“I can’t tell you ‘how’ to pray, friend. But I can point you to the ‘who’ of prayer,” was the effect of Torrance’s reply. Torrance reminded the man that Jesus promised Peter he would pray for him even through Peter’s denial (Luke 22:31). In fact, Jesus returned from the dead to restore their relationship (John 21:15-24). Paul the apostle, Torrance explained, acknowledged that we don’t know how to pray, which is precisely why the Father set his risen Son at his own right hand to intercede for us, and placed his Holy Spirit within us to do the same (Rom. 8:26,34). Jesus, even now, said Torrance, “is praying for you … and with you and in you.”

Soon after that conversation, Torrance had the opportunity to introduce both the man and his wife to what he calls the Trinity’s “grammar of grace”: Our “Father … has given us Christ and the Spirit to draw us to himself in prayer.” At the heart of that grammar is the priesthood of Jesus Christ: “our great high priest, touched with a feeling of our infirmities, interceding (to the Father) for us, opening our hearts by the Spirit” (J. B. Torrance, Worship, Community & the Triune God of Grace, p. 45).

As with prayer, so with worship: the “how” is not as important as the “who.” Torrance challenged a generation of theology students to repent of “Unitarian” worship and embrace “Trinitarian” worship. According to Torrance, you know your worship is Unitarian (even if you label it Christian) if your worship is about various techniques of experiencing God on your own. You know your worship is Trinitarian if your worship is about Jesus, your elder brother and great high priest, drawing you into the eternal communion of love that has always characterized God’s own life as Loving Father, Beloved Son, and Holy Spirit, who is love itself.

I’ve led worship long enough to know the lure of technique-obsessed, Unitarian worship. I’ve seen it practiced over and over again. Along the way, I have learned to look for a different way, and to know the surprise and delight of the Trinity’s “grammar of grace,” where Jesus is our true worship leader.

A New Kind of Priest

We are not the first generation to have to figure out how to move from Unitarian to Trinitarian worship. The anonymous writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews helped a first-century Jewish congregation see how monumental the shift is from an old way of worship to a new, where the Son is worthy of worship alongside the Father (Heb. 1:3,8,10-12; 13:8), as is the Holy Spirit (Heb. 6:4; 10:29).

Of particular concern to the writer to the Hebrews, though, is the special nature of Jesus’s role as priest in representing us to the Father and the Father to us. Jesus is the unique God-Man priest “in the order of Melchizedek,” whose priesthood is eternal and whose once-for-all self-offering brought a redemption and forgiveness that is complete and needs no augmentation. Jesus is a priest whose work is done, in one sense. He sits at the right hand of the Father because he does not have to make any further offerings. By his sacrifice, Jesus has assured God’s satisfaction in us, and has cleansed our consciences. We don’t have to worry about guilt or death any longer.

But in another sense, Jesus’s priesthood goes into overdrive when his sacrificial work is completed. Now he serves as “Liturgist (Gk: leitourgos) in the sanctuary and the true tent which is set up not by man but by the Lord” (Heb. 8:2).

Throughout his brilliant letter, the writer carefully unpacks different elements of Jesus’s ongoing liturgical leadership. They couldn’t be more relevant to what we do when we worship.

Prayers for the Rescued

Perhaps the first thing to notice about Jesus’s work as the church’s prime worship leader is what the writer says just before calling Jesus heaven’s Liturgist. “He holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. Consequently, he is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Heb. 7:24-25).

On his breastplate Israel’s high priest bore the names of the tribes of Israel, those whom Yahweh had redeemed and called into relationship with himself (Exod. 28:29). What’s different about Jesus’s priestly ministry of prayer is that our names aren’t carved on some sort of accessory. As Isaiah put it so tantalizingly: “I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands” (Isa 49:16). Our names are written into Jesus’s flesh, into the very scars he bears for eternity in his side, his hands, his feet, and his brow.

The writer to the Hebrews sums Jesus’s life up as one long series of “prayers and supplication, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him out of (note: the Greek is not “from” but “out of”) death, and he was heard for his godly fear” (Heb. 5:7). His life was one long lesson in obedient prayer, even in that dark moment when he implored that perhaps there was another way, “Let this cup pass.” Happily, in the Garden the Father said, “No!” to his Son in order that now in heaven the Father can say, “Yes!” to his Son in our behalf.

I remember the first time I experienced incense in worship. Immediately, I recalled the word picture in Revelation: the prayers of the saints and the incense mixing and rising into God’s presence (Rev. 8:3-4). The sweetness of the smell brought to mind Christ’s “fragrant offering and sacrifice” that qualifies us to stand righteous and pure before God’s throne (Eph. 5:2). I imagined Christ bringing those incense-laced prayers into the heavenly courts and mingling them there with the Glory Cloud, the depiction of God’s presence in the Old Testament. What a profound picture of our union with God by the Spirit through Christ’s prayer with, for, and in us!

