Mitigating Anxiety
So, my preaching friend, are you finding it hard to thoughtfully ponder your sermon this week? I am.
This week at my church we had a small dinner gathering for Lent. It’s the last one we will be having due to the Covid-19 pandemic and our latest diocesan directives and guidelines. As we talked about worship changes, communion in particular, a parishioner suggested, “Why can’t we use those little cups for the wine, like I’ve seen in other churches?” To which I immediately replied, “Not on my watch!”
If your priestly formation happened through a catholic tradition, then you probably relate to the speed with which I silenced that idea. But, in hindsight, my initial reply now makes me wince.
“The time is coming,” Jesus says in this Sunday’s gospel, “when you will worship in spirit and in truth.” If you look at Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message, it reads, “But the time is coming—it has, in fact, come—when what you’re called will not matter and where you go to worship will not matter.” (Jn 4:21-23)
That section of the story, as Jesus broadens the Samaritan woman’s understanding of right and wrong when it comes to differing worship practices, resonated in my head as I replayed my curt and quick dismissal of a practical suggestion. What really does matter in gathering for worship when all of us are filled with anxiety around gathering period, right now? What changes are right, even if at one time we believed they were wrong? What elements of worship matter the most for our spirits and for living into that weighty word: truth?
Were I to be preaching a sermon this Sunday I might explore those questions in the context of my community. Yes, it is an Episcopal church and that is the basis for our practices, rituals and traditions, but every community is unique. At a lecture I attended years ago, the liturgical scholar Louis Weil expressed, and I’m paraphrasing here, that orthodox liturgy grows out of a worshipping community, not the other way around. And if the clergy were continuing the exact same manual acts and practices with the gathered from day one to year twenty, then something was amiss.
Our gospel is a living text, our worship is alive too.
Our rituals and practices aren’t done because they are “right” as opposed to “wrong.” Our praying together shapes our being and our believing. Our communities, times and places shape our worship and vice versa. I’ve experienced this in community and it continually shapes me.
I want to reflect with my community on why we do what we do. I want to talk about my own resistance to change because underneath that resistance is anxiety. Change is hard even with those transitional warnings parents know are a help. Change happens. Sometimes we initiate changes and sometimes they are initiated whether we like it or not.
I have always loved the story of this woman, or I have loved the story of how Jesus meets this woman. Without judgment and with questions of his own. I love how his validation of her story is what enables her to leave her task behind because sharing this encounter, this good news, is all she cares about. I love the silent astonishment of the disciples as they watch change happening right before their eyes and it is upending their world.
And I love the way in which it helps me reflect as a priest and worship leader on what matters in worship, where the spirit and truth are to be found. We meet Jesus at the altar and Jesus meets us there too. Don’t we all want an encounter there that has running into the world the share the good news of what changed for us there?
