The Seventh Sunday of Easter / Ascension—Luke 24.44-53

Note: Although many churches will celebrate the Ascension of Christ on Thursday, the 40th day of Easter, other churches will move this celebration to Sunday. Our notes this week therefore are focused on the gospel for the Ascension. 

To us humans Ascension seems almost like a celebration of the Lord’s absence. The framers of the liturgical calendar and lectionary surely did not intend us to celebrate such an “unpious” experience as absence! The days’ focus is supposed to be the great commission to “make disciples of all the nations,” but we often identify more with the disciples who stood there gazing up at the sky, wondering what to do next, and those few disciples who had “entertained doubts” seem more familiar than a rush to go out and save the world. What we experience by different names and at different times are the distractions at prayer, the shouting out for God in a world bent on destruction and the grieving for the anonymous ones who die in someone else’s war.

The feast of the Ascension of the Lord may just be the most truthful feast of the year for us, in a way similar to how Saint Jude, patron of lost causes, is one saint most of us get to know. If we can point to the times in our life when the Lord seems absent or distant, then what can we expect from this feast? What would bring us here and what would give us something to live on beyond this moment? We seem to be best at recognizing the absence of the Lord, the empty tomb. Or, like the Galilee disciples, we spend a lot of time looking up at the sky, chanting, “Where are you now?” What we really need help with is recognizing the Lord’s presence, always.

This celebration of the Lord’s absence gives us the chance to stand on the mountain top admitting to one another our experience of missing the Lord. But beyond being an opportunity for us to concede that we are not very good at recognizing the presence of Jesus, the celebration of the Ascension also affirms our hope that some day, maybe even today for some of us, we will receive the insight to “know him clearly.” That the God of so many promises, we will discover, has kept the pledge to be among us always. That one day, as out of the blue, the Lord will be as close and as real to us as the bread and wine we share here. And on that day we will look back on all our longing, all our calling and searching of the horizon, and we will know our faith was not in vain. [Blair Gilmer Meeks, "The Healing Word," Homily Service, 38.6 (May 2005): 18-19.]

Blair Gilmer Meeks is a writer living in Brentwood, Tennessee, and a former staff member of The Liturgical Conference.

Interfaith Worship--A Christian-Muslim Conversation

As we continue our conversation about the possibilities and limitations of inter-religious/interfaith worship, we offer the following Muslim perspective on interfaith worship. It is drawn from a conversation between Adam Ericksen and Dr. Esmail Koushanpour entitled "Learning, Serving...Praying?: A Christian-Muslim Conversation" in this issue of Liturgy. The question addressed here is the goal of interfaith worship. Dr. Koushanpour responds:

The first goal of interfaith worship is to get to know one another. The Qur'an says, “I created you from different nations so you can get to know one another” (49:13). How do you get to know one another? Eat a meal together. Exchange information. Learn from one another for the sake of God. We are all trying to please God. Can we learn from one another about different ways of worshiping God? Can we live into the spirit of our religious traditions and “compete with one another to do good works” (5:48)? Interfaith worship should remind us that God desires for us to be merciful, compassionate, and loving toward one another.

Interfaith encounters do not mean we have to debate. Rather, we should come together in the spirit of learning from one another. Dialogue means we can disagree, but we do not need to be disagreeable. Arrogance has no place in interfaith worship. The point is not to compete with one another by claiming my religion is better than yours; rather, the point is to learn and be reminded of God's mercy, grace, and compassion.

For many Muslims, the impetus for interfaith worship is summed up in the words of the thirteenth-century Persian poet Saadi. Reflecting on our common humanity, Saadi wrote:

    Human beings are members of a whole,

    In creation of one essence and soul.

    If one member is afflicted with pain,

    Other members uneasy will remain.

Interfaith worship should remind us both of the oneness of God and of the oneness of humanity. It should invite us to open our hearts to this radical vision for humanity. Regardless of faith, creed, color, or nationality, humans are interconnected. We share a common destiny of our own making. If we live into God's mercy and compassion, we will have a bright future of shared mercy and compassion. If, on the other hand, we seek to harm one another, we will create a future of violence and revenge.

Worship is not just going to a synagogue, church, or mosque. Worship is a way of life. It means being aware of God all the time, remembering God and thanking God. If you walk to God, God will run to you. He loves you more than anyone else does and wants you to remember him. This message was delivered by every prophet.

