Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 20, 2003

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I spent the week before last at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry Summer Institute for Liturgy and Worship. You all approved a week of paid study leave so I could attend that Institute, and having now completed it I feel moved to share with you the conclusions, or better the vision, with which I come away from that experience. After all, I don’t want you to think I was wasting my time and your money. At least, I hope you won’t think so after this talk is over.

After a full week of listening to a truly illustrious group of nationally recognized experts speak about Christian liturgy I have come away more convinced than ever that what we do here on Sunday morning matters. In fact, if we let it, and if we do worship correctly, it can make all the difference not only in our lives but in the entire world. Now, I imagine that that sounds like a very rash statement to you. It does to me. How can what we do here on Sunday morning make all the difference for our lives and even for the whole world? That sounds like pure chutzpah at best and pure delusion at worst, doesn’t it? Well, maybe it is, but that is indeed the vision that grasped me as I participated in the Institute last week. Let me try to explain.

We start with our context, the world in which we live and work. People in our culture are longing, yearning, pining for an authentic, living relationship with the Holy, the Divine, with Spirit, that is, with God. If you doubt that, go to any bookstore and look at the number of books, even best sellers, on topics in spirituality. As a people we are dying of hunger and thirst, not physical hunger and thirst of course (at least for most of us) but spiritual hunger and thirst. Our people are dying for want of it. They, and we, long for God. St. Augustine got it right when he said: "You have made us for Yourself Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

What we don’t often realize is that God also longs for us. God seeks us, yearns for us, pines us. God does this without ceasing. One of the speakers at the Institute, quoting someone else, but I don’t remember who, called God "that old insomniac who stalks the night sky," always looking for ways to make connection with us, to reach us, to turn us back to God. We can see all of Scripture as the story of God’s relentless quest to reach the hearts and minds of God’s people. We may give up trying to find God, but God never gives up trying to find us.

And we forget, or we never knew, that for us in the Christian tradition the Sunday liturgy, the worship we do here every week, is the primary place where we find God and where God finds us. It is the primary place where we and God find that connection with each other for which we both so powerfully yearn. The Sunday liturgy, when done in the ancient, ecumenical form that we follow, if rather imperfectly, here and that so many of us so wrongly have come to call when done fully and properly "Catholic," is what formed the church. It has sustained the church and countless generations of Christian people for almost two thousand years. The church would not have survived, indeed it probably would never have been born, without that liturgy.

And the miraculous thing is how it does it. It does it through perfectly ordinary things. Traditional Christian liturgy is like a treasure hidden in a field, to cite the theme of the talk at the Institute by my friend Dennis Hughes. It works its magic in the most ordinary things and actions-our gathering together, our prayers, our songs, the Scripture we read and the Gospel we hear proclaimed. It does it through the symbol of baptismal water. When traditional Christian liturgy is done fully and properly, that liturgy works its magic most powerfully through those most ordinary things of the Eucharist, bread and wine, even the "unfermented wine" that we use here.

I invite you to imagine the liturgy that we do here on Sunday as a feast. That’s easier to do when we do Communion, since then we have at least the remnants of a real feast. That’s what the liturgy was in the beginning-a meal. The Christian church was founded around a table, the table of the Lord. The Christian gathering was originally a love feast, called an agape meal or feast. It still is, even though at most all we eat is a crumb of bread and all we drink is a sip of juice.

Think of our worship service and the feast the father gave for the returning prodigal son. Most of at one time or another in our lives have wandered away the church and its Sunday liturgy. I sure did. And perhaps the liturgy is best appreciated by those of us who have been away. Because you see, the Realm of God is about the shepherd searching high and low for the one lost sheep, the woman tearing her house apart until she finds the one lost coin. It is about welcoming home the prodigal son, the prodigal daughter, with a great feast, a love feast. We experience that feast, that irrationally exuberant welcome of God, first and most of all in our Sunday worship. Our worship is a feast for the least, the last, and the lost, to quote another speaker from the Institute. It is God’s great welcome home to all who have wandered, to all who are seeking and searching for their true spiritual home, that is, for God.

