"Is anyone thirsty? Come and drink-even if you have no money! Come, take your choice of wine or milk! Why spend your money on food that does not give you strength? Why pay for food that does you no good? Listen, and I will tell you where to get food that is good for the soul!"
--Isaiah 55, verses 1-2
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I remember the first time I went to a Unitarian Universalist church on a Sunday morning, looking for nourishment to feed my hungry spirit. From a young age, I have loved Sunday mornings (even when I was not fond of the meaning or message). After several years of disenchantment with Protestant churches, I was craving religious community.
This was before most churches had websites, so I found the address of the church in the phone book. I showed up just a few minutes before 11:00. You see, I didn't want to have to actually talk to anyone this first time - I was just checking it out and hoped to sneak in to the back and see what it was like. Little did I know that the service started at 10:00.
I was flabbergasted. 10:00? What kind of church was this? Every church I'd ever gone to growing up held their service at 11:00, not 10:00. What were they thinking? I high-tailed it out of there before anyone spoke to me.
I was a bit naïve back then. But reflecting back, this was the first signal that what Unitarian Universalists do on Sunday morning would be different than my expectations - different from what I had experienced in those Protestant churches. Obviously, I tried that UU church again. And absolutely loved it. I found the food that would sustain my spirit.
Some churches call what we do on Sunday mornings the Service, or the Program. Here, we call it our Celebration of Life. But regardless of what we call it, I believe that the act that we engage in is, at it's core, worship.
We have many people in our congregations who shy away from the word worship. Some of us have had horrible experiences in the churches of our youth and prefer not to use language that reminds of those experiences. Some of us want to be intentionally set apart from other religious organizations that use the term, to be different. Since we are not worshipping anything, since there is no object of our worship, some of us object to use the word on general principle.
At it's root, however, worship is not a transitive verb that requires an object to be worshiped. You can take God out of worship, and it can still be worship. Trust me - even some fundamentalist churches have done this!
The word "Worship" comes from woerth-scrippten, which means to scoop worth. Or, in more contemporary language, to shape, or be shaped by, that which is of worth. To shape, or be shaped by that which is of worth. Because I believe that what we do here is of value, is of worth, I've become more comfortable with the term. Scooping worth together, isn't that we do here on Sunday mornings? We gather to explore, to share, to connect, to learn, to be challenged, to be comforted, to be nourished - our hunger and thirst quenched. Or, in the words from our anthem, we seek the truth that lies in our hearts' sequestered chambers. All of these are ways of finding that which is of worth, that which is of value. So when you hear me refer to "worship," or see "Call to Worship" at the start of the service, know that this is my understanding of what we are doing: we are coming together to scoop worth; to dig our hands into the existential muck, to find and pull out what has value. Our service, our Celebration of Life, our worship gives us a place to shape, and be shaped by, that which is of worth.
No matter what you call it, however, what we do on Sunday mornings is the central activity of our Unitarian Universalists congregations. The Reverend Kendyl Gibbons, minister of First Unitarian Society in Minneapolis and a staunch humanist, puts it this way: "Worship is participation in a community's intentional creation of a dramatic, symbolic work of art which represents what is real and valuable in this world."
When we gather for worship, we do so believing, hoping, that we can create a place to bring our full selves to be present with one another: to set apart a place and time where we can simply be. For some of us, there aren't many places where we can set down our to-do list and be quiet for a moment, where we can take off the masks that we wear every other day and allow ourselves to be whole, to be vulnerable.
I, personally, am a cry-er - y'all know this after the last two weeks. When I was a layperson, I used to cry during worship, pretty much every week. It didn't matter what the topic of the sermon was - that wasn't usually what made me cry. It was the poignancy, the tender relief of being in a safe place with other people who shared similar values and hopes for the world. The opening words would touch me, and I would cry. Or something shared during joys and sorrows. Or what the choir sang. But most often, it was the hymns. To sing my hopes and fears, joys and anguish, and to hear other people singing the same words, feeling many of the same feelings; I would become overwhelmed with tenderness, and would cry. I let down my guard that I carefully kept up the rest of the week, and I let the cares of the world, the vulnerability of this life, touch my heart and my spirit. Touch in me love, and passion; pain and pleasure, grief, and comfort.
The Reverend Forrest Church talked about the difference between religious experience and worship. He said that we can have a religious experience anywhere, anytime, without warning: on Sunday mornings, during worship, or while walking in the woods, while looking into the eyes of a child, or by feeling connected to all of life during meditation. What we try to do in worship is create a safe place where people can respond to these experiences, to process them, to feel them. Part of our religious heritage is giving people the tools to handle responses to powerful moments: whether they occur on Sunday morning, or outside of it.
This is one of the main differences between what happens during worship and what happens during a secular production. During worship we work with religious experience, we examine the great religious and philosophical questions of life: Why are we here? What gives life meaning? How should we live, knowing that one day, we will die?
