Our Gathering God
Series on Worship, II
Deuteronomy 30:1-6 and Ephesians 2:11-22
June 22, 2014
By the dictionary’s definition, to gather is “to bring together into a group,” such as “the teacher gathered the students around her desk.” It can also mean “to accumulate gradually,” as in “dark clouds gathered in the sky,” and, my favorite, “to pick up and enfold” like “the boy gathered the kittens into his arms.” By any one of the definitions, God can be understood as a gathering God. Through Moses, God assembles the people enslaved in Egypt, empowering them to leave. God in Jesus, the teacher-healer, traveled throughout Galilee, with increasing crowds and more and more people asking for his touch. As he looks over Jerusalem – God’s holy city – Jesus cries out his longing to, like a mother hen, bring its inhabitants under his wings.
Since God is a gathering God, it makes sense that we begin worship by entering into God’s out-stretched arms. We call the beginning of worship the gathering time, which can sound like a description of what we do when we find a seat, make announcements, and greet one another. In fact, the moment of gathering, like all of worship, is about what God has done and still hopes to do in us. To say “Let’s gather for worship” is to say “God is calling out to us and we now place ourselves within God’s welcoming enfold.”
Over the centuries Christians have learned that the best way to do this – to situate our worship and ourselves within God’s enfolding embrace – is to begin with God’s words. Knowing that God gathers us, we enact God’s welcome of us. We do this especially in the greeting. In the course of a week, there are multiple ways in which we exchange greetings.
“Hi, friend. How are you doing?”
“Good evening, my name is Tom and I’ll be your server.”
“Quiet. Please silence your cell phones. The show is about to begin.”
But in worship we start with God’s words. “The Lord be with you,” we say. “And also with you,” we reply. Today’s bulletin reads: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God from which nothing can separate us and the life-giving Holy Spirit be with you all. Listen to my favorite: Blessed be the holy Trinity, one God, the sower, the seed, the fruit; our lifeboat, our treasurer, our leaven. Hear the difference? We are in God’s home, using words proclaiming who God is as the sower, the seed, our lifeboat and treasure. By extension, we are claiming who we can be as the gathered ones of God.
Your bulletin notes seven elements within this gathering moving from the moment Chris plays the organ’s first note all the way through to the quiet that settles over us after we’ve passed the peace with our neighbors. Seven elements: prelude, announcements, first hymn, opening prayer and the passing of the peace. On the surface, these pieces might appear to be an organizing time. It is the time to get settled if you are running late, to half listen to announcements, or to check the bulletin to see if we will sing any of your favorite hymns. Some weeks it may feel like a miracle just to have made your way here and those weeks you walk into worship harried, distracted, or preoccupied by your own cares. Rather than a mundane, organizing time, though, the gathering makes two profound claims capable of cutting through our distractions. One is about God. The second is about us, those who God has brought near.
First, the claim about God. Moses’ words in Deuteronomy confess that God, with utmost compassion, will bring together those who have been scattered beyond their lands. To you who were exiled, even to the ends of the earth, God will bring you back. It is a promise of return to those living a long distance from the land to which God first delivered them. It is a daring, audacious promise that no matter where you are, no matter how you’ve gotten there, no matter how long you’ve been away or what you’ve done in the meantime, God will reverse the scattering. God will gather you back. In doing so, God will increase your love of God, and you will live.
Now you and I are not the people of ancient Israel, exiled from our nation and living under foreign rule. We aren’t homesick, defeated, without voice or future, and wondering where God is in the chaos. Or maybe we are some of those things: homesick, defeated, without voice, confused about our future or uncertain about God. I’ve noticed that whenever we are asked to describe some of the attributes of God, we often mention that Grace is not a neighborhood church. We’re all scattered across Baltimore. Furthermore, we are living in a time exiled from peace, in a world that appears uninterested and sometimes deeply suspicious of church, and amid a culture that constantly worships other gods. And despite those scattering forces God has the power to gather us here. Imagine that: it is not by your inclination that you arrived at these doors. It happened through God’s call, by God’s hand. This is the first claim we make through the greeting. Come home, you who are exiled. We are here because God has brought us here.
It is a powerful thing to claim I’m here because God gathered me up; God took my scattered life and is forming it into a life that loves God. But God doesn’t just gather you, individual you, here. God doesn’t say to come in by yourself, sit in your pew on your own, and worship in isolation. God brings us together and changes us from distracted, self-contained persons into one worshipping body. That is the second truth claimed at our gathering: God gathers all of us into one. We sing in one voice. We pray in unison. We offer Christ’s peace to each other. Through these seven quick elements – less than 15 minutes of the service – we are unified; gathered by God into something we weren’t before we arrived and something we can’t be without each other.
This is the truth expressed in Ephesians. All of you who are far off and all of you who are near, become a new people through Christ. Christ is our peace and in Christ we who were aliens to God and strangers to one another become citizens of God’s kingdom and members of the same household. This is a second outrageous claim. We may enter worship strangers. We might look across the room and think “Who is that?” But God makes us members of the same household, those who belong to one another. Kathleen Norris puts it this way. “Worship is home,” she says. “It is the place where they have to take you in. There is no one who is not welcome in God’s house, and no amount of human pettiness or pompous religiosity can alter that fact. When people come together to worship, they come as God knows them, with their differences, their wildly various experiences and perspectives. And by some miracle, they sing, and listen, and pray as one.”[1]
Have you experienced the unity? Have you ever found yourself linked to someone who weeks before had been a stranger or praying for someone you’ve never met but whose needs are now as dear to you as your own? I sense that unity. I feel it when we baptize a baby, or when I watch you walk across the aisle to greet someone. During the week, I walk into hospital rooms and there perched on the windowsill are flowers you’ve sent. I walk through the entry way early on a Sunday morning and there you are, making a fuss over someone arriving for worship for the first time in a long time. “In Christ, the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord.” That is what is happening as we are gathered by God for worship. We’re knit to one another; we’re altered by the Spirit; we’re reminded Someone bigger than ourselves runs the world. It is here that God reorganizes us back into the unity for which we were created. Our capacity to be God’s dwelling place rests upon our willingness to be joined as one. It is through our unlikely but undeniable unity that others sense God’s presence in us.
A few years ago, a pastor friend lost her father and then had to lead worship the following Sunday. When I asked her how it went, she said, “It was good. I was worried about how I would be able to do it, but I found it to be a good thing to go to God’s house, to praise God for the mercies that are new every morning and to be comforted by the fact that even though my world has been rocked, God is still faithful.” Although I could not have said it, I felt the same thing 15 years ago as a searching young adult, overwhelmed by the world’s pain and still figuring out myself. Then the temporary resident of several cities, I worshiped in a series of church in the course of 18 months. Each one was a brief stop. I don’t remember any church having a particularly memorable way of gathering. I do remember the way hearing “Grace and Peace to you from God” made me feel. Not a hostile stare from an angry driver. Not someone measuring my accomplishments, but grace and peace from God. And I remember how it felt to reply, “And may that grace and peace be with you also.” Giving the gifts of God to one another, I couldn’t help but be reminded that we all are creatures under God’s care, still gathered within God’s fold, and blessed to be gathered with those around us.
[1] Kathleen Norris, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (New York: Riverhead, 1998), 246.