SCM Studyguide: Liturgy, 2nd Edition

SCM Studyguide to Liturgy

SECOND EDITION

Stephen Burns

© Stephen Burns 2018

Published in 2018 by SCM Press

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Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Contents

Preface to the Second Edition

1. Of and For the People

Part 1. Shaping Christian Worship

2. Scripture and Sacrament

3. Space and Symbol

4. Music and Song

5. The Sermon and its Alternatives

Part 2. Worship and Mission in a Diverse World

6. Styles and Substance: Relishing Diversity

7. Cycles and Crises: Time for Worship

8. Liturgy and the Fullness of Life: Liturgical Spirituality

9. Presiding in Liturgy

Sources and Acknowledgements

Thanks Again

I am glad to acknowledge the presence in my own thinking of much I have learned from the following people, though this is not to suggest they would all agree with what I say: Andrew Curnow, Anita Monro, Ann Loades, Bryan Cones, Christopher Duraisingh, Gail Ramshaw, Gordon Lathrop, Jione Havea, Michael Jagessar, Nicola Slee, Kwok Pui-lan, Richard Giles, Robert Gribben, and Susanna Snyder – to each of whom I am hugely grateful, with Dominic, Damola and, as always, Judith.

I wish to thank David Shervington, Mary Matthews and Neil White, the team at SCM Press with whom I worked on the production of this book.

Preface to the Second Edition

Stubborn and Newness

This revised edition of Liturgy comes 12 years after the original book. In approaching its revision I have been conscious of an epitaph used by Kenneth Leech, quoting Michael Howard: ‘Those who do not change their minds in the course of a decade have probably stopped thinking altogether.’¹ For my part, I am aware not only of my own new learning but also of the stubbornness of some of my liturgical convictions – and this revised Studyguide reflects both of those things. The revision is structurally very similar to the first edition, with some updated content and several sections of new material.

Things Have Changed

The most obvious marker that things have changed in my own life is that the tiny baby in my family, newborn as the first edition was published, is now a strapping basket-balling near-teen, already taller than me. His presence every day challenges me to ask how I have grown and am growing, in understanding, in love and in a life of worship. And since the first edition I have also lived in three countries, enjoying long summers in south-eastern Australia and enduring long winters in New England in the USA, as well as Birmingham in the UK. These different contexts shape the new edition: my mind and my thinking have developed a stronger global consciousness, and though the revision of this book is more minimal than radical, something of that wider consciousness is reflected here, just as it is in my own writing in the in-between time. Yet while my own migration has been around the global West, and largely easy, it has also been closely bound up with others whose experience was less secure, chiefly through the inclusion in my family of another young person, himself a refugee, but also through coming to know many more students with such experience, as well as fellow members of multicultural churches that have provided something like home in diaspora and exile. My writing since the first edition of this book has engaged with dynamics of postcolonialism and diaspora, and there are hints of it here too.

The last decade and more in New England and south-eastern Australia has also introduced me to some stark polarities in my own Anglican tradition – from the confident liberalism of the Diocese of Massachusetts on the left edge to intense conservatism, both evangelical and Anglo-Catholic, in the Dioceses of Sydney and Melbourne on the right wing. In this book and elsewhere, I try to affirm difference. And in general I find my own Church of England’s convictions about a necessary ‘mixed economy’ of church comprised of complementary difference helpful and encouraging. I hope that my own affirmation of a mixed economy helps to keep me open to durable liturgical traditions as well as to new possibilities, and it is both the durable past and newness that I am trying to represent in the following pages. Yet I can also admit that while both Massachusetts and Sydney are growing in their own ways, only the former attracts me. No doubt – I hope – this book reflects that I write out of experience of participation in vibrant outward-facing churches marked not only by robust multicultural make-up but vivid commitments to inclusivity, as well as in emergent churches engaged in rich traditioning practices, sometimes among diverse and marginalized persons. I have seen such churches teeming with young people in ways that make me glad to have entered a life of ministry and that give me hope for the future of church. I hope their energy has made its way into this book, and I certainly intend their influence on me to shape Part 2 of this book especially.