How does it work? How does traditional turn ordinary things into a treasure buried in a field? It does it through a four part movement. We do it that way here. Look at the section headings in your bulletin. The first is "God gathers us." The liturgy begins with the people gathering at the call of the Holy Spirit. The second is "We hear the Word." We gather to hear the Word of God in the stories of Scripture and in the proclamation from the pulpit. The third heading is "Our Thanksgiving." When we have heard the Word we respond with thanks, in our prayers, our offerings, and (at least once a month) in the Eucharist, the technical term for Communion. It is a Greek word that means thanksgiving. For most of us, these first three movements constitute the worship service. We probably don’t pay much attention to the last one, "God sends us out." It consists only of a closing hymn, a benediction by the pastor, and maybe a sung benediction response. We probably think of this fourth movement of the service as nothing more than a way to end it, a way to signal that it’s over.

Let me suggest to you, however, that the fourth movement, the sending, is at least as important as the other three movements and that, indeed, it is the most important of all. It is so much more than a way to signal that the service is over and say good-bye. That’s because we do not gather for the sake of gathering. We do not hear the Word for the sake of hearing it. We do not give thanks for the sake of giving thanks. We gather precisely so that we can leave. We come in here, in a very real sense out of the world, precisely so that we can leave again, go out into the world again.

But not the same way we came out of it. We come here so that we may go out into God’s world fed, refreshed, inspired, indeed transformed. The purpose of our Sunday worship is transformation. If we leave here at the end of the service the same people we were when we came in, something hasn’t worked. Of course, that happens all the time. Lots of things keep the service from working its magic on us. In his talk at the Institute Dennis Hughes summed those things up by saying that we let our egos get in the way of the Spirit. Yet, I am convinced that if we will get our egos with their resistance to transformation out of the way, over time the Christian liturgy really does transform us. If I didn’t believe that I’d think that what I do here, and what we do here together every Sunday, was all a waste of time. And I don’t believe that what we do here is a waste of time.

We come to be transformed, and we are transformed. Maybe we can see that in our private, personal lives. I hope so. But there’s one more important point to make. Our worship, our liturgy, is not merely for our own transformation. It is for the transformation of the world. In our worship we experience anew every week the Incarnation of Christ. We experience Christ Incarnate first of all in our gathering. We gather as the Body of Christ. Those aren’t idle words. They are the ancient self-understanding of the Christian Church. We, collectively, are Christ Incarnate in the world. We experience Christ Incarnate in the proclaimed Word. When the Word is proclaimed in the Christian assembly as we do here every week Christ becomes once again incarnate in the world, among us. We experience Christ Incarnate in our thanksgiving, especially in the Eucharist, in the symbols of bread and wine that we call the body and blood of Christ. The purpose of our leaving here, of the last movement of the liturgy, is then to take nothing less than the Incarnation of Christ back out into the world. Our experience of Christ Incarnate in the liturgy is not for ourselves alone, not merely for our personal transformation. It is for nothing less than the transformation of the world. We leave here to be the Incarnation of Christ in the world. And if we truly are Christ Incarnate in the world, the world will be transformed. Like us, the very world will be changed, renewed, when we truly leave here to be the Incarnation.

It’s a scary thought, isn’t it? We leave here with a responsibility, a divine responsibility, to bring God’s peace, God’s love, God’s justice to all the people of the world. How can we do that? How is it possible for mere mortals like us? It’s possible, we can do it, because the liturgy feeds us with divine food. It grounds us, and it lifts us up. It humbles us, and it inspires us. It draws us in, and it sends us out transformed, changed, if only by a little bit each week, into the image and likeness of Christ in the world. What we do here on Sunday morning matters. It matters a lot. It matters ultimately. Thanks be to God. Amen.