No One Should "Have to" Say the Lord's Prayer

A Nouwen retreatant fashioned this

crucifix from dried cactus at Ghost Ranch.

No one should “have to” say the Lord’s Prayer. Anymore than anyone should “have to” savor quality chocolate, bite into a freshly ripened peach, or make love.

I’ve been made aware that some folk associate the prayer Jesus taught us with all those “have to’s” of formal worship, an accessory to a spiritual straitjacket of liturgical conformity that was required wear in some Christian traditions. I guess my largely optional Baptist worship experience as a child and youth prompts me to see it as a choice rather than a requirement, on a par with the stiff reciting of the Apostles’ Creed or a self-abasing Prayer of Confession. (To be clear, though, in my better moments I try to value all liturgies and their parts as opportunities for spiritual expansion.)

But for me, the prayer Jesus taught is my favorite part of my morning prayer time. Sometimes I save it for last, like dessert. And sometimes I say it first, like a child unwilling to wait.

I write this to say I do not recite the prayer Jesus taught his disciples because God somehow “requires” it, but for selfish reasons that I can only hope become altruistic in the transformation the words may bring me.

It is a way of transcending my self, even as it connects me to my past and future selves. It connects me to Jesus, who first recommended it, and all those disciples and saints, sinners and saviors who followed, are following, and will follow in our spiritual tradition. It connects me to God—I believe, Jesus’ intent—without the “in Jesus’ name” sign-off to prayer we use as an imprimatur / notary stamp / access code / password to let God know our legitimacy as Christians.

The prayer reminds me of the permanent familial relationship we all have with God AND with each other. For me, it’s not simply a Christian prayer, but a Universalist prayer, even a Unitarian prayer for those who believe “the Lord our God is one.” When we pray “thy kingdom come” or the variation “thy kindom come” we are praying for the world a commonwealth in which everyone is a citizen, a beneficiary, and an heir—including those who do not subscribe to any faith or religious tradition. This is the grace of God at work that excludes NO ONE.

And it doesn’t ask of us any less than it asks of God: forgiveness. As synchronicity would have it, the day of writing this post I read Benedictine monk John Main’s words, “Perhaps the gift our violent and fear-filled world needs most is forgiveness…in an age so dissatisfied with its own shallowness—a dissatisfaction that produces so much confusion and violence.”

Finally, it lifts us up to God’s glory, the transformative power of God’s love, and the divine value of all that is.

Other posts on The Lord’s Prayer:

The Lord’s Prayer—What It Means to Me

Fresh Takes on The Lord’s Prayer

“Deliver Us from Evil”

A Pragmatic Guide to Prayer

I will again be co-leading a 5-day contemplative retreat April 27-May 1, 2020 in Cullman, Alabama, through the Spiritual Formation Program of Columbia Theological Seminary. It is open to the public.

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Front Porches

Luna takes her "sabbaticals" on our porch

when her porch gets too busy.

Wade and I spend a lot of time on our front porch. We each have fond memories of front porches. As a child in Indiana, Wade used to sit with his paternal grandmother on her front porch, munching saltines topped with butter while watching cars and people pass by. My Kansas relatives would apologize that there was nothing to do in their small town, but, as a youth, I loved just sitting on their front porch reading. “Nothing to do” was an invitation to enjoy the quiet, to relax.

My family porch in California was not large enough for chairs or a swing, but Mom used to enjoy sitting on its concrete steps, and that’s how I often remember her as I left for my own homes, whether in New Haven, Philadelphia, West Hollywood, or Atlanta. And it was there that a non-English speaking Asian neighbor left a vase of flowers on the day of her funeral, twenty years ago this week, in memory of their friendship around their gardens.

Wade and I recently had stonework put on our front porch columns followed by new handrails. Wade said it made it look like a new house. The skillful Mexican stone mason’s name is Javier, a variation of Xavier, which, I found in my friend Cleve Evans’ Unusual & Most Popular Baby Names, comes from a Basque word that means “new house”!

Historically, I’ve been told, front porches served to keep neighbors in touch. We too enjoy seeing the kids going to and from school, greeting neighbors walking their dogs (or, in the case of our pastor’s family two houses down from us, their dog and their cat, Luna, who follows along), watching runners and walkers, bicyclists and those riding the trendy scooters filling Atlanta neighborhoods.

