Melting into Graced Community: Some Thoughts on Liturgical Presidency

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to preside at a liturgy. Partially, this is because I'm at Sewanee right now, in the third year of course-work for my Doctor of Ministry. Both classes I'm taking have a liturgical focus. The first, Mapping Liturgical Rite, is an explicit liturgical focus. The second, The Oxford Movement, the Liturgy, and the Crisis of Faith, is a bit more implicit... however, given the title, liturgy is clearly still a significant part of the conversation.

It seems to me that throughout the history we've been exploring, one of the fundamental questions is the way in which the community addresses itself to God. In the early church, as the community gathered around the table, they broke bread and wine with a deep sense of Christ's presence with them. The presider, in the late first-century Didache referred to interestingly enough at times as a Prophet, was given distinct words but was also invited to use his own words if he so wished. And at the end of the meal, the Presider invited the community to remember that the world into which they were returning was not real—only God's grace is real. Thus, the lovely concluding prayer, "Let grace come, and let this world pass away. Hosanna to the God of David. If any one is holy let him come, if any one is not holy let him repent. Maranatha. Amen."

The point being that the Presider, on behalf of the community, invites God's presence into the community. The beginning part of the post-communion prayer in the Didache has the Presider giving thanks for the way in which, particularly through the liturgy, God has come to dwell within the community. "We thank thee, Holy Father, for Thy Holy Name, which Thou hast caused to dwell (tabernacle) in our hearts."

Over the following centuries, as the liturgy developed and became more and more elaborate, formalization set in with the Presider's role. The words became set, the actions became more and more concrete. Having been raised in a non-liturgical tradition, I would argue that this formalization of liturgy and action caused the Presider increasingly to fall back into the liturgy. No longer even praying in your own words and instead praying in the words of the church, the liturgy took central place.

Now, of course, concurrent with this could be unhelpful developments. In some areas it began to be seen as though the liturgy was primarily something the priest (and servers) did while the people watched. Or, in others, laziness on the part of the clergy meant that the liturgy happened but in a very sort of rote manner.

Since the Liturgical Movement, however, the liturgy of the church has become much more participatory. Though the liturgy can certainly no longer be seen in most places as something the priest does privately while the people standing by, I would suggest that in many areas it has become a performance put on by the priest. The people say their parts, do their standing and keep their eyes on the liturgical action... but the affectations of the priest mean that their eyes are actually on the priest rather than elements upon the altar.

Ironically, I generally find this particularly in clergy with a lower theological understanding of priesthood. However, when it comes to their style of celebration, they hold out the elements at the words of institution acting in persona Christi, they break the bread and hold it out in a manner that emphasizes what they just did in the breaking. They spend most of the prayer looking at the people (when they are not looking at the book).

I would argue, this style of celebration has lost the understanding of the Presider as one who simply functions as the congregation's chosen president for their prayers to God. This style has lost a sense of celebration where the priest humbly approaches God's altar, saying his or her words, but also affirming the proper liturgical roles of the rest of the servers alongside of the people. In proper presidency, no one person is more important than the others. Each has simply been given a distinctive role to play—and God remains the fundamental actor in the liturgy, wherein the congregation calls on God to make grace present once more.

I'm sure I don't do this well all the time. But as I move towards five years as a priest, I'm increasingly convicted about the need for us, as clergy, to learn what it means to melt into the action of Holy Eucharist. As I wrote in an essay several years ago, the traditional liturgical vestments of cassock, amice, alb, girdle, stole, and chasuble give me a sense of being swaddled in grace. It covers me in the clothes of the church that I might sing the song, dance the steps, the church has asked me to do.

And, in the end, when I experience a presidency of prayer that functions in this way, one in which I truly did experience myself melting into the community's liturgical action, I discover a profound experience of grace. I am reminded that very little of my ministry is dependent upon my personality or inherent gifts... rather, it is dependent upon me accepting God's grace through a deep entrance into Christian community, coming up alongside to say my words when it is my time, being quiet when it is time for me do that.

In melting into the liturgy, I find that grace is not effected by any clergy person's "magic hands," least of all my own. Rather, grace is revealed as always present when we, as the worshiping community, succeed in pulling back the curtain on the world as it seems and encounter the world as it truly is: deeply infused with the gracious love of the Holy Trinity.

