Worship in the Broken Places

The Dream: 

I was touched on the face by a small, old woman who, by the smell and look of it, hadn't showered in weeks. Her feet were bare on the cold ground and rags covered her body. "Dear," she said, "could you help me? I've been hurt, I'm cold, and I am alone."
I could not deny that my first reaction was to jump back, give her a piece of my mind, and ask her why she had gotten herself in that situation, but I simply stared at her, unmoving.
"I see the confusion in your eyes, dear," she said, her voice cracking. "You are wondering why I would choose to live this way. You are wondering what I must have done. You are wondering if any of the money that you have in your pocket will go towards food or clothing, or if it will fund alcohol or drugs."
I stood there dumbfounded, unable to move. Her hand still on my cheek.
"Dear," she whispered, "I once had a family. I once had love. I once had safety. And I was robbed of all of those things. All I ask for is empathy. Judgement is quick and painless for the judge, but it leads to a life of misery for those who recieve it. Empathy is difficult and painful, but leads to change. Which will you give me?"
As her eyes searched mine, I awoke with the thought ringing through my brain:

It's easier to be judgmental than empathetic, but which one betters the human experience?

The Reality: 

It was a Thursday night and the worship team was chatting before practice while I got the sound system ready to go. We were practicing the music for the bi-monthly service of healing & renewal and the team was talking about lament in worship. And then I heard it from one of the team members:

"The Psalms remind us that we're allowed to lament - aloud."

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It really doesn't take much to get a song stuck in my head. My mind is wired to recognize tunes and throw words to them. But sometimes it's not a song that gets stuck in this ol' noggin of mine; sometimes it's sayings - and those two have been bouncing around my brain for a few days now. And when I sat down to write this post, it started as something completely different and didn't feel right. So I started over with those two things in mind. Then another question hit me, something that someone had asked me at one point in time when they heard parts of my story: "So you've been through so much - what do you think God wants you to do with it?"

And then I started to identify once again with the stories of women (and men) who are caught in abusive relationships, with people who haven't been in the situation tell them that all they have to do is leave, and the absolute insanity that is living in abuse. I empathize. And it hurts.

And I hear the stories of people who have seriously considered suicide to escape despair, depression, and the lies that their subconscious tells them. I empathize. And it hurts.

But what hurts even more is the worldly response to sin. Without the promise of a Savior who will come once again to right the wrongs of this world, there is no hope; however, the correct response to hopelessness is not making light of serious situations and trying to laugh through it.

The response to abuse in a hopeless situation is not to offer "support" by telling women to not walk alone or to "take the stairs". The response to thousands of people who have gotten out of abusive relationships and telling their harrowing stories of #WhyIStayed and #WhyILeft is not to use it as a marketing ploy so that people will buy more pizza.

Don't get me wrong - there is a time to laugh. There is absolutely a time to laugh. But as Ecclesiastes tells us, there is also a time to weep and a time to mourn (Ecc. 3:4).

And our laughter should not come at the expense of those who have been touched by sin in tragic and horrific ways. 

So what does this mean for our corporate times of worship?

It means that when we, as leaders, call the congregation to worship, we hold very closely to the balance that God is a good and loving and wonderful God who is to be praised for the good things He has given to us, AND that He is weeping with those who are weeping, mourning with those who are mourning, and comforting the afflicted. It means that we welcome ALL to worship and praise, even (and sometimes especially) those with tear-stained faces. It means that Christ has called those in need of a healer and those who are trapped in the cords of sin to the table - that He carries the broken, allows them to taste freedom and forgiveness.

Because grace means that we are carried to the table - a place that we don't belong.

It means that your leaders are as much effected by sin as those in the congregation.

But it also means that there is hope. And there is peace. And it means that sometimes I need to force myself to sing the words that are hard to sing because I know that by reaffirming truths about God and His goodness with the people around me, by reminding myself that God has not dropped me yet and will not drop me, even if it seems impossible, I will find hope. I will find peace. It might just be for a moment, but a moment of peace in the midst of chaos is a precious thing.

