OUR WAY OF WORSHIP
This is adapted from a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Thomas D. Wintle,
Senior Minister of the First Parish Church in Weston, Massachusetts.
The scripture readings were Jeremiah 7:1-7 and John 4:5-30.
“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn.4.24).

I.

One part of our new members class is often an exercise in which I ask the participants to write down a list, from memory, of the parts of our worship service. After we collectively outline the service, I then ask these prospective members to go through the list and mark the parts they especially like with a plus-sign, the parts they dislike with a minus-sign, and the parts they don’t understand with a question-mark.

It always leads to a fascinating discussion. I’ve been doing this for a number of years, and I can tell you that the only consistent response I’ve noticed is that the collection never gets a plus-mark!

This morning I want to talk about why we worship the way we do – how I see the meaning of the parts of the service – and to offer some thoughts on how we might get the most out of “our way of worship.” And I will tell you what is MY favorite part of the service.

Let me begin with three general comments. First, our worship is historical – we are not just any group of people gathered for whatever strikes our fancy, we are not a school or a public library; we have roots, over 300 years of roots. We utilize the words and melodies, the myths and symbols, the stained glass and the furniture of the Christian tradition to give us our common language, and we are formed and informed by the interpretations given by those who preceded us here. We are Protestant, Puritan, Unitarian, Christian in our worship. Not to mention almost irretrievably Yankee!

Secondly, our worship is free. This is the great gift of our Unitarian history. We are not straitjacketed by any creeds or doctrinal formulas. You may disagree with the sermon, and be thought no less a member in good standing. You may pray or not pray, you may sing well or you may mumble in your beard.

Finally, our worship is participatory; it is congregational. This is the great gift of the Puritans. Worship here is not a show conducted up in front by a priest; it is not a lecture or a concert or a performance we observe passively; but rather it is an act of a people. Like a play, we all have some parts, and thereby we constitute ourselves as a community and give a meaning to the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

So what do we do? Let’s walk through the Order of Service.

II.

The service begins with an always-magnificent musical Prelude. This is a time to begin the process of unwinding, of getting in mood for reflection. It can also be a time for personal assessment and interior preparation – to ask “what do I bring here this morning?” “what sort of person have the events of the past week made me?” I came upon this prayer written by a woman in a Unitarian congregation in Boston before the Sunday service began; she wrote:

Thank you Lord for the beauty of this place, and for the generations of those whose caring preserved it. Thank you for the privilege of worshipping here, for the aura of reverence here, for the freedom of choice permitted and the fostering of friendship engendered here. Thank you for the lives of those now living who encourage me to be my best. Bless and help those close to me in need of divine strength, and those in tune with people’s dilemmas who share their own strength. May my mind be receptive, my heart responsive, and my spirit fortified here today. Amen.

Next, we gather our individual selves into a community by singing together the Processional Hymn – the choir literally, and we figuratively, march in singing! It is intentionally upbeat, a song of praise.

The hymn is followed by the Call to Worship – a responsive call read by minister and congregation alternating lines, for it is not the minister alone, but you also, that causes this gathering to occur. We also greet one another with the ancient words of Christian greeting and prayer – “The peace of God be with you / And also with you” – praying that together we might speak and act in a way that recognizes and honors the divine presence among us.

And have you ever noticed how our worship both begins and ends with an emphasis on peace, peace in our world and peace in our souls. There is more to our gathering, we hope, than you and me alone. Thus there is also an opening prayer and the Lord’s Prayer, perhaps stating our purpose and asking the blessing of God on our worship. The Lord’s Prayer is a constant, familiar and known by heart, not requiring prayerbook or order of service. Saying it may be something like the Pledge of Allegiance or the National Anthem at a ballgame – it identifies us, it makes us comfortable. My own experience is that the presence of the Lord’s Prayer in the Sunday service of Unitarian churches is often a pretty good indicator of whether that church still takes its Christian tradition seriously in other ways as well.

After the opening exercises, there are often special, occasional, elements – children’s stories, special anthems by one of our children’s choirs, or today’s celebrations for our eighth graders and our new members. The anthems or hymns at this point are usually music for centering, for turning inward for reflection, a transition from the communal expressions of praise and hope to the occasions for individual thought.

We listen next to the Readings. The readings in a worship service are not just anything-of-interest, they are not there for entertainment, and they are certainly not there to illustrate a minister’s sermon. They serve a much more important function. The Bible is the Church’s story, and it is the regular telling of that story which gives a church its identity through time. Rather than the readings illustrating the minister’s sermon, it SHOULD work the other way around – the readings are the Word that contain truth greater than minister or congregation, truth that challenges and judges, truth that inspires and instructs. It’s not that every biblical word is the literal word of God; the old Universalists had a better way of phrasing it – the words of the Bible, they said, CONTAIN the Word of God, and it is our task to hear it.

