Sermon – December 12, 2010

Jazz, From Beginning to End

Sermon

preached By Rev. Ginger Gaines-Cirelli -

December 12, 2010

Isaiah 35:1-10, James 5:7-10, Matthew

11:2-11

“My way

right away.”

“What have you

done for me lately?”

“What’s in it

for me?”

“Looking out

for Number One.”

“I did it MY

way!”

These are some

of the mantras that govern many in the world today.  I’m not sure that

the individualist and self-serving notion is a new one, however.  It

seems that human beings have always been pretty good at making things

“all about ‘ME.’”  The Judeo-Christian story provides a stark contrast

to this human tendency.  Because from beginning to end the story we tell

is about relationships—about how to make things as much or more about

others as about ourselves.  In short, our story is one long and dramatic

call to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our

neighbors as ourselves.  John the Baptizer’s ministry was not about

getting people to see him, love him, laud and magnify him.  Rather his

whole ministry was about pointing beyond himself to another, to Jesus.

And, from beginning to end, Jesus was all about serving others—and

especially the most vulnerable in the world—and not only sometimes or

when it was convenient, but as a way of life.  One could also argue that

Jesus, too, wasn’t that interested in getting people to love him,

but rather he spent his whole life showing us how to love one

another—and pointing beyond himself to the kingdom of heaven, the reign

of God.

All of this is

to say that our faith involves relationship, it involves caring about

more than just my own needs or desires, it involves being part of a

community; it involves attending to the needs of the most vulnerable

ones in God’s creation.  Truly, these communal, other-focused aspects of

the faith are not peripheral to our practice of Christian faith.  On the

contrary, as those who are created in the image of God, a God who IS a

community of self-giving love, our primary practice of faith, our

primary activity of being and becoming who we really are is found in

intentional, relational, communal living. (doesn’t mean living in a

commune!)

Weekly

gatherings for worship are our most regular, broadly shared communal

experience of relating to God and to one another.  For those who come in

for the first time, what they see, hear, and do as part of our worship

tells them a lot about who we are and what we’re about.  For those of us

who are here regularly, everything we do in worship is an occasion for

rehearsing our faith.  One writer says that “the repeated patterns and

practices of Christian worship over time shape us in ways of

being with God and one another.  In the repeated patterns and practices

of Christian worship, we are formed and fashioned into the values and

vision of the gospel.”[i]

“Repeated patterns and practices,” it is suggested, are necessary in

order to be formed into the shape that more closely resembles the

kingdom of heaven.  Ritual forms us into a more Christ-like shape?

It shouldn’t

surprise us, really.  One easy analogy is a body-builder:  if he wants

to change the shape of his body to emphasize certain aspects of his

physique, then regular, repeated patterns and practices are required.

The same movement, over and over, builds strength and definition.  If we

want our lives to look a certain way, to have particular characteristics

and reflect particular values, then repeated patterns and

practices—disciplined habits—are required to help our lives take that

shape.

The repeated

patterns and practices of Christian worship have, from time to time,

come under attack when they seemed to have disintegrated into empty,

unexamined formulaic words and actions that don’t bear the fruit of

changed lives.  The founder of the Methodist movement, John Wesley, was

deeply concerned about the fact that the Anglican Church of which he was

a part seemed to have devolved into empty ritualism, seemingly cut off

from the life-transforming power of the Holy Spirit.  His response to

this concern was to organize small groups to study the Bible, pray,

support one another in the faith, hold each other accountable, and serve

the poor.  These small groups provided a context within which folks were

reminded of what they were doing and of the God whom they worshiped when

they showed up on Sunday morning.  Wesley remained an Anglican priest

his whole life and always expected members of the Methodist societies to

worship at their parish church, bringing their spiritual awakening with

them into the pews to enliven the ritual with a vital and living faith

in a living God!

Our spiritual

heritage as United Methodists, therefore, is rich with the worship

patterns and practices of the Anglican Church out of which we grew, but

also enlivened by an intentional focus on the movement of the Holy

Spirit who is always at work to challenge us, transform us, inspire us,

and make us new.  The best example I have found for how this works in

practice is a musical example.  In playing jazz or the blues, “what

happens in the various melody lines, in the interaction between bass and

treble at the piano, or in the interaction between various instruments,

depends on a basic pattern and progression of harmonies that keep

repeating.  While this repeating pattern regulates the improvisation

that occurs above and within it, it is also this repeating pattern that

makes the improvisation possible in the first place.  If each musician

has to constantly think about or reinvent the pattern, improvisation

will be limited; the music will not ‘happen.’  The pattern must be so

much a part of the musicians, like the beating of the heart or the

regular inhaling and exhaling of the lungs, that they do not have to

think about it but can ‘play’ it.  At the same time, the pattern

provides something upon which the diverse instrumental voices can build

harmony and play off one another; without the pattern, there is only a

discordant juxtaposition of voices, speaking at or over one another.”[ii]

