BEWARE. BEWARE. BEWARE.

Friends: Instead of a blog, I am sending you a copy of something on today’s Benedictine e-column, “Vision and Viewpoint,” written by Sister Joan Chittister, OSB in one of her books. (See credit line following this article.) I find that it throws out a challenge to us as Protestants as well, particularly to Presbyterians. It speaks to the PCUSA as a whole and to individual congregations such as ours. If there is anything in this article which catches your attention, or challenges some of your ideas about church, or differs with your views, then take that as an opportunity to reflect on what is written here, meditate about it, and pray about it. -- Jean

BEWARE. BEWARE. BEWARE.

There is a revolution going on in today’s Church. Very ordinary people are discovering the energy, the insight, and the power that comes with a real spiritual life. And, as it happens when the Holy Spirit steps out of the chanceries of the world, quite ordinary people are being spiritually empowered to make decisions on their own.

They know they have been sent to live the beatitudes in a world where two-thirds of the people are deprived of the basics of life. They know they have been sent to be the sign of the call, the gospel commitment, in a world that wants power and profit instead. They know they have been sent to become the Christ-figure in a world that says, “You get them before they get you!” In a Church that says some of us are inadequate images of Christ. They know they have been sent to turn the world around, one part at a time.

A folk tale may explain it best.

Once upon a time a priest announced that Jesus, himself, was coming to church the following Sunday. How the people turned up in large number, of course, to see him.

Everyone expected Jesus to preach. But he only smiled. And everyone offered him hospitality, but he refused. He wanted to spend the night in church, he said. “How could he!” everyone thought. But the next morning, by the time the church doors were open, Jesus had already slipped away. And to their horror, the priest and the people discovered that their church had been vandalized.

Scribbled everywhere on the walls was the single word, “Beware!” No part of the church was spared; the doors and the windows, the pillars and the pulpit, the altar; even the Bible that rested on the lectern. “Beware!” Wherever the eye rested one could see the word, “Beware!” Shocking! Yet, confusing. Hauntingly terrifying! What were they supposed to be aware of?

The first impulse of the people was to wipe out every trace of this defilement, this sacrilege. The only thing that stopped them from doing it was the awareness that it was Jesus, after all, Jesus, himself, who had done this deed.

But the days went by. That mysterious word, “Beware,” began to sink into the minds of the people each time they came to church. They began to beware of the Scriptures, so they were able to profit from them without falling into bigotry. They began to beware of the Sacraments, so they were sanctified without becoming superstitious. The priest began to beware of his power over the people, so he was able to help without controlling. And everyone began to beware of religion, which leads the unwary to self-righteousness.

They became law-abiding, yet compassionate to the weak; they began to beware of prayer, so it no longer stopped them from becoming self-reliant; they even began to beware of their notions of God, so they were able to recognize God outside the narrow confines of their church. Finally, they inscribed the shocking word over the entrance of their church and as you drive past at night you can see it blazing above the church in multi-colored neon lights. The message is a simple one: Beware! Beware of power without spirituality and beware of any spirituality that does not empower. Beware. Beware. Beware. For the sake of the Church, and the sake of the children, I’m begging you, beware.

– from “Empowerment and Spirituality,” by Joan Chittister,Creation magazine, March/April, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1990

Worship: A Many-Splendored Thing

Ever since I first became a Presbyterian, back in 1959, worship has been important to me in my life of faith. Well, actually, worship has always been important. I have often said that the Baptists taught me about the Bible, the Episcopalians gave me an appreciation of liturgy, and the Presbyterians provided a sense of church structure and polity. Always these elements have been for me set within the context of worship. Almost from the time we joined the Presbyterian church in Madison, I served on the Worship Committee there. At Duke Divinity School, the first course I signed up for was a history and survey of Christian worship. And one more credential to add to this list: when the Presbyterians published the Book of Common Worship, I was already familiar with its contents, having worked for several years with its proposed resources before they were finally approved and published in the form we now have.

I attended every workshop possible on worship over my years as a member at Madison. Our committee sampled various forms of worship and versions of liturgy. We experimented and then once a general pattern was agreed upon, following the recommended form, it was followed thereafter with some modifications from time to time. Once I began serving churches myself, I was a stickler for what ought to be in a Service for the Lord’s Day. When congregations showed me how they had “always done it,” I worked hard to introduce them to the “proper” order and content of worship. My successes were rare, but usually there were some gradual changes to what was deemed good Reformed worship. There were battles, of course, over adopting the newest hymnal but even those mountains were finally scaled. The grounding was that Book of Common Worship.