And as someone once said, it’s not that WE keep the Bible, but that the Bible keeps US – keeps calling us to be the kind of people we ought to be.

In between the lessons, we often read responsively from the Psalms. Do you know that these are the most ancient parts in our service – the book of Psalms was the hymnal of the ancient Jewish synagogues. Our Puritan ancestors here used the psalms as their only songs. In fact, “to know and love the Psalms” was for centuries the mark of being a Protestant. The psalms are also, it seems to me, one of the most human parts of the Bible, expressing not always inspiration but also sometimes pain and doubt and fear. The translation we have been using here is a modern, inclusive-language version, which is why sometimes-familiar phrases seem different. We also occasionally use responsive readings of modern, even secular, poetry.

The Sermon is, historically, the most important part of Protestant worship. Sometimes it is for teaching, sometimes for inspiration, but usually it is the explorations of a fellow searcher, one who like you is wrestling with the questions of faith and hope and love in a world that often seems to offer everything else but faith and hope and love. Carl Scovel says that writing sermons is simple – you just sit down at the typewriter and cut open a vein! I know that you HOPE for good preaching, I can tell you that I PRAY for it!

A good sermon leads appropriately into the next part of the service – the Pastoral Prayer. This was, to the Puritans, the point in which communion with God was believed to be most fully enjoyed (and, consequently, it often lasted for half-an-hour or longer!). In terms of length, we are not so favored today, but the purpose is still the same: the Minister seeks to express, to give voice to, the concerns of the congregation, and the prayers often do very much reflect what is happening in people’s lives during the week, both directly and more often indirectly. This church has the good custom of a period of silence following the spoken prayer, so that we might become much more specific and personal in our own prayers. The choral responses and anthems here are also intended to be prayers, prayers that sing their way to God, that express things in ways that the spoken word alone cannot do.

I haven’t yet mentioned my favorite part of the service. It comes next – believe it or not, it is the Offertory. (No, the treasurer did not tell me to say that). The offertory is really a three-fold offering: there are announcements, which often speak of opportunities to offer yourself, your time and energy to various good projects; there is the collection, which invites us to give away something of our treasure and offers us in return the incomparable gift of feeling like a generous person; but it is the third, unspoken, aspect of the offertory that I think is the most important – you see, right there, after the readings and the sermon and the prayers, the Offertory asks you to do the one thing that shows the impact of worship itself: to offer yourself, your very life, in service to the world, in the spirit of Jesus Christ. As Jeremiah issued the word of the Lord in the gates of the temple: we dwell properly in this place only when you act justly with one another, do not oppress, and do not seek after strange gods. Do you see what I mean? Worship is not an end in itself, rather its importance lies in what we do the rest of the week.

The worship then ends fairly quickly: a closing hymn, which as one of my colleagues puts it, says that “however the sermon came out, we are still together as a congregation.” We greet one another as we did at the beginning, wishing the ancient greeting of the Peace to one another. The Benediction – which means simply “a good word” – offers some closing words, technically a “charge” or a “dismissal” that, in so many ways, sum up what we are all about (“Go forth into the world in peace . . .”), and also a blessing (“The grace of our Lord . . .”) – a prayer which summarizes for me the great gifts of God which I wish for each of you.

III.

There is one final comment I want to make about our worship. Some parts of the service will not be as meaningful to you as other parts. That’s alright. They may be meaningful to the person sitting next to you.

I’ve never forgotten the story a minister told about attending church with the woman who later became his wife soon after he had graduated from seminary. He was sitting through the service thinking, of course, how he could have done this or that so much better, and after the pastoral prayer he turned to his date to tell her what a terrible job the minister had done – and he saw that the prayer had so affected her that tears were streaming down her face. He did not give his critique that day, instead learning something important about worship.

I’ve learned it too, and I will tell you: something happens to words in a worship service when they’re in that space between the speaker’s mouth and your ears. Sometimes they become jumbled, but sometimes there is grace – and you hear perhaps not even what the speaker said but rather something you needed to hear, and it becomes in you a word of comfort or inspiration, of confession or challenge. Sometimes, like the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, we come asking the wrong questions but are still met by one who knows our souls and our mistakes and loves us anyway.

My friends, God is at work in our worship. But we need to be attentive. God is not rude, and seldom interrupts our preoccupations. The messages from God are there, but we need to remember, with Albert Einstein, that “God is subtle.”

Let us worship attentively, in spirit and in truth.