Hours later, I was driving one of my kids to an event on the other side of town, and I kept sensing a certain smell. It was vaguely familiar but maddeningly elusive. Suddenly, I remembered that I had not changed clothes after church. The smell of the incense had penetrated my shirt and pants, clinging to me long after the service was over. Heaven smells of us, because Jesus is there bringing our needs and burdens always before the Father. None of us, I realized, makes it through a moment of this life by virtue of our looks, our brains, our skills, or our likability. We make it because we have a friend in a high place, who “always lives to make intercession.”

Declaring the Father’s Name

On the one hand, as our worship leader Jesus goes to the Father in our name. On the other, he comes to us in the Father’s name. The complement to what the writer to the Hebrews says about Jesus remembering us to the Father is what he says earlier, in chapter 2. There, the Risen Jesus shouts to his Father: “I will declare your name to my brothers” (v. 12a).

While Israel’s high priest wore God’s people’s name on his chest, he bore the personal name of the Redeemer God, Yahweh, on his forehead: “Holy is Yahweh” (Exod. 28:36-38). In Numbers 6:26-27, Moses summarizes what the high priest is to do with Yahweh’s name: declare it in blessing. Three times the priest pronounces Yahweh’s name, calling upon him to bless, keep, make his face shine upon, be gracious to, lift up his countenance upon, and give peace to his people.

But Israel’s Yahweh had never been just hers, and her blessings had never been just for herself. Already back in Genesis 14, the mysterious figure Melchizedek had appeared out of nowhere. He is king of Salem (the city that is eventually to be Jerusalem) and priest of El-Elyon, that is “God Most High” — a pagan designation of the God above all gods. Representing all the nations then, Melchizedek blesses Abram: “Blessed be Abram of El-Elyon, Creator of heaven and earth” (Gen. 14:19). Melchizedek declares that the God who had just given Abram victory over his kin’s captors is not a local, petty tribal deity, but Lord of the whole earth. Melchizedek confirms to Abram Yahweh’s promise that all the nations of the earth will be blessed through Abram (Gen. 12:3; see 14:22).

Jesus comes to declare God’s name to us in blessing — exactly as he said he was doing in the so-called “High Priestly Prayer” in John 17: “I have made your name known to them, and I will make it known” (v. 26). As “mediator of a new covenant” Jesus shows God to be a Father who desires his children’s presence (Heb. 9:15; 12:24). As “merciful and faithful high priest” and as victor over death and the devil, Jesus proves God to be a Father who will tolerate no bondage for his children (Heb. 2:14-17). As “pioneer and perfecter of our faith” Jesus shows God to be “the Father of spirits” who lovingly shapes his children to bear his character (12:1-11). As “apostle and high priest of our confession” Jesus shows the intent of “the God of all” to fill the cosmos with a “festal gathering” of “the just made perfect” (3:1-2; 12:18-24).

One of the great preachers of the 19th century was Boston’s Phillips Brooks. In our day, his hymn text “O Little Town of Bethlehem” keeps his memory alive. In his day, he was known for his preaching, as commemorated in a statue just outside the church he served in Boston, Trinity Church. The statue depicts Brooks standing next to a lectern that holds an open Bible, his hand lifted in blessing. Behind the lectern stands Jesus, his arm on Brooks’s shoulder.

The statue reminds us that our job is to bless God’s people by declaring the Father’s name. When we do, we may, by the Holy Spirit, feel his Son’s kind, empowering hand on our shoulder. When we declare somebody else’s name — our own, our favorite team’s, our preferred political party’s — we may well feel a bit of a squeeze.

Singing in Our Midst

As our worship leader, Jesus prays and he declares. He also sings. “In the midst of the congregation I will sing a hymn to you,” concludes Heb. 2:12b. The same one who declares God’s name in blessing also leads the congregation in song.

The writer is actually quoting Psalm 22:22, one in which David is recounting God’s miraculously delivering him from enemies who nearly killed him. The psalm starts out as a lament of abandonment, one of the darkest in all the Bible: “My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?” At the point of rescue, the psalm pivots and becomes a victory chant, celebrating among Jew and Gentile, poor and rich, already dead and not yet born, the righteous rule of God.

It’s an extraordinary thing that the mightiest warrior of the Bible is also its most celebrated musician. He whose “hands are trained for war and fingers for battle” offers a new song to God: “Upon a harp of ten strings I will sing praises to you” (Ps 144:1,9). In his youth, David soothes Saul’s soul with his melodies. In his maturity, with harp in hand he confesses his sin, protests his innocence, humbles himself under God’s discipline, calls for help, composes “new songs” commemorating God’s fresh acts of deliverance.

