ONE TEMPLATE; TWO SERVICES AS EXAMPLES

This material is from the second of my three projected "books" -- the one called "Come Through the Door" that is a kind of anthology of religious services.   Here are two more versions of services using the template that comes from Victor Turner’s three part crossing-the threshold, being together in the liminal space, return to the world, plus the “Dilation of the Spirit”.  It ought to feel familiar to Christians.

First Unitarian Church of Chicago

When I was in seminary (1978- 1982), we took turns presenting Vespers on Fridays at 5pm in the little side chapel of First Unitarian Church.  Most of the time the space was separated from the gaping cavern of the main sanctuary by a fire curtain, but one day that curtain was up.  Looking into that darkness, feeling the cool of the unheated stone space, sensing the ghosts of so many ceremonies, I had an idea.

The next time I did Vespers, I turned all the chairs around so they were facing through that stone arch into the void.  On a low table I propped the biggest mirror I could find and put the symbolic flaming chalice in front of it.  When the students and faculty arrived, they sat more quietly than usual.  It was winter.  We were exhausted.

In-gathering and crossing the limen:

Opening words:  In the diminishing February twilight, we’ve hurried along under the gaunt elms and the leering stone gargoyles of the quads.  As we do weekly, we gather at the end of an arduous week of plodding through snow and hunching over books.  We come to gather comfort and respite in our small community, not so much saints as friends.

Dilation of the spirit: 

Broken world:  We risk so much by coming to seminary.  We fail, we go too deeply into debt, we turn out to be unsuited for the ministry, and we surely lose our faith, because that’s what seminary is for -- to break open our simple faith and press us down into every resource you have.  Now we find out there is no God, there is no easy way, and we are no one’s heroes.

Healing:   We are dazzled by ideas we never guessed existed and join the historical pilgrimage of learning that stretches back for many centuries.  The world opens out before us and we will be welcomed into the company of scholars.  Just when we despair, we will discover a new strength.

Then the main sermon and prayer, which revolved around the idea of KENOSIS, the classic doctrine of emptying out.  All the time we continued to look into that black void with the comparatively small mirror and flame because it was such a good sensory metaphor.

Closing words:  This week has ended.  It is over.  We have left it.  Now we go into the weekend where we will be renewed and serve congregations all over the city.  Let us be light-hearted.

(All the words above are mine.)

In 1988-1989 I served as interim the Blackfeet Methodist Parish based in Browning, Montana.  I preached from the Bible-based lectionary:  Psalm 29, Isaiah 61: 1-4, Acts 8:16-17, and Luke 3:15-17 and 21-22.  The lectionary is created by a committee that shares among several denominations.  The idea is to suggest four verses:  one each from the Psalms, the Old Testament, the New Testament and a Gospel.  If the lectionary is followed through the year, the whole Bible is included.  They only approximately focus on a theme.   I felt I should use the lectionary because my formal affiliation had been Unitarian Universalist, which is not necessarily Christian, but this congregation was nominally Christian Methodist, so I should accept their discipline.   In practise, the congregation was pretty mixed general Christian.  In practice the church is more "community" than denominational.

Here’s a sample from January 8, using the same template as above.  The sermon title was “The Wind in the Trees” and dealt with the metaphor of the tree in many religious traditions.  (The words here are all mine.)

___________

CALL TO WORSHIP  (Responsive)

We come again in this New Year to renew our faithful attendance at this house of worship.

The calendar has turned now and we look down the length of the months for a whole year to the next Christmas.

It is cold and we draw together as families and as friends in order to keep our hearts warm.

And we warm ourselves before this great flame of glory that we give the name of God Almighty.

May those who are frightened come to be with us here where we may comfort them.  May those who are joyful come to be with us here that we may rejoice with them.  May those who love life come to be with us here, for this is a place where we love life and all its beauty.

