The four services provided variety as follows:
1. A “Service for All Generations” included separate meditations for children, youth, and adults.
2. A “Sing–in for Peace” included a portion of a poem by the Jesuit priest, Daniel Berrigan. Convicted and sentenced for the destruction of draft files during the course of the Vietnam conflict, he then occupied a prison cell. The poem in part read:
A man stood on his nails
an ash like dew, a sweat
smelling of death and life.
Our evil Friday fled,
the blind face gently turned
another way, toward life.2
3. A “Folk Mass for Passion Sunday,” taken from the Revised Liturgy of the Lord’s Supper of the Episcopal Church, USA. Musicians at piano, bass guitar, and vibraharp accompanied the liturgy.
4. A “Drop–In Communion” for the first day in Holy Week presented the worship with a liturgy side by side with explanatory notes set for private reading. The printed meditation by Catholic author, Romano Guardini, led eventually to the printed invitation to come forward when ready to receive the loaf and the cup. The basic format of the service derived from the Iona Community of Scotland.
God is not better worshiped by some “high church endeavor on Main Street” rather than by a “low church” effort in a white frame sanctuary by the railroad track. Likewise, newness of form offers no panacea. Familiar forms may lead to dulled spirits. Some lively combination seems recommended. Liturgy may provide the comfort of the familiar and the adventure of the new. How desirable!
When two or three gather together, no matter the form, all seek the Presence.
Doing Theology Regularly
The parish minister is ordained and installed as “pastor and teacher.” So in the December 2003 newsletter at Bethel United Church of Christ, in Manchester, Michigan, I devoted the “Minister’s Minute” to one traditional theory about the way the sacrificial death of Jesus applies to our sins: “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
Old and current stories illustrate the meaning of “ransom” —The Norse myth of how everyone’s tears might ransom Baldur from the dead; the account of The Fisher King, in which a guilt–ridden disc jockey risks his own life to ransom a derelict back from the brink of destruction; the C.S. Lewis space fantasy in which Dr. Ransom fulfills the meaning of his name by saving the mythic planet, Perelandra, from destruction.
The dying of Jesus on the cross has, in Christian theology, been called a “ransom offering.” That is to say it is a price paid to redeem the people from aimlessness and sin back into the safety of God’s eternal care.
The notion of ransom sacrifice finds a small place in many main–line Protestant pulpits. Yet how does Jesus Christ, as the United Church of Christ Statement of Faith says, achieve the “conquering sin and death?” Ransom is one way of answering that question.
We ask, “Does God demand the ransom?” and answer, “Yes.” Immediately we add, “And God provides in Christ the ransom sacrifice.” What God’s moral law demands God’s loving will provides. As in the story of Abraham and Isaac, God both requires and provides the sacrifice.
Once we attended an organ dedication in a near–by church. We sang these words from the hymn, “Salvation unto Us Has Come”:
And yet the law fulfilled must be, or we were lost forever;
Therefore God sent His Son that He might us from death deliver;
He all the Law for us fulfilled and thus His Father’s anger stilled
Which over us impended.
Well, it rhymes, but is there reason? These words, translated from a German source, Paul Speratus (1484–1551), contemporaneous with Martin Luther, remind us of the theology that made the little girl report to her mother about the church service, “Well, I like Jesus, but I don’t like God.”
I do, however, resonate positively with the next stanza of the hymn:
Since Christ has full atonement made and brought to us salvation
Each Christian therefore may be glad and build on this foundation.
Thy grace alone, dear Lord, I plead Thy death my life now is indeed
For Thou hast paid my ransom.3
Other hymns proclaim the ransom. For example, the hymn, “Praise, My Soul, the God of Heaven,” reads as follows:
Praise, my soul, the King of Heaven; to his feet your tribute bring,
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, evermore God’s praises sing.4
It may well be argued that a key verse in St. Mark’s gospel is, “For the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).
God
The rookie minister asked the veteran pastor, “About what should I preach?” The wise pulpiteer answered, “About God and about twenty minutes.” That advice needs revision in light of contemporary short attention spans. The correct answer now is this: “About God and about twelve minutes.”
In my first opportunity to speak from the pulpit on June 9, 1968, in Park Church, I chose as a title, “God.” There issued from my lips a lengthy harangue taking up four printed pages. The paragraphs wandered about as with a person lost in the woods. Certainly the parishioners needed extra grace that summer’s day to endure the so–called sermon.
It was Trinity Sunday. I sought to make this doctrine relevant. But only one illustration provided a window into the teaching. I related a story Cardinal Cushing of Boston told on himself. He was in a department store shopping. Someone rushed up to him, breathless, urgent, saying, “There’s a man in the store seriously ill!” Immediately going to him and leaning over his prostrate form, the Cardinal asked, “My Son, do you believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit?” The man replied, “Oh my, here I’m dying and he’s speaking to me in riddles.”
The human incident illuminated for a moment what I struggled to convey that day—that faith is a risk of a relational sort which allows the complexities of doctrine to await a more opportune time.
One year later, June 8, 1969, I mounted the Park Church pulpit again. Trinity Sunday. The message this Sunday consumed only one–half the previous time. The sentences strode forth in more Hemingwayesque fashion.
I began as follows:
The greatest theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth, in 1928, said, “As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory.”5
Nevertheless, I sought to speak of God. Among others, I quoted American theologian, Roger Hazelton, who wrote:
Traditional talk about a being who is supposed to preside over human affairs, whose prerogatives are properly described in the images of authority and sovereignty may of course persist for a long time in the church