August 28, 2016 - Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost - Christian Worship Practice

The word and music usually move me most in worship.  That is clear reading these posts.  This week I thought about these responses to worship that written here in relationship to the time when I am not in worship and from week to week.

My posts come from reflection on the worship experience of a particular day.  It is reflection, not worship itself.  So much of worship is so familiar I don't include a description in these posts and yet that detail is part of what I treasure when I read posts from my previous worship blog.

My wife and I have always talked about spirituality and religion when we were not going to church and when we became Creator members. Reading the Bible, commentary, philosophy and theology at home is the norm.  We enjoy films and are moved by profound musical experiences.  For example, this clip of Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

As I review the blog these kind of experiences are what I prefer to describe here.  The gospel insight, the thought-provoking sermon that tied the Bible readings with today's world, the musical highlight of the day.  The "thin place" moments Marcus Borg describes as the place our hearts are opened." A geographical location, or an activity the thin place is any moment in time in which the boundary between the mundane and the divine for an individual is so thin as to be porous.  

Yet this isn't the heart of worship, is it?  This obscures the familiar and and distracts from a kind of mindfulness and thankfulness in how we gather as the body of Christ.  I put this on the back shelf and never describe what is commonplace.  Why would you want to know that each Sunday I carry into church a guitar, a cell phone and a tripod?  I set up for streaming the service live while Jon sets up microphones and the soundboard.  Jon and I may chat, we may not.  However there is a comradeship to treasure.  It hasn't been captured in any particular exchange I can recall on a given Sunday but is real and valuable to me.

Normally Matt and other singers and instrumentalists, (like Shirley, Tini and Luka most recently) gather in short order after our set up.  There are pleasantries and a little chatting and then comes practicing the music of the day.

There is a dimensional aspect that comes into this now that makes me break off from continuing this particular description.  There is familiarity from week to week yet the gathering is always unique in who attends and the service that has been planned and put together.  I mentioned three names but it is just as likely that Janice, Craig, Annie, Toni or Vaune might participate now.  There is a communion-of-saints aspect to this where those who are gathered stretch back to those who have contributed in the past as well.  I wouldn't be there if it were not for Kelly.  David changed how I understand and play guitar for worship to blend with the piano.

There is too much to detail much more here but that is an aspect of why I attend each week that I don't keep in the forefront of my thoughts from week to week and yet it is present.  There is also the familiarity of the sanctuary, the changes in the banners and bulletin boards that could be detailed here.  The memories and associations around the baptismal font.  Knowing the story of Joel making the risers that used in the service and the time he was here at worship each Sunday.

Unfortunately this can read like nostalgia but this is a different feeling.  Weekly worship is a means of mediating God. We join ourselves with a community that transcends time, both locally and with all of those centuries of Christians who have heard and said these words in worship and tradition.

I know how to understand and write about becoming the body of Christ each week will remain a challenge for me in these posts.