I have been challenged and creatively stimulated by this week’s lesson on the church’s historical use of Scripture and public prayers/liturgy in worship. I guess that I have been too wary of using what I considered “canned” prayers because of Jesus’ warning in Matthew against praying public prayers or using “meaningless repetition” (Matt. 6: 5-15). But the context of these warnings is hypocrisy – doing these things to be seen by others as ultra-religious. I think perhaps the danger is less if we are all reciting Scriptures together, or reciting a prayer that expresses a real sense of what is going on in the life of the congregation.

I have been thinking about prayers that have been meaningful to me in private and public worship. I have a book called The Christian Book of Mystical Verse, compiled by A.W. Tozer,  that consists of devotional  poems and prayers by Christians through the ages. The word “mystical” just means that the writers believe that God can be experienced personally and intensely, and these prayers/poems are a reflection of that hungering for intimate relationship with God. Some of my favorite poems/prayers in that collection are by Christina Rossetti (1830-18940), Gerhard Tersteegen, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Madame Guyon.  I also happen to like the prayers/poems of Amy Charmichael of Donovher. I wonder how to use these in church, however. Many of the prayers were either written or translated in the 18th-19th century, and so tend to use antiquated or formal language. That doesn’t bother me at all, but it may seem foreign or off-putting to contemporary worshipers. Yet changing the wording can often destroy the meter or rhyme scheme of the poem.  The same goes for singing many hymns. But maybe I don’t need to worry so much about simplifying the language. Maybe the challenge of the words would help the congregation to focus. But I’m afraid it might just seem like Latin to some people.

Here is one of my current favorites by Christina Rossetti:

None Other Lamb, None Other Name

None other Lamb, none other Name,
None other Hope in heaven or earth or sea,
None other Hiding-place from guilt and shame,
None beside Thee.

My faith burns low, my hope burns low;
Only my heart’s desire cries out in me,
By the deep thunder of its want and woe,
Cries out to Thee.

Lord, Thou art Life, though I be dead;
Love’s fire Thou art, however cold I be:
Nor heaven have I, nor place to lay my head,
Nor home, but Thee.       –Christina Rossetti

I really like how this poem expresses the truth that Jesus is the source of our life and passion, our hiding place, even when we are discouraged or even spiritually dry as dust.  The passion in it always moves my heart to worship and thankfulness.

But is it even appropriate for public worship? It seems to me the private cry of the heart – yet to acknowledge publicly that we are in that place is helpful – that we are not alone on our journey. Especially in a time of trial in the congregation (or even in our current economic crisis) perhaps this poem/prayer could minister to the heart, and draw us close to God in worship.  I also think it could be put to music, or used in a multimedia presentation, and that is a project I’m thinking about. I’d be grateful for any comments/suggestions about this.

Many churches today combine old and new in ways that reflect more than architecture. Decisions about which historic traditions to keep, change, limit, or abandon have caused heated arguments, and even led to church splits.

I’ve spent three decades as a worship leader and two decades as a pastor trying to figure out how the “old” fits in with the “new,” how to value both tradition and innovation without idolizing either.

Here are some of the things I’m learning.

via A Richer Blend | LeadershipJournal.net.

Bob Kauflin writes about combining tradition and innovation in worship.

It has been said that a pilgrimage is a physical journey with a spiritual destination. A “mystic,” from the word “mystikos,” means “to see with the eyes closed,” and at times, and in places, we are called to a blind wandering of sorts. The ancient Celtic Christians called this wandering, this pilgrimage of the soul, a perigrinatio. A perigrinatio is a journey, a wandering, whose destination is not primarily a physical location, but rather is a Person.

I like the idea of a pilgrimage as a journey whose destination is a Person. I was thinking about our life as a pilgrimage, in which Jesus has already gone before us. Each “spot in time” (to use a Wordsworthian phrase) is a place where we can stop and reflect that Jesus was and is here. It’s good to know that Jesus has been here before me, and that I can find Him here in the Spirit.

Dan suggests as a form of meditation that before we take a trip we need to pack, pray, and plan. I think that is a good metaphor that I will use to structure my quiet times this week:

• pack: what do I need to have with me? That would include a portion of the Word to meditate on, and my spiritual armor.
• pray: what do I need to say to God and hear from God about this day? This would include a private worship time.
• plan: plan my itinerary, knowing that God has gone before, and looking to follow Him in the way.