Porches seem to be a particularly Southern thing, and so it seemed natural for our new church start, Ormewood Church, to organize “porch groups.” And, in worship, we sit in clusters as we might do on a porch, to facilitate discussion of the question for the day. Btw, I’ll be guest preaching there this Sunday.

I sometimes do my morning prayers on the porch, with coffee of course, and almost every late afternoon Wade or I find ourselves reading or watching something on our tablets, sipping wine and munching chips or crackers. We welcome the occasional neighbor or friend who might join us, most likely on weekends.

What surprises us is that more people don’t use their front porches. Nearby is a very toney neighborhood with fabulous and sometimes wrap-around porches, but when we walk that way, it feels like a ghost town. Maybe they have to work harder and longer to afford their pricey homes. I suggest this as a possible reality, not a critique.

Just as we apply what we learn in school or church or on the job to the rest of our lives, what we learn on our front porches may be helpful as we encounter people and pets elsewhere. Relax. Recreate. Remember. Reach out. Invite. Welcome. Listen. Pay attention. Appreciate our environment. Lift others in prayer. And thank God.

Our front porch, Winter 2019.

Please hold the United Methodist Church in your prayers as it meets in St. Louis this week to discern "The Way Forward" regarding the full welcome of LGBT Christians!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

What Jesus Wants

I’ve been rereading Henri Nouwen’s The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry for a contemplative retreat I will be co-leading this spring. It’s amazing how much one can get out of what seems a simple little book each time it is read. This time I realized why Henri became popular among evangelical Christians. He emphasizes a very personal relationship with Jesus, so personal that “Christ…lives in us, that he is our true self.”

In the margin beside that assertion I countered, “? not a false self?” In other words, both Nouwen and Merton warned of living the inauthentic or false self. In Merton’s words from Contemplative Prayer, even or especially “the ‘approved way’ may in fact be encouraging us in falsity and illusion.” And, in Way of the Heart, Nouwen warns against “the danger of living the whole of our life as one long defense against the reality of our condition, one restless effort to convince ourselves of our virtuousness.”

I take this to heart because I frequently wonder if this blog is “one restless effort to convince [myself or perhaps readers of my] virtuousness”!

I grew up in a Christian milieu that defined JOY as J.O.Y.—Jesus, Others, You, in that order. “The wisdom of the desert,” Henri writes, “is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ.” I put a question mark beside this assertion, too.

I guess that surrender was the idea behind sitting with Henri very early one morning in his first improvised chapel at Daybreak (the L’Arche community of Toronto) silently contemplating the Host for an hour.  Henri fidgeted continually, undoubtedly wrestling with what he called his “banana tree of monkeys.”

I sat, for the most part, still, but found little meaning in the exercise. Have me contemplate a scriptural phrase or story, or a work of art or icon, even a window with a view of nature, and the silence would have been more spiritually fulfilling. Simple adoration of a transubstantiated wafer within the glass heart of a cross was not in my Protestant bag of tricks!

But giving myself to Jesus Christ was. That’s what I thought I was doing at the tender of age of six or seven when I went forward at an altar call. But that meant following Jesus, not losing myself in Jesus. I do believe Christ “lives in us”—for me, the meaning of the Resurrection—but Chris, not Christ, is my true self.

When I served on my seminary’s worship committee more than forty years ago, I disagreed with those members from “higher” church traditions who believed a worship leader should serve only as a kind of “invisible window” to God or Jesus or the Kingdom. This concept might have suited me well: I am grateful that my parents intentionally gave me the name Christopher, because it means “Christ-bearer,” and that my last name, Glaser, comes from a German ancestor who must’ve been a glassmaker.

But at the time, I pointed out to the committee members that Yahweh was the God of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and his sister Miriam, Jesus and his mother Mary, and that their particular personalities gave very personal faces to the Almighty and God’s Commonwealth.

No doubt my view was influenced by my Baptist upbringing, with much emphasis on personal testimonies, including those of our occasional evangelists or the even rarer visits to one of the late Billy Graham’s “Crusades” in my hometown of Los Angeles.

