as community enhancing. [1]
In the remainder of his article Sowash expands on the seven points in the sentence quoted above. His is not an attempt to make worship memorable, or funny, or entertaining. Instead, he understands worship to be the expression of the power of God for us. The reason that I have recommended this article is that his idea of God is neither pop-cultural nor fadish which so much ‘new worship’ implies, nor does he view God as otiose as so much traditional worship implies. God cannot be the substance of our passing fancies, just as God cannot be some heavenly being content to watch the world like a plaything, from on high. The one we would worship we do because God is the one categorically worth worshiping. And this means worth interacting with around matters of life and death, creativity and destruction, hope and despair, love and hate. Worship must be as creative and important as these great things warrant.
John Coltrane, the late, great jazz saxophonist once said about his musical expression that he did not so much compose as search. He investigated to see what else might be in the offing, what else might evolve, or emerge. Worship is not just another entertainment venue or place to hear a sermon, but a place to let religion find its own tune with us, personally and communally, after a hard week of improvising. Music which is attuned to this creativity and a worship team that is creatively in conversation with each other about the world and about religion’s new story in it, can move us to the kind of flourishing in right relation that I continue to put forth as our church’s motto.
We have, in the past few weeks, had different congregational experiences with music, from a capella congregational singing, to beautiful clarinet music accompanied by a CD (thanks Joni McCraw) to our choir singing Be Thou our Guide. What do you think? What kind of musical experiences reveal the sacred for you? Are there artistic genres you think we should explore in the coming weeks, months, years? Let us not look back on this time and wish we could have talked more, but share with each other in love and patience.
1. Where Two or More Are Gathered: Exploring Alternate Worship Strategies by Bradley Sowash