The Liturgy, no. 2: The Word of God, Howard Thurman, and Transformation
"Will you come and follow me and never be the same?"
Ms. Pamela Winders taught me civics in high school and was one of my favorite teachers. She spoke Mandarin fluently and always alluded to some fascinating life before teaching without going into detail. This caused my adolescent brain to conjure fantastical images of her as an undercover secret agent sent to our small town on a particular assignment. More importantly, she introduced me to the intricate system of government that comprises the United States of America. She stressed that a bedrock principle of the American republic is the system of three co-equal branches of the federal government: the legislative, the judicial, and the executive. Despite what our politics often resemble, Ms. Winders argued that the framers of the Constitution envisioned a republic with checks and balances to ensure equality and proper working order among the constituent, co-equal parts. The balance enables proper function.
As we journey through the liturgy, it is crucial to understand that balance enables proper function. The eucharistic liturgy comprises two co-equal parts: Word and Sacrament. The two exist in relationship to one another. You can’t have one without the other. In the famous Emmaus Road story in the Gospel of Luke, the grieving disciples hear the Word as the stranger-turned-Jesus discusses the Torah and the Prophets, but they only know it through the breaking of bread. We’ll return to the breaking of bread later. For now, I want to focus on the first portion: the Word.
The Word—or λόγος in Greek—is an essential concept in the Christian tradition. Genesis 1 tells us that God creates by speaking, and John 1:1, a creative midrash Genesis 1 in light of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, tells us not only that “the Word was with God and the Word was God,” but that “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Jesus is the creative voice of God that makes things happen: light, order, and beauty. Thus, referring to the first portion of the liturgy as “The Word of God” says a lot. This is not the preshow or the opening act to the Sacrament. In part of the liturgy we call “The Word of God,” we encounter the Word of God who gets things done; however, this time, the theater of God’s creative action is not a primordial, dark, chaotic, watery abyss. Our hearts are. The prayers, the readings from scripture, the creed, the confession, all of it is part of a liturgy that brings us face-to-face with a God who, like a divine Marie Kondo, wants to organize and order us out of our self-destructive impulses.
This transformation happens didactically (teaching us through lessons) and charismatically. The didactic quality of liturgy is deceptively straightforward. We listen to scripture, sermons, and a few rather pointed prayers, and we can better understand what we’re supposed to do (or not do). Actually doing it (or not doing it) is another story. I say “deceptively” because much of the didactic power of the Word of God is beneath the surface when we wrestle with the anti-heroes of the Bible or hard ethical questions. Amy-Jill Levine says, while discussing parables, that these stories are meant to shake up our ethical calculus. We’re supposed to be uncomfortable. However, rather than sit in the discomfort, we explain away the discomfort, turning transformative stories of divine encounter into banal, antiquated fairy tales. We’ll reflect more on the power of the interpretation of scripture in a few weeks.
The charismatic quality of liturgy is less clear, especially to those who like their religion from the neck up. The Word of God works on us by the power of the Spirit. It’s not simply the words. It’s also the experience.
In the liturgy, we are gathered by the Holy Spirit with the people of God around ancient and living scriptures given to us by our faithful ancestors across time and space who themselves have wrestled with God and with whom we are now in divine conversation, all focused on the super-reality of Jesus Christ whose resurrection grants the past new meaning and the future new hope.
The Church argues—and schisms—about the presence of Jesus in the Sacrament, but we seldom focus on the presence of Jesus as the Word. In the Word of God, we are brought face-to-face with God. Like Isaiah, the only thing we can truthfully say in the face of God is, “Woe to me! I am ruined!” (Isaiah 6:5). It is easy to get stuck at “woe is me,” which likely explains why we are so hesitant to go there in the first place. We prefer our religion to be easy and comfortable, not to rock our boat too much while completely disrupting the lives of those we think deserve it more than we do. Genesis and John remind us that the purpose of the Word is not woe, but transformation and renewal. John 3:17 says, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
Howard Thurman’s The Creative Encounter is easily top-5 of the most transformative theological books I’ve ever read. Thurman, a mystic, spends much of this book reflecting on what it means to encounter God. I want to share a portion of this book with you to help us think through the implications of encountering God in the Word.