Twice on this blog I’ve quoted the Hasidic Rabbi Zusya, “In the life to come, they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

In his book, Reaching Out, Nouwen suggests, “The great saints of the past don’t ask for imitation. Their way was unique and cannot be repeated. But they invite us into their lives and offer a hospitable space for our own search.”

I feel much the same way about Jesus. What Jesus wants, I believe, is for each of us to manifest God’s glory in our own unique way. We can be members of the Body of Christ, his spiritual community, and still be and become ourselves.

In the life to come, they will not ask me, “Why were you not Christ?” They will ask me, “Why were you not Chris?”

A post for St. Patrick’s Day: Easter Rising

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Watch Your Language!

A memorable episode of the old sitcom Frasier featured a scene from the dog Eddie’s perspective. The human conversation about him was unintelligible except when he heard his name or the few words in his vocabulary like “treat,” “walk,” “food,” and so on. A parallel scene from the father Martin’s perspective listening to his psychiatrist sons using psychological jargon revealed the same babble interspersed with words he understood.

This is the way I feel about 100 pages into Stephen Hawking’s (with Leonard Mladinow) The Grand Design. I experienced the same thing 95 pages into his book, A Brief History of Time, and I was reading the illustrated version! Suddenly everything gets more complicated as he connects QED with QCD and GUT (Grand Unified Theory), quarks and Feynman diagrams, baryons and mesons and asymptomatic freedom.

There are too many subatomic particles in the air! I can’t keep up!

I got a laugh when I mentioned in a workshop at a Unitarian Universalist Church that in Christian worship I hear traditional jargon, and say to myself, “Why did they say that? What does it mean?” My subtext is: How does it enhance the experience? Is it intelligible to an outsider?

Some like to mock Scientology’s terminology, but Christianity’s lingo is just as weird to the novice, yet because those in our culture have heard it so often, we take it in stride. I’d like to avoid specifics, because each example will offend someone for whom the phrase has taken on positive connotations. But at the risk of losing you, here goes one example…

What does it mean, for instance, to say, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost”? When I was baptized at the tender age of six and asked, just before my full body immersion, if I believed in this trio, I was stumped. I thought baptism meant I would belong to God and Jesus forever. I wasn’t certain who the Father and Son were, and I’m not sure I knew of the Holy Ghost.

I know some of you will now think, well, he was too young to be baptized, to give consent. Blessedly my pastor knew better, and told the congregation so before he dunked me. He knew I wanted Jesus in my heart and God in my life. More sophisticated theology would come later. And besides, I gave more consent than infants who are baptized.

But why do we need to do everything in the name of the Trinity? Why is it said so often, as if this incantation sacralizes everything? First, it excludes other possible manifestations or faces of God. Second, it’s an exclusively male grouping, unless you know that the Spirit is feminine in one testament and neuter in another. And why not include Mary, the mother of Jesus? Who gave God sole custody?

(I myself used to reduce the Trinity to their functionality: Creator, Reconciler, Sustainer, but that too seems unsatisfying, incomplete and much too impersonal.)

I know, I’m just being difficult, like a parishioner who puts an anonymous petty criticism in the church suggestion box.

Progressive religious intellectuals have a similar problem with holy gobbledygook. I was given an article by a scholar for publication in a magazine I edited. I could make out what was being said (I can read academese). But I thought it could have been said in a paragraph rather than the 20 pages I received, and I doubted my readers would appreciate the author’s complicated and convoluted reasoning with multi-syllabic words that sounded recently devised. So I published an intelligible excerpt!

Okay, so now I’ve offended everyone. Undoubtedly someone will say, take the beam out of your own eye before addressing the splinters in others. Mea culpa. But we need some kind of modern day Pentecost to proclaim a gospel that others can grasp. Come, Holy Spirit!

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Biblical Potluck

A minister for whom I was to read the scripture for his sermon delayed giving me the reference until, minutes before worship, I asked again. “Oh, I’m glad you reminded me,” he said, “Let me find it.” And he began thumbing through his Bible for the reading with which he seemed to have spent little time.