Ritual, the repeated patterns and practices of Christian faith in

worship, as jazz!  What a concept…  But it does make sense.  The basic

pattern is the dramatic movement of our worship—gathering in prayer and

praise, being encountered by the Word of God, responding to the Word in

acts of faith, sacrament, and commitment, and being commissioned and

sent forth.  The improvisation happens as the Word or context calls

forth something new, innovative, creative.  So within the basic pattern,

certain elements may change from week to week.  In any given week,

something may happen “on the spot” that calls forth a communal response

at the prompting of the musicians or worship leader.

I will never

forget the Ascension Sunday when, after preaching a sermon inspired by

an image of Christ dancing into heaven, I planned to have my friend sing

the song “I Hope You Dance.”  I knew I would invite the congregation to

respond during the song, but wasn’t sure what form that response would

take—whether it would be an invitation to pray at the altar or in the

pews, or—well, I just didn’t know ahead of time.  When the time came, I

simply invited folks to respond however they wanted to…they could pray,

they could just ponder, they could dance, whatever.  And, lo and behold,

people got up and started dancing together, right there in church!  This

is improvisation—and I am convinced that the Holy Spirit was at work

because it all felt so alive and…dangerous!

Ritual

provides us the context within which such surprising things can

happen—because the patterns offer us a familiar and safe space, created

together in community, within which we can allow ourselves to respond in

new ways.  Ritual is also important because of its consistency—it helps

us remain in relationship to God and to one another through the varying

conditions of our lives and the inconsistencies of our feelings and

moods; this is why I encourage those who are grieving—or those who are

struggling in their faith—to try to get back into regular worship as

soon as possible; the ritual helps provide something constant, a place

to be held.  It has also been said that ritual practice is necessary for

us because of our persistent amnesia—our forgetting who we are, whom we

live for, and why.[iii]

And so we come together, we pray and listen and ponder.  We stand as we

are able to sing our praises to God and to honor Jesus Christ at the

reading of the Gospel.  We speak words full of poetry and mystery that

call us to remember the story, to remember who we are and who God is and

why we are here anyway—that it’s not all about me or my way right away

or just looking out for Number One, that there is something larger of

which we are a part and that there is hope for our lives no matter what

the circumstances.

The Sunday

after the tragedy of 9-11, I found myself at a complete loss for words.

What word could possibly contain all that needed to be expressed?  I

knew that I didn’t have it in me to create something new to speak into

that dreadful time.  And so that Sunday—even though it wasn’t a

Communion Sunday, we gathered at the Table.  We confessed and received a

word of grace, we offered peace to one another, we recounted the loving,

saving deeds of God and the mighty acts God wrought through Jesus

Christ.  We prayed that God’s Kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.

We broke the bread and shared the cup, proclaiming our hope in

Christ—that in the face of the worst the world can do, God can bring

healing, reconciliation, and new life.  It was the ritual that gave us

the words—the old, old story of Jesus and his love.  Every week

following that one, we gathered mid-week to continue to embody our hope

in Christ in the midst of the brokenness of the world…those folks had

never received Communion every week.  And the ritual began to do its

work on them and it became part of their lives in a new way, shaping and

forming them into a people who were even more deeply grounded in the

promise of new life offered to us in Christ Jesus.

Perhaps the

most poignant example for me of the power of ritual to form and shape us

and to become so much a part of us that it lives in our bones is the

experience of praying and singing with folks who suffer from Alzheimer’s

disease or dementia.  Somehow the Lord’s Prayer, the favorite Christmas

carol—whatever was repeated and enlivened through the rituals of the

Church for that person—those things remain when so much else is lost.

The disease can’t touch that part of them; they can still recite those

prayers…it makes me think that we might want to be very intentional

about what we include or exclude from our regular pattern of worship

because those rituals will live in very deep places in us.  They form

us; and they remind us who we are even when so much else of our lives is

forgotten.

I invite you

to think about what rituals, what words, what melodies, dwell deep in

your own soul…  How do those rituals and words shape you?  How do they

help you remember what is true?  How do they call you to follow the One

who lives, from beginning to end, for others?