And please believe me when I say that I fully understand - it is difficult to raise your hands when you're flat on your back.

Please don't misunderstand me - I fully blelive that there are chemical imbalances that lead to depression, anxiety, and other disorders of the brain and they should be treated medically. I also fully believe that therapy is one of the best things ever - that having a therapist helps tremendously with dealing with life.

But when we're talking about brokenness in corporate worship, sometimes the thing that we need to do is to sing praise, to remind ourselves that God is good and loves us - especially when we don't feel it. I also firmly believe that Satan will do whatever he needs to do to take our focus off of the truth that God is in control, whether that be attacking our subconscious with lies that we don't matter, that God doesn't care, that life is hopeless or any other way. And sometimes praise, even with tears streaming down our faces, is necessary to bring a dot of light into a dark and broken place.

I also want to say this: as the body of Christ, we are called to tend to those parts that hurt. The example that always comes to mind for me is my ankles because I'm very very prone to rolling them. When I roll or sprain an ankle, it swells. That swelling is the reaction of my body to the injured part, sending extra fluid and white blood cells to aid in healing. Then why is it, in the Body of Christ, that I see more often than not a response of running away from injured members when the response should be running towards them (not literally, people. Don't stampede hurting people, please)?

Because empathy is hard. Sitting in silence, mourning with those who mourn, crying, all of that is tiring. Recently, one of my friends told me, "I can't say I understand. But I care so so much." And that's all I needed to hear. I didn't need a solution, I didn't need someone telling me their situation, I just needed to hear that someone cared.

Y'all, sin hurts. We live in a broken world. But we don't have to suffer alone; in that same breath, neither should we allow others to suffer alone. From personal experience, pain is a lot easier to deal with when I have people who are shouldering it with me. There is a time to laugh and dance, and in a broken world, laughter and dancing are also absolutely necessary. But let us remember to treat each other with grace and understanding, with open ears and care.

We are allowed to lament - aloud. We are allowed to feel the weight of sin and we are allowed to speak about it. We are also called to empathy, to being willing to hurt with someone, for that is the example of Christ, bearing ALL of the weight of sin for a broken people, walking towards the lepers, the adulterers, the liars, the thieves, and healing and forgiving them, inviting them to eat with Him. Taking their pain. And then, after doing all that, being nailed to a cross, being despised by the very ones that He loved.

Worship isn't just for the happy. Worship is for all.

"Come, ye sinners, poor and needy

Weak and wounded, sick and sore.

Jesus ready stands to save you

full of pity, love and pow'r.

Come ye thirsty come and welcome

God's free bounty glorify

True belief and true repentance

Every grace that brings you nigh.

Come ye weary, heavy laden

lost and ruined by the fall.

If you tarry till you're better

You will never come at all."

Joseph Hart

On Worship & Being Present

I was on my way to church on Sunday Morning and wanted to listen to something other than music. I pressed the "seek" button on my car's radio and a talk radio show came on. I'm generally not one to listen to talk radio much, but this particular segment caught my attention, simply because they were talking about something called, "The Kingdom of Ordinary Time."

As a student of worship, I recognized all of those words: in the Roman Catholic traditions, Ordinary Time is the largest season of the Church year - celebrated in between the baptism of Christ until Ash Wednesday and then the First Sunday after Pentecost until the First Sunday of Advent. In the Reformed Church, it's categorized as the "growth" season - its color is green. There are no holidays to be celebrated, no festivals to be had - it is quite literally, an ordinary time.

Unfortunately for the Church, the word "ordinary" very rarely exists as something good. We find beauty and awe in the extraordinary - the creation of the universe from absolutely nothing, God-turned-man in the form of a child, the death of Christ on the cross & His subsequent resurrection - all of these and many many more remarkable things are viewed as extraordinary, awe-inspiring, things to be celebrated. And then we hit Ordinary Time and it seems as though we plateau.

The author of the book "The Kingdom of Ordinary Time" is the current New York State Poet Laureate, Marie Howe. If you would like to listen to the 90 minute segment, you can do so here.