The Qur'an shares the same message with other religious texts. It gives both a warning and good news. It tells us that we need to take responsibility for this message of mercy and compassion. Worship is to remind us to practice God's mercy, grace, compassion, love, and desire for social justice.

How would you answer this question from your own religious tradition?

Dr. Esmail Koushanpour is emeritus professor of physiology of the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois. He has served as executive director of the Islamic Cultural Center of Greater Chicago and as advisor on Islamic affairs to the president of the Graduate Theological Foundation in South Bend, Indiana.

Adam Ericksen is education director at the Raven Foundation, a not-for-profit educational organization that seeks to foster an understanding of social influences and positive ways of addressing conflict.

Sixth Sunday of Easter--John 14.15-21

The gospel text this week begins "If you love me..." and ends "and I will love them and reveal myself to them." From this beginning and ending, Blair Gilmer Meeks suggests that this text is a "poem for lovers." She continues:

...but it reflects a particular style of loving. Unlike the often fleeting infatuation of first love, the love John speaks of is deep intimacy rooted in profound experience of care. It is a love that survives death and that models for us the kind of love we are invited to have for each other.

While this kind of love possesses many qualities, we will focus on four: obedience, companionship, revelation, and union. Obedience is the ability to be open to listen to the authentic invitations for life and to respond in a way consistent with one's best sense of self.

Companionship highlights the commitment of care that heralds authentic love. When love exists between two people the commitment is also present. The focus is the other's well-being, which involves helping that person grow in responsible selfhood. "Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other," writes Rainer Maria Rilke.

Revelation includes transparency and vulnerability based on trust. Because one experiences oneself as cared for, one risks revealing more of oneself. The journey of self-discovery corresponds with the love journey.

The love Jesus speaks of to those who choose the lifestyle of the reign of God is inclusive, freeing, vulnerable and strong. Naturally, this love cannot be experienced and expressed in the same depth with all persons; it is manifested in various ways with various people. joined together through common bonds of obedience, companionship, revelation and union.

What is startling about the love poem on Jesus' lips is that the love it reflects is the heart and source of our lives. It is God's love for us, the gift of grace. But unlike some expressions of intimacy, this love is manifested in the experience of loving and being loved by the other. We come to know God and God's love through the experience of love in creation, in each other and most radically in Jesus the Christ. God's love is not one that asks us to choose between God and the other. It asks us to choose God through the other. Our very ability to live in obedience, companionship, revelation and union with ourselves and others is founded on and strengthened by God's love. [Blair Gilmer Meeks, "The Healing Word," Homily Service, 38.6 (May 2005): 8-9.]

Blair Gilmer Meeks is a writer living in Brentwood, Tennessee, and a former staff member of The Liturgical Conference.

The Limits of Interreligious Worship

Last week we started looking at a conversation about interreligious worship, which serves as the theme of most recent issue of Liturgy, vol. 26.3 (2011). We will be continuing with excerpts from this issue over the next several weeks. The following draws from the conclusion of Ruth Langer's and Stephanie Perdew VanSlyke's introduction and overview to this issue, where they emphasize not only our need to engage in interreligous worship but also our need to do so carefully and cautiously.

Whatever our national or religious appeals to unity in the face of the September 11, 2001, tragedy, the ensuing decade of war and terrorism has meant that even as American Christians, Jews, and Muslims continue to live in proximity to one another, our suspicion of one another is in many ways heightened. Communities such as Eugene, Oregon, organize interreligious observances in an attempt to emphasize unity and forge common bonds, yet we can honestly ask whether a decade of sharing prayers or readings together on the village green has lessened intolerance or wariness of one another. The controversy that erupted in 2010 regarding the proposed construction of the Cordoba House/Park 51 Muslim Community Center near the former site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan may signal limits to increased unity and understanding as outcomes of interreligious prayer. At the very least the controversy around and suspicion of the Cordoba Movement (which itself refers to a place and time when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in proximity to one another with mutual respect) illustrates that the American ability to live with pluralism is an ongoing process, in which experiments with interreligious prayer may only play a small part.