Critically Classicist Ecumenical Catholicity

Over time I have learned to state my own basic stance in terms I picked up from Gordon Lathrop: ‘critical classicism’;² that is, to a great extent prepared to take Christian liturgical tradition – itself plural – on trust, yet also eager to subject the tradition to many questions. Pivotal in this, for me, is a willingness to scrutinize practices as to their capacity to do the work of traditioning – ‘handing over’ – in contemporary contexts. If inherited practices are not being handed on, and if newer practices are not proving durable, questions need to be asked. How what the tradition holds fast is handed on may take different forms and be changed – and needs to be changed when the ‘classic’ side honoured in critical classicism becomes calcified. I have witnessed a brittle kind of church that seems to have little life except in what the Melbourne Anglican Gary Bouma calls ‘geriatric assemblies’,³ and I am prepared to face up to the idea that some forms of church are on the way out, and will – indeed should – take up less space in a mixed economy. The study of liturgy needs to be undertaken with concern for inviting and nurturing not only the next generation but new Christians from among the previously unchurched.

Another way, perhaps, to speak of critical classicism is to identify my own liturgical convictions as ecumenical catholic and yet open to reform. I find myself, as strongly as ever, wanting in this revised edition of Liturgy to commend the ecumenical ordo proposed in contemporary liturgical renewal, a pattern of gathering in community around word and sacrament – with word and sacrament affirmed as gifts of gracious divine self-revelation, and therefore properly at the heart of mission – and forming Christian people for God’s mission in which they are sent out to share. Part 1 of the book, I hope, delineates and elaborates on this fundamental commitment. Part 2 then explores what I see as part of a mixed economy of church, exploring various kinds of difference, persons to be included, in their diversity a witness to the ‘boundless riches of Christ’ (Ephesians 3.8). Part 2 touches foci that have become central to my own learning and writing since the first edition of the Studyguide, representing the likes of feminist, postcolonial and queer perspectives, which are under-represented if not entirely missing in much liturgical practice and in much liturgical study.

The diverse ethnic and ecumenical context and content of my classrooms has been one constant over the past decade or so, albeit with a somewhat different make-up in each place. In the UK, people from black-majority churches have been well represented in shared learning, alongside those from old-line traditions deeply committed to an ecumenical future. In Australia I have been very pleased to discover the Uniting Church, whose students, along with Anglicans and a mish-mash of neo-Pentecostals, have come to my classes. In the USA, Episcopalians with others from many Christian traditions, and also Unitarians, came to classes shaped by this book. In each of these contexts I am glad that people from the Metropolitan Community Church have been in the room, at the table and taking turns with the rest of us to offer a lead.

Location, Location, Location: Presider’s Chair, Pew and Door

Another dynamic of which I am conscious is that I am always trying to learn, think and write from at least three places in liturgical assembly: presider’s chair, pew and door.

First, presider’s chair. As an ordained minister (a presbyter in the orders of the Church of England), worship is always for me at least in part about both pastoral care and mission, the leadership of which my Church entrusts with the ordained. Good worship both invites and cares for persons. It beckons and carries into the mysteries it celebrates. Presiders have responsibilities for enabling this inviting and caring work of liturgy to happen. In what follows I am conscious of looking at liturgy from a presider’s chair, seeking to encourage others who are entrusted with the responsibility of sitting in that chair.

Then the pew, by which I mean the midst of the assembly, where good presiders often are anyway, either because their chair might be physically situated among the people but whether or not that is the case, who firmly see themselves among the people, as a part of the worshipping assembly, not apart – least of all somehow ‘above’ it. The image of the pew also reminds that more than the presider’s view of liturgy needs to be heard, learned from and cared for. The assembly itself, liturgical theology would teach, is the primary symbol of the liturgy, and the people in the pews are never spectators at something that – ordained, leading – others do. In what follows I am seeking to engage with the reality of the variety of experience, perspective and conviction people in the pews bring to liturgy.

