Children of Royalty
Dee, Thank you for your reflection this week. I feel torn between two realities. I think that indeed we celebrate the Lord’s Day and resurrection every day with joy and wonder and the pattern of the liturgical year also helps us prepare (both worshippers and worship leaders), focus and celebrate in ways that maybe we don’t every Sunday! Probably some where in the middle would benefit our worship…more attention to weekly preparation for a celebrative Sunday and less fanfare on Easter….not the same…just maybe a little closer together.
Another challenge for most contemporary Christians is that we don’t worship as a community every day. Daily prayer and communal worship allows us to pray through the nuances of life and the Gospel…both the highs and the lows. If we did this we could really then “interrupt” our daily worship and proclaim hope and resurrection in the midst of lament, sorrow, temptation, anger, contemplation. This is how it should be. In the Early Church, these faithful disciples met daily for table fellowship and talked about life and knelt to pray…but on Sunday they stood (no kneeling allowed) because they were not servants of the Sovereign, they were children of Royalty and rejoiced!
I become concerned with Praise services that only celebrate the exuberance of the resurrection without any daily worship. The message is rejoice, rejoice, rejoice! Oh, and by the way, if you’re angry, depressed or grieving and don’t feel like coming…well come back when you do. The body of Christ is fractured. So many people I know disappear when life gets tough and they need their spiritual community. And yet they don’t feel “up enough” to worship. How can we make room for all in our weekly worship? How do we welcome those who grieve, those who lament, those who are feeling abandoned and still celebrate with Easter joy?
I pray that we can encourage more daily worship within the family, little groups in the church, between friends as well as craft worship that balances both the joy of kingdom come and the reality of sorrow and suffering not done. -Julie
Another challenge for most contemporary Christians is that we don’t worship as a community every day. Daily prayer and communal worship allows us to pray through the nuances of life and the Gospel…both the highs and the lows. If we did this we could really then “interrupt” our daily worship and proclaim hope and resurrection in the midst of lament, sorrow, temptation, anger, contemplation. This is how it should be. In the Early Church, these faithful disciples met daily for table fellowship and talked about life and knelt to pray…but on Sunday they stood (no kneeling allowed) because they were not servants of the Sovereign, they were children of Royalty and rejoiced!
I become concerned with Praise services that only celebrate the exuberance of the resurrection without any daily worship. The message is rejoice, rejoice, rejoice! Oh, and by the way, if you’re angry, depressed or grieving and don’t feel like coming…well come back when you do. The body of Christ is fractured. So many people I know disappear when life gets tough and they need their spiritual community. And yet they don’t feel “up enough” to worship. How can we make room for all in our weekly worship? How do we welcome those who grieve, those who lament, those who are feeling abandoned and still celebrate with Easter joy?
I pray that we can encourage more daily worship within the family, little groups in the church, between friends as well as craft worship that balances both the joy of kingdom come and the reality of sorrow and suffering not done. -Julie
posted by Rick at 3:52 PM
2 Comments:
No, Julie, thank you. Your piece is very helpful. We've been talking about doing weekday worship on three different days around here, and your thoughts help seal the commitment, as far as I am concerned. Our idea has been to do one morning worship, one mid day worship, and one evening worship. Then, after trying that for awhile, we might change the format until we hit on something meaningful on its own right and popular among the people -- popular being 12 peoople or so.
And another thought. Sometimes, more by the Spirit's intervention than by careful planning, we are able to pull off Sunday morning worship services that are really sad or meditative in tone and they prove profoundly moving. People like them, or atleast some folks tell me they do. I think they respond for the reasons you suggest, that their own sadness or whatever is being valued and they appreciate that. Maybe ramping up Sunday worship on days other than Easter means that that we ramp "down" every now and then, into the depths, acknowledging pain and separation and loss where so many people live so much of the time. It is to keep Good Friday connected to Easter on a more consistent basis. To use your word, Easter would be the "interruption" to how life so often goes.
Weekday, even daily public prayer would be best; but failing that, a variety of liturgical moods interspersed throughout the year might work as a back-up strategy.
Thanks again.
Dee
When I was in Gainesville, FL (sing: “Long, long ago; long, long ago), we had daily prayer at First Presbyterian Church—at least Monday through Friday—at noon in the chapel. We were experimenting with being what we called a “metropolitan church,” that is a church for the larger community. So, we offered prayers both to the community and for the community each day at noon. I think I still have the order we used somewhere, and if I could find it, I might be able to figure out how we cobbled it together. I know we used the daily lectionary as our Scripture “source.”
There were three ministers on the staff at that time, so it was reasonably easy to cover three days a week, whether anyone else came to prayers or not. And frequently no one else did come. Still, we stood up and read scripture and prayed aloud, as if the hosts were there. And, often it felt—empty or a scattered few—as if they were.
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