Another minister once told me he had tried “that meditation and prayer stuff,” but rather proudly announced he had never really “got it.”

A Roman Catholic priest for whom I served as his first Protestant friend began looking at the texts and preparing for his Sunday homilies on Wednesdays rather than Saturdays, he said, because of my influence.

The pastor whom I credit with my becoming Presbyterian in college had an intelligent, deep spirituality that blossomed in solid preaching and social activism. He wrote his sermons in phrases, as if they were poetry, and I am grateful he gave me a few of his manuscripts upon retirement. One especially memorable sermon was about “The One Remembered Line” we sometimes take from a sermon that gets us through the week.

A college religious studies professor remarked to us, his students, that in his first parish job description, he insisted on having twenty hours per week for reading, study, reflection, prayer and sermon preparation. Another professor admitted becoming increasingly hesitant to enter a pulpit, believing more and more that preaching is such an awesome responsibility, something I couldn’t altogether understand then but a feeling with which I resonate with age.

And the activist pastor I first worked alongside after graduation from seminary explained to me that he woke daily at 6 a.m. for two hours of prayer, reading, and silence, having been reared a Quaker.

While “acknowledging his [or her] poverty,” Pope Francis writes, “The Sunday readings will resonate in all their brilliance in the hearts of the faithful if they have first done so in the heart of their pastor.” He quotes Thomas Aquinas that preaching should be “communicating to others what one has contemplated.”

He encourages preachers in the practice of lectio divina, a mindful and prayerful reading of scripture. During the men’s monastic retreat I attended a couple of weeks ago, we practiced lectio divina with John 14:1-14, a text which Jesus begins, “Let not your hearts be troubled.” The phrase I gravitated to was Jesus saying “I will take you to myself.”

When that was the gospel the following week, I, as guest preacher, invited Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church to do lectio divina with the text, providing a copy for everyone, giving a chance for each to share the phrase that spoke to them. I knew this scripture would resonate in the heart of a congregation that faced so many recent challenges.  I explained that, were Sunday worship reinvented, this might be a desirable practice.

Giving it still more thought, it occurred to me that Sunday texts could be assigned much like a church potluck. Instead of last names beginning with A-F bringing salads, they could read the Hebrew lesson in preparation for worship. Instead of main dishes, G-L might contemplate the Psalm for the day, while M-R could reflect on the Epistle lesson. And instead of bringing desserts, S-Z could meditate on the Gospel.  To be fair, a congregation should rotate the assignments. To be honest, I have experienced abundant as well as sparse church potlucks, so it depends on the spiritual investment and generosity of the congregation as to how this will turn out!

Often we want church leadership “to do it all for us,” rather than doing our own spiritual work. But my experience is that people attracted to spiritual formation are eager to do their own work, in the spirit of the apostle Paul’s advice to the church of Corinth:  “When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up.”

For me, the “punch line” of the men’s monastic retreat came when our leader, Carl McColman, who has written his own excellent and readable The Big Book of Christian Mysticism, recounted once being asked by an interviewer on a program, “If you could recommend only one book on Christian mysticism, what would it be?” To which Carl responded, surprising the host, “Why, the Bible, of course!”

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Related post:

Open Your Refrigerator

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Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

A Dream within a Dream

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As I told those attending the Meekhof Lectures in the Seattle area a few weeks ago, “If my dreams are any indication, I have much unfinished business with the church.”

One morning of last week’s Georgia Winter Institute, just before I woke, I had a dream of church in which people of diverse race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, gender identity, abilities, and beliefs were having quite a good time talking over differences amiably, even kidding one another, but with no “gotchas” or condemnation or competition.  It was so moving to experience that I awoke with tears in my eyes.

No doubt it was a reflection of what we were experiencing at GWI 2014. People with disabilities are themselves diverse, but they also gather people around them who differ in almost every way except the fulfillment we experience recognizing the power and potential of people facing intellectual and physical challenges—our family members, friends, neighbors, strangers, clients, patients, parishioners, and community members. Their stories were central to building the community we achieved during our days together.

