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Another
Road, Another Year
by the Rev. Rich Smith
January 6, 2008
Matthew 2:1-12
This weekend, kicking and screaming
all the way, I will finally take down our Christmas tree! It’s
been drying out, becoming a fire hazzard and aggravating our allergies,
and the dogs have expressed their opinion by chewing up a couple of low
hanging ornaments, but still, I hate to see it go. Maybe it’s
because when the tree’s gone, it means the season is over, all the
anticipation, all the magical qualities, the peaceful feelings gone and
the rat race begins again. Maybe it’s my resistance to the consumer
culture , which brings out the decorations and the ads even before
Halloween and then the day after Christmas puts it all away in
anticipation of the January sales and Valentines Day. Or maybe
really am just an old fashioned traditionalist at heart, and I remember
that historically, and liturgically, the church has observed Christmas
for twelve full days. So we are singing a few Christmas carols
today, and leaving the candles and the wreaths and the Chrismon tree
up, for I believe in celebrating the Christmas season in all its
fullness, right up to Epiphany, which is today!
In some traditions, the Feast of the Epiphany is
actually bigger than Christmas. In some Eastern European
countries, it’s the day when the gifts are opened, in honor of the magi
bringing their gifts to Jesus. As a child, I was glad not to be
Eastern Orthodox because it was hard enough waiting until December 25th
to open the packages. Then I found out the Jewish kids had it
even better – Hanukkah comes even earlier, and they get to open
presents eight nights in a row!
Well, today is Epiphany, a word meaning
“revelation,” and referring not to the presents, but to the biblical
motif of Jesus being revealed as the Christ. It’s actually not a
day, but a whole season, righting right up to Lent, where if you follow
the Gospel lessons in the lectionary, Jesus is progressively revealed –
first to the Gentiles (represented today by the magi), then at his
baptism (with the voice of God saying, “This is my son, the beloved”),
then through his teaching and healing, and finally, at the end of the
season, on the Mount of Transfiguration. The season of Epiphany
is about revealing Jesus to the world, as the light of the world.
And so today we hear again that traditional story of
the coming of the magi. In the midst of the Christmas
celebrations, we tend to bundle everything together – we picture the
manger scene with the wise men and shepherds all together at the same
time. But that’s a blending of two different stories – Matthew’s
and Luke’s. They are actually more poetry than history, but even
if they were historical it would be rather impossible, as the land from
which the magi came was at least five hundred miles from Bethlehem, and
if they were following a star that appeared at Jesus’ birth, and taking
time to stop in Jerusalem to ask for directions, it would have taken
them about twelve days to get there by camel. Of course the Bible
doesn’t give many of those details. It gives very few,
actually. You know, we sing the carol “We Three Kings,” even
though Matthew never says how many there were, nor does it even say
they were royalty. In one early tradition there were
twelve. At our early Christmas Eve service this year I counted
thirteen, many of them female (as was Jesus, by the way!).
I am reminded of a Christmas card which said, “If
there had been three wise women instead of wise men, they would have
arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, cleaned the stable, and left
casseroles in the freezer.” That’s what’s known as midrash – the
stories grow and develop through the centuries. There is also a
legend that in 54 AD the three wise men had a reunion in Armenia where
they celebrated Christmas together. Afterwards, having celebrated
the mass, they each died – St. Melchoir on January 1st, aged 116; St.
Balthasar on January 6th at 112; and St. Gaspar on January 11th, at 109.
Now it may not matter much that historically,
Christmas was not observed until the fourth century, nor was the mass
celebrated in a form we would recognize until the 6th – for even with
its anachronisms and details that have no basis in the Bible, Epiphany
with all its legends still make for a beautiful and powerful story, one
which reveals Christ to the world and says, “He is for everyone, not
just the chosen few.”
Now we need to ask, two millennia later, what does
Matthew’s story of the magi at the manger teach us, who know how to
sort fact from fiction, but who still appreciate its poetry and its
deeper truths? What is the epiphany that we experience here?
