Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on us. Melt
us, mold us, use us, fill us. Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on us.
Amen.
Nearly
every Sunday, the foundation of the sermon is one of the passages of Scripture
that is read. On some occasions, it might be a prayer, hymn, or part of the
liturgy that the sermon is based upon. But today I’m going to preach about
something that I never, ever thought that I’d preach a sermon about. Today’s
sermon is about the bulletin.
As
you’ve noticed, it’s not that we’ve tweaked the bulletin, but the entire idea of
what a bulletin is has been adjusted. So, for one, the sermon allows me to explain
why we’ve made this change. But as I thought about it, I realized that our
bulletin actually says a lot about who we are as Episcopalians and what worship
in our Anglican tradition is all about.
First,
an explanation of the change. It used to be that the Sunday bulletin had most
everything that you need for worship every single week. We’re still providing
that information, but it’s presented differently. In the pews each week, you’ll
find a liturgy guide that stays in the pews. We’ll update that document
seasonally, as parts of the liturgy change. If you’re familiar with our style
of worship, you might not even need to pick up that document. An exception is that
we’re using new song of praise, so at least
until you learn it, you’ll need to look at it. And a note on that hymn of
praise – if you don’t like it, please don’t blame our organist, Matt. It was my
choice to use it. The tune, Thaxted, is
absolutely gorgeous and was written by Gustov Holst and is featured in the “Jupiter”
movement of my favorite symphony, The
Planets. I hope that it lifts your soul as it does mine.
What the ushers will hand
you is a weekly insert – it contains the information that changes week to week,
so that’s where you’ll find things like hymns, readings, announcements, and schedules.
The weekly insert is something that you can take home with you each week to
continue reflecting on Scripture and reviewing the announcements and schedules.
In
a sense, you might say “You’ve just complicated things – instead of one
bulletin, now we have two.” I’ll acknowledge that there’s no such thing as a
perfect way to do bulletins. Obviously, we’re not going to install projection
screens. And really, the best way to make the liturgy accessible to guests isn’t
something that we can print up – it’s you. When you see someone new, even if it
means not sitting in your regular pew, go over to them, welcome them, and ask “Would
it be okay if I sat with you and helped you navigate our worship service?”
There’s no substitute for hospitality, and so the bulletin and insert is
intended to supplement your gracious help, not replace it.
What
caused me to pursue a change though was this parish’s commitment to Becoming
the Beloved Community. Sometimes we use that phrase to talk about our work
around racial reconciliation, sometimes we use it to talk about our own fellowship
and parish life events, such as today’s parish picnic, but Beloved Community is
also about our relationship to the earth. If we do not live in a beloved
community with Creation, we will continue on our path of environmental
destruction and unsustainability. And it’s those environmental concerns that
prompted this change.
In
our previous format, we were using about 620 sheets of paper to print bulletins
every single week. And a large proportion of what we were printing was
duplicative every week. Yes, some things would change week to week, but a good
chunk of the bulletin was just repeating the same information. That’s why we’ve
changed to a format that uses only 160 sheets of paper a week, cutting our
paper usage nearly in fourth. We have an environmental stewardship committee and
we are committed as a parish to the work of being good stewards of God’s
Creation, but using so much paper on a weekly basis simply isn’t compatible
with that commitment and so something had to change.
I also want to
acknowledge and sincerely and heartily thank Dawn Hamaty for her years of
faithful volunteering in producing our bulletins. Truly, her generous use of time
has been a blessing to this parish and having her in the office is a joy. I’m
thankful that she’ll be staying on as an office volunteer. Since the new weekly
insert is mostly putting together schedules and announcements, both of which
Caroline Stephenson is already overseeing, it makes sense to have the same
person coordinating all of that, so she’ll be producing the weekly insert going
forward. So that’s the how and the why of the bulletins, but now on to what
these bulletins actually say about how we understand Sunday worship.
You
all know that I’m a Biblical preacher and so, indeed, the Scripture for the day
guides us. The prophet Jeremiah is speaking a word of prophecy from God to
Israel and uses a metaphorical image to get the point across – we are clay and
God is the potter. When I was taking classes at Sewanee in my doctoral studies,
one of the classes was called “Images of God in Scripture,” and the professor’s
main idea was that when Scripture gives us a symbol, the deeper we go into that
symbol, the more we’ll find the power of God’s word. So, as we studied this
image, w took a fieldtrip to a pottery studio to watch a woman throw a pot and
learn about what God is saying through this metaphor.
What
this image of the potter tells us is that God intends to mold us, to shape us,
to form us. We are not a finished product, but through the Holy Spirit, God is
fashioning us as the people of God. And when you’re throwing a pot, it has to
be perfected centered on the wheel, or it won’t stand up straight. And so the
potter has to make sure the clay is centered. One of the primary ways that God
shapes and centers us is through worship. We get the equation backwards when we
think that worship is something that we do for God; instead, it is something that
God gives to us in order to form us. As we participate in worship, we are fashioned
as the people of God.
Since
I grew up in The Episcopal Church, I was asking my wife about what her
experience of bulletins was like as she attended both Methodist and Baptist
churches growing up. The answer was surprising – they didn’t really have
bulletins. And so I asked, “Well, how does the congregation know what to say?”
