Preaching and Praying as Though God Matters: In the Post-establishment Church

Introduction

What the Pandemic Taught Us

The last service in our church before the COVID-19 pandemic hit was on March 8, 2020. It would be more than a year until we were invited to return to the sanctuary in person, under certain conditions: make a reservation (limited numbers), wear a mask, social distancing, no singing by the congregation, no offering plate passed, no Eucharist. We made the effort, even though it made for an earlier morning than we had grown used to; we needed to dress more carefully to leave the house, and, though vaccinated, we were taking a measured risk that we were not used to taking. My spouse and I entered by a door from the education building, meaning that we came in from the front of the sanctuary, facing the pews. All at once, we saw people we had not seen in more than a year. We saw them from the nose up, masked. The sight struck me emotionally in a way that I had not experienced before when coming to church using that same entry.

We were not allowed to sing for the first three Sundays, while a small group from the choir sang the hymns for us, masked. As they began to sing, I was grateful for my own mask, because not only were my eyes filled with tears, but I was shaking the pew with smothered sobs. When the worshiping assembly is part of a normal weekly routine, it is natural to take it for granted. We may not even know that week by week, we are accumulating a set of experiences that are being laid down in layers in our unconscious minds. We are absorbing by a kind of osmosis a series of impressions from our surroundings, scarcely noted in the moment, including color, furnishings, symbols, sounds, actions, and, most important, the presence of other people, all accompanied by emotions most often not cognitively registered. Even if one faithfully watches a service online, many of those experiences are missing entirely, or in the case of those that are adaptable to a computer screen, they affect one differently by the fact that they are miniaturized and no longer part of a whole liturgical ecology. Each experience, when removed or taken out of context, alters the perception of the whole in some way.

The parts of the liturgy that remain in an online service tend to be highlighted by those that are directed to our thinking and reasoning selves. Or, if not quite that, they are the parts that can be most easily expressed in words. Words matter, of course. They are not insignificant, and need to be chosen carefully. But words are most effective when embedded in a series of actions in a holistic environment, drawing upon layers of our bodily and spiritual experience that influence us enormously without our being tuned into them consciously.

For the Mainline Churches, Established Status Is Over

Under scrutiny, it seems evident that even in our usual worship spaces and following familiar patterns, something has been lost, and the losses precede the pandemic. One of those losses is the confidence that accompanied the sense that mainline churches would always enjoy a kind of unofficial establishment status in the mostly Protestant (USA). Clearly, the culture has withdrawn any such privilege. But there is an even more existential loss. It is hard to put a finger on it, but that loss seems to be whatever it is that we were once able to bring to our worshiping assemblies—maybe a sense of trust. In other words, the dominant culture has changed, slowly enough that it has been hard to notice, but none of us has been left untouched. What once came naturally may now seem forced, or even false.

In several other writings I have tried to unfold what I think has happened.¹ We are not the same culture, not the same people that we were in the sixteenth century, or the nineteenth, or even in the mid-twentieth. For many reasons, faith of any kind is more often met with skepticism in contemporary society than it used to be. For one thing, our society is suspicious of institutions generally, and we are taught to be on the lookout for signs that we are being deceived. Any claim upon us is likely to be evaluated in that light. Does this person or this authority claim that they believe something to be true? Particularly in an era suspicious of faith, they need to prove it. And, in this culture the default setting for proving anything is either to produce objective evidence or a reasoned argument sufficient to overcome objections.

Actually, it is hard enough to do that consistently in any area of thought, including the sciences, but it is especially difficult in reference to holy things. In terms of Christian faith, and other faiths as well, God is not a phenomenon within the universe, but its creator, and therefore beyond either evidential proof or satisfactory explanation in language that sprang into being to deal with temporal matters. If we are to know God at all, it will almost certainly involve engaging those layered parts of ourselves that lie below the surface, feeding the intellect and being fed by it, yes, but overflowing the capacities of the intellect alone. Objectivity serves its purposes; but there is also a place for that part of us that is intuitive, for insights that reach us otherwise than by a reasonable syllogism.

