Stranger in a Strange Land

When I told a friend that my contribution to a project on the “cultural crisis” in contemporary worship would focus on the recovery of the Eucharist, he was very enthusiastic. It was a good question, he thought: “why the contemporary worship movement seems to devalue sacramental participation.” I didn’t have a chance to tell him that wasn’t my question. Yes, one way to begin getting a handle on the worship crisis is to interpret our confusion and conflict in terms of the tension between “traditional” and “contemporary.” But tradition, as the contributors to that invaluable volume, The Invention of Tradition, have shown, is a very slippery notion, and the facile distinction between the “traditional” and the “contemporary” often obscures more than it reveals.

An alternative way (an alternative, not the alternative) of framing talk about worship today asks us to start with the presence of God among his people. In Deuteronomy 12, the Lord instructs his people to break down the altars where “the nations” serve their gods,

burn their sacred poles with fire, and hew down the idols of their gods … You shall not worship the Lord your God in such ways. But you shall seek the place that the Lord your God will choose out of all your tribes as his habitation to put his name there. You shall go there, bringing there your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and your donations, your votive gifts, your freewill offerings, and the firstlings of your herds and flocks. And you shall eat there in the presence of the Lord your God, you and your households together, rejoicing in all the undertakings in which the Lord your God has blessed you.

Here is the essence of worship. God is always present, but in worship he calls us to a heightened collective awareness and acknowledgment of his presence. “In the late second century,” writes Gordon Lathrop in Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology,

Irenaeus of Lyons, perhaps the first, great, post-biblical theologian of the church, created a remarkable, brief summary of liturgical theology. He was arguing against those gnostics who belittled “the things around us” and regarded the flesh as evil, when he wrote: “But our judgment is consonant with the Eucharist, and, in turn, the Eucharist establishes our judgment.” For Irenaeus, the very bread and cup of the thanksgiving meal, which are the body and blood of the Lord and which nourish our own flesh and blood, proclaim the truth of the God who created the world and redeemed it in Jesus Christ.

So in the Eucharist we see Christian worship in its most concentrated form—”not just the Lord’s Supper,” Lathrop writes,

isolated and considered as one illustration of the Christian message. Rather, Eucharist is the whole economy of word set next to meal, texts set next to preaching, thanksgiving set next to eating and drinking, which makes up the deepest ecumenical pattern for celebration. Eucharist is the every-Sunday assembly for doing this word and meal event set next to the recurring experience of the week.

Perhaps the most curious aspect of the current debate over worship is what hasn’t been said. Where, in this passionate and sometime acrimonious conversation, is there any sustained reflection on the Eucharist?

The sanctuary reminded me of churches where I had worshiped as a boy. It happened to be Lutheran, and it happened to be in Minneapolis, but those details didn’t signify. It was dark and unbeautiful, corresponding to a certain early twentieth-century conception of churchiness. But the service on this weekday night—part of a gathering devoted to “Ministry on the New Edge”—was different in some ways from that remembered past.

True, there was a bulletin. (I am a bulletin-holder; sometimes when I raise my hands, exulting in the Spirit, I realize belatedly that I am still clutching my bulletin.) There I could read, under the heading “Prelude,” that the music we were hearing was, first, “Jesus Walking on the Water” (Violent Femmes, 1983) and, second, “Mercy Is the Mansion” (House of Mercy Band, 1999).

We sang, in the course of the service, a gospel song, a spiritual, and the old Irish hymn, “Be Thou My Vision.” The sermon was a team affair, out of Saturday Night Live by Saint Augustine. There was incense from a thurible. And at the center of worship, there was Communion.

In recent years I’ve been to a number of “alternative” services that resemble this, not in most of their particulars but in the hunger that drives them. Yes, the rhetoric can be off-putting in its sweeping condemnation of the dreaded status quo, but the hunger is genuine, the thirst, I believe, for God’s presence. Is it surprising, then, that such alternative liturgies almost always include the Eucharist?

—John Wilson