As often happens after a successful retreat with people who coalesce, I would think many of us had the thought, “Why can’t it always be this way?” And, in my dream within a dream, I clearly yearned for a church that was as good at diversity as this gathering had been. And sometimes, we are. Though my leadership was more along the line of “generic” spirituality, I mentioned during a conversational segment that the early church was attractive not so much because of its beliefs, but because the first Christians were so kind and compassionate to one another and their communities.

I counted among my new friends several Pentecostals and a Promise Keeper, as well as a soldier who was not part of our group but, as a fellow guest of the hotel, was drawn to what we were about.  The philosophy of the conference was not only building community among ourselves, but also with the citizens of Columbus, Georgia, and its environs.

I am writing this on an American high holy day, Super Bowl Sunday. This morning I awoke to quite another dream about the church, extremely vivid and detailed enough to become another Book of Revelation! Or perhaps Hildegard of Bingen’s visions that I’m currently reading are rubbing off on me? 

In this dream, I had been asked to meet with a committee of a church I once served asking what I thought if they spent their endowment on their current expenses, and I advised them the money was given for future generations and that they should build into their current budget what they needed so their present church generation understood how much it costs to run a church, rather than squander their capital. I doubted the committee would take my advice.

Because in the dream (and in reality) it was Sunday morning, I considered staying for worship. But the scenes that unfolded around me were both dramatic like a mega-church and chaotic like a three ring circus, everything happening at once. Instead of one there were seven tall pulpits, spaced on an angle on the raised chancel like on a brow of ship, each bearing the name of a pastor in bronze-cast letters. And the one leading worship was dressed like he was about to perform The Mikado!

As I tried to leave, I kept remembering things I had to do, or I’d run into someone I knew who wanted to talk, and after clearing these hurdles, I found that parts of my clothing and the items I was carrying kept getting caught on things, resisting my departure.

As I wrote at the beginning, “If my dreams are any indication, I have much unfinished business with the church.”

Next week’s post also about GWI 2014:

“Pride Goeth before a Fall”—and Getting Back Up!

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Jesus: Introvert or Extrovert?

Reading Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, was like coming up for air! Or eating an entire box of See’s chocolates at one sitting, enjoying every morsel! As one friend said to me on Facebook, reading the book was her own “coming out” experience.

You see, I am an introvert who nonetheless manages to play the extrovert—I do enjoy people, after all—but then needs a rest, alone, in quiet, probably why I’m a promoter of contemplation. Throughout my life, however, I have felt constantly compared to what Cain calls “The Extrovert Ideal,” sometimes by my own hand, and sometimes at the hands of others, including American culture and the church. For example, I realize now that preaching or even speaking from a manuscript is not deficient, as I have been told, but my strength. Oh, for President Obama’s teleprompters!

Acknowledging the need for both extroverts and introverts, Cain, an introvert, strikes a blow (though that’s usually an extrovert’s temperament) for the necessity of introverts. Studies suggest that introverts are usually “high-reactives” to stimuli, and thus need to limit our exposure. Another word that is used is “sensitive.” We need time to observe, reflect, and consider situations, people, and events prior to speaking or taking action.

That’s why I insist on a “monastic moment” of silence when I pose a question to people in a workshop or retreat, a moment to turn inward, consult one’s own experience and feelings and thoughts, before opening general discussion. My experience has been that others are quick to express their thoughts before I have had a chance to consult my own experience. I thought Sir Thomas More’s Utopia had it right when its legislature vigorously debated a concern but waited till the next day to take action! Cain writes, “Congress…is made up of some of the least sensitive people in the country” because to get elected and re-elected virtually requires an extrovert’s temperament.

That’s also why I wrote a post two weeks ago about experiencing spiritual community outside of church, what I had thought of calling “spirituality for loners.” Several pastors took me to task on Facebook, though in previous posts I have acknowledged that church and worship are worthy spiritual disciplines.  But as I have discovered the need for silence in my own spiritual practices, I have looked for more silence in worship, and when it is interrupted or when worship gets raucous it sounds to me like fingernails scratching a chalkboard. And I reclaim words I found appealing in college, words from Alfred North Whitehead, “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.”