Every one of us experiences more input from our environment than we are capable of recognizing and paying attention to. Lots of incoming data cannot be processed by the conscious, evaluating mind at the moment of input. There is simply too much of it. To receive it all at once would overload our circuits. Our conscious minds just have to filter lots of it out, paying attention only to those small bits we can absorb at the moment. But that does not mean that all the data we filter out does not affect us at some level. We know more than we are processing consciously, and more than we can put into words.²

Working Out Our Relationship with the Dominant Culture

The culture in which we are all immersed has formed our expectations, even in church. We do not entirely trust the faith we have, because we are pressed to put every truth claim to the test. In these circumstances, doubt comes at least as easily as faith, and because it really matters, we are not at ease with ambiguity. The liturgy of the church is one in which Christ is the liturgist, guiding us as we express faith both personal and shared by the communion of saints that includes generations present and past. It is meant both to provide a vehicle by which to offer praise, thanksgiving, and intercession, but also an immersion experience in which we as a specific faith community are being formed, shaped, supported, and mentored in the faith of the church. This faith is already ours, and yet it continues to be a work in progress, requiring a lifetime to reach maturity. A liturgy both expressive and formative requires the use of two side-by-side and layered languages: the language of the head, and the language of the heart. These are not opposed to one another, but each touches us somewhat differently, and together they engage us holistically. The apostle Paul understood the need for both, and while he reasoned with those who learned the faith from him, he also prayed that the Ephesian believers would have the eyes of your heart[s] enlightened (Eph 1:18).

Those who plan and lead worship as well as those who preach live in the same world as the congregation does, and are not immune from its pressures. Even the church’s appointed leaders may rightfully feel defensive in today’s culture, and defensiveness can lead to timidity in place of confidence. Preachers may feel just a little less pressure when ways can be found to circumvent some of the more challenging parts of the church’s faith. Once I was pastor of a relatively new congregation. The members were young, as I was, and many of them were educators or staff members at a university nearby. One Easter Sunday, a visitor from out of town, older than I, introduced himself to me at the door after the service. He had an authoritative demeanor, and kindly tried to help me out, explaining that it made no sense for me to be preaching about the resurrection to this young, well-educated congregation. I guess he assumed that he and I shared a learned skepticism, but that I was too timid to come right out and say so. Better, maybe, to find something Easter-ish to say that might be passable to presumed skeptics?

Of course, it is not safe for one’s soul (not to mention integrity) to offer an alternative gospel that is less likely to offend settled opinions in a congregation. In a recent conference at a retreat center, one person present had a question for the presenter of the day. He reported that some people in the congregation of which he was a part had objected to the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds on the grounds that they didn’t entirely agree with either of them. Why shouldn’t we stop saying the creed? he asked. The presenter, a church musician, responded that it is mistaken to imagine that the only possible position was either to believe or to doubt. The fact is, we all both believe and doubt at the same time. True. And one might add that, should we abandon everything about which one or many may have doubts, settled or occasional, we would have nothing to say at all.

While our Easter visitor may or may not have assessed either me or the congregation accurately, any pastor nevertheless understands that the resurrection is one of the hard parts, as are incarnation, healings of the sick, giving sight to the blind, raising people from the dead, and the cross itself, not to mention the resurrection of the Lord. Understanding the difficulty, we look for ways to deal with those challenging texts that we will certainly run across if we are using the lectionary. Of course, there are always ways of taming the hard texts—for example, de-theologizing them—turning a challenging text into a moral lesson or social commentary. Minimizing the hard parts may reassure skeptics in the congregation that the church is reasonable enough, after all, suitably updated, really a kind of school and support group for people interested in ethical and social questions. All good, if the object is to save the institution even if it means throwing under the bus its Lord and its raison d’être.

An Unexpected Question: Do You Believe in God?

The writer and preacher, Fleming Rutledge, reports a conversation she had during a lunch with someone whose own writing interested her. At some point, he asked her, Do you believe in God? An unexpected question, addressed to a member of the clergy. Yet Rutledge describes her own experience:

I have heard sermons from Maine to Florida, from Boston to Honolulu, from New Orleans to Minneapolis. No exaggeration. Therefore, I speak with a certain amount of authority when I say that there are a lot of clergy out there who give every impression of not believing in God. By that I don’t mean that the word God is not mentioned. What I mean is that God plays only a subsidiary or vague role in the messages. . . . The subject in so much of our preaching is ourselves—our faith, our ‘spirituality’, our works, our journeys, our responsibilities, our needs, our ministries.³

To the extent that Rutledge is right, belief in God is not always evident in preaching, but neither is it always evident in a liturgy created just for the day either. Mainline Protestants, hardly noticed by the greater part of society any longer, have managed to define themselves to each other as the anything-but-fundamentalist churches, the not-wed-to-the-right-wing folks. As the several mainline denominations meld into a shared kind of anything-but category, it feels as though we are experiencing what might be called a thinning out of the hard parts. Mainline churches seem to be leaning toward theological and sacramental minimalism, too easily conforming to the enlightenment-shaped culture that thinks of the truth as available only by means of objective evidence that must be processed intellectually, and justified by the intellect alone.