During decades of experimentation with interreligious prayer in the American context, we have also seen an intellectual shift from the assumptions and presumptions of modernism, with its large claims and grand themes--including those of universal and universalizing values--to the suspicions and cautions of postmodernism, and its accompanying emphasis on the local, the personal, and the particular. As we enter another decade of experimentation with interreligious prayer, in any of the contexts described here, it may be that we are seeing a shift from attempting prayers and liturgies that are broad and synthesizing to planning prayers and liturgies that are a bit like collages made of the bits and pieces of many religious traditions. If the postmodern context has brought to us an emphasis on particularity, one of the continuing dangers in the American context is the confusion of religious observances with spiritual consumerism. Among some Americans, postmodernism has ushered in a religious relativism and a spiritual searching. Combined with American consumerism, this mood often results in dabbling in the prayers or rituals of another's tradition without necessarily knowing anyone of that tradition. This spiritual consumerism is often perpetrated by those with the time, money, or education to purchase religious experiences that may or may not be authentically tied to a religious community or tradition. Planners and presiders of interreligious worship in this context will need to be cautious, and contain any enthusiasms that may lead us to think that an ever-increasing collage of prayers and liturgies can be said or shared in an interreligious gathering divorced from those formed in a specific tradition of prayer or qualified to lead such prayers.

You can read more at Liturgy: Interreligious Worship.

 

Stephanie Perdew VanSlyke serves as senior pastor of the First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Wilmette, Illinois. She is an adjunct faculty member at McCormick Theological Seminary and Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in the areas of Christian worship and early Christian history.

 

Ruth Langer is associate professor of Jewish studies in the Theology Department at Boston College and associate director of its Center for Christian-Jewish Learning.

Fifth Sunday of Easter--John 14.1-14

Jason Byassee comments that he usually hears this gospel passage used in one of two ways, either at funerals to offer a word of hope about where a loved one will be, or in conversations between Christians and other religions to emphasis the exclusive nature of "the way of Christ." He continues, "What troubles me about both these common uses of these verses is that they direct our attention away from Jesus and toward something else." The answer, he writes, is always Jesus.

"How typical of us, of Thomas and Phillip, to want information from Jesus about God. When our loved one dies, we want information about where that person is, and whether his or her location is a dwelling place or a mansion. When the question is about other religions, we want information about who's right and who's wrong. But the answer is Jesus.

What we want is information to brandish against our enemies to win an argument, or to make ourselves feel better when we don't, and what we get is Jesus. Not a mascot we can put in our pocket, but someone who stands over against us in judgment and in grace, who won't be reduced to our petty agendas. To look at Jesus this way is to see ourselves unsettled and judged, in the position of Thomas and Phillip, who are confused but starting to catch on--the answer is always Jesus.

So instead of judging some other people's standing before God, we should attend to our own. When we think of God, we ought not to think of a big, impressive figure in the sky who might pay attention to us or might not--that would be Zeus. We ought not to think of a God who blesses our armies and grants us victory--that would be Mars. We ought first and always think of Jesus Christ...It's very easy for us to misdirect our worship elsewhere than toward Jesus. Mansions, dwelling places, the sort of comfort we offer those who mourn the dead is that of moving to the suburbs, a private place of one's own to live in comfort, like winning the lottery, when first we should think of Jesus. His resurrection and his promised return are the final words of Christian hope about death.

...remember, the answer to every question is Jesus. The thing we're to ask for in prayer is Jesus. The form of the great works we're going to do is Jesus. What we can always get more of is, you guessed it, Jesus."

Perhaps the question for every preacher when confronted by the gospel of John is whether or not we will take up the work of the "beloved disciple," whether, in what ever work we do, we will use our work to point to Jesus.

From Jason Byassee, "Serving the Word," Homily Service, 41.2 (2008): 151-152. Jason Byassee has been a research fellow in theology and leadership at Duke University Divinity School and will soon become pastor of the United Methodist Church in Boone, NC.

Interreligious Worship

The newest issue of Liturgy (vol. 26.3) focuses on the question of interreligious worship. The issue was edited by Dr. Ruth Langer and the Rev. Stephanie Perdew VanSlyke. The following is excerpted from their introduction to this issue.

"Denominational worship reinforces and celebrates particularistic religious identity. However, in today’s North American context, our lived communities transcend these particularities. Occasions regularly arise that call for ritual responses that cross denominational lines, where other elements define the identity of the gathered community. Such occasions include incidental expressions of civil religion, such as communal responses to disasters (or more rarely, moments of celebration), regular community commemorations, such as Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, or Holocaust Memorials, and more intimate settings involving life cycle celebrations in blended families. In such situations, may we come together in prayer, and if we may, how do we construct successful rituals? [What are] the factors that shape the decisions made by practitioners when they chose to participate, or refrain from participating in such settings. What are the factors that shape these choices? What wisdom have we gained from several decades of experimentation in the North American context?....