For us at Westmoreland, this story has led to a
year-long epiphany, as it was one year ago this Sunday that we also
read the story and used it to kick off our “Worship Initiative.”
In case you don’t remember, I put it this way: “They followed the star
to Bethlehem, where as prophecy suggested, they found the infant
Jesus. ‘On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary, his
mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage.’ Or as the older
versions put it, they worshiped. ‘Then, opening their treasure chests,
they offered him gifts...And having been warned in a dream not to
return to Herod, they returned to their own country by another road.’”
I went on to say that the act of giving gifts,
whatever their individual symbolism, was at its heart an act of
worship, a way of acknowledging worth, of recognizing that here is
something crucially important, something we are compelled to give our
very lives to. And that when the magi were done, they didn’t just
retrace the steps that brought them there – they had a further
epiphany, a revelation in a dream, and they went home by another road.
That’s what worship does – it gives us not just
another road, but another world, really. As my UCC colleague Tony
Robinson puts it, “worship is like stepping through the door to a
different world, a world where we see ourselves and others, and even
life, a little differently. A world where we are caught up in a
special and wonderful story.” And then when we go back into the
ordinary world, we find that we are not the same, we have been
transformed, and like the magi, we go by another road.
So we began a year in exploring that other world,
and the ways we walk in it, and now a year later, we bring the Worship
Initiative to a kind of formal conclusion. Not that we’re done
exploring worship, or experimenting, or any of that. We’ll always
be doing that, just not in quite the same way. But this is a good
time to celebrate what we’ve done, what we’ve learned, how we’ve
changed, what we still need to do.
The year for the church pretty much followed the
rhythm of my own year, divided into thirds. For me that was
pre-sabbatical, sabbatical, and post sabbatical. During the first
four months we met a lot with our consultant, Sid Fowler, who got us
listening to one another, but also to God, and reminded us that we
should always begin in discernment, asking the Spirit to lead us.
We took surveys, we did some reading. Over the summer, while I
was away, I urged Bob and all of you to experiment, try things out, see
what really enhanced your worship experience, and when you were
traveling, to worship elsewhere and see what impressed you. Then
in the Fall, we put a few things into practice, and we kept listening
to each other and to God.
We explored news ways of involving children and
youth in worship, many forms of prayer, worked to more intentionally
connect our worship with our work for social justice, began tentative
musings about how to enhance the physical space in which we
worship. All of this played out in increased lay involvement in
leading the services, in more service built around particular themes,
and in several stellar guest preachers. We’ve worked more
intentionally as a staff team in the coordination and planning.
We’ve introduced a lot more diversity, so much that at least one person
has begged for a little stability! And through it all, attendance
is up!
As I said, we’re not really finished. There’s
much more to do – but rather than keeping this a separate initiative or
program, we’re folding it into the whole fabric of our church
life. Each of the boards will be asked to pay attention to
certain aspects, as a part of their on-going work. The Board of
Christian Education, for example, will be asked to continue
explorations about the best ways to involve our children in worship, to
teach them to worship, to make it meaningful for them. The Board
for Community Action will continue to forge the link between worship
and social justice. The Board for Membership and Fellowship might
keep an eye on how worship might be more attractive to those who are
not yet here, and what the experience of first-time visitors is.
You get the idea.
And beyond that, there are several areas that
surfaced in our wrap-up discussions. One is prayer, and how many of us
are asking what the disciples asked of Jesus, “Teach us to pray.”
We’re trying to move away from the old “Pastoral Prayer” model, where
the minister tries to gather up all the joys and longings of the world
and bring them before God, in words that sometimes resemble great
poetry, at other times a laundry list. We’ve explored many ways
of making the prayers truly “of the People,” and we will continue to do
so, and we will pay more attention to the teaching aspect.
