Liturgy Series Part VII: Sharing of the Peace

I really wish I remembered where I found this bumper sticker.
No clue.    A. Hanson 2013

The sharing of the peace is one of my favorite parts of the liturgy.  It occurs after the prayers of the people and before the meal.  The sharing of the peace is often seen as merely a time of greeting.  But it is so much more.

The sharing of the peace is a communal absolution.  In the words of the preacher, we are all making a confession of our human sinfulness.  And in the sharing of the peace, we acknowledge the freedom from that bondage.  We absolve one another when we say, "the peace of Christ be with you...and also with you!"

I have often wondered what our world would be like if we shared peace with one another on a more regular basis.  A sort of greeting that states, "I see the humanity in you and you see the humanity in me.  And we are bound together by our common identity in Christ."  We frequently hurt, disappoint, and otherwise harm others.  We in turn are hurt, disappointed and harmed by the human failings of other people.  What we are saying when we greet one another with the peace of Christ is "I forgive you in the name of Christ."

Our theology states that the forgiveness is not done by us.  Rather, it  is done through us by God in Christ and the Holy Spirit.  So, sin boldly.  But also forgive boldly.

Up next...

Part VIII: The Offering

Liturgy Series Part VI: Prayers of the People

Prayer Candles
St Thomas Episcopal, Denver.   A. Hanson, 2012.

The prayers of the people are also a part of the Word section of the liturgy.  These prayers are addressed to God the creator, the first person of the Trinity.  The prayers of the people are of ALL the people, so we voice them in first person plural, using "we" language.  They are a collective prayer, offered aloud by one speaker. Different congregations have different ways of voicing these prayers. My home congregation in Denver provides the opportunity to write prayer petitions at a prayer station, which are then read aloud.  At my church here in St Paul, prayers are spoken aloud during an appointed time in the service.

Each congregation also has a distinct tone in their prayers of the people as well.  One of the things that I often notice when worshipping in more evangelical (less liturgical) churches is that there is a certain prayer vernacular.  Those in prayer will say something along the lines of "Jesus, I just want to thank you.  Jesus, I just want to ask that you..."

This is a pet peeve of mine.  This sort of prayer feels apologetic.  It makes one kiss the feet of God and does not boldly ask for anything.  Jesus gave us the Lord's prayer and instructs us how to pray in Luke 11:1-13.  We are told to "ask and it shall be given to you...for anyone who asks receives."  Jesus boldly asserts, "Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish?  If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"  We are commanded to pray for what we need and to ask boldly for it.

The prayers of the people include several general categories:

-For the church universal, its ministers and the mission of the Gospel
-For the care of creation
-For peace and justice in the world, the nations and those in authority
-For the poor, oppressed, marginalized, sick, bereaved, and lonely
-For all who suffer in mind, body, or spirit
-For the congregation and local and specific concerns
-For the faithful departed

I am in the process of writing the prayers of the people for the chapel service where I will preach next week. I am going to keep an eye on the liturgical propers for the day (certain prayers and prefaces), the news for current events, and any specific prayer requests for the seminary community.

up next...

Part VII: the sharing of the peace

"Who is My Neighbor?"

"The Good Samaritan" by He Qi.  (Posted by Patheos 7/2/13)

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to preach extemporaneously at my congregation here in St. Paul, Humble Walk Lutheran Church.  In the month of July we are gathering in the park and our liturgy is more informal and  we join in a potluck together.

The lectionary text (for more about what a lectionary is click here) for this past Sunday was the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
Luke 10:25-37

This is the most frequently retold parable and is deeply culturally ingrained.  We talk about being a "good samaritan" and we have "Good Samaritan Laws."

We usually hear it preached or re-told in a certain way.  Usually it is something along the lines of, "When you see someone hurt by the side of the road, you should find it in your heart to help them.  Be like the Good Samaritan, do not be like the Priest or the Levite."  And we like to imagine ourselves right into this specific parable as the Good Samaritan.

But the fact of the matter is that we are not the Good Samaritan.  A Samaritan at the time was part of a very reviled and marginalized group.  They would have been instantly recognizable for their style of dress.  Any self-respecting person would not have accepted help from them. But we have essentially mythologized this character of the "good samaritan" and seem to have forgotten that this was a very real person from a very real social class.  At my text study last Wednesday we tried to come up with modern day comparisons for the Good Samaritan.  We talked about witnessed someone in Islamic dress or the Hijab.  We talked about encountering someone on the street who appeared to be homeless and mentally ill.  We talked about encountering someone who is of a different race.

