Reflection /Teaching for All Saints’
Diocesan Convention 2009
Worship and Liturgy are part of what defines us as Christians in the Anglican tradition. Our celebrations are the articulation of our beliefs—we say that the "law of praying is the law of believing". If we want to know what The Episcopal Church believes about Baptism, Eucharist, Confirmation, Reconciliation, Marriage, sickness, death, ordination…we must look to the Book of Common Prayer. Our beliefs are embedded in our prayers; our prayers are rooted in Scripture, Tradition and Reason.
We are accustomed to gathering for a liturgy we call the Eucharist—a time of worship we expect to last a bit more than an hour, depending upon how many hymns are sung and how long the sermon is! But today is different. Today we have gathered, we have heard lessons read, the Gospel proclaimed, and following this reflection we will include in our worship items of business—the consideration of resolutions, acts of service in the world, conversation about budget priorities, the fellowship of sharing a festive dinner—all within the context of our liturgy.
This approach provides the opportunity to conside the words we use to describe our worship…..Liturgy and Eucharist. Some of you have heard me talk about this before, but the lesson is worth repeating—these words convey meaning which grounds our identity as Anglican Christians.
Both words are from the Greek, and we have come to think of them as having fairly simple meanings. Eucharist, many of us have learned, means ‘thanksgiving.’ Liturgy means ‘work of the people.’ These definitions are correct, but both words have deeper meanings.
In ‘eucharist’ we find a prefix and a noun. ‘Eu’ is common in words from the Greek and means ‘good.’ We see it in ‘euphoria’—feeling well or elated, ‘euphemism’—a positive way of stating something, ‘euthanasia’—good or gentle death, you get the point. The noun is ‘charis,’ which means gift. A charismatic person, for example, is one gifted with certain abilities… and when the prefix and noun are combined we get eu-charis—the good gift, for which we give thanks.
What is this gift? We can begin the list, but never exhaust it… the gift of life itself, the gift of being able to perceive beauty in the world around us, the gifts of freedom, of creativity, of companionship and family, the gift of love, of people who are examples and encouragers in our lives—the whole communion of saints, in whose presence we are whenever we gather to worship God.
Eventually we must come to the greatest gift of all—the gift of God’s own self—the revelation of God’s love for us in Jesus, the Incarnate One. Jesus the Christ is eu-charis—the good gift Who invites and challenges us to live in thanksgiving.
In the word ‘liturgy’ we also find depth of meaning. It is compounded of the Greek words for people ‘laos’ and work ‘ergon.’ The simplest definition, then, is that liturgy means ‘work of the people.’ Today the word is used to describe worship which has a certain formality and ritual about it. But it originally meant something rather different—and not at all religious.
‘Liturgia’ meant a work done on behalf of the people. The Rev’d Dr. Charles Price (Liturgy for Living) explains that the word was used to designate work done on behalf of others at private cost.
If a private citizen were to build a bridge across a stream and leave it for others to use, that would be ‘liturgia’—a public work accomplished at private cost. The same would be true of private financing of a militia to protect a city, or the commissioning of a statue for the town square, or producing a drama for the citizens...all public works accomplished at private cost.
Price says that St. Paul took this concept and applied it to what God has done in Jesus. In Jesus the Christ, God has accomplished the greatest of all possible public works at the highest of all possible private costs.
My thought about this is that when we consider the cost of God’s love for us in Jesus we may be tempted to think first of Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross. Suffering is a cost we can begin to imagine, and death, we claim, is the ultimate sacrifice we can imagine making. But we believe in more than the death of Jesus. We claim him as God Incarnate—God in the flesh.
We speak of God as Trinity—a triune community of eternal Being and mutuality. At the heart of Christian faith is the conviction that this community allowed one of its own—a part of its very self—to take on the life of an inferior species of being. We’re accustomed to thinking of humanity as the crown of creation, made in the image of God. Even so we are not divine.
We can try to imagine what it would mean to become something less than human—some other species of being, as different from us as we are from God; but we may never fully understand it. What we do know is that though we treasure our humanity we have to admit it’s a mixed bag.
We humans have the capacity to be creative, patient and caring. We enjoy beauty and laughter, and we have the ability to reason, to learn, to be generous, and to love. But we can also be jealous and petty, unforgiving, indifferent, and deliberately violent and cruel.