A catholic future for the Episcopal Church

My June 6, 2013, article for Daily Episcopalian, A catholic future for the Episcopal Church,

As I approach nearly ten years worshiping in the Episcopal Church, including nearly five as a priest of the church, I’m struck by what first drew me into the church as someone in his young twenties. Though I was raised in an evangelical tradition, it was one that emphasized both the early church and the importance of reason, study, and intellect in the practice of the Christian faith. The more I studied in my undergraduate and graduate work, the more I found myself drawn to a more ancient expression of Christianity, one that didn’t view the early church merely as an historic curiosity, but instead as a group to whom we were organically connected. I began to realize that certain ideas I had been told were “catholic innovations” growing up—ideas like the Presence of Christ in Communion, a hierarchical structure, the veneration of saints—these were actually important concepts in the church from her earliest centuries.

For the past five years, my priestly ministry has been deeply shaped by a group known as the Society of Catholic Priests in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. The Society began in England in the mid-nineties as a place for Anglo-Catholic clergy who also supported the ordination of women and of gay and lesbian Christians. It believed that the ideals of the catholic heritage of Anglicanism were not only essential, but that they needed a resurgence in the church today.

Read more at the Daily Episcopalian's website here.

CRAMER: Religious intolerance is on the rise

My May 22, 2013, article for the Grand Haven Tribune, Religious intolerance is on the rise,

Most small children learn that many of the first colonists to the United States were pilgrims seeking the freedom to practice their religious views.

The Church of England — the mother church of my own denomination, The Episcopal Church — was not only established as the state church, it also explicitly sought to suppress nonconformist and Roman Catholic groups within the country (this is a part of Anglicanism’s history over which we repent, and from which we have turned).

But, still, we teach our children at a young age that some of the first colonists came here because they wanted to practice their religion freely. There is an important nuance to be made here. The Puritans, along with other religious groups arriving in 17th-century America, wanted to practice their religion freely — they did not want freedom of religion.

Read more at the Tribune's website here.

Unsettled by the Evils of Segregation

My May 8, 2013, column in the Grand Haven Tribune, Unsettled by the Evils of Segregation,

Over the three years I have been serving as a pastor in the Tri-Cities area, an area in which I spent much of my upbringing, I’ve become increasingly unsettled by a difficult reality: we are a segregated community.

Growing up in Grand Haven, I never thought of us as segregated. We just didn’t happen to have many people of other races in our area, or so I thought. However, after ten years living in various areas of the US, I returned to our community with a different set of lenses.

Federal data indicates that we live in the 20th most segregated area in the nation. Not the state. Not our region. In the nation. People of color live in northwest Ottawa County, far more than many white residents of Grand Haven realize. They just usually live in different areas, often not far from the city limits, than the white majority of Grand Haven citizens.

Take the local Latino population. According to the most recent census, almost 9% of Ottawa County’s population is Latino—twice the percentage of the rest of Michigan. In Grand Haven, however, only 2.4% of the population is Latino. Head just a bit south into West Olive and the percentage jumps up to 8.6%. Move a bit to the east and south into Allendale and it is 4.5%.
The Latino population in our area is growing. Between 2000 and 2010, though the overall population of Grand Haven decreased by 6%, the population of Hispanics increased a full percentage point. However, we have a long way to go as a community before we succeed in welcoming and inviting Latino persons to be full and equal participants in our community.

One of the key reasons I find all of this unsettling is because of the Good News of God. In Ephesians, chapter one, the Apostle Paul writes about the mystery of God’s plan of salvation, a mystery that has finally been revealed in Jesus Christ. The church has been redeemed, our trespasses forgiven, according to the “riches of his grace that he lavished on us” (1:7-8). It is to this Church, with wisdom and insight, that God has revealed the mystery of God’s will for Creation. What is that will? “A plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (1:10).

For Paul, indeed, throughout much of the New Testament, this gathering up of all humanity in the New Creation is primarily about destroying the barriers that have been erected between Jewish and Gentile Christians. In our day, we have our own barriers that have been erected around us. Make no mistake, though, God’s plan to destroy those barriers and gather us all together is not just diversity for the sake of diversity. It is because the gathering up of all things reveals “the wisdom of God in its rich variety” (3:10).