Religious experience in its profoundest dimension is the finding of man by God and the finding of God by man. This is the inner witness. The moral quality is mandatory because the individual must be genuine in his preparation and in his motivation and in his response. His faith must be active and dynamic. …the individual enters the experience and/or the preparation for it with the smell of life heavy upon him. He has in him all his errors and blindness, his raw conscience and his scar tissues, all his loves and hates. In fact, all that he is as he lives life is with him in this experience. It is in his religious experience that he sees himself from another point of view. In a very real sense stripped of everything and he stands with no possible protection from the countenance of the Other. The things of which he is stripped are not thrown away. They are merely laid aside and with infinite patience they are seen for what they are. It is here that the great decision is made as to what will be kept and what will be discarded. A man may take a whole lifetime to put away a particular garment forever. The new center is found, and it is often like giving birth to a new self. It is small wonder that so much is made in the Christian religion of the necessity of rebirths. There need not be only one single rebirth, but again and again a man may be reborn until at last there is nothing that remains between him and God.
There is so much here to highlight, but allow me to highlight a few key points:
Whether we like it or not, God sees all of us. Nothing is hidden. Just ask Jonah. We’ll engage this more deeply when we look at the Collect of Purity in a few weeks.
Liturgy (or what Thurman calls “the religious experience”) allows us to see ourselves from another point of view—namely, God’s. We see how profoundly God loves us, how much we often leave beneath that love, and how God rescues us again and again from our most self-destructive impulses.
Liturgy facilitates a process of complete transformation. We are reborn again and again.
To encounter the Word is to be transformed, bit by bit until we are made new. When we hold up our cynicism to God’s faithfulness, our selfishness to God’s generosity, and our bitterness to God’s compassion, we are given the opportunity to hand over the thing that we grasp as we cannot live without it to receive something much better in return.
The Gospel of John tells us the story of a man who was born lame and who was laid by the Pool of Bethesda for decades, surviving on the pity of others. Jesus sees him, knows how long he has been there, and asks him, “Do you want to be made well?” The man responds, “We’ll, I’ve tried, but I am not fast enough to get into the pool when the water is troubled.” This proves to Jesus his willingness to be healed. He tried and failed, but he was committing to continuing to try. Jesus commands him to “stand up, take your mat, and walk,” and instantly, he is healed. These details lead me to believe that this story would’ve turned out differently if the man had responded to Jesus’s question, “Do you want to be made well?” by saying, “No,” or “I’ve never tried.” The man’s willingness and effort, insufficient though it was, was the opening that enabled his transformation.
The Word of God poses a similar question to us: do you want to be healed? Are we willing to stand and walk? Are we willing to take on a new identity? Are we willing and ready to leave that garment or that burden behind? Are we willing to hold that experience up to the scrutiny of God’s love so we can be healed? What about our addiction, our pain, our grudges? Do we want to be healed? We may fail. Like Thurman says, it may take us an entire lifetime to lay down what ails us; but, as a mentor once shared, “God asks for faithfulness, not success.”
We encounter the voice of God made flesh in Jesus in the part of the liturgy we call “The Word of God.” Hebrew 3:15, borrowing from Psalm 95, says, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.” Keeping a soft heart can be difficult, particularly in a cynical and often painful world. We also know from the Parable of the Prodigal (Luke 15:11-32) that it is possible to be physically present and still be closed off to love. I see it all the time—people who want the soothing rhythms of the Christian religion (hymns, familiar stories, rituals, etc.) without any interest in its more profound call to new life. It’s like dying of thirst while sitting beside a refreshing oasis.
The internal balance of the liturgy—Word and Sacrament—allows us to see what is right in front of us—a river of living water. It allows us to sufficiently contemplate our need for solace and pardon, but also strength and renewal. Jesus—the Eternal Word of God—calls us to deeper life: to love, to service, to joy, to peace. The journey begins by turning our attention to him, and it is to this turning that we will devote our reflection next week.
Questions to think about this week:
Where do I encounter the voice of God in my life?
What part of me or my experience am I not yet ready to surrender to God’s love? How can I offer it to God?
How can I shift my thinking from seeing the first half of the liturgy as the “preshow” to seeing it as a co-equal part of the whole liturgy? How might this shift my experience?