Many people used to refer to what Unitarian Universalists do on Sunday mornings as "a lecture and a concert" or as a "hymn sandwich." But this belies the difference between worship and a secular production. Worship is the unique function of a congregation. There are lots of other things a church does, but there are other bodies in our communities that can serve the same function: social justice organizations, community building organizations, coffee shops and other venues. Therefore, the approach that we take to social justice work and the rest of our endeavors outside of worship should somehow be informed by the fact that worship is the uniqueness of what our community is about. It becomes an informing metaphor: For example we do something differently than a secular body does in the community around social justice issues, because we are coming out of a religious tradition that is formed by our memory and expectation that we come together as a congregation on Sunday mornings to shape, and be shaped by, that which is of worth . Our worship necessarily has a tangible result in how we live our lives. Because we worship together, we participate in the larger community differently than a club or social organization.
Sometimes, what we do on Sunday morning may look very similar to what happens in a secular production. For example, when we have a guest speaker who is also a public speaker outside of our tradition, or when we put on a dramatic presentation of a play. The difference is that when we do something like this in the context of worship, it is not just our attention to details or, in the case of a play, not just the suspension of disbelief - there is also a discipline of meaning - that we experience something going on that explicitly relates to what has meaning in the world, to what has worth and value.
The question then arises: if this is how we differ from a secular production, how then do we differ from other religious traditions? How is what we do on Sunday morning different, besides not having an object to be worshiped?
When I was in a protestant church, one of my favorite things was communion. I loved the ritual in it, and was profoundly moved by the connection I would feel with the congregation and with the divine. It also meant the sermon would be shorter, which I also appreciated.
I would eagerly await those Sundays in which communion was to happen - it usually worked out to once a month or even once every 6 weeks. I was jealous of my Catholic friends for whom the mass occurs as often as they want. For Catholics, the Eucharist, Communion, is the central event during worship.
But the strand of Protestantism that Unitarians and Universalists come from recognizes the sermon as the central part of the worship service. The minister stands at the pulpit and imparts his (usually his) wisdom about God's word, and those of you in the pews are expected to listen and then to agree. There is little room for doubt, for your own opinions, or for disagreement.
In our living, growing, changing tradition, the sermon is not the last word. Thank goodness! Unitarian Minister Ralph Waldo Emerson idealized that a good preacher passes to her congregation "life passed through the fire of thought." That what you hear in a sermon may not be new to you, but you may not have organized, processed, and thought about the subject as formally as it is presented in the sermon.
David Bumbaugh, Universalist Minister and worship professor at Meadville Lombard seminary, says that "in our tradition the sermon is never the last word on any subject" and that as we preach, the words we have offered are given over to the people to do with as you will (and we sure hope you will!). Like a poem, a sermon will take on a life of its own as you hear, process, interpret it.
Indeed, for our Unitarian Universalist tradition, it seems that rather than one piece of the service being the pinnacle, instead the entire service we present is our sacred endeavor: something those of us crafting worship ideally approach with reverence and respect.
Unitarian Universalist seminarian David Pyle was raised Southern Baptist. He shares that, in his experience, there was "no doubt where the sermon rested in [his] religious life. What Brother John said from the pulpit might as well have been from Moses holding the Ten Commandments, or from St. Peter just out of conference with Jesus. There was no room for doubt, there was little room for [his] own opinions, and the stories [his] mind made up to distract [him] from the sermon were the source of both guilt and frustration."
David shares with us the story of how , when he first started attending a Unitarian Universalist church, he was confused enough to the point that he left for a while. When he came back, he realized that he had missed that what the services were asking from him was completely different than what had been expected in the Baptist tradition. David points out that, in our living tradition, the power of worship and of the sermon in particular "lies not on the pulpit, and not on paper, but in the space between the pulpit and the pew, in the space between the open heart of the minister and the open hearts of the congregation. It is in that ...relationship between [us] that worship occurs."
When I create a Celebration of Life, I pay attention to how each piece fits together, how it all flows, hoping to create space for you to shape, and be shaped by, that which has meaning. I hope that you will feel safe enough to engage in something that has deeper, richer meaning than a secular production, and I don't expect mine to be the last word on the subject, but instead hope to spark that creative flame in you. David Pyle entreats those of us participating in worship to "open [our] heart as far as [we] can. Visualize, remember experiences and stories from your life, feel the emotions that flow through you… After the sermon, don't just say to the preacher "Great Sermon!"", he says, instead, "Tell them [a] story you remembered, or describe the emotions you felt."
In Unitarian Universalist worship, the entire service might be considered our sacrament, the most sacred thing we do together. Ideally, it can enable us to connect with the sacred, or to reflect on that connection in the context of community - to allow ourselves to shape and be shaped by that which is of worth.
When we worship, we enact of our living tradition. We gather on Sunday mornings because doing so has inherent value. It is communal, intentional, symbolic and alive. We worship because it gives us a place to reflect on what it means to be human and living these brief lives that we live. We do it because it allows us a quiet space where we can let down our guard, where we can be with others of similar values and ideals, where we can cry tears of sorrow, or joy, frustration or relief. May our hungry and thirsty souls find relief in this holy act we create together.
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