As I read the reflections of others on the soul languages of space and time, I see many like myself who don’t relate to the cyclical weekly/yearly view of time Dan talks about in the video. We experience God in specific remembered moments. We also see this in the Old Testament, when the Patriarchs would build altars at spots where they experienced God in a significant way. It occurs to me that these spots of time are what happens between us and God, usually in solitude, and usually when he is revealing Himself on a very personal level.  In contrast, the cyclical times are for communal worship. They are public reminders of the covenant God has made with the community of believers. For those of us who did not grow up as believers in a church family, it is harder to make those heart connections with the church year. I wanted to make those connections more real to my children, but the churches we have attended have not emphasized the church year and it just has not “stuck” very well to try to do them on our own in our family. I’m excited to see what kind of creative projects will come out of this course – maybe it will be something that will help make this kind of time a soul-language for those of us that don’t relate!

We know that Jesus could heal from a distance. He could have said, “be healed,” and never had to touch the man. But the Bible tells us that Jesus was “filled with compassion” for him. The leper didn’t just need physical healing – he needed emotional and spiritual healing as well. He had been a social/spiritual outcast for who knows how long. So when Jesus said, I am willing, he meant, I am willing to touch you. I am willing to pay the social/ceremonial price for healing you. So he touched the man, and the man was healed!

Now why didn’t Jesus want him to tell people about his healing? (Mk 1:43-44).  I have mostly heard this explained that the large crowds would keep him from being able to go into the city. But I’m not sure that is it. I think that Jesus knew that if the word got around that he had touched a leper, he would be quarantined and forced to stay out in the waste places for 14 days. Jesus healed the leper. Jesus was NOT contaminated. He knew it, and the leper knew it. But did the people in the city know it? NO, the religious leaders and those who did not believe in Him would not believe that he was undefiled. They would insist that Jesus stay outside the city. And that is just what happened. The healed man told everyone what had happened, and Mark tells us that Jesus “could no longer publicly enter a city, but stayed out in unpopulated areas; and they were coming to him from everywhere” (Mk 1:45). Yet the next chapter tells us that he was able to come back to Capernaum “several days afterward” (Mk 2:1). Did his power to draw crowds become any less? No. Than why was he able to come home when before he needed to stay outside the city? Such is the power of legalism and unbelief (and ceremonial law), that even though Jesus was obviously NOT going to become leprous or spread the disease (he healed the guy), he was forced to remain in quarantine. But those who needed healing and who were desperate for the true spiritual life came to him anyway. They got it in a way the religious leaders did not.

This insight really touched me, in that it showed the depth of Jesus’s compassion, and the utter wordliness of the Pharisses and other religious leaders of the time. He was willing to minister to the leper’s deepest needs, even at the cost of being misunderstood by the religious elite, and of great inconvenience to himself. Do I have that kind of compassion? Alternatively, am I as wordly as those who completely missed Jesus’s life-giving power because of religious prejudices?

I had never thought of time or space as a soul language, so this has been an interesting lesson for me. I grew up in Ohio in a very unbelieving household, but as a child I remember loving nature. Nature is an amalgam of time and space: wandering in the red-leafed woods of autumn, watching snow fall in the light of streetlamps, smelling the lilac bushes burst in bloom, and biking out to the river in the heat of summer and skipping stones in the shallows; these are my favorite childhood memories, times when I was alone and at peace with the universe. I had a vague notion of God, so I wouldn’t have called such times “worship” – but I think they were, really.

We moved to Tucson when I was in high school, and my love of nature continued in the two seasons we have here: summer and hell (sorry – Tucson joke). Seriously, the grey and purple craggy mountains, the wide deep blue sky, the delicate greens and browns of the desert, all ministered to my soul. My favorite worship times are still out of doors, especially with a view of the mountains or the ocean. The mountains and the ocean give me that sense of the majesty of God that leads me to worship.

The churches I have attended since becoming a Christian 30 years ago have been very utilitarian spaces, and being a good Puritan, I thought that churches should be utilitarian, and that spending money on stained glass and worship spaces was wasteful and sort of idolatrous. Then I entered a cathedral for the first time, in England about four years ago.  The feeling of awe was incredible. So now I have mixed feelings. I think we should be extravagant in our worship, and perhaps my former attitude was like that of the disciples who chided Mary Magdalene for pouring the precious ointment over Jesus’ feet.