As we get to know our neighbors and blend our families, interreligious observances are not rare occasions but the patterns of everyday life. We attend one another’s marriage and funerary rites, honor one another’s children by attending baptisms, bris and baby-naming ceremonies, bar and bat mitzvahs, first communions and confirmations. For our ancestors, setting foot in one another’s houses of worship might have been rare, but for us it is becoming commonplace. Yet we still yearn to know how to navigate the commonplace. How should we behave in another’s house of worship? This is one context in which we encounter interreligious prayer and the issues it raises.

When attending the religious rite of a friend or family member, what is called for? Do we sit quietly? Read the prayers? Sing the hymns? Participate in other communal ritual action? If we do so, what might this participation mean for our own faith commitments? These questions have been met with
publications meant to educate those who ask them. From 1996 to 2011, the book How to be a Perfect Stranger: The Essential Religious Etiquette Handbook has been updated five times in order to address the increasingly diverse religious landscape in North America. Denominations have also recognized
that we are visiting one another’s houses of worship more frequently for life cycle events and weekly worship, and have responded with their own guidelines about appropriate participation, and the limits of such participation. So the reality of religious diversity in the United States, lived out in our attending one another’s denominational liturgies and life cycle observances, is one context in which we encounter interreligious worship and the issues that arise when we are invited to visit, celebrate, or even participate in another’s religious life."

In the remainder of their editorial introduction, Langer and Perdew VanSlyke endeavor "to name and reflect upon the contexts in which religious leaders, presiders, and practitioners encounter religious prayer, address the issues that arise, and give current examples of limits, challenges, and controversies in planning interreligious ritual in the North American context. The [other] contributors to this volume expand our reflection on these contexts and the inherent theological, spiritual, and liturgical issues surrounding interreligious prayer." 

You can read more at Liturgy: Interreligious Worship.

Stephanie Perdew VanSlyke serves as senior pastor of the First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, in Wilmette, Illinois. She is an adjunct faculty member at McCormick Theological Seminary and Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in the areas of Christian worship and early Christian history.

Ruth Langer is associate professor of Jewish studies in the Theology Department at Boston College and associate director of its Center for Christian-Jewish Learning.

Fourth Sunday of Easter- John 10.1-10

The gospel story this week is the first half of the good shepherd discourse in John's gospel. To say there is a good shepherd assumes that other shepherds exist. John's literary method sets up contrasting images in his discussions, Light and dark, sight and blindness, good and bad are only a few of the contrasting images John uses. Such contrasts highlight the tension posed by Jesus as the Christ: Who is this Jesus and why has he come?

The problem for many people is this: If Jesus comes in the image of the good shepherd, then we must come in the image of sheep. Most of us find this distasteful. If we are compared to sheep, then we realize the comparison is less than flattering. Most images of sheep, outside children's nursery rhymes--about Mary and her little lamb--are not very positive. Sheep are smelly, stupid and unmotivated. There seems to be little creativity in their species. Besides that, they are always at risk. Wolves lurk. Sheep must be protected and led to water. We have a problem seeing ourselves as sheep.

Could it be that we resent the comparison because it contains an element of truth? Left to their own devises sheep wander from the flock by grazing away. Eating from one clump of grass to another, they are eventually separated from the rest of the flock. Whether they panic or not is a matter of conjecture. No nefarious plan to escape responsibility seems present; they merely wander from the flock, distracted in self-absorbed grazing.

Most of us, like sheep, left to our own devises, do not want to "have erred and strayed from the ways like lost sheep...following the desires of our own hearts." Or stomachs. Most of us are neither really good or really bad. We simply forget what is often in our own self-interest. We can become distracted. We get lost to God's ability alone to provide for us. We need what Scripture calls shepherding. We need more than a good border collie. This fact may not be flattering, but it's accurate, at least according to the thinking of the author of the gospel.

When John tells us that Jesus says he is the door of the sheep or that the sheep know his voice, John is suggesting that Jesus is the one who loves the sheep beyond any hireling's capacity. If and when this realization breaks through, then the sheep have been given the gift of abundant life. John suggests that there will be competing voices calling for the sheep's allegiance, but Jesus' voice is the authentic voice of the good shepherd.

