From time to time, I enjoy visiting liturgical churches. If you’re not familiar with the term “liturgical,” it literally means “work of the people” but in this case tends to refer to a worship style that includes a good number of speaking prayers and readings in unison. Across multiple liturgical churches, certain elements crop up frequently: the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed (a statement of faith affirming the core beliefs of Christianity), a generic confession of sin and declaration of forgiveness, some version of the Lord’s Supper, and Scripture readings that are read on a three-year cycle known as the lectionary.
If you were not raised with an occasional exposure to liturgical worship, it may sound hyper-structured with little noticeable spontaneity, and you’d be right. But is spontaneity really all it’s cracked up to be? While I think that living permanently in the liturgical worship style would grate on me, there’s something to be said for leaning on the structure of something like that from time to time. How many people struggle with prayer because they don’t have the words? Pre-written prayers are like training wheels for that. Sure, pre-written prayers don’t show off verbal skill, but verbal skill isn’t the point of prayer. Relationship with God is, and we don’t stop telling our loved ones “I love you” just because it’s a stock phrase. In the same way, the ancient prayers of the Bible take on new meaning over time. The Lord’s Prayer may be the most-repeated Christian prayer on the face of the Earth, but why not? It covers so many of the things close to the heart of God and allows us to focus on those things. The Psalms are so raw and vivid emotionally that they ring with fresh truth for different life experiences even though they were written thousands of years ago. Praying these incredibly old prayers regularly, when done intentionally and with a whole heart, can be life-changing. One professor of mine would pray and think on the 23rd Psalm each night, and the peace that practice gave him showed in his interactions with his students. The serenity he brought with him into the classroom was, to be frank, incredible. My great grandmother is in the practice of praying for the fruits of the Spirit listed in Galatians, and it shows. Much of what we’ve been discussing in these Friday blogs has been about increasing the variety, joy, and spontaneity of prayer. All these things are, of course, necessary. The key here is balance. If your spontaneous prayers are getting stale and self-centered, take a crack at praying through the Psalms or another pre-written prayer. If a prayer you recite regularly is feeling empty and mechanical (whether it’s a meal blessing, the Lord’s Prayer, or whatever), maybe it’s time to move to a different one for a while or to push yourself to compose your own. The beauty of these old prayers is that they’ll still be there to enrich your life in an entirely different way later on. Done well, the spontaneity and the structure enrich and inform each other, leading to new horizons of rich experience with God. Communion is probably the most important piece of liturgy practiced in the entire Christian world. This ceremony elicits some strange reactions in people. I’ve seen attendance go down in some churches when they know it is Communion Sabbath, and go up in others. Some people get nervous and bolt when the church breaks for the ordinance of humility (foot washing), and others call the church in advance, eagerly wanting to know when the next Communion will be celebrated so they can be there. For some, emotions run high about the particular details of what is and isn’t appropriate in the communion service--one of my female colleagues even reported being physically assaulted after officiating one once. Where does this all come from? A good deal of how people feel about Communion derives from how they feel about symbols and rituals in the first place. Symbols have a beautiful way of bypassing the intellectual chatter by which we avoid God through overexplaining Him, and rituals give words and practices a chance to let important things soak in properly instead of overindulging in an unhealthy obsession with novelty. As someone who has experienced Communion many times from both sides of the table, I can honestly say that each time, it both comforts me with its familiarity and reaches me in a new way. Why? Symbols, when repeated, offer up more of their meaning over time. They grow different roots into new life experiences. Having my filthy feet washed by my friend Katherine after traipsing around Leoni Meadows, a camp known for its thick red clay, changed me in profound ways. In an entirely different way, the experience of handling the emblems for the Lord’s Supper myself and praying for the congregation while the elders are passing it out moves me and humbles me each time. That experience is special to me because it’s the only time I actually get to look at the congregation’s faces while not having an action to perform. I look forward to being able to do that again whenever the pandemic clears. Symbolic layers of meaning are unlocked by layers of life experience. The same principle goes for any repeated experience, making old prayers and practices well worth revisiting periodically. The best of our oldest hymns, such as “Be Thou My Vision,” “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” “Amazing Grace,” and a large set of Christmas carols (which are some of the oldest songs in common usage sung anywhere) have gained new meanings for each generation that has sung them. The best layers of the old provide an anchor for interpreting an ever-changing world. With our world changing in dramatic ways nearly every week these days, old sentiments like “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace,” (and all that follows in that particular prayer) have become exponentially more important and relevant than even when they were first penned. And now, today I will close with a common blessing of sending in many liturgical churches: Go in peace to love and serve the Lord. ;)
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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