That is, a homogenous church, drawing only from one people group, will never reveal the richness of the depth of the riches of God’s wisdom.

To wit, I along with all the white residents of Grand Haven are deeply damaged by the segregation in which we live. We are diminished, unable to see the richness of God through different ethnic groups and cultures, some not very far from us, and some right here in our city, small, but growing. And this damage is being passed along to our children, as the disturbing reality of racial slurs in our schools cast shame upon all of us in this community.

It is time for us, as residents of the Tri-Cities, to do something about the embarrassing stain of segregation and discrimination in our area. But we must approach this with a healthy sense of contrition and humility. Because the system of white privilege so present in our society—in our very community—can blind us to the ways in which we fail to be welcoming, we fail to see the gifts of other cultures. Unless we are ready to look carefully at the ways in which we are complicit in segregation, we will fail in genuine dialogue and authentic transformation.

And, furthermore, I believe the church must lead the way on this issue. After all, Sunday morning is the most segregated time in the United States. Let’s say we defined a racially mixed congregation as one in which no one group comprised more than 80 percent of the whole. By that definition, only 5.5% of the Christian congregations in our country are racially diverse. The church must lead the way by being willing to repent, by being willing to change, by being willing to let go of the illusion that we know what’s best and by receiving the rich gifts of grace present God’s diverse creation. 

We'll be singing with Shirley one more time

My April 29, 2013, column for the Grand Haven Tribune, We'll be singing with Shirley one more time,

Singing was always a part of my life. 

 

I was raised in a small Christian tradition that was very conservative on a number of questions, and one of those was worship. Like Christians in the first centuries, that tradition still worships with no instruments. Instead, it is straight a cappella hymn singing.

And though I’ve learned to love the rich Anglican musical heritage, some days I still miss a good four-part gospel number.

Read more at the Tribune's website here.

A Loving Death

A couple weeks ago, at the our diocesan Spirituality Retreat, Bishop Gepert asked us to take a few minutes to reflect on what Gospel story we find ourselves most drawn to. He urged us to share the first one that immediately came to mind. Then, after we went around and shared what stories came up, he invited us to spend some time reflecting about how our life story connects with that Gospel story.

For me, the first story that came to my mind was this: the Restoration of Peter.

If you would have asked me years ago what story would come to mind, I don't think I would have picked this one. However, ever since my last pilgrimage to the Holy Land I have been captivated by this story.

One of the places we visited during that pilgrimage was the Church of the Primacy in Tiberius. It is a lovely church along the lake shore that commemorates Peter's restoration. For Roman Catholics, it also commemorates Christ's final and clearest statement about his primacy and his pastoral role among the other apostles and the broader church.

Do you remember the story?

After the resurrection, Peter still hasn't seen the resurrected Christ. He says to his friends, "I'm going fishing." The others say they'll go with him. They head out on the Sea of Tiberius and fish all night, catching nothing...

Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, ‘Children, you have no fish, have you?’ They answered him, ‘No.’ He said to them, ‘Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.’ So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’ When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the lake.

Jesus has prepared breakfast for them, cooking over a charcoal fire (the same word used to describe the fire at which Peter warmed himself while denying Christ). Three times Jesus asks Peter if he loves him. Three times Peter says he does, only to hear Jesus respond, "Feed my sheep."

While I had always thought of this story as being the Restoration of Peter (as I even described it above), that is the more Protestant understanding. In much of Catholic thought, the story is often seen as a restoration and ordination of sorts. Peter is not only restored—he is commissioned for ministry.

At the Church of the Primacy, there is a statue depicting this scene. When I first saw it, I was stunned and captivated. Peter kneels before Christ, clearly overwhelmed by what is happening in this moment. Christ doesn't look normal, he looks other-worldly, as though the Resurrection has changed him. He extends one hand over Peter in an act of ordination and with his other hand he offers Peter a crozier—the symbol of episcopal ministry.

It's clearly a piece of art, not intended to be an historical depiction of this event. And as a piece of art, I find it powerful and moving.