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

A great wind came last week to rip at our roofs, tear at our windows, knock us off our feet when we tried to walk.  Now it is stone cold and we must watch our fires to make sure they don’t go out, watch our children to make sure they dress warmly.  We feel fragile in such a world.  On the news we hear of terrorists and nerve gas and we hear the wails of the bereaved mothers.  We are very small, oh Lord, and we must trust others to guide our country through the perils.  Keep us from the loss of hope when the chance of peace is great, but the powers of hatred are still potent.  Let us never lose hope or confidence that good will overcome evil.  We falter.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

Our God has made us various and resourceful, able to draw on each other’s strengths.  We are not alone in the world, for we have families, fellow country people, wise people, strong people, people who will be with us even as we are with our God.  For if we are unable to reach out for God, behold, the wind of His Spirit reaches us and lifts us up.

SERMON BASED ON THE BIBLE VERSES:  "The Wind in the Trees."

BENEDICTION

The change in our lives sometimes feels like loss, but other times it is a gift and we are glad to be different.  Some of the trees who live alongside us survive by dropping their leaves and growing new ones, and others survive by conserving and renewing the old needles.  In the coming week may we both conserve and renew, sending our roots deep into the soil of our world.  For through us blows not just the cold winter winds, but also the wind of the Spirit which lifts us up everlastingly.

________

It’s easy to compose a service like this if there is a clear focus metaphor (trees) and then a lot of sensory and immediate experience.  These will call out emotions and connections that would never be presented by logic.  But this sermon had a lot of history in it plus the theological concept suggested by Tillich, that the Cross is a tree and that the upright points at Heaven and the transcendent, while the cross bar extends along the horizon in immanent worldly fashion.  There’s a lot of material in Joseph Campbell and many others.  

ECSTATIC MEANING

Of course ecstasy is a physical state, maybe something like an orgasm or a drug high.  Rats crave it.  So do humans and most other mammals, but it’s not clear that other animals get that way.  If it’s something physical, they probably do, since we evolved out of them.  Maybe a songbird in a mating and territory song frenzy.  No one knows whether a bull elephant in musth is feeling anything good -- his actions are outright dangerous and look like rage though the scientists say it’s sex. Even in humans it can be hard to separate sex and rage, down there in the ancient dark brain there are no words for. 

Clearly “ecstasy” (oh, yeah, it’s a drug and all that) is a mental/emotional state, claimed by emotion-based institutional religion as well as “spiritual” individual experience.  Clearly, it is experience-based, not related to dogma except for bookish prescriptions about how to get into that state.  But it’s attractive and impressive enough for people to go seeking institutions and leaders who promise to create the state.  To the individual person it is very real.  It feels privileged.

Pentecostal groups include ecstasy in their meetings, in what could pejoratively be called “self-hypnotism.”   In the Christian tradition “it marks the coming of the Holy Spirit on the disciples and their transformation from frightened and confused people to men who would face martyrdom for what they believed.”  Sounds Islamic to me.  Actually, it is characteristic of any human movement based on intense emotional states, particularly those dependent on drugs like peyote or ayahuasca or psilicibin -- or come to that -- alcohol.  Even adrenaline as in battle or extreme sports or something as risky as walking a tightrope or driving fast or “base jumping.”  Photos of people about to be killed as martyrs or criminals often look dazed and transported, like a mouse confronting a cat, and probably in just about the same blood molecule state.

Pentecost is this Sunday, May 24, 2015.  Rev. Mark Woods is a Baptist minister and journalist.  He says,“Pentecost is from the Greek word 'Pentekostos', which means 'fifty'. It's the 50th day after the Sabbath of Passover week and in Judaism is called the Feast of Weeks (Leviticus 23:16).”  It’s traditionally a good day for baptism or joining a church.  Or starting summer.

Some exotic practices are attached to the Pentecostal movement, which is popular on Native American reservations and often expressed in other denominations.  It is the flame on the cross at the entrance of Methodist churches.  Strangely, though it is an individual experience, it becomes a force for joining a community.