Then the George Zimmerman verdict happened on Saturday night.  For those of you who do not know, George Zimmerman  is a man who was recently put to trial for shooting and killing an unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida in February 2012.  George Zimmerman was acquitted by a jury on Saturday amid much public outcry.  Some people are proclaiming triumphantly that justice was done because George Zimmerman used his own gun to shoot someone he found threatening.  More people are crying out in lament that this misguided neighborhood volunteer shot and killed a teenager who was walking home from the convenience store carrying only Skittles.  No gun.  We will never really know what happened because George Zimmerman did not testify and Trayvon Martin is dead.

In liturgy on Sunday night, one of the questions that I asked small groups to reflect on was "Who would you cross the street to avoid?"

Some of the answers I received (these are multi-generational small groups): 

a bully, someone who looks different from me, someone who is asking me for money, someone who smells bad, someone with a weapon, etc.  

All this felt terribly poignant in the face of this latest news on race relations in the United States.  I am part of a privileged group.  I will never understand what it is like to be a racial minority.  And as I read the Gospel, as it talked about the priest and levite passing by the wounded and beaten man on the side of the road, I wondered how often we are actually those people, passing by our neighbors in need.  And all I could think about was a mortally wounded black teenager in Florida.

Who is my neighbor?  Why?  Is it only someone who looks like me?

And how are we the wounded man and in need of help?  Would we be willing to accept help from someone who is so different from us?  We generally only break down our strict cultural delineations when it's life or death.  Natural disasters, communal grieving, etc.  I am not an expert on racial matters.  But all I know is that George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin are both my neighbors.  It's easy to want to care for the wounded.  I find it a little more difficult to want to care about George Zimmerman.  But no one won with this verdict.  We all lost.  My pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, laments the place where we find ourselves with violence and guns in A Lamentation of Sorts for Sunday July 14 (A Day after the George Zimmerman verdict).

Who is my neighbor?  I have no clue.

Liturgy series part V: Sermon

Preaching on Epiphany at HFASS,
January 2013.  With the Abelkis clan.

Apologies that I am a day late with this post.  I have been working on producing a sermon for tonight at my congregation, Humble Walk Lutheran Church.

Preaching is one of the most misrepresented parts of the liturgy.  I think we often view it merely as a preacher standing behind a massive stone pulpit and issuing pedantic edicts to us in some sort of holier-than-thou persona.  If that is all that preaching is all about, why wouldn't we have a huge distaste for it?!

Preachers are portrayed in popular culture as buttoned up men who preach fire and brimstone judgment of others.  This rests on at least two problematic assumptions.  First, there are many different types of people who are called to be ministers of Word and Sacrament (in other words, pastors).  My denomination ordains women, LGBTQ persons, and so on.  Next, that it is the preacher's role to be above judgment and to tell others what God thinks of them.  This could also not be further from the truth.

My own understanding of what it means to be a preacher has been profoundly shaped by Gordon Lathrop's book, The Pastor: a Spirituality.  In this book, Lathrop discusses the pastor as being a broken symbol that points ever more closely to God as seen in Christ on the Cross.  The pastor is just as broken as all others.  Another formative piece for me is the Lutheran understanding of the priesthood of all believers.  This underscores that as a result of our baptism, we are all charged with preaching and carrying out the Gospel.  Some of us are set aside to preach and preside, but never set above.

The sermon is the point in the liturgy where the scriptures interact with the world.  Today as I prepare to preach on the Good Samaritan text, I am finding myself being ripped apart by the news of the Zimmerman verdict.  "Who is our neighbor?"  Stay tuned, there will be a blog post about this.

There are all sorts of methods for producing a sermon. Probably as many different methods as there are preachers.  I thought I would share my method.

1. Determine what text I will be preaching on (sometimes determined by the lectionary, sometimes selected based on a theme, sometimes picked for me by the pulpit supply congregation, etc.)

2. Read that text in a couple different translations and in my Greek-English interlinear Bible.

3. Begin mulling over the text.  I ask questions of it.  Pray about it.  Talk about it with a ton of people. Sometimes I crowd source my sermon questions on social media.

4. Go to text study.  A text study is a group of pastors, church leaders or other interested folks who study the texts with the intent of preaching them.  We talk about the implications of the text for our contexts and I draw on the wisdom of others.

5. Sometimes I consult commentaries and other resources.  Sometimes I don't.  One of my favorites is The Hardest Question, which reflects on the most difficult parts of the text.  I sometimes consult Working Preacher and usually look over The Text This Week.  I sometimes will do a google image search for images to pique my thought process.  I participate in the blogging discussion at RevGalBlogPals to engage with others about the sermonating process.