The thing that caught my attention, though, is the beauty in the details of ordinary time - from her poem, "Nowhere" - "This is how things happen, cup by cup, familiar gesture after familiar gesture. What else can we know of safety or of fruitfulness?"

And I'm reminded once again that sometimes ordinary is extraordinary. Ordinary is beautiful if we take the time to be present within it.

There is a danger in working in a church in what we call "vocational ministry" - your pastors, your youth directors, your music directors, etc - and that danger is looking forward. I find myself looking forward 80% of my time, thinking of the next song to teach the congregation, the next event  that needs to be planned, the next move towards church growth, the next season. For all intents and purposes, I'm planning Christmas and have been for two months. August was an incredibly stressful month because it included planning for September, the starting up of youth groups and Sunday School. Every season, I'm given a list of the pastor's sermon topics for the season and I try to figure out how best to re-emphasize the Word of God in music.

There is also a danger in being a part of a church - and that danger is looking back. I can't tell you how many times in the past four months I've heard the words, "Well this is the way we used to do it," or "back when so-and-so was the music director." There is the danger of idealizing the past, of thinking back to the "glory days" and if we could just go back to the way things were then we would have a larger church, more engaged youth, and things would be good. And I confess that I have been a member who has done this very thing on more than one occasion.

The tricky part of both of those things is that neither of them - looking forward nor looking back - are inherently bad. We take a look at the Psalms and see the words, "I remember your goodness when," or, "You have saved me."  We also see in Scripture the expection of deliverance - God's people trusting that He will bring a Savior or that Christ will return and the earth will be fully and completely reconciled to Himself. Those who read the Bible find that it is a very delicate balance of forward-thinking and remembering.

The problem comes, however, when we take those two things and live only within the confines of what will happen or what has happened based not on God's promises but upon our own preferences. Once we live in the confines of what has happened on the basis of our own preferences, we become resistant to change, resistant to hearing the voice of God in the right now. Once we live in the confines of what will happen based upon our preferences, we take control of the future and fully believe that we are the agents of change in the lives of the congregations in which we serve. I've seen it happen myself - church leadership trying to lead (read: drag) a backwards-facing church into a future that they cannot - will not - accept as a possiblility. In most cases, it never works out well for either the church or the leadership.

And that's where we hit a massive problem - because being present is uncomfortable.

Living in either the future or the past requires living in essentially a story of our own making. Since we have made the story ourselves, we are comfortable in it. Our preferences are in that story and in our story, we are gods. We  forget the parts that weren't so good about the "glory days" or we simply choose to believe that in our futures, people will agree with us because we are right.

But living in the present means getting uncomfortable, recognizing that we are not all-powerful, that we cannot control life, and that over the years, life has changed drastically. Being present means listening to those sitting in front of you or behind you or next to you or even in the "other" service. It means recognizing that people have different preferences than yourself and then celebrating the fact that we are all created differently and like different things and think different thoughts and that means that the God we serve is a very very big God. For the person who prefers drums and guitars was created as much in the image of God as the person who prefers organs and hymnbooks.

Being present means that we recognize what is going on in our churches, our communities, our governments, our world, and knowing that God is the God of all of them. Being present means that we take a long, hard look at today and hold to the promise that God will not drop us (future) because we are able to look back and see that He never has (past). It means getting involved in the lives of other church members, even if things like age, race, or gender seem to divide. It means taking an interest in people who look, act, and speak differently because you are able to celebrate that they are who they are because that is how God has shaped them. It means listening to the words of the new worship song and seeing how it fits with Scripture and the truths about God that God has revealed instead of tuning it out because it's not a hymn - or vice versa.

It means loving people for exactly who they are and not trying to mold them into your own image or the image of who they might be.

And that is incredibly uncomfortable.

So as we worship, if we look to the past or the future, let us look to those things on the basis of God's revealed truths about Himself instead of our preferences - but let us also remember to stay in the present, to enjoy the ordinary.

For it is in the Ordinary that we are challenged the most to grow.