Closely related to this is the clear longing for
meaningful silence in worship. We are busy people, we’re used to
bombardment of sound and image and things to do. The younger we
are, the more adept at multi-tasking. I could never figure out
how, when I observed my kids doing their homework, they usually had a
book open, the computer, TV and radio on, they were talking on their
cell phones, and yet still managed to get A’s! Do we even know
what to do with silence? And yet, many of us yearn for it, and
our worship service doesn’t provide much of it. We are going to
be more intentional about that, work at increasing our comfort level
with it. Although, if it gets quiet and we do hear God speaking,
we may well have cause for discomfort! In any case, even if we
don’t come to resemble Quakers, we do know there is a time for silence.
Another thing we’re going to work to cultivate is
the spiritual practice of testimony. We’ve had the tradition, of
course, of “Pillars in the Pulpit” where we hear marvelous
stories of faith and action, but this has always come in the Fall,
related to the annual stewardship campaign. I’ve thought for a
long time that we need to spread these throughout the year, make
testimony a regular part of our worship and our life. It can take
many forms, and need not be lengthy. Our hope, for example, in
having a different person invite the offering each week is that they
will use it for a mini-mission moment. To lift up some aspect of
their response to God’s call in their life as a way of challenging our
response to God’s call in all our lives, and symbolized in the act of
offering – whether we put in money, or the card on which you write your
own commitment to prayer or action.
And finally, we had a discussion about the matter of
applause in church. That’s always an interesting question, and I
don’t know many churches for whom this is not an issue. How do we
find a balance between spontaneity, the expression of emotion, and the
beauty and flow and spirituality of a more formal liturgy? We
like expressing appreciation, whether for a great effort by the
children’s choir, or a Volunteer Corp member, or for someone’s birthday
or anniversary. We like applauding guest musicians, a way of
saying, “We’re so glad you’re here today.” There are many other
places where applause might break out spontaneously, and a lot of us
wonder about that, although I have to say, if it were happening in
conjunction with sermons, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
AS Garrison Keillor once said about Lake Wobegon’s Pastor Inquivist,
“His sermon was so moving that people almost came up and told him
so!” While we like decorum, neither do we want to stifle the
movement of the Holy Spirit. Bob said I should tell his story
about the woman who showed up in a rather sedate church and kept
shouting Amen and raising her hands and clapping, until an usher came
over and attempted to make her be quiet. She protested, Well,
I’ve got religion, what am I supposed to do? To which the usher
replied, “Well, you surely didn’t get it at Westmoreland!”
Apparently, some people here are in danger of getting religion.
So how do we find the balance between spontaneity
and a certain sensibility which recognizes that those of us up here are
not performing for you, we are making an offering to God, or as
Kierkegaard put it, we are the prompters, you are the actors, and God
is the audience – not the other way around. Think of worship as a
drama, or musical movement where you don’t applaud until the very
end. I know that the choir and musicians would be honored if
there were no applause for then during the service – simply let their
offerings waft over you and lead you to experience the beauty and awe
and wonder of kneeling before a manger in epiphany. And if
you like it, tell them so later. If you agree with me, now would
be a good time to shout “Amen!”
Well, each of these things need more discussion,
more discernment, more experimentation, and they will have it. In
the meantime, we need to say thanks – thanks to the Deacons and
especially Peggy Alfonso for shepherding the initiative; thanks to the
Deacons and the Briggs Center who funded our consultant, Sid
Fowler. Thanks to everyone who came to meetings, and shared and
listened; to those who served on the Steering Committee and so very
many of you who filled out surveys, and to everyone who patiently and
with good humor came to church on many Sundays not knowing what to
expect. I applaud your sense of adventure, which in many ways is
like those magi of old, who left the comforts of home and risked much
following the signs in the sky, finding at last their epiphany.
They went home by another road, for having met the Christ, and
worshiped, they could never travel the same roads again. I hope
this is true for us as well.
.
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
1
Westmoreland Circle
Bethesda, MD 20816
301-229-7766
Email the church office: churchinfo@westmorelanducc.org
www.westmorelanducc.org
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Open and Affirming Congregation
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