6. I usually begin my sermon with my own description of the text.  I refer to this as "opening up the text."  As I do this, I find that there are different things that stick out to me and I see things in a new way.

7. I sit quietly and wait for words to come.  Sometimes they do and I start writing.  Sometimes they don't, so instead I go for a walk or do some chores around the house to make space to hear what the Holy Spirit is saying.

8. I generally end up writing two or three drafts of a sermon.  It always feel inadequate. But I choose to trust that the Holy Spirit will make something out of my words.

9. I pray a silent prayer that God would have my words be what they would be.  Then I preach.

10. I set aside all of my feelings about the way I preached the sermon and let it be.


Here are a few things that I hold true about preaching:

a. Preaching is a dynamic art.  A sermon is something that occurs for a specific community at a specific time.  Those same circumstances will never be replicated again.  This is why I do not believe in recycling sermons in their entirety.

b. Preaching is not a one-way communication, from preacher to congregation. Rather it is a continuation of a conversation that has occurred all week about the text.  The preacher is speaking to a specific community, and they should see themselves in the sermon.  The essence of the Gospel is "for you."

c. Sermons tie together the text with the times.  You cannot ignore what is going on in yourself, your community, and the world.  Keep one eye on the scriptures and one eye on the newspapers, as the old quote goes.  Or more accurately in my case, one eye on the twitter feed.

d. There are many ways to preach. It is not just someone standing behind a pulpit.  You can engage in conversational small groups, you can act out the scriptures, you can do a literal crowd sourcing sermon during the service.  The possibilities are endless.

Jesus watching over my Greek translations

Up next:
Part VI: Prayers of the People

Liturgy Series Part IV: Reading the Scriptures

A. Hanson, Luther Seminary.  2013

The next portion of the liturgy is the Word portion. In this portion of the liturgy, we hear the scriptures and hear the word preached in a sermon.  We then proclaim that word with the hymn of the day, confess our faith with one of the creeds, offer prayers of intercession, and finally share the peace with one another.

We read from the Bible each week as part of our liturgy.

There are many different translations of the Bible into English from its original language of Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament).  My favorite translation is the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and is also the most widely accepted for academic study.  

The Old Testament (more correctly called the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible) includes three parts: 

The Torah: First five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy)

The Nevi'im: Prophetic books. There are major and minor prophets

The Ketuvim: The writings (miscellaneous collection of books including Psalms, Song of Songs, etc).  

The New Testament includes four Gospels.  Matthew, Mark, and Luke are considered to be the Synoptic Gospels because they have many similar stories and tell the story of Jesus.  John's Gospel also tells the story of Jesus, but does so in a way that has a higher Christology (which means that Jesus is said to be the Son of God, God incarnate, etc).  The Book of Acts is the second part of Luke's Gospel and was written by the same author or group.  The remaining books in the New Testament are letters written by Paul and other early Christian leaders to specific Christian communities.  

The Bible is best viewed as a library of individual books instead of one cohesive whole.  This library is called a canon and represents the books that are generally agreed upon to be authentic.  There are also non-canonical books, called the Apocrypha, that are used in some traditions, but have some more disputed origins.  

The readings from scripture each week include a First Reading (usually from the Old Testament), a Psalm that is chanted or sung, a Second Reading (also called an Epistle and from the New Testament) and a Gospel reading from one of the four Gospels.  

There are several ways to select readings for a given Sunday.  The ELCA usually uses what is known as the Revised Common Lectionary.  This is a three-year plan for reading scripture and focuses on a different synoptic Gospel each year.  Year A is Matthew, Year B is Mark, and Year C is Luke (which is what we are in presently).  Readings from the Gospel of John are used in the seasons of Christmas, Lent, and Easter.   The lectionary attempts to tell the story of our Christian faith in a way that corresponds with the church year. 

There is a downside to using this lectionary because the readings appear to be fragmented and there are huge chunks of the Bible that never appear in lectionary texts.  In an attempt to tell a more cohesive story, two professors from Luther Seminary, Rolf Jacobsen and Craig Koester, have developed the narrative lectionary, a relatively recent invention.  This is a four year lectionary cycle that covers the sweep of the Biblical story from Creation through Paul's letters to the early Christian church.  The aim behind the narrative lectionary is to help tell our story as people of God.  

Additionally, congregations can select their own readings to correspond to a sermon series or theme for the congregation.  The preacher will build their sermon off of one or more of the readings.  

Part V: Sermon