Thursday • 12/14/2023 •
We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days, as we consider several aspects of worship: corporate and personal. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader Magazine a few years ago. We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office this next Monday.
Creating Cathedrals of Meaning
If, as Liza sings to Alexander in the musical Hamilton, people can create “cathedrals of words,” in worship we create cathedrals of meaning.
When my son was about 3 years old, one day he and I were in the family room rolling a ball back and forth. A television with a looping news show was on in the background. As the top of the hour rolled around, I decided to take a break for the news. I said, “Charlie, let’s catch the news.” Charlie toddled over to the TV, and spread out his arms to “catch” the news—just the way he had been catching the ball I had been rolling to him. I suddenly realized that over the course of his young life, I had been creating for him a world in which the word “catch” meant one thing.
That was the moment I began to rethink what I was doing as a worship leader—a moment of realization that worship creates a climate for perceiving who God is, and what he has done and is doing. I began wondering if I had been inadvertently creating misperceptions.
Commenting on the first line of the Apostles Creed (I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things), Dorothy L. Sayers notes: “…the great fundamental quality that makes God, and us with him, what we are is creative activity.” Bearing his image, we can’t help it: we constantly create, whether we know it or not. That’s especially worth underscoring for us who lead worship.
In the church I was serving at the time, for fear that communion would become rote and meaningless, we had been including it in worship infrequently. I began wondering if we were creating a sense that the Bread of Heaven was an immaterial idea rather than a living person—something you related to only through abstract nouns like “justification” and “sanctification” rather than a person who comes to you in the messiness and earthiness of life’s wilderness journey.
I also began wondering if the tone of our communion was somehow “off.” It usually felt tacked on, teachy, and funereal, even scary. It was always made clear that nothing magic was going on (we weren’t Catholics, after all); despite that fact, I wondered if our pedantic over-warning about coming to the Table “in an unworthy fashion” was making strugglers fear that their faith was inauthentic.
Feeling like every prayer needed to come directly from the heart, we only prayed impromptu. I began wondering if we were creating a climate that presumed the God of Garden-of-Eden-to-New-Jerusalem–redemption could inspire only in the moment and not ahead of time.
Corporate readings as well as corporate prayers had been out of bounds for us because some members said those things felt too “churchy,” even if a prayer like the Lord’s Prayer came from Jesus himself, and even if the readings were straight Scripture or the Apostles Creed’s crystallization of scriptural truth. I began wondering if we were unwittingly contributing to a prideful individualism that made each person the arbiter of their own truth.
On the other side of the reflection about worship that began the day my son tried to “catch” the news, I have landed in a worship world that is shaped by the rich resources in the Book of Common Prayer. That worship manual speaks to the joyful hope that comes with knowing Christ, to his comfort in pain, and to his provision of nourishment for the soul.
…in these last days you sent him to be…the Savior and Redeemer of the world. In him, you have delivered us from evil, and made us worthy to stand before you. In him, you have brought us out of error into truth, out of sin into righteousness, out of death into life. …
…Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us. Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in his name. Risen Lord, be known to us in the breaking of the Bread.
We are all called to different settings—each setting to be respected and loved. We all have different levels of authority and influence—all of it under the kind and firm hand of Jesus. But it’s always worth considering the kind of cathedral of meaning we create, whatever the setting and whatever the contribution we make.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+