Finally, I am more and more interested in the door as a place from which to reflect on liturgy. This is not only because I have sometimes attended liturgies I have longed to leave, or on rare occasions have actually left because they were so dire, excluding or overrun by their leaders, but also because the door – the entrance, the threshold, the portal – is a crucial locus of missional consciousness. It represents questions about how people find church, enter into what is going on, are welcomed into worship, invited to participate, come to love it, or perhaps are baffled, challenged or put off by what they find. In some liturgical assemblies the doors to the sacred have become sadly ‘overgrown’,⁴ and space needs to be retrieved, clarified, reopened, not only so that people may enter in but also so that persons being formed by the liturgy for mission, for ‘service after the service’, are better sent out for witness in the wider world. The pathway to and from liturgy needs to be opened up.

So door, pew and presider’s chair are always in my mind throughout what follows. I invite the reader to keep the same shifting consciousness before them, and offer a reminder of these different lenses with an invitation to ‘locate your own thought’ at the end of each chapter.

Notes

1 Michael Howard, The Causes of War, p. 6, cited by Kenneth Leech, Doing Theology in Altab Ali Park (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2006), p. 215.

2 Identified and elaborated in Gordon Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993).

3 Gary Bouma, Being Faithful in Diversity (Adelaide: ATF Press, 2011), p. 13.

4 Graham Cray, ‘Doorways to the Sacred Through Fresh Expressions of Church’, in Phil Potter and Ian Mobsby (eds), Doorways to the Sacred: Developing Sacramentality in Fresh Expressions of Church (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2017), p. 5.

1. Of and For the People

‘The congregation is not an audience.’¹

In his novel Il Postino, Antonio Skármeta tells a story of life among the handful of inhabitants on a remote island, Isla Negra. One of the islanders is the notable poet Pablo Neruda, who lives in a villa high on the mountainside, overlooking the ocean. Another is Mario Jiménez, the postman from whom the novel takes its name. Mario, like most of the islanders, is illiterate, and Pablo Neruda is in fact the only person for miles around to receive mail with any regularity. Mario therefore has plenty of opportunity to meet him, and plenty of time on his hands to daydream. And most of his daydreams are about a girl, Beatriz González, a waitress in her family’s tavern on the waterfront of the local port.

Mario wants to find a way to woo Beatriz, and his pursuit of her is the heart of the novel. Mario asks Neruda to help him seduce Beatriz. Mario wants Neruda to teach him poetry, so that he can draw her attention and impress her with metaphor: one of his first attempts is ‘[your] smile stretches across [your] face like a butterfly’!² And as the story unfolds, she does fall for him, and Neruda becomes the best man at the couple’s wedding.

Although essentially a love story, the novel is set against the backdrop of political upheaval in Neruda’s native Chile. So as well as falling in love, Mario also receives an education in politics, and Neruda himself returns to the mainland to fight in the cause of communism. One day, from Chile, Neruda writes to Mario – who is now able to read – and asks him to make a tape recording of sounds from around the island. Mario sets determinedly about his task, taking an old spool recorder and microphone around with him. He climbs a bell tower and captures the sound of the wind blowing through it, then of him clanging the large bell. He stands on the beach, holding the microphone out to the ocean to record the noise of waves hitting the rocks and then of ‘the sea retreating’.³ He tapes gulls flapping their wings along the water’s edge, the buzzing hum of a beehive, various birds singing, dogs barking at night and, finally, the crying of Beatriz and his newborn baby, named Don Pablo after Neruda, and who the poet has not yet seen.

The film version of Il Postino is an especially delightful and detailed portrayal of Mario at this task. We see him giving careful attention to identifying the sounds that surround Isla Negra, then taking considerable care to capture them on tape. He strains to relate the magic of the island, its particular features and distinctive things.

Paying Attention to Christian Worship

Now, the point of my beginning with a story that never mentions worship is that I want to suggest that Mario’s sound-recording is a marvellous image to transport into the start of our thinking about liturgy. To describe worship in a particular place, with a specific congregation, Mario can help us. If you imagine your regular experience of worship as your ‘island’:

What might you want to record to convey a sense of it?

What is characteristic or impressive about a particular service, or your congregation?

What makes your liturgy distinctive?

What are the riches of your tradition?

What are the sounds of your worship?

