Texts: Exodus 3: 1-6; Psalm 100

The Elements of Worship

Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise.

-Psalm 100

            Most of you know that I’ve recently returned from Cuba as a part of my sabbatical leave, where I had the opportunity to witness some of the rituals and ceremonies practiced on that island by people of African descent, practices that now travel under the names of Santeria and Palo.  If you were here last week, you heard me describe how those ceremonies are formulated, beginning with drums heard but usually not seen, somewhere outside of the ritual space.  It continues with a spoken or sometimes drummed prayer directed toward ancient spirits, or toward the ancestors, after which songs of praise are sung toward various African deities.  Most ceremonies last between two to three hours (those of you who get anxious after a mere hour in this space can count yourselves lucky!), and include an offering, opportunities to receive a blessing, and, if all goes well, a visitation from one of those African deities in the form of spirit possession, the moment in which Africa speaks.  Sooner or later the ceremony draws to a close, though it was never clear to me why that happened – if the drummers got tired, or if a natural cycle of songs had concluded.  Usually, when it was all over, food was served – a hearty soup, along with potatoes or plantains, and something sweet.  After we had eaten, we thanked our hosts, said our goodbyes, and were on our way, often to another community, where another ceremony would unfold. 

I considered it a tremendous privilege to witness these rituals, which had originated in Africa, had survived the horrors of the Middle Passage, and had been used to strengthen and fortify these communities through upheavals and disasters, and ordinary times as well.  The ceremonies that are still conducted throughout Cuba are a treasure house for the study of how humans touch the sacred, in all of its complexity, in all of our multiplicity.

            But witnessing the ceremonies of another culture, especially those that are as vibrant and colorful as Cuba’s, comes with a risk.  We tend to find the practices of others exotic, and rather thrilling, such that a false dichotomy comes to be established: they’re interesting, while we’re a little bland; their worship is freeing, while ours is stultified; their practices are capable of sustaining them through great struggle, while ours simply blesses the status quo; they’re in touch with the sacred, while we’re locked in a kind of rigid formality.  That’s one of the blessings and curses of travel: we tend to idealize what we see elsewhere, while downgrading what is familiar to us through the routine practices of our ordinary lives.

            What I’d like to do today, and in the coming weeks, is to re-enchant our own practices here in this place.  I wish to convince you that, like Moses, you too stand on holy ground.  I wish to suggest, with the Psalmist, that there is something praiseworthy about our own weekly rituals, something worth celebrating. 

I’d like to do so by initiating a thought experiment.  Those of us who traveled to Cuba were a sympathetic and eager audience, eager to understand where it all came from, how it all worked, and what it all meant to participants there.  What I’d like to imagine with you over the next several weeks is what this place might be like for a group of sympathetic and interested outsiders, eager to know what we’re doing when we come to the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme every week.  Say that a group of people wholly unfamiliar with the conventions of Christian worship were bused into Old Lyme, and that they stood in the back videotaping our ceremony, and making notes.  What, exactly, would they see?  And then imagine if they asked you what it was you were doing when you walked through the doors of the meetinghouse.  How would you reply? 

Over the next several weeks, I’ll get at those questions by thinking about each element within our worship service, asking what it means, and how it might affect our lives, in small and imperceptible ways, and maybe also in large and life changing ways.  The result, I hope, will be that all of us come to appreciate the significance and the depth of our own practices a little more, because there’s a powerful beauty in all that we do in our worship.  It’s not to be dismissed, or taken for granted.

            Today, however, I’d like to take a kind of panoptic overview of it all, saying a few words about worship in general, and what it means in the life of our community.  The basic claim I wish to make is simple, and maybe all too obvious.  But it bears saying.  What’s more, it bears elucidation.  It is this: our gatherings on Sunday mornings are the central, defining, governing feature of our life together.  Everything we do as a faith community emanates from what we do on Sunday mornings.  It’s all attached – to this.  None of it floats free.  I like to think of our many activities as a faith community as something like a solar system.  Sunday morning worship is the sun, and all of our other ministries – from our global partnerships to the White Elephant Sale, from the pottery lessons to the Ladies Who Stitch – orbit around the gravitational field of our worship.  Remove the sun, and all of the satellites floating around that sun begin to float free, drifting through space, unattached to a wider orbit or purpose. 

In other words, unattached to the activity of worship, all of our other activities lose a crucial component of what makes them work.  Without the gravitational field of our Sunday gatherings, they simply become the activities of a town community center.  In truth, that’s what many churches have become – a cluster of good and worthwhile activities, but unattached to any wider sense of transcendence, dislodged from any larger theological claims about the world.  Don’t get me wrong – community centers are great, and I think there’s a lot of overlap in what churches do.  I actually wish there were more centers for community engagement in the world.  But absent that sense of transcendence, absent the sun around which we orbit, then we lose our basic identity as a people.  I think that’s when a lot of churches begin to disintegrate.

            That insight about the centrality of worship brings to mind another insight, one that seems to run counter to all I’ve just said.  It’s this: for many people in our culture, and for many people in this very community, it’s the satellites, all the other things we do besides Sunday worship, that provide the point of entry to our community.  Truth be told, for a good many among us, worship can often feel like an impediment to participation in a community like this one.  For some, it feels too formal.  For others, it feels archaic, trapped in an earlier time that doesn’t translate into the realities that most people are facing today.  For still others, the words and concepts of worship hint at some unflattering aspects of religion, and of God – that there could be a being somewhere who needs to be told, again and again, how wonderful and majestic he is, and that that same being somehow requires the loyalty and love of his people – or else!  We know that kind of power.  We’re caught up in a national crisis because of that kind of power.  The point is that many people rightly sense that the worship of such a being psychologically conditions many people to participate in similar forms of authority elsewhere in their lives – in the way they run their households, in the way they run their businesses, and in the way a government might operate.  Sensing that, many thoughtful and wise people wish to steer clear of any form of worship, for fear that it will steal away some of their most precious critical faculties.  And so worship becomes a stumbling block, rather than an invitation to a fuller existence. 

            And yet, there continues to be, for many, a yearning for some kind of spiritual connection, despite that aversion to worship.  Those are the folks that find their way into this community by volunteering at the Food Pantry or participating in the Tree of Life, who work with the Crosby Fund or who love Tribal Crafts, but don’t find their way to church on Sunday mornings.  I get that.  We need a lot of different entry points into our community.  We need many doorways, and they don’t all have to lead to the same place.  Still, I always hold out hope that those satellite ministries will wind up leading here, to the central feature of our common life.  Because each of those satellites grew out of, and orbit, the claims, and the story, that we rehearse in this space week after week.

            Human beings are nothing if not storytelling creatures, and one of the great benefits of gathering in this place every week is that we get to tell and retell one of the most powerful stories about the world that I happen to know.  That’s one of the things I would tell our observers about what we’re doing here.  We’re reminding ourselves of the most powerful story of all.

What is it?  Well, the story goes something like this: that fundamentally, everything within the world was birthed into goodness, including and especially human beings.  That’s the affirmation of the first chapter of the Bibl