Easter is about acceptance of a gift that we humans cannot bestow on ourselves. The good shepherd and the promise of resurrection are constant reminders that God is faithful to his promises.

From Hilary Hayden, "Serving the Word," Homily Service 38.5 (April 2005): 25-26. Hilary formerly served as an associate editor of Homily Service. He is a monk of St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C.

Prayer and Theology

The fourth century theologian Evagrius, in his Chapters on Prayer, claims "If you are a theologian you truly pray. If you truly pray you are a theologian" (chapter 60). In some ways, this is a more important center for the work of liturgical theology than the often misused axiom lex orandi lex credendi (the law of prayer establishes the law of belief). Ian Curran develops this claim about the interaction between theology and prayer by way of a conversation with Barth in the recent issue of Liturgy on liturgy and spiritual disciplines (vol. 26.1, January-March 2011). In his article "Theology as a Spiritual Discipline," Curran makes four claims:

1. "Theology is performed within the context of a living relationship that God has established with the church, and with the theologian in question. It takes place within a realm whose windows are necessarily open to God's gracious self-disclosure...intellectual movement toward God in theological reflection is...inseparable from the contemplative movement toward God in prayer."

2. "God is the object of theology not as an object among other objects in the world, but as a transcendent, personal reality.... Theological discourse is less speech about God than it is speech directed to God."

3. "Authentic theology emerges from a sense of gratitude for God's free gift of grace...Theology, like the offertory in the worship service, is both a response to God's gift of self to us and a gift of ourselves back to God in return."

4. "The dialogical form of theological inquiry forms our desires so that we cannot help seeking God in the effort to understand matters of faith.... The work of seeking and finding in theology is an implicit petition for God to be disclosed to [us]."

Curran argues that through "prayer and worship, good reading, writing and reflection on scripture and the Christian tradition" we learn to worship in "spirit and truth." He concludes his article this way: "Both the Sunday school classroom and the sanctuary are open windows to heaven in the house of God. Why should those who speak God's name pay so little attention to the source of their speech?"

As I think about our earlier discussion of emerging worship, I find it striking how little of the conversation is attentive to the questions Curran asks here. What would emerge in and from the Christian community if we gave closer attention to these questions?

Ron Anderson is Styberg Associate Professor of Worship at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and president of The Liturgical Conference. Ian Curran is Visiting Assistance Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Young Harris College, in Young Harris, Georgia.

Third Sunday of Easter--Luke 24.13-35

Blair Gilmer Meeks suggests that all of the texts for this third Sunday of Easter portray the resurrection as a "present reality in our lives." 

She continues, "But reality itself and its relation to our own individual realities continue to baffle us.... The reality of the resurrection for Christians will not have an easy time in a world that firmly attaches itself to realities promising short-term success and happiness. But we are not speaking of something over which we have no control. You and I belong to a community of faith in which the Spirit dwells. We are given that gift of the Spirit by the risen Christ at baptism and many times since. It has made us believers in the resurrection. A privileged people? Yes. We are indeed privileged. But there are condition. We must live as people raised up from sin; or who, knowing us, can be expected to believe the Easter story? We must in some measure raise up a fallen world--those whom sin has felled or those for whom the whole thing is a sham.

It is a glorious thing to celebrate Eucharist at Eastertime.... But we cannot sing 'life' and live death. We can't sing 'joy' and live gloom. Hidden with Christ we may be, but these...fifty days of Easter are a time to come out of the tomb and stand in the light." [From "Serving the Word," Homily Service, 38.5 (April 2005): 36.]

She includes in her reflections this quote from the Orthodox liturgical theologian, Alexander Schmemann:

"The great joy that the disciples felt when they saw the risen Lord, this 'burning of heart' that they experienced on the way to Emmaus, was not because the mysteries of an 'other world' were revealed to them. It was because they saw the Lord. And he sent them to preach and to proclaim not the resurrection of the dead--not a doctrine of death--but repentance and remission of sins, the new life, the kingdom. They announced what they knew, that in Christ the new life has already begun, that he is Life Eternal, the Resurrection and the Joy of the world." [Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the world (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1973), 31.]

The question Meeks and Schmemann suggest, then, is "How is resurrection a present reality in our lives today?"

Blair Gilmer Meeks is a writer living in Brentwood, Tennessee, and a former staff member of The Liturgical Conference.