Impressionistic evidence is that today mainline preaching is being affected by the temptation to minimize, and so is worship. My proposal in this book is that we look once again to liturgical theology to take us by the hand and lead us to a recovery of solid theological substance. Most importantly, leading us to the God in whom we have claimed to rest our trust. That theologically substantial, God-centered witness is embedded in the liturgical texts that are most likely to be found in the several most recent denominational service books. They are particularly evident in the newer eucharistic prayers (Great Thanksgivings) that have appeared in the books of various denominations since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The Great Thanksgivings at the altar/table are often reliable guides to biblical basics, and particularly to the eschatological images that are being revisited and welcomed again by theologians both Protestant and Catholic.

Liturgical theology, like other kinds, is both conservative and liberalizing. Conservative in the sense that it can remind us of important things that we may have grown used to ignoring, to the point that they have become lost for all practical purposes. But they are also liberalizing in the sense that liturgical theology is an instrument that can be called upon to support necessary reform. It can wake us up, draw our attention when something has become obscured, misunderstood, blown out of proportion or minimized. To begin to recover affirmations basic to the Christian faith in our preaching and in our worship, we would do well to look carefully at that treasure easily accessible in newer denominational service books. They conserve by bringing to view things that had fallen out of sight; and they frame those forgotten things for new generations to notice.

The Reformers brought preaching in from the margins to serve a sacramental purpose every Lord’s Day. It may be that, at the time of the Reformation, the recovery of preaching in every Sunday service had the effect of serving, along with other purposes, as a kind of rescue-mission for the sacraments. Preaching modeled what sacramental means vividly enough to save the sacraments from superstition or obscurantism. One wonders whether something like that might be possible again now, but this time it might be the Eucharist that comes to the rescue of preaching.

Eucharistic Prayer Shows a Way

In this book, I am particularly interested in eucharistic prayer and what a careful examination of it might mean for those who take the risk of preaching in the twenty-first century. The preacher may benefit by respect for the Trinitarian substance of eucharistic prayer, as well as its consistent thanksgiving for the mighty acts of God as represented in biblical narratives. Preaching may become less narrow, less cautious, and offer a grander view when eucharistic prayer models the renewed accent on a cosmic and universal redemption that is exemplified in the eschatological expectation of the reign of Christ, the kingdom of God, the parousia (return of Christ) leading to the basileia, a new heaven and earth. These reflections can lead us to more confident preaching of the central things, marked by both a generous orthodoxy and an expansive and welcoming big picture.

Included in various moves throughout the book will be a preacher’s reflections, mostly from my own lightly edited sermons and provided here as food for thought for those preaching on specific biblical narratives named or alluded to in the Great Thanksgivings. They may also be useful for teaching congregations about the magnificent prayer that they will be expected to affirm with their Amen. Teaching the liturgy matters. Every reformation starts with rediscovering the power of sources, and the sources begin with the Bible itself, the ecumenical creeds (Apostles’ and Nicene), and two millennia of ecclesiastical experience in liturgical praise and thanksgiving. In the twenty-first century, liturgical theology may be the right countercultural tool to help us to engage with those basic sources for reform and renewal once again. That source-based theology is heartily represented in the service books already on our shelves. There is delight to be found in them and in the ways they serve to alert us to look for the sacramental dimensions of both preaching and worship, just as there is delight in the uplifted heart.

Lift up your hearts!

We lift them to the Lord!

A Note on Engaging with Scripture

At some point, everyone who expects to preach needs to come to terms with the challenge of the Bible. Those who arrive at seminary without having had an academic introduction to the study of Scripture often experience a sense of shock in their first course on Old or New Testament. Presuming that their pre-seminary church experience was in one of the mainline denominations, they are not likely to have been taught any particular theory about the nature of the Bible. They were not taught that every word came directly from God, or that a choice needs to be made between believing in science or believing in the literal factuality of the creation stories in Genesis. And yet, it still comes as a surprise to learn the complexities of