Second Sunday after the Epiphany; Ordinary 2; 20 January 2013

Those of us who preach the Word within communities that have a tradition of abstinence from alcoholic beverages can find it difficult to engage the biblical passages where wine is spoken of in a positive fashion. I remember years ago, at the height of the demythologizing craze, hearing a pastor preach a sermon on John 2:1-11 in which we were told that Jesus didn’t actually make wine, per se, because first of all miracles are not actually a thing, and secondly everybody knows that wine is evil.

Sigh.

Blessedly, that sort of thing seems to have mostly died out, at least in the places where I hear the Word preached.

An audience of one

The final article in the current issue of Liturgy examines the issue of “performance” from a different point of view that the rest of the articles. Using a more colloquial meaning of performance, Matthew Lawrence Pierce invites readers to examine the oft-repeated complaint that this or that worship service “feels like a performance” to a visitor. Pierce’s contention is that this complaint is most often voiced by those who visit worshipping congregations who utilize a style of worship which is unfamiliar to them, and that it has its genesis in the fact that two of the major styles of worship current in American protestantism are, in fact, derived from various theatrical practices.

The durability of an ethos, the effort required to cultivate it, and its ability to move from one sphere to another poses a perennial problem for those involved in the planning and execution of worship. Charles Finney sought to sidestep the problem by subordinating ethos and order to the question of practical effect: understanding conversion to entail a particular kind of human response, Finney constructed a worship service that helped to nurture and elicit that response. In the process, though, Finney borrowed the rationality and argumentation of the law courts as well as the drama and histrionics of popular theatre...From Finney onward, the Revival/Seeker service pattern will employ within worship an ethos crafted from other areas within the contemporary culture. Similarly, those who advocated for the aestheticizing of worship later in the nineteenth century borrowed the ethos of the ‘‘highbrow’’ theater by employing musical styles suitable for more ‘‘cultivated’’ audiences who, in turn, became an audience participating through their disciplined silence. In both circumstances, Christian worship took on a markedly theatrical character while importing a range of assumptions, behaviors, and habits of heart and mind.

Citing Kierkegaard’s exhortation that God (rather than the congregation) should be viewed as the primary audience for Christian worship, Pierce goes on to discuss the difficulty of helping congregations change their self-understanding from that of spectator and critic to that of actor and participant. He maintains that though changing the Order for the service to one that was deliberately constructed to maximize congregational participation (Word & Table) will not be enough to motivate a change in the congration’s ethos.

Do you think that the congregation with whom you worship think of themselves primarily as participants or primarily as spectators? 

Matthew Lawrence Pierce (2013): Redeeming Performance? The Question of Liturgical Audience, Liturgy, 28:1, 60.

Matthew Lawrence Pierce is a doctoral student in the Laney Graduate School of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Being the change we want to see

One of the central aspects of performance studies, with which the current issue of Liturgy is concerned, is the examination of the ways in which speech acts and embodied actions perform the relationships between individuals and the communities within which they are embedded and the relationships between small communities and the larger social order within which they are, in turn, further embedded. In “Performing Transformation: The Lord’s Supper,” Simon du Toit invites readers to consider two different examples of the rite of Holy Communion as performed in England, the first in the medieval period and the second during the protestant reformation. 

In each case du Toit posits that the rite of Holy Communion required participants to perform their own personal transformation in various publically perceivable ways, but in neither case does his examination reveal that the locus of this transformation is entirely interior. The transformation performed in Holy Communion, du Toit maintains, can only be properly understood in terms of a shift in individuals’ place within the social order of which they are a part. Specifically, participants in Holy Communion perform their membership in a community which is distinct from their larger surrounding culture in significant ways.

In the conclusion to the article, du Toit then invites readers to consider the implications of this aspect of the rite of Holy Communion in light of the current decline in religious sensibility in the industrialized West. 

Both traditionalists who assert the paramount authority of scripture and innovators who seek new hermeneutics are examining, reasserting, challenging, constructing, and deconstructing boundaries and markers that stabilize or destabilize the embodied representations of the sacred.
I believe that it is fruitless to attempt to reinvigorate a religious practice simply by changing its surface features, the frequency or location of its practice, or even the doctrines that surround it as stable representation. Unless and until a transformative religious practice such as the Lord’s Supper performs a meaningful distinction that all its participants can readily recognize and desire to appropriate, no enduring change will result. The practice will lose its performative force. In the context of what Ellen T. Charry has called the ‘‘hermeneutics of emancipation,‘‘ the central struggle facing the Christian churches in the midst of the West’s crisis of representation is to discover and assert distinctions that can meaningfully be made. From what do most people need to be saved? Toward what do people experience the need to be transformed? What performative relationship between body and scripture do we long for and desire? In grappling with these questions and others like them, the transformative force of our worship practices will be renewed.

Simon du Toit (2013): Performing Transformation: The Lord's Supper, Liturgy, 28:1, 53.

Dr. Simon du Toit is Undergraduate Chair in Communication, Media, and Film, and is also Sessional Instructor in the School of Dramatic Art at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada.

Feast of the Epiphany; 6 January 2013

The Feast of the Epiphany has always held an extra layer of poignancy for me because it was my wedding day. Each year, as I joined the church in celebrating the manifestation of God’s presence in the midst of the created order - and the massive, monumental changes that God’s presence brings - there was always a part of me thinking of an entirely different upheaval that 6 January 1990 brought to my life. 

Upheaval - and the resistance of the keepers of the status quo - is the central theme of Epiphany, and the upheaval inflicted upon the world when God’s self is made manifest has implications both personal and societal. These implications shine out in the scripture lessons for the day: the refugees of Israel are returned to their home, gentiles are made co-heirs with Israel, and a baby born in poverty is the true King.

In 2010, Jennifer E. Copeland invited readers of Homily Service to reflect upon the way in which Epiphany raises our eyes from the quaintness of the baby in the manger, to the world-changing reality of God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ

Matthew’s story is not one of shepherds and stables and poverty. It is a story of wise men and kings, palaces and power. It is not the fuzzy warm Christmas narrative that the Gospel of Luke gives us. It is a story of tyranny and betrayal as Herod fears for his throne and the wise men realize they must protect the life of this little babe. It is the struggle for power between a king who carries the official Roman title and yet is not a king, and a little baby who carries no titles and yet is the greatest king of all. And for us, it’s a story about people who were once excluded from God’s saving grace, who are now included - people who become heirs to the promises made to Abraham and David and who now sit at the same table with Jesus the Christ. These travelers from the east represent the world and the world’s recognition that everyone is now numbered among the people of God - and we are included.

In this time of political tension and social upheaval, how do you plan to use the Feast of the Epiphany to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”?

Jennifer E. Copeland, “3/6 January 2010: Epiphany Sunday; Epiphany Day” Homily Service, 43:1, 87-88.

Jennifer E. Copeland is a United Methodist Chaplain at Duke University and director of the Duke Wesley Fellowship.