Perhaps above all, Mario’s tape-recording reminds us of the difference between words and sounds. He does not describe the island – he records it. Similarly, liturgy is more than words on a page, more than texts from prayer books (or PowerPoint projectors). Liturgy is at least the sounds of those texts spoken, apart from all kinds of other details, both sonic and relating to the other senses. As the preface to the Methodist Worship Book (1999) puts it: ‘worship is not a matter of words alone. It involves not only what we say but also what we do’;⁴ or even more succinctly, the Church of England’s New Patterns for Worship (2002) has as its opening words: ‘worship is not worship until you do it’.⁵ Liturgy is not found in books, however important books may be to particular styles of celebration. The liturgy is something bigger than texts or words – certainly something more sensual – involving hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch.⁶

Note that if we want to speak about a particular act of worship on a given occasion, simply to say that, for example, ‘The liturgy followed Worship from the United Reformed Church’ (2003) or ‘followed Common Worship’ (2000) yields very little detail. Many congregations of the Church of England will have used Common Worship and their worship will have been remarkably diverse. Many congregations of the United Reformed Church will have referred to their liturgical resources but their use of it may have been extraordinarily varied from place to place.

In this Studyguide we are looking to Mario to learn to look at worship in a more nuanced way.

Engaging the Senses

The non-textual dimensions of worship are of course of enormous importance. Words from a page may be spoken or sung, either by a single voice or by a range of voices in unison. Words are ‘layered’, as it were. Additionally, singing voices may well be accompanied by different kinds of music, adding another kind of depth to the human voice. Worship unavoidably involves other kinds of audible noises – footsteps, perhaps the pouring of water or wine – but other kinds of noise may have also been integral to liturgy: in many congregations, noise such as hand-clapping, a human contribution – like the voice – accompanied by or accompanying music.

Sighted people are likely to find the visual dimension of worship most significant, even though liturgical books may say little explicitly about the ‘staging’ of visual aspects of liturgy. The human face is central to visual engagement in worship: a communal experience, worship involves other people, and particular faces – of ministers or worship leaders – may be especially prominent. Human figures may also be depicted in glass, stone or woodwork, in painting or embroidery. Signs and symbols – not least the cross – may also be important aspects of the worship environment worshippers have in their sight. This list of things seen in worship might be extended – extensively.

Other senses may not always be so engaged, but the taste of bread and wine in the sharing of Holy Communion is likely to be a valued dimension of the experience of worship for many people. Touch may be a regular part of the proceedings of liturgy: some of it shared among just some of the people present – hands laid on others in gestures of blessing or commissioning, for instance – while other touch is more likely to be shared more widely, such as in ‘the sign of peace’, when the service fragments for the purpose of greeting the presence of each one assembled. In some traditions, use of incense will be an obvious part of how the sense of smell is engaged in worship, honouring holy things or accompanying the prayer of the saints in the local congregation; but more subtly, smell may have been significant for others in other ways, such as the aroma of cut flowers, noted on the anniversary of a member of the congregation lost in death. Or, indeed, the smell of good coffee brewing in the background ready for the end of the liturgy may be a most helpful nasal signal of a welcome place of hospitality.

In fact the sensual dimensions of worship are only one of the ways worship is bodily, or embodied. Movement may be significant in liturgy, processions of people perhaps marking important moments – such as the movement of the Scriptures to the centre of the assembly, as a symbol of Christ at the heart of the church.

Postures may also be important to people’s sense of worship: standing in confidence, kneeling in reverence, raising hands in thanksgiving or signing the self with the mark of the cross, as a way of enacting prayer.

Relatively recently, liturgical scholarship has begun to attend to the embodied and sensual dimensions of liturgy in such a way as to make the study of worship less fixated with ‘dissecting, reducing, analysing, [and] abstracting’ texts.⁷ It is a central conviction of this book that liturgy is necessarily concerned with this more expansive agenda, and not simply with texts alone.

The Meanings of ‘Liturgy’

Worship, then, is so much more than words, and ‘liturgy’ should be used to include this ‘so much more’. It can be immensely helpful to remember that the word ‘liturgy’ means something like ‘people’s work’ (from the Greek words laos, ‘people’,