David passes on his legacy of song to members of the Levitical priestly line, to the likes of Chenaniah and Asaph (1 Chron. 15:22; 16:5). It is descendants of these Levites who would oversee Israel’s musical worship (see 2 Chron. 23:18; 35:15), even, at times, going before Israel’s army into battle (2 Chron. 20:14-25).

But there is only one priestly order that could establish a permanently “new song,” only one director who could incorporate into a single choir people of every race and nation, tribe and tongue, bandwidth and skill-level, only one singer who could lead that menagerie into the fray against the powers and principalities: he who went all the way into the silence of sin-forsakenness and rose in victory to be God-incarnate singing over his people with love (Zeph. 3:17).

The glory of song in worship is that we get to join our voices to his. His is the voice that counts, not ours.

Bread & Wine

In Christ Our King Catholic Church in Mt. Pleasant, SC, there is a beautifully colored stained glass depiction of a man who is obviously from the biblical era. The picture includes a number of clues as to the figure’s identity: he bears a crown on his head and priestly vestments on his shoulders; he stands behind scales of justice and an olive branch of peace. What gives him away, though, is the cup and loaf he holds in his hands. It’s Melchizedek. The stained glass picks up on a detail in Genesis 14’s portrayal of Melchizedek that is easy to pass over, until you’ve really “seen” it. Melchizedek brings to Abram, according to Genesis 14:18, “bread and wine.”

This verse is the first convergence of “bread and wine” in the Bible. Accordingly, ancient commentators and Christian artists through the centuries have found in that detail an irresistible invitation to ponder the Eucharist, the gift of bread and wine the New Testament’s greater Melchizedek provides his brothers and sisters.

The entire redemptive project envisions, as Robert Stamps’ lovely hymn puts it, “God and man at table are sat down.” As a foretaste of Israel’s ultimate journey, seventy of her elders “eat and drink” in God’s presence on Mt. Sinai (Exod. 24:11). The Bible virtually ends with a wedding feast shared by Christ the Bridegroom and his church, the bride (Rev. 19:5-10).

In the meantime, as the writer to the Hebrews puts it, “we have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat” (13:10), but from which we do have the right to eat. Every time Jesus’s people gather he is there, and one of his delights is to set the Table and feed us: “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven. The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.”

One of Jesus’s most shocking statements is also one that most vividly portrays the genius of Trinitarian worship. Jesus says that the master who returns to find his servants laboring “will gird himself and have them sit at table, and he will come and serve them” (Luke 12:38). Of course, in one sense, the master has yet to return, and will do so only at the end of time. But in another, he has already returned, having already defeated death and sin and Satan. He is among us to serve us at Table.

When we receive “bread and wine” from the greater Melchizedek, worship gets transformed. It takes on that mysterious “grammar of grace” to which Torrance referred. Recall that after giving bread and wine and after blessing Abram, Melchizedek received from Abram a tithe (Gen 14:20; Heb. 7:4-10). Accordingly, after indicating we have the right to food from a better altar, the writer to the Hebrews says “through Jesus” we can offer better offerings — not mere tithes, but “a sacrifice of praise to God, that is the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name,” and the doing of good and the sharing of what we have, “for such sacrifices are pleasing to God” (13:15-16).

Our task as worship leaders? Simple, if not easy. Give the platform to the real worship leader. Let him pray effectual prayers. Let him declare the Father’s blessing. Let him sing over his people in love. Let him set the most lavish of tables.

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“My servant,” says Isaiah, “will justify many by taking their guilt on himself” (Isa. 53:10 NJB).

“My servant.”

Lent outlines the contours of the Suffering Servant’s servitude. Maundy Thursday – named, as it is, for the giving of the “new commandment” that we love one another as Christ has loved us – pivots on the occasion of the footwashing (John 13). Maundy Thursday’s washing and being washed creates in me a fresh hunger for participation in this new regime in which basin and towel are emblems of rule.

In the church, it is “deacons” – literally, something like “table waiters” – who are most explicitly called to model this servant lifestyle.

Apprenticeship in “the Way” of Service

Of late, I’ve been apprenticing as “subdeacon” at the Cathedral of St. Luke. Because I don’t come by “the way of the liturgy” naturally, there’s little I take for granted. And so “the way” is filled with delightful surprises – each one an important lesson for a pride-prone theologian.

Note the “sub-” in subdeacon.

