Conversion: My Ebinezer

Gospel Reading: Matthew 20.1-16
Click HERE for last Sunday's readings.

"Here I raise my Ebenezer; hither by thy help I've come."
from "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"

This morning I stepped bravely into a vulnerable place. Different groups at Christ Church each have a code to enter the building for after hours meetings. A member of one such class ended an email with "I'm surprised the code isn't 2046. Or do too many churches use that number?"

I had no idea what she was talking about.

2046. 2-0-4-6. 20-46. Hmmmm. What in the world did she mean? Is there some obvious cultural reference I'm too square to get? It's true that my TV watching habits are pathetic. They are limited almost entirely to the 8pm time slot on Thursdays: The Office.

Even so, I do know that 90210 is a Beverly Hills zip code. (I was in seminary with one of the show's stars, believe it or not. But I never mustered the nerve to tell Ann that I'd never seen a single episode.)

I also realize that I'm quite out of the apocalyptic literature loop these days. While in 1988 I was well aware of the book "88 Reasons Why Jesus will Return in 1988" I'm afraid that such a book now would have to create quite a stir among the heathens before it came to my attention. So is 2046 the latest greatest prediction of the rapture?

The vulnerable place I entered so bravely was a simple acknowledgment of ignorance. I emailed back that...gulp...I didn't know what she was talking about. Why 2046?

The sad reality is that I too often just nod along, smiling, while people drop references I don't understand. How shameful to flag myself as the only person in the free world who's never heard of . . . ?

And so I end up bereft of good things. Good things like "Ebinezers."

I love the hymn "Come thou fount." And our hymnal changes the cryptic original line "Now I raise my Ebinezer" to "Now I find my greatest treasure". Now it's true that most of us just sing right through those "Ebinezers" as though we know what we're doing. So maybe it makes sense to do away with these obscure references so nobody feels dumber than thou.

But there's a real 'treasure' to be unearthed for anyone willing to wonder "Who or what is an Ebinezer?"

The reference is to a moment in 1 Samuel. After a victory against all odds, Samuel set up a stone and called it "Ebinezer", "...saying, Hitherto hath the Lord helped us." Ebinezer isn't about some generalized treasure. It's about a moment in a story. It's a stone being tipped up, a marker to remind of a day when God helped us through when we thought we were done for. A marker to return to, perhaps, on a day when God feels awfully absent.

I think we impoverish our faith when we ditch the particular in favor of the general. Even if the particular is a strange and obscure reference it might be a more fruitful discovery than its paraphrase.

On Sunday we read another of Jesus' parables. And I'm reminded that Jesus taught in such a way that people were drawn into stories rather than given clear platitudes. It's as if he didn't mean for us to get his teachings so much as to get into them. Imagining myself a vineyard laborer who gets the shaft or tipping up my own Ebinezer might mean a lot more to our faith than generic notions of blessing or treasure or ... whatever.

So, I know you're dying to have the mystery of 2046 disclosed. Well, it's the sign of the cross on a keypad. And now every time I enter the building I might see that cross. A little, latent blessing there in the foyer. A sign hidden in plain view. And all I had to do was ask.

Worship

Gospel Reading: Matthew 18.15-20
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

My daughter Kate and her friend Clare are spies. Which means, of course, they have invented a code language. No respectable spy is without a code language. 

Most correspondence-written or verbal-between Kate and Clare includes the phrase "doog si efil". You won't need a Cracker Jack decoder ring to break this one. You don't need to speak pig latin. "Doog si efil" is the reverse of their favorite line of t-shirts: "Life is Good".

The fact that encoding and decoding is irresistable to kids is worth noticing, I think. There are any number of reasons this is so. Besides the mystique of spy work in general, there is something satisfying about having the answer to something that mystifies everybody else. It' s all great fun. 

But I think our encoding/decoding instincts lead us astray as soon as we stop playing. Or as soon as we don't realize we're playing.

Let's turn to the topic o' the blog: worship. One view of worship is as a very serious, adult kind of encoding. There's an idea that we intend to deliver. Let's say the idea is that God loves you. Well, we could send this message in an email or spraypaint it on a bridge. But we choose to deliver it along with smoke and bows and chants and hand gestures, presumably because each of these has encoded some bit of information about the mystery itself. 

Our assumption that this is so is made plain by almost every newcomer to liturgical worship. The question we all want answered is "What does it mean when....?" Whether we're talking about kneeling or making the sign of the cross or being delivered into the chancel on a zip line, our first instinct is to ask what something means. But a better first question might be "What does it do when..."

We tend to assume that worship is an encoded mystery. But worship is an embodied mystery. 

When we think we're encoding the faith in the vestments and the gestures and the words of our worship they are quickly put to use for "didactic purposes", as Kathleen Norris says. When put to use to deliver someone's agenda, liturgy stops being the work of the people and becomes a kind of work on the people. 

Maybe this is why worship has long been described as a kind of holy play. Kids don't play spies in order to gain information. Kids aren't so interested in what that encoded secret message actually means. They play because they like what the game does to them. They like inhabiting a world of mysterious unsolved things. Once the mystery is solved, the game is over.

And so it is with faith and worship. Worship is a way of inhabiting a mystery, not solving one. Worship isn't a code, and it's not just a pretty way to deliver important information about God to us. Liturgy can never be reduced to the information it delivers. Once the mystery is solved, the game is over.

Kate and Clare don't play spies to learn that "Life is Good". They play because life is good when you're a spy. Maybe that's the best reason to worship as well.