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.