The service began quietly with a repeated Taizé chant.
In the midst of this chant, an unfamiliar man came into the chapel from the outside. The man was carrying a saxophone, which he began to play. At first, he made an effort to play with the Taize chant. But after a little bit the notes became more insistent and wild until eventually the sax simply overpowered the chant. The people in the pews stopped singing, their contemplative chant, so rudely interrupted, lay in tatters. All that remained was the plaintive, discordant staccato blaring and squealing of the saxophone.
When, at length, the saxophone died away, a student came to the lectern and read a psalm of lament:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul
and have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
When the psalm reading was finished, another man appeared. Like the saxophone player before him, this man too, came in from the outside. He casually walked up to an electric guitar that was propped up against an amplifier, swung the guitar over his neck and flipped the switch on the amplifier. The amp came to life with a disconcerting thrum of electircity.
I braced myself.
The man hit the chord hard. The methodical progression of crunchy distorted chords was painfully loud.
The man began singing. The vocal mic was positioned in such a way that he had to crane his neck upward in order to sing – a position that made him look like he was addressing God. One of his feet kept rhythm by coming down hard on a wooden box. As the song progressed, the wooden box began to break, and by the time the song was over the box was reduced to a pile of splinters, spread here and there across the chancel.
When this frightening performance was complete, the Dean of Chapel came to the pulpit.
She read the Matthew 21:12-13
Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”
Preaching from this text, she made it clear that, not just her sermon, but, indeed, the whole service that we were experiencing, was about turning over tables…
The shocking performances were intentional.
It was all about disruption.
And, in case this theme had not already been clearly demonstrated, a woman came into the center of the chapel – again from the outside – and interrupted the sermon. She was yelling.
What was she yelling?
Gradually we recognized what the woman was yelling – she was yelling a prayer.
It was a very strange experience to hear the language of prayer being yelled.
When this was over, the Dean of Chapel stood up again. She approached a table that was set in the middle of the chancel, and picked up loaf of bread, which she began crumbling it into pieces:
“This is my body,” she said “broken for you…”
A silence followed.
At length, someone stood up and left. A moment later another person stood up and left. This started the chain reaction, and soon the chapel was empty.
I have often stated, from this pulpit, my belief that church, at its best, must exist in a kind of creative tension between comfort and challenge.
It is a beautiful and important thing, that we can come to church to find solace from the pain of the world.
This, in part, is why we call this place a sanctuary.
It is a place where we can live into our belief that there is something – something wonderful and mysterious, woven into the very fabric of existence, that is good…
It is this essential and mysterious goodness that we worship with the name “God.”
As crucially important as it is that church be a place of comfort, it is equally important that we not, as people of faith, make the mistake of allowing our “comfort” to turn into moral laziness.
We need comfort, but we must avoid being complacent.
Remember, that Jesus gave comfort – but to do so, he worked hard, walking the dusty roads of Galilee.
To make sure that comfort does not become complacency the church must provide challenge.
Moral challenge.
Because, to truly live into our faith, it is not enough to be embraced by the goodness that is at the core of the universe. We must also spread that goodness in the world.
To live into our faith is not to simply to receive the benefits of that essential goodness. We must also broadcast that love.
Church calls us to be two-way radios of love.
We receive comfort, and we are challenged to broadcast love.
In this way we try to become like Saint Francis: we become “instruments of peace.”
**
The upsetting worship service that I have described earlier took place at Marquand Chapel at Yale Divinity School. It was certainly the most controversial chapel service of that year – my last year at Divinity School. In the weeks that followed, I talked to a number of people about it, because I was fascinated about what people thought about the liturgy.
The various elements that come together to form a worship service – the lighting of the candles, the singing of hymns, the sermon, the prayers – all of these elements are part of what we call “liturgy.”
What was the cumulative message of the all liturgical elements of that service?
Most people said that the service was designed to disrupt. The service seemed to suggest that in addition to comfort and challenge, another role of the church might be to disrupt.
But I don’t think of worship as a disruptive act. I can imagine a play or a movie being disruptive. But worship?
And yet… if worship seeks transformation – disruption is certainly one effective way to create the conditions for transformation. .