The post opened me to pleasant conversation with Sam Troxal, a young and gifted blogger, and with a role model pastor and author, J. Barrie Shepherd. Barrie, a regular reader of this blog (I am proud to say), has written many books of poetry whose daily rhythms encouraged me to pray regularly long ago. I appreciate the fact that in poetry, pauses are as vital as words, and an economy of words are carefully, thoughtfully selected to convey exactly what is intended. In my book of “secular” poetic meditations, Communion of Life, I called poets “secular mystics.”

Barrie sent me his recent book, Between Mirage and Miracle: Selected Poems for Seasons, Festivals, and the Occasional Revelation, urging me to read his poem about church, “Why I Still Go,” which meaningfully concludes: 

For all my weary, reasoned doubt,

the continuing disillusion and despair

of this already blood-drenched century,

for all my anger at her blind echoing

of the worst that hides in all of us,

come Sunday morning, somehow,

I still find myself in church.

I have questioned whether it is the church’s “blind echoing” of prejudice against LGBT people that prompts me to seek other counsel and other forms of worship. But it is also true that the expected conformity and the lack of silence and gentle voices are also factors. And what presents itself as teamwork, collaboration, or democratic process is too often an opportunity for extroverts—sometimes with less experience and expertise, or worse, less compassion and wisdom—to outtalk and occasionally bully others! 

So I’ve been wondering about whether Jesus was an introvert or an extrovert. Obviously I may be projecting, but I believe he was an introvert. He was certainly a “high reactive” to religious hypocrisy and “sensitive” to religious outcasts. When tempted in his solitary sojourn in the wilderness by relevance, sensationalism, and power, he resisted. Though followed by multitudes seeking healings and teachings, he found lonely places to pray or a boat from which to preach. He called 12 disciples, and taught them privately. Perhaps it was the temperament of being introverts that Jesus shared with “the disciple whom Jesus (especially) loved” who gave us the most mystical gospel. But without extroverts like Peter and Paul, the world may not have been evangelized.

That may be the power of the Spirit, that gives even introverts the gift of speech. Yet it is also the Spirit’s gift to hear God’s voice in “the sound of sheer silence” that follows the storm, the earthquake, and the fire.

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

This blog is entirely supported by your donations. Thank you!

Posts you may have missed:

In Praise of Praise

The Right Word

Open Your Refrigerator

During last week’s Beecher lectures at Yale Divinity School,  Anna Carter Florence illustrated what congregations expect of preachers with an unforgettable metaphor, that of teenagers opening the refrigerator, looking at the foodstuffs therein, and complaining “There’s nothing to eat.” Translation: “I need you to prepare me something to eat!”

The Columbia Theological Seminary professor compared this to our expectation that preachers will prepare something to satisfy our spiritual hunger. And both parents and preachers try to fulfill the demands of such expectations, sometimes simply because we can or should, given our expertise and duty, but sometimes also because we feel needed and even powerful. But, just as parents need to equip kids with cooking skills so they can leave the nest, so pastors do best to equip parishioners with spiritual skills.

Anna suggested that right in front of those sitting in the pews are mini refrigerators—Bibles, hymnals, prayer books—waiting to be opened in their pew racks. And, I would add, many of us have books at home, blogs on the internet, blank journals for our own musings, spiritual guides and soul friends, retreat opportunities, and those Celtic “thin places” in nature waiting to be “opened,”  if only we opened our minds and hearts and schedules to their spiritual possibilities.

Anna’s metaphor captured one regret I have about church—that many prefer worship “to do it all for them” rather than embracing their own spiritual adventure. Please don’t misunderstand me: attending worship is a valuable spiritual discipline, but so much more is possible. That’s why I liked Anna’s other metaphor, that of a repertory church whose members actually engage with scripture. As she led us in various exercises to accomplish just that, I experienced what Presbyterian pastor Rick Spalding alluded to in the Q&A that followed: the disciples on the road to Emmaus reflecting on Jesus’ scriptural interpretation, “Did not our hearts burn within us as the scriptures were opened to us?”

I thought of another kitchen metaphor from professor Henri Nouwen’s days at YDS, the opening of his Road to Daybreak when a member of the L’Arche community prepared him dinner in his own home, using fine linens, china, crystal, candles, food and wine. “Where did you get all this?” Henri asked her. “In your own kitchen and cupboards,” came her reply, “You obviously don’t use them too often!”  Suddenly Henri’s eyes were opened to new spiritual possibilities from his own cupboards!

