Well. Isaiah doesn’t seem to be much of a cheerleader
for high church worship:
Stop
bringing worthless offerings.
Your incense repulses me.
New moon,
sabbath, and the calling of an assembly—
I can’t stand wickedness with celebration!
I hate your
new moons and your festivals.
They’ve become a burden that I’m tired of
bearing. (Isaiah 1:13-14)
I think that
I’m flexible when it comes to the different “styles” of worship. And I don’t believe in making “war” over
worship; contemporary vs. traditional songs, organ and piano vs. guitar and
drums, yada yada yada (which might also be what God is saying in the Isaiah
reading, come to think of it). But I
know myself well enough to know that my liturgical DNA is Anglo-Catholic. If it were possible, there would be incense
at every Eucharist I celebrated.
But today’s
reading is a necessary caution to anyone whose personal concept of “beauty” in
worship threatens to become the only way to express beauty in our worship. Today’s reading also reminds us that the
purpose of our worship is not to feed our appetite for beauty, but to
strengthen us to “Seek justice: help the oppressed; defend the orphan; plead
for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17).
But in that
case, why not just skip the middle man and go straight to doing the right thing
out there, in the world. How does
worshiping on Sunday morning do anything to help us to accomplish our purpose? Perhaps it has to do with the gap (which
sometimes may seem like a chasm) between the world of peace and justice we want
to accomplish, and the reality we see around us.
We wish for
peace as a Christmas present, in beautiful wrapping under the lighted tree. But in this Advent season before Christmas,
which starts on December 25th, we see no real peace in Syria,
Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza, Congo. And
while at least we haven’t resorted to shooting in this country, there is no real
peace in the political season of “Cliffmass.”
Our political
leaders threaten to wreck our economy because they think that the world turns
on a couple of percentage points in our taxes.
We have endured a campaign in which both sides took liberties with the
truth, and contemptuously refused to have their campaign be “dictated by fact
checkers.” And whoever won, the losers
were bound to scream that the Apocalypse is coming, and keep the cycle of fear,
suspicion, and political gamesmanship going on, and on, and on.
What does
liturgy have to do with any of this? It
fills in the gap between the world we find ourselves in, and the world God
gives us to imagine. Speaking about the “liturgy”
of Israel, the Old Testament scholar Walter Breuggemann writes:
Liturgy makes it possible for Israel in
such circumstances to practice the poetic presentation of an alternative world,
alternative to the given world of exile and post-exile. This liturgical activity is a stubborn
refusal to accept the notion that the world is an unalterable given…Indeed, the
very act of liturgic portrayal is the offer of an alternative. The world in which the faithful live is not
directly experienced but is mediated through the bold creativity of liturgy
that asserts “it could be this way.*
In our
liturgy, we imagine a world that could be, using all the resources of
scripture, music, decoration and prayer available to us. We try to get it right for at least one hour
on Sunday, trusting that as one of my friends said, “Practice makes possible.”
With
whatever creative resources you have, may this Advent be a time of imagination,
practice, possibility, and peace.
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