A number of phenomena are associated:  one is speaking in tongues, a kind of babbling that’s interpreted as an unknown language (a bit of a contradiction in terms.)  Another is snake-handling which ought to boost adrenaline.  The idea is that God is protecting the handler of the rattlers.  Partly because such things are considered weird and dangerous enough to justify stigma and persecution, they are tagged with scripture quotes but also by claiming that they are from contact with a supernatural world: a great wind, a huge fire, or bones that come alive -- all human metaphors that are exaggerations of the real.  Supersized.  Other.

Clearly, if you take the drug called “ecstasy” but more technically MDMA (3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine)  which is the chemical found in the synthetic "club drug" ecstasy, a drug with stimulant and hallucinogenic effects, you are likely to trigger a flood of serotonin.  The catch is that it’s only borrowed against the future and therefore causes depletion of serotonin which is pretty painful, maybe damaging.  “Drug” levels in the blood are meant to swing back and forth between more and less, not too far in either direction.  If that loop is addled -- either too much or too little -- behavior is affected and may take the person into extremes of high and low that persist, keep rolling though unwanted.

The problem with the ecstasies of emotion or the reciprocating despair is in the tension between the life of an individual and the life of the community, which can also be both intensified or destroyed.  Power and fittingness in the culture must allow the self-regulation that is located in the pre-frontal “ethical” cerebrum.  That is, the ideas and practices that promote survival of self and group, even if a powerful charismatic leader is encouraging everyone to jump into a volcano in order to get to Heaven.  (End of the World Syndrome.)  The fancy of being a “Saving Remnant,” opposed to the rest of a depraved world, is a direct route to terrorism.

Hope makes stigmatized minorities vulnerable to ecstatic states of mind, the ethical/emotional reward for a religious context.  If that can be successfully recorded in dogma, housed in institutions, and rewarded with prosperity, then you’ve got yourself a church at least, maybe a denomination, and possibly a world-changing conflagration people call “religion.”  The political power, as we see, is enormous and can destroy whole populations through violence or sheer disruption, sending masses of people into the “deserts” or seas to starve and die.  

I’m interested in all this, how it happens, and how vivid metaphors change the way we interact with the world and other people.  A denominational seminary is likely to oppose the ideas, because they are disruptive and challenge loyalty.  “Just follow our rules.”  But a university with a strong comparative religion program will be friendly, up to a point.  Many fear that without a boundary, “religion” can become destructive, as history has shown again and again.  Art, I might reflect later, has fewer boundaries because it is considered harmless unless it begins to show icons as cartoons or -- what is “Piss Christ,” the crucifix standing in urine?  Deconstruction, iconoclastic or oxymoron?

Claiming specialness on the evidence of access to another world -- either supernatural or poetic -- can provide a sense of safety that may not be realistic but can satisfy an individual that they need not struggle anymore.  Christians' claim that their access to another world amounts to the denial of death, because those with the privilege will reincarnate -- literally become meat again.  

Making a metaphor this real introduces a lot of problems, as even Osama Bin Laden realized when he told only one wife of his many earthly spouses that she could be his wife in Paradise.  (So much for all those promised virgins.)  Then there’s the “monkey’s paw” dilemma in which a person torn apart by machinery comes back to life in the same ghastly state as he was in when he died.  Someone went to the trouble of figuring out how much physical space each human occupies and discovered we’d have to be piled up in layers if we’re all going to be reincarnated at the same time on this planet.  In philosophical circles, this is called “misplaced concreteness.”

What people know on this planet is what supplies the metaphors of religion with ideas, thought projections.  But in the very beginning, it is pre-verbal felt meaning at the animal level, rooted in ecology, that supplies the emergence of cultures of survival.  Individuals fit themselves into these patterns or, if they can’t, search out or invent new patterns either as a part of the whole or by finding a new basis of community.  It might be small and unique, in which case it is likely to be unknown, or if it responds to a felt need, it might eventually sweep the continents, as a new religion.

We are told, in fancy language, that there are two approaches to the understanding of religion: one is at the level of theories about existence, and the other is a matter of simply “doin’ it:” praxis.  In the best of all possible worlds, the two fit together.  But the human brain is still newly evolved and the planet is full of both limits and possibilities. Some of us get high on ideas, but they aren’t always in words.