In the story of Martha and Mary offering hospitality to Jesus, Mary is upheld by Jesus himself as choosing “the better portion,” listening at his feet, while Martha is portrayed as distracted, busying herself preparing food in the kitchen. Thus Mary became a symbol for contemplation. But now I wonder if Martha might equally be a role model for many of us, who need to do our own work in our own kitchens, independent of our spiritual gurus.

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal devotions, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.  Please click here to learn more about this ministry and/or make a donation!

Watch the You Tube video of the panel Chris Glaser moderated last week at Yale Divinity School, “Religion in the Public Square.”

In Praise of Praise

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.
 

In memory of a friend and colleague in ministry, the Rev. Julie Two Suess.

Attending the Sunday evening praise service of MCC San Francisco, my partner turned to me and said, “For this service, you’re gonna need a lot more rhythm!” I had just moved there to serve as interim pastor, and the clapping and swaying and emotional singing had not been a regular feature of my worship experience.

A visit to the service a year earlier had alienated me. “What if I’m in pain when I come to the service?” I judgmentally thought, “I wouldn’t fit in with all these happy people.” Sharing that thought with the former pastor, the Rev. Jim Mitulski (one of the world’s finest preachers), he corrected, “We started that service to give voice to all of our feelings facing the AIDS crisis in the Castro.” He explained it was the old gospel songs and Taize style chants that expressed the range of their emotions, from lament and longing to hope and faith. One might compare the similar range of the Psalms.

I’ve just finished reading a book by a progressive Christian who expresses many insights I cherish, but who suggests we praise to “flatter” God to get what we want. That may be true for some, but not for me, and not for most, I would say.

Rather, we praise to be uplifted into God’s realm, to feel and to be embraced by something larger than ourselves—spiritual community, planet earth, the cosmos and all that is within it. The expanding universe calls for our own expansion. Spiritual ecstasy, like sexual ecstasy, gets us out of our selves, literally “out of stasis,” out of the status quo.

Just like prayer, praise is the place, not of God’s transformation, but of our own! To paraphrase the spiritual, “It’s not you but me, O Lord, standing in the need of praise.” In her book, Suffering, the late German theologian Dorothee Soelle affirms that collective “lament, petition, expressions of hope” empower those who suffer to address wrongs, comparing workers’ protests to liturgies, particularly the Psalms.

I come from traditions—both Baptist and Presbyterian—suspicious of the charismatic expressions of worship. Even the simple act of lifting our arms and faces upward—ironically, the praying posture of Jews and Christians of biblical times—seemed indecorous in our  somber and earnest worship.

There is “bad” praise music, of course—uninspired, unpoetic, musically dull, and theologically untenable for progressive Christians. But even the theologically questionable ones, if inspired and poetic and musically interesting enough, may be fun to sing. Just don’t take them literally (just like scripture!).

I introduced a new song with just the right theology at the annual Kirkridge men’s retreat I co-lead, but when we faltered at its difficulty, someone started singing “Jesus Loves Me,” and it became the reprise of the weekend.

My preference is for Gregorian chants, songs and chants from Taize, Iona, and John Michael Talbot, as well as spirituals, sambas, salsas, and freedom songs. But I also still hum and sing the old gospel songs and staid hymns as well. Just ask our dog, Hobbes.

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Serendipitously, for those of us in the Atlanta area, I just learned that John Bell from the Iona community will be leading an evening of song at 7:30 p.m. March 20 in Cannon Chapel on the Emory campus as part of the Candler School of Theology’s conference, “The Singing Church: Current Practices and Emerging Trends in Congregational Singing.” Tickets are $20 for the evening.

And, in regard to last week’s post, I have since found and recommend the film version of the book, “Lord, Save Us From Your Followers” on Netflix.

Finally:

I welcome the use of Progressive Christian Reflections with attribution of author and blog site as contemporary readings in worship or other non-profit purposes. 

My hope is that you will also browse the archives (right column) to use previous reflections in your daily or occasional devotions.