For a long-time, I thought Christianity was primarily about grace and knowing that I was saved regardless of my own failings and weaknesses. And it is, of course, significantly about that. During this time I loved books like Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-up, and Burnt-out. Books like this taught me the beauty and truth of God's completely free and extravagant love. They were the warm milk upon which every young Christian must feed.

However, I've been slowly moving beyond that.

Well, not really beyond that, that's not the right word.

Because in some ways, extravagant grace has become even more important alongside of a deepening understanding of what the working out of my salvation looks like. The deepening understanding for me is the sense of call, the sense of being sent... and the fear of what that entails.The deepening understanding is about how accepting my calling to be sent deep into the the heart of my parish community... how this is a part of my own salvation.

When I was in discernment of ordination and then in seminary, a common narrative was how so many people wanted to run from the call. I remember one mentor saying that unless someone approached the concept of ordained ministry with great fear and trembling, they probably approached it wrongly. And that always made me feel a little guilty, because I wasn't scared of ordained ministry. I was excited and thrilled to receive this call, to be affirmed in something I had wanted to do almost my entire life.

But now, approaching the five year anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood, I think I understand the fear bit better. Because I understand that priestly ministry truly is a daily participation in the sacrifice and death of Christ. I understand that it is a constant giving up, a constant letting go, a constant laying down of yourself on behalf of the community and the church catholic. After having been called to walk through a few small deaths in my practice of ministry, I see how sometimes the clear path forward, the clear path deeper into the community, is one that will inevitably require death.

And perhaps that is why moving "beyond" the simple milk of God's unexpected and extravagant grace to the inevitable sending into ministry that every single baptized Christian has is not actually a moving beyond at all. It's a moving deeper.

Because one of the deepest gifts my spiritual director has given me is the connection between a deep and passionate love affair with God and service to that God in the Christian community.

Peter received his calling in the context of repeated questions from Christ regarding Peter's love for Jesus. Over and over again, Jesus asked Peter if he loved him and with each affirmative response Jesus sought to cast Peter's gaze broader, insisting that love of Christ involved feeding Christ's flock.

This connection is what saves any baptized Christian, lay or ordained, from allowing their practice of ministry to destroy them. We are all handed a certain type of death from our Lord, a cross to pick up. But when we accept that cross—symbolized for Peter in the crozier—we accept it with our eyes locked upon a Christ who loves us and who invites our passionate love.

The death to which are called may be scary, but it is the way into divine love.

Loving Christ without the death through which we feed Christ's body—that is, loving Christ without a participation in his Eucharistic self-offering—will only ever keep Christ at an arm's length. It will not allow our very selves to be formed after the mind of Christ.

Feeding Christ's body without a strong connection to the love of Christ will result either in a lack of authenticity or burn-out. We will find ourselves consumed or we will find our care exhausted. We will be left hurting and looking for the redeeming healing grace of God.

In order to love, we must hear the call to die in self-offering service. In order to serve, we must be grounded first in a relationship of passionate love.

I don't have this all worked out. I feel like I'm only now brushing the edges of this mystery. But more and more I can smell the charcoal from the fire. More and more, I hear Christ asking my spirit, "Do you love me?" I hear Christ inviting me to respond, "Yes, Lord, you know that I love you."

And with each year, with each day in the life of ministry, I see more clearly the loving death into which I am invited.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.

Wrestling with a Consistent Ethic of Life

My February 27, 2013, column for the Grand Haven Tribune, Wrestling with a Consistent Ethic of Life,

The other day, as I was on my way to a lunch meeting riding with a parishioner, he relayed to me an experience he had in state-level politics.

He was approached by a representative from one of our elected officials and asked if he would support a bill that would exclude health insurance carriers from covering pre-existing conditions of adopted children.

Knowing that this politician was “pro-life,” my parishioner pushed a bit, asking how that made sense. “So, you’re telling me that you support forcing someone in poverty to have a child, but then if that parent chooses to give the child up for adoption, you also support allowing a health insurance company not to cover any pre-existing conditions that child has.”

The representative paused for a moment and then said, “I suppose we hadn’t really thought about that.”

Read more at the Tribune's website here.