It was just over a year ago, on the Sunday following the shootings in the Charleston church, when I did something in worship that I naively thought would be a one-time thing. Before standing up for the greeting, I began to sing some words written by Desmond Tutu that John Bell had set to music. As if from nowhere, my hesitant voice announced something many of us were struggling to remember, or to believe:
Goodness is stronger than evil;
Love is stronger than hate;
Light is stronger than darkness;
Life is stronger than death.
I remember singing it slowly at first, almost more of a question than an affirmation. And I waited far longer than intended at the end of each line.
When I sang the words a second time, I did so with a bit more conviction, especially as I realized that others from the congregation had joined their voices to mine. By the time we had finished singing that refrain several times, we sang with one voice. And even with our broken hearts, we managed to lift a song large enough to hold our grief and our confession and our hope.
But that way of beginning worship has become commonplace for us now. I have felt the need to begin worship that way a number of Sundays in the months since last summer’s beginning. The details blur, leaving only the names: Charleston. Paris. Jakarta. Orlando. Baghdad. Brussels.
So many acts of terror, so many tragic choices, so much injustice, so much fear, so much devastation and anger and destruction cause us to cry far too many tears. And these things want us to believe that we’ve somehow been singing the wrong song. They want us to believe that evil is stronger than goodness, and that hate is really stronger than love, and that death gets the final word these days, not life.
And I am just so weary, as the violence keeps stalking our streets, showing no signs of relenting.
Baton Rouge. Saint Paul. Dallas.
I hear the names and discover once more how weary I am.
I am weary of the violence we commit; weary of the fear we feel when confronted with someone not like us; weary of words that no longer bear truth and grace; weary of people who refuse to listen to the voices seeking to tell us what it is like to be a person of color in our country, or to be a good cop that no one trusts, or to be a stranger in a foreign land with no welcome in sight.
I am just so weary.
But I am not too weary to protest.
Only my protest will seem a cop out to many.
You see, I will not be marching in the streets to proclaim what lives I believe matter or what answers I believe will “solve” our intractable problems or to pronounce judgment upon those I deem to be at fault. That kind of certainty eludes me now, which is why I am sorting through the voices around me, listening for words that are trustworthy and true.
But make no mistake. I will join the protest that takes place whenever the church gathers for worship.
At its best, the church’s worship is a protest against everything which suggests that anyone is beyond the reach of God’s love.
It is a protest against all attempts to justify our sinful treatment of people of color.
Worship is a protest against any demonization of “the other.”
Worship is our protest against everything which defies God’s righteousness and love.
Most of all, our worship is a protest against giving into the despair that wants us to believe that nothing will ever change.
For now at least, worship is the protest I choose.
Which leads me to Sunday’s worship with the people I walk alongside as pastor.
For some, our liturgy is often too routine, too rote, too predictable. And while that may be true at times, the language we speak in worship matters because it shapes who we become as we live into the world created by our words.
Since the goal of our worship is for us to become the liturgy we celebrate, we attempt to craft language that opens us to the vastness of God’s love and that immerses us in the fullness of God’s grace.
This week’s worship bulletin was already printed and folded by the time the latest wave of violence struck. So how do you hear these words and imagine these elements of worship in light of this week’s events?
- A silent prayer for those who gather: “Give your church the grace to serve you with courage, so that our lives may be a witness to your compassion, and our actions a testimony to your mercy.”
- A call to worship that invites us to love God with all that we are, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
- A prayer of confession that includes a line in which we confess that “we have avoided difficult responsibilities to our neighbors.”
- A reading from scripture in which we hear the call to love God and neighbor, and a proclamation that invites us to consider the question: “And who is my neighbor?”
- A hymn that invites us to sing about how “light dawns on a weary world, when eyes begin to see, each one’s dignity. Light dawns on a weary world, the promised day of justice comes.”
- An affirmation of faith in which we confess that we believe “Christ calls us to live for our neighbors,” and that reminds us that “Jesus broadened the definition of neighbor to include those ordinarily despised and excluded,” and that invites us “to accept the risk and pain which love requires.”
- A gathering at the Lord’s Table in which life will be for a single moment the way it should be in all of our moments, a table from which we will be sent to embody the grace we have received.
- And a final benediction in which we will sing: “Together met, together bound by all that God has done, we’ll go with joy, to give the world the love that makes us one, the love that makes us one.”
Of course, it’s what happens after the protest that tells you whether what you have done matters. Will we go forth as those committed to loving God with all that we are, and our neighbors as ourselves?
In that hope, may we not grow weary.
thank you