It seems to me that when we speak of God’s work on our behalf as ‘liturgy’—as the greatest of all possible public works accomplished at the highest of all possible private costs—we must begin with God’s decision to share fully in all that it means to be human.
In the Incarnation God was willing to enter with us into all that is best about our lives, and—was also willing to become vulnerable to all that is worst about them.
In the Incarnation God took the initiative to get alongside us—to be present with us not only as inspiration, or as wisdom, but as one of the least of us. God did not take on humanity as a governor or monarch. The Incarnation did not have God appearing among us as a person of privilege and wealth. Jesus, when he spoke in the synagogue at Nazareth, described his mission by reading from Isaiah; “the spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
The people who heard him knew that Jesus was claiming a particular relationship with God by applying these words to himself. But they did not understand that relationship as we do.
The lesson from Ecclesiasticus reminds us that there have always been people who lead exemplary lives—lives worth praising and emulating. Such people have lived in every generation, and it is good to thank God for them. But their presence and example has not been enough to effect salvation.
Such examples of virtue have never been enough to spur humanity into faithfulness. The Law of Moses had not been enough. The ranting of the prophets had not been enough. If we can draw any lesson from the history of our faith it certainly could be that humanity is not able to pull itself up by its own bootstraps and become all it is capable of being—all it was meant to be.
Jesus was both an example and a prophet. He was a healer, a teacher. But we say he was more.
We claim Jesus as the initiative taken by God to become immersed in humanity so completely that humanity could become new, redeemed, faithful. In the Incarnation God took the initiative which enables us to become immersed in the life and love of God….the ‘liturgia’ of God.
We have no idea what it cost God to take this initiative, but in our baptisms we bind ourselves to the meaning of it. And whenever we gather for worship we claim the reality of it, we give thanks for it, and we open ourselves to share in it. We call what we do when we gather ‘liturgy’ and the word itself implies that we agree to participate in God’s public work of redeeming the world, AND that we are willing to have it cost us something.
What the cost will be we have no way of knowing in advance. The cost for God was taking on human life, and getting alongside the rejected, the despised, the oppressed and the forgotten, to bring them the great good news that despite what they had been told all their lives, God loves them.
It seems to me that the liturgy in which we engage will necessarily include some of the same cost…..the cost of taking initiative to get alongside those who have been told they are not favored by God—that they must continue to live without hope.
At the very least, our participation in what we call ‘liturgy’ must issue in something beyond the reading of lessons, the singing of hymns, the offering of prayers, and the remembrance of what God did for us once upon a time.
If our liturgy serves to connect us to the holy—if it is Sacrament and grace to us, as we claim it is—then we dare not relegate it to an hour or so a week. If our worship is truly liturgy we must allow it to form us, and we must carry it beyond the altar and into the world—ready to pay whatever it costs to get alongside those who have yet to hear the message that they are beloved by God.
Our liturgy must issue in ministry….which is an essential component of being disciples of Jesus.
Elton Trueblood, an esteemed Quaker theologian and author put it this way;
“ If you are a Christian you are a minister. This proposition is absolutely basic to any understanding of Christianity. A non-ministering Christian is a contradiction in terms. The Christian faith is not made up of spectators listening to professionals, and it is not for individuals who are seeking primarily to save their own souls. It is necessarily made up of persons who are called to serve as representatives of Christ in the world, and to serve means to minister. Ministry is intrinsic to the Christian life. Ministry is not something added on, and it is not a means to an end. It is central and ineradicable.”
Trueblood’s thought is not new to us. Our own catechism reminds us that the ministers of the Church are lay persons, bishops, priests and deacons. All members of the Church are to represent Christ to the world; all are to engage in God’s public work of reconciliation by doing mercy, ensuring justice, and learning what it means to love.
The ministries we will undertake during this convention will have a variety of forms, but in all we do, let us be conscious of the fact that we are engaged in liturgy—public work accomplished at private cost.
And let us be thankful the whole time, that we proclaim not only the cost paid by Christ, but the triumph— the resurrected life which can belong to those share in God’s own initiative of ministry and love. Let us be thankful that we can be saints – those whose lives become ongoing liturgy, and who share not only in the cost, but in the triumph of resurrected life.
+Catherine M. Waynick
Bishop of Indianapolis
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