Several years ago, I was serving as a hospital chaplain the summer after graduating from seminary when I found myself with a family who was about to unexpectedly say goodbye to a loved one; an older gentleman who had been rushed to the hospital and was in cardiac arrest. When I arrived at the room, they were all standing around the bed, about five of them, each touching his leg or arm and talking to him, hoping he would hear. We said a prayer together, and then we all stood there in silence, the weight of the moment bearing down on us.
Then something happened. The man’s daughter, a women maybe in her 50s, began to sing what she would later say was his favorite hymn, “Shall We Gather at the River,” that beautiful gospel hymn looking ahead to the day of restoration and return described in the book of Revelation. She began to sing into the silence of that room and the tenderness of that moment, softly at first, and then she slowly grew louder, as others of us joined in, and suddenly we were at church there in that emergency room. Suddenly we were a church.
But after the first verse of the song, something else happened. She didn’t know all of the words, and neither did we, but without skipping a beat, she began to make up new words as she went along, in a kind of stream of consciousness. Words about her dad, about the hospital room, about all the family there, about what she hoped for him. The rest of us hummed on around her as this song, already rich with images from scripture, took on new verses to ground us in that present, tender moment, which took us someplace else entirely.
I.
I believe this was worship in its highest form.
The shared rhythms of our faith provided this family a melody to sing when music was needed. It gave them words to say when they could not find their own, and when they could, it gave them a pallet and a pattern to work from, inviting them—in a moment that could have been defined only by unspeakable loss and the closeness of death—to imagine a different story. A story of reunion and hope and the mysterious persistence of life.
This is what we do when we worship, whether we gather in a vaulted sanctuary or under tiled ceilings and florescent hospital light. Or at least it is what we hope worship will be; what we aim for it to be: an invitation to inhabit a particular story, about the world, about our lives, about our neighbors. About what is real and good, and finally important. It’s a story that, in the end, is very different from the story told about these things in popular culture.
It’s a story rooted in the Biblical story as revealed in scripture, but that includes all the traditions and rhythms and practices of the church—which at it’s core is a worshipping community—that connects the story of scripture and tradition to the story of our individual lives and our common life together, giving them new meaning and purpose. It’s no wonder that the word religion shares the same root as the word ligament, the connective tissue that holds our bodies together, that gives us shape and an undergirding strength and cohesion and allows us to move in the world. For this is what all the rituals and traditions and patterns of our faith do: they hold us together, within our own lives, but also within a community.
We feel this deep resonance in powerful and evocative ways here in the twelfth chapter of Exodus when Moses describes the ceremony, the act of worship, that will finally set God’s people free from bondage in Egypt, and provide the images and rituals that continue to shape not only Judaism but Christianity to this day.
II.
Even in describing this first passover, that at the time had not yet happened, Moses already names the future this story will make possible. He looks ahead and tells the people that this will become a day of remembrance for all future generations so they, too, can claim this story of deliverance as their own, which the Jewish people continue to do each and every Passover.
Through the generations an even more elaborate tradition has been added to the description in Exodus, resulting in a 15-step choreographed ritual meal, in which specific foods are eaten—unleavened bread and bitter herbs, as those mentioned in Exodus—each part telling, or really, bringing to life, a part of the story. This is more than a remembrance. It’s a reenactment. The goal of the seder is to place all the people gathered around the table in this ancient story of deliverance so that makes this passage together would become their story.
The goal of worship is not just to remember the past, but to make the past present. In New Testament terms we call this kind of memory anamnesis, a Greek word that means, literally, “against forgetting.” It’s the kind of memory that Christians evoke at our own ritual meal that we will share in just a few moments, that itself is rooted in this passover tradition and story: the Lord’s Supper.
We remember how Jesus and his disciples gathered to celebrate the Passover, and Jesus, taking on that story of deliverance, tells them that starting that night, they’re to remember something else. Not just how God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, but how God would soon deliver him, and how God would one day deliver all people from sin and death. He tells them, As often as you do this, remember me. And I think we can agree Jesus doesn’t mean this in a kind of thin, “think of me when you do this,” sort of way, but in a much thicker way. A way so thick that most Christians believe Christ is present to us in this act, though different traditions understand just what that means differently.
In reenacting that night we hope to make that past present to us again, to find ourselves within it and imagine how this story could shape our lives. Or even to consider, as Faulkner put it, how “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
III.
I thought of these things this past week after learning of the death of Wendell Berry, the great poet-farmer who passed at his home in Kentucky at the age of 92. I know he had many fans among us here and I’m grateful that we read many of his works as part of our Lenten devotional this past Spring.
He wrote from what I would describe as a place of “deep communion”—communion with God, with the earth, with his community in Port Royal, Kentucky, both the living and the dead. He understood, more than most, the ties that bind us together across space and time. And I thought of one poem in particular that expresses this. It’s one we have read before around Christmas time, one of his sabbath poems, in his which he describes going out to his barn one chilly April morning, and just before opening the door to one of the horse stalls, he pauses, and imagines the holy family there behind it:
the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light
That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning’s light, the air
Around them joyful as a choir.
And this thought of the holy family there reveals to him a deeper truth, a truth so near to the heart of the Passover and to communion:
that we
Ourselves are living in the world
It happened in when it first happened,
And so…
We stand with one hand on the door,
Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own white frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not.1
IV.
This is what worship is: a time we set aside, or that sometimes sets aside us, to look “into another world, that is this world.” That we would remember these stories, distant as they seem, are not so far from us. They happened under the same sun and moon. They were first spoken or sung with breath from the same air. That they live inside us, and even more, we live inside them. They call each of us to our truest selves and call all of us to a Promised Land—that would be, too, is in this world, this moment, if we let it.
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1 Sabbath Poem 1987: VI, By Wendell Berry