And then I realized that in many traditions, outside of hymns and maybe the
Lord’s Prayer, there isn’t really much for the congregation to actively do.
Now, I’m not casting judgment on how others worship, I’m simply noting that
worship in The Episcopal Church is participatory. It’s not just me saying
prayers, preaching, and then we sing a hymn and go home. You participate by
standing, kneeling, sitting, bowing, and making the sign of the Cross at
various times – and these postures all say something. You participate by saying
“Amen,” not just parroting it back to me, but you say it at the end of each
prayer because it’s your line, not mine. You participate in call and response
at the beginning of the liturgy and at the Eucharist, and you say the
Confession and Creed.
And
because our worship is participatory, there needs to be a playbook. One
liturgical scholar has said that “praying shapes believing;” and it’s true. The
way that we worship shapes and forms our beliefs. So the fact that we have a
bulletin is a signal that the worship isn’t done for God’s benefit, but rather
for ours as the liturgy teaches us about what it means to be the people of God
who receive the gifts of God.
One
of the greatest hymns of all time is Charles Wesley’s “Love divine, all loves
excelling,” and the last stanza sings about our ultimate worship around the
throne of God and notes that we will be “lost in wonder, love, and praise.” It
is through wonder, love, and praise that our Episcopal liturgy is intended to
shape us. First: wonder. From today’s Psalm, “Lord,
you have searched me out and known me,” or as the Collect for Purity puts it, “Almighty
God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are
hid.” God knows us intimately, our sitting down and our rising up, God has
marvelously made us.
And, knowing us fully, God
loves us to the point of taking on flesh to bring us to abundant life, to the
point of enduring the shame and agony of the Cross on account of Sin, to the
point of rising from the grave to make all Creation new, and to the point of
pouring out the Spirit on all flesh so that we might flourish in this love. And
if that doesn’t inspire wonder, I don’t know what will. Our intentional worship
is intended to remind us of God’s abundant grace. So in worship we hear the
story of God’s loving purposes in Creation, of our wondrous redemption in
Christ, whom we encounter in the Eucharist, and of the Spirit’s abiding presence
within us. Just like the clay that is shaped by the potter, liturgy is a tool
that God uses to form us in the difference that Christ makes.
Next, as Wesley’s hymn
suggests, in worship, we are lost in love. That’s why I’m, perhaps stubbornly
and wrongly, rejecting the trend that a lot of churches are doing with
bulletins – putting every single thing in the bulletin. What happens when every
word of the liturgy is printed in the bulletin is that, in addition to the high
paper usage, people never touch the The
Book of Common Prayer. As Episcopalians, we are people of this book. What
unites us is not that we all vote the same way, not that we all think the same
way, not that we all have the same preferences or lifestyles, not that we interpret
Scripture in the same way, rather what unites us is that we pray together.
Our tradition is about
unity, not uniformity and this unity comes not through ideology, but through our
commitment to a style of worship that is held in common. And so I don’t want a
bulletin to take that away, because without the foundation of the Prayer Book we lose our identity. As you
are flipping to find the Nicene Creed, I want you to thumb past the Baptism and
Burial, I want you to notice Confession and Catechism, I hope you find Psalms
and Prayers to use in your own daily lives. Because the whole sweep of the Prayer Book tradition is about the love
of God. In birth and death and everything in between, the love of God towards
us is our story. Life can be hard and the world can be harsh, so our liturgies are
intended to feed our souls so that we can be lost in the love of God. Our Prayer Book tradition roots the entirety
of our lives in this love, and so it’s essential that we keep that tradition
alive.
Finally, worship is about
praise. As I said in the sermon two weeks ago, praise isn’t about the words
that we say as much as it is about the orientation and posture of our lives
towards God. We praise God not because God needs a pat on the back, but because
we need the reminder that we are not our own creator nor are we our own savior;
instead, we are dependent on God in whom we live, and move, and have our being.
Worship is sort of like
dancing, if you’re thinking about your feet, you’re not quite there. As Wesley’s
hymn notes, worship is about being “lost” so that we can be found and caught up
in the grace of God. I was recently talking with a friend who said that his
spouse, who is new to The Episcopal Church, is struggling with it because
coming from a more charismatic background, it seems that there isn’t much heart
in our worship. And here the image of the clay and potter is helpful. What
makes the clay able to be shaped is water. Dry clay can’t be shaped, and so the
potter has to continually wet the clay to make it moldable.
The waters of Baptism flow
through all of our liturgies and the more that we drench ourselves in the love,
belonging, blessing, and redemption expressed in Baptism, the more we will find
the heart of worship and get lost in wonder, love, and praise. At its core,
what we do on Sundays, and in every liturgy, is to remember and reinforce our
Baptismal identity in Christ. And so it really is my prayer that these pieces
of paper facilitate this experience of being shaped by God. If they get in the way,
just let them be and let the liturgy wash over you as God’s grace washes over
us in Baptism. If they help, use them to go deeper into the liturgy so you can
get lost in wonder, love, and praise. Either way, we give thanks to God who has
given us liturgy to shape us just as the potter shapes the clay, as we
participate in the mystery and glory of our salvation in Jesus Christ.