Something that is rude and uncomfortable, might also be transformative.
I remember one person saying something like: “I wasn’t sure what happened at that service, but I knew people would be talking about it for years to come…”
Another person told me that after the service they did not attend chapel again for the rest of the year.
They said they “did not feel safe.”
A third person, upon hearing about the chapel boycotter, said:
“It’s not always easy to be a Christian. We are a community reaching toward something that seems unattainable.”
This was interesting!
“What do you mean?” I asked.
I remember my friend’s reply because it was very interesting. She said: “there are liturgies that talk about something right now, and there are liturgies that ‘lean forward.’ That service wasn’t about “mother’s day” or about the weather being nice. It was about something we, as Christians, are striving for.”
“So, by ‘lean forward’” I said “you mean toward the Kingdom of God?
“Yes,” she said. “And we’re not going to get there by being complacent. Sometimes people need to be shaken up a bit.”
“But,” I said, “the person who came to chapel to be comforted, left feeling betrayed. Wasn’t it reasonable to expect to be comforted?”
“Yes,” she said, “that is a reasonable expectation. But should that expectation govern the whole of our experience of Christian liturgy?”
Sometimes – like, for example, when Jesus turned over the tables in the temple – sometimes… we may need to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and shaken up a bit.
Sometimes shock value may help us to understand something important – something we might not otherwise see.
The English novelist Graham Greene, who was known to be a deeply Christian man, was once asked by an interviewer why human depravity played such a prominent role in his novels. He answered: “Mustn’t we illuminate God’s infinite mercy to man, and can’t it be done by using indirect lighting?”[1]
Indirect lighting.
There is no use pretending that human sin is not present in the world… especially if you are a novelist. And since we, as humans, can recognize our own sin, perhaps we can catch a glimpse of God when our sins are answered by God’s mercy.
But what happens – as it sometimes seems – when it feels like the world has turned against us?
Does this mean that we have been denied God’s mercy?
Or worse yet, what are we to think when, just like in the passage that Deb just read for us from the Book of Job, it seems like we have become play things in the hands of an actively evil force?
How are we to understand God’s mercy, when we are surrounded by war? When we are victims of violence? When we fall into the clutch of addiction? Or when these desperate things happen to someone we love?
The Book of Job is a troubling book. In it, God seems to have very little compassion or mercy. For thousands of years, faithful people have been trying to reconcile this book with their understanding of God.
I wonder if this idea – this idea of disruption as a way toward transformation, may give us some understanding of the Book of Job. Perhaps this idea helps us, not so much to reconcile Job’s vision of God with our own, as much as it helps to understand the possibility of transformation that this book is awakening in our souls.
As I sat in among the gathered faithful, I fought against this discomfort. My ears complained. I looked over at an old man who was clearly uncomfortable. Other people were following along, but their consent seemed begrudging. Like me, they were startled, disoriented. Off-balance.
For three years prior to entering Divinity School, I cared for my aging parents. My father’s death occurred precipitously. My mother’s decline took two years. During this time I began attending church, at first with the only intention of accompanying my newly widowed mother. Soon, though, the church became important to me. I came to depend upon the friends that I made there, and the steady weekly ritual began to settle into the texture of my life. At that time, Christian liturgy meant solace. My encounter with God was an encounter tutored by grief and loss. I was broken open. Made ready.
When I first visited Divinity School as a prospective student, I found an altogether new Christian liturgy – one founded in beauty and in joy. I found the beating heart of the institution. My hands gradually unclasped, and turned, openly to God.
As certainly as we are consoled in loss and lifted in joy, liturgy can also destabilize.
To lean forward is to fall…unless your foot steps out.
When we are off balance, we learn not only with our minds, but also with our hearts, hands and feet. Destabilizing liturgy insists that we can move toward God’s justice without being naïve about the terror of the world that we live in. Liturgy that leans forward insists that we recognize the presence and promise of God even as we face the tremendous injustice that paralyzes our world.
Amen.
[1] Jouve, Pere and Marcel More, “Table Talk with Graham Greene,” Conversations with Graham Greene, Henry J. Donaghy, ed., (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), Print, 18.