Then I began an interim ministry in two small churches in Stokes County. There were printed bulletins for each church with different orders of worship, and neither congregation followed the “accepted” forms. The two churches used different hymnbooks, neither of which I had ever seen before, and neither based on the Reformed tradition. I was nearly distraught. This isn’t right! I thought, looking through previous bulletins. I resolved to set those folks straight about what should and shouldn’t be in a worship service, and about where in the service those elements should go, and also, what were the proper liturgical colors to use. The last piece was the easiest to resolve: neither church used paraments, so I crossed that issue off my list.

The third or fourth time I led worship in the churches, something began to dawn on me. Because nothing was as it should be, nothing correctly attended to in the course of worship, I discovered a sense of liberation! I was free – free at last from the constraints of being part of the worship police. By the time my ministry ended at those small churches, I had learned that it is not necessarily the order or the correctness of worship that takes priority. It is instead being in the holy presence of the people of God that matters. There in those small churches “far from the madding crowd,” I began to sense the surroundings as blessed by the Holy Spirit, that we were standing on holy ground, sharing our songs from the heart, feeding one another from the Table, listening for God’s word and for what that word meant for us in our time and in our place. I had been liberated from conformity, from particularity of things, from the dictates of the right piece in the right place with the right words in the right time. I let go and as the saying goes, let God be revealed, however that might be, throughout the service.

Now, it is true that on occasion I have been a back-slider and tried once again to set the standard order of worship as the Proper Way to Worship. But then I am drawn back to that other realization, that worship services were designed by the People of God in order to give God praise and to offer our petitions, intercessions, and thanksgivings. How we do that, and in what order, and with what words, is simply our own undertaking. It can be flexible to meet the needs of worshipers, and to address the texts of the day, and to encourage creativity. After all, we are made in the image of our Creator.

I remembered the main teaching about worship as posited by the Danish theologian and philospher, Kierkegaard: the congregation, choir, preacher, and all others in the service are the performers for God, Who is the Audience. It’s not so much about us as it is about the One we worship, the Three-in-One, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. We sing our hearts out for that One who listens there in the sanctuary. We pray, we plead, we give thanksgivings with tears in our eyes, we grieve the sorrows that come upon us, but always . . . always . . . God is there, with the healing wings of the Risen Christ spread wide as the whole world.

A Historic Moment

It was during this week 63 years ago that our military dropped two atomic bombs on large cities in Japan: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The event brought about the end of World War II, although there were formalities to attend to and continuing battles on some of the Pacific islands. Debates have continued over the years as to whether or not it was the correct decision to drop the bombs. We will never know for certain. But we do know of some long-lasting effects of the radiation produced from the two bombs. We know of the cancer from radiation that took many lives in Japan even years later. We know of the permanent scars on the psyche of an entire nation who faced defeat and occupation. We know of effects upon our own military personnel from radiation left on the land long after the actual bombing. There were other long-ranging effects as well.

My husband Charlie is chronicling the history of an earlier war, and uncovered something surprising. He writes this:

“At the end of the Great War (WWI), 74 capital ships of the German High Seas Fleet were sailed from German waters by their German crews to be impounded at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands, the largest port in England. They were to wait there, captives of the British but commanded by Germans, until terms of the Treaty of Paris were negotiated. By June 21, 1919, the terms were known, including the surrender of the entire fleet to the British. At 10:30 on that morning, a prearranged signal from Admiral von Reuter, German commander of the fleet, ordered the fleet to be scuttled, rather than allow the British to add the fleet to their own navy. The skeleton German crews sank all but four of the ships (they were grounded) - a total of 400,000 tons of armored vessels. It was the largest maritime disaster in a single day in history.

“Between the World Wars, most of the ships were salvaged for scrap. By the end of the Second World War only three capital ships and several destroyers remained at Scapa Flow. Along with 100 German U-boats scuttled after the end of WWII, these ships today are one of the last readily available sources of non-radioactive steel. It seems that all steel made after the two atomic bombs fell on Japan in 1945 has contained tiny amounts of radioactivity. This is because the atmosphere now contains trace amounts of radioactive isotopes. Steel-making involves the use of substantial amounts of air, and that transfers the radioactivity to all steel. Radiation free metal is vital for use in instruments and equipment used for measuring radiation, for fine sensors used in space satellites, and in some medical equipment.”

The lasting effects of those bombs have been forgotten by many today, but this week during a remembrance service in Hiroshima, the mayor noted that the effects of the atomic bombing on the minds of survivors had been underestimated for decades, adding that “the voices, faces and forms that vanished in the hell” had never left the hearts of survivors.

The damage of war reaches far beyond military actions. In our time, not only are those serving as combatants in the world’s battles in danger, but I came across an unbelievably startling statistic: that 95%-98% of all deaths and injuries in today’s wars come not to the military but to non-combatants, meaning those who suffer the greatest are children, women, and the elderly. In the long run, who are the true winners of wars?

May we discover the shalom of God’s peace.