Outward and Visible Signs

Dear People of Christ Church,
This week at our Episcopal Church class we talked about the shape of the liturgy. In the Episcopal Church, that’s also to have a conversation about what we believe theologically—we “do” theology as we “do” church. It’s also to have a conversation about our history, since the way our practices have changed is also part of the story of how our context has changed. The Episcopal Church is part of the Anglican tradition (Anglican just means "of England"—we are one of the many branches of a tree that reaches back to the Reformation in England in the 16th century), and the Anglican tradition is very, very wide in its variety of practices.

This past Sunday, though, with our combination of incense and jazz mass, was definitely an unusual pairing. There are places where you hear saxophones in church, and there are places where you smell incense every week, but they are not frequently in the same place. AND we got to sprinkle holy water at the baptism! Putting them together is not so much a “more is better” attitude—it’s not always—so much as it’s a way of thinking about liturgy in terms of embodied experience. Church is the only place most of us ever sing. It engages our souls and bodies in a new way. Watching the incense rise and being enveloped in the sweet smell of frankincense reminds us that our prayer moves out of our sight and into the heavens, that all of our senses are part of our encounter of God in the world. Why in the world would we want church to be less engaging than our regular lives?

Worship, at its best, should be a time to connect with mystery and transcendence. We don’t just go to church to hear a nice sermon (though hopefully the preaching is engaging enough to come back). We don’t just go to church to be fed at communion and buoyed enough to slog through the rest of the week. It’s not just about coffee hour and having good conversation. Hopefully church is about instilling in us a certain way of seeing that can permeate all of our lives. We practice our faith—not just in the sense of completing particular tasks, but also in the sense of inculcating a particular attitude toward the world.

The Episcopal Catechism, which I absolutely adore in its paradoxical duality of precision and openness, tells us that a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible grace.” We need the sacraments and our embodied worship to remind us to look behind what we see, to remember that what you see isn’t always what you get. God’s vision is exponentially broader than our own. (I did hear recently that the real test of Christian faith in implausible things was not believing that Jesus could be present in bread at communion, but that the wafers we use are actually bread…that’s a point for a different day.).

How does church help you practice your wider vision? How could our practices at Christ Church do that better?

Blessings,
Sara+

Ascensiontide, Season for Uncertainty

Dear People of Christ Church,
In my sermon on Sunday I was thinking with you about the uncertainty of Ascensiontide. Not like “tide” like waves, but like time (—in the church we just stick “tide” as a suffix to whatever we want to extend past its traditional expiration date). The disciples experience Jesus as having been lifted away from them, literally into the sky. Renaissance paintings just show feet at the top of the canvas. However that spatial metaphor works or doesn’t, I said, in my sermon, there is something decidedly new in the disciples’ experience. Jesus was with them in the post resurrection experiences, and then he wasn’t. He stopped showing up with breakfast on the beach, stopped walking along with them pretending to be a stranger, stopped telling them not to be afraid. All of that just stopped. In our Gospel for Sunday we hear Jesus talking about sending the Holy Spirit, that he has to leave for it Spirit to show up. The Greek word is “advocate”—the Paraclete.

Easter season might be the liturgical season for joy, but if there were a liturgical season for uncertainty, ascensiontide would be it. In our lives, uncertainty doesn’t have a season. There is always plenty of it to go around, anytime. Just like you don’t need Lent to realize your distance from God, you don’t need a painting of the tips of Jesus’ feet to know ambiguity. The invitation to think about it in an intentional way comes from the disciples—this time of year we are trying to hang out with them for a while in this in-between space.

We’ve been doing a lot of that in Easter season, just hanging out with the disciples and seeing what’s going on. I think of that as one of the goals of preaching—to bring us all into the text and see what’s happening, listen in on those long-ago conversations and see what’s there for us. Taking the disciples up on their invitation can feel kind of like a strange choice to make, admittedly. It takes a certain willingness to suspend disbelief, not to know the answers ahead of time about what you’ll find, and just jump in. The past is the past, but through Scripture it’s a living past that touches the present in an unexpected way. We are in community with those disciples and with Jesus as we are in community with each other.

What are you finding in this season of uncertainty? Pentecost is coming up on Sunday and we turn toward the Holy Spirit, her rushing wind and tongues of fire. But we have a few more days of quiet. What have you heard here?

Blessings,
Sara+