Under the Word, in the Spirit

The subdeacon holds the Gospel-book while the deacon reads it so the preacher can preach it before the celebrant celebrates it in bread and wine. My calling as a seminary professor is to teach the Word and Sacraments to aspiring ministers. It’s a bit of a reversal for me to take a wordless role in worship, while somebody else reads and preaches and celebrates. What’s left to do? Everything! – like, silently pray that the good news will have its effect on us. Oh, blessed reversal.

The way it normally works at the Cathedral is that the subdeacon carries the Gospel-book out into the congregation from the altar, turns around to face the altar, and opens the Gospel so the deacon can read it to the congregation. The thurifer (the person who bears the incense) accompanies them, and gives the thurible (the incense vessel) to the deacon, who “censes” the Gospel and returns the thurible to the thurifer. Then the subdeacon holds the Gospel while the deacon, facing the congregation with his or her back to the altar, reads.

The first time I held the Gospel for the deacon I noticed that the thurifer, who had just returned to the altar, now continued to swing the still-smoking thurible, signifying the continued prayer that the Gospel being read would be illumined in our hearts by God’s Holy Spirit. I couldn’t not mix my unvoiced prayers with the rising incense. It was an overwhelming experience of both physically and symbolically “standing under” the reading of the Word, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

I recalled Paul telling Timothy to attend not just to the exhortation and teaching of the Word, but “to the public reading of Scripture” (1 Tim. 4:13 ESV). I recalled him celebrating the fact that the gospel had come to the Thessalonians “not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit with full conviction” (1 Thess. 1:5 ESV). I recalled Justin Martyr’s description of early Christians’ worship in Rome: “… the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits” (1st Apology 67.3). Paul must have had something like this dynamic in mind: the children of God gathered in the presence of their Heavenly Father, saying (metaphorically), “Read it again, Daddy!”

For me, assisting someone else to read is something of a parable of my labors as a theologian: come under the Word in the Spirit, and enable others to read and proclaim it well.

A Prayer-filled Eucharist

The subdeacon’s second main task is to point the text of the prayer the celebrant offers in the course of celebrating the Eucharist. It’s profoundly good for me wordlessly – and, again, prayerfully – to support a reality I have the privilege to ponder and teach.

What strikes me the most about “the way of the liturgy” is the prayerfulness of the Eucharist – in this respect more than any other, it is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced elsewhere. It is remaking me. Customarily at the Cathedral, the Altar/Table is incensed – again, depicting the rising of our prayers and the intermingling of our spirits with God’s Spirit.

Now, there’s a centuries long argument between Western and Eastern liturgical churches over whether the thing that really counts in the Eucharist is “the words of institution” (West) or the “calling on the Holy Spirit” (East). But even the Western churches who practice “the way of the liturgy” pray the words of institution: “When the hour had come for him to be glorified by you, his Heavenly Father, having loved them to the end; at supper with them he took bread, and when he had given thanks to you, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, and said…” (Book of Common Prayer, Eucharistic Prayer D, p. 374). In this practice, there is a tacit recognition that the most important actor in the whole affair is the Lord. Our main task is to be present to his presence.

A profound mystery takes place at the Table of the Lord, and the angle of vision that subdeaconing provides has taken me further into it. The King of the Angels has stooped to serve, and a prayed Eucharist acknowledges the wonder of the mystery in which we participate. As John Calvin wrote, in explanation of how it is that the Lord can be in body in heaven and in Spirit among us at Table: “I rather feel than understand it” (Institutes 4.17.32)

In his Dust of Death, Os Guinness once observed that the truly unique thing about the Christian faith is that at its center stands one who went so low that none of us can ever say we have gone lower. In the Lent of his own preparation to stand silent before his accusers, in the Lent of his bowing before his Father’s Word, in the Lent of his own prayerful dependence upon the Holy Spirit, in the Lent of his descent into “holy darkness,” Jesus marks the way of “table waiting” – even of being “sub-“ to the table waiters – to be the way to the richest of feasts.

See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! –
One drop would save my soul – half a drop! ah, my Christ!

But I love the story even when Disney does it, as in The Little Mermaid. Twice since college I’ve failed to get all the way through Mann’s Dr. Faustus. This time I’m going to make it. It’s such a great story.

Thomas Mann had a special understanding, I think, of the challenge of faith for people whose societies have tried to banish the God-question. In Dr. Faustus, Mann spins a familiar yarn: “For what are you willing to sell your soul?” He does so, however, in a most arresting way. The lead character’s goal is a transcendent, game-changing way of composing music (for what it’s worth, his model is Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone serial music). Mann sets the story against the backdrop of the demonic sway Nazism gained over the Germany he loved and had to leave. How could such evil take hold of one of Europe’s most refined cultures and “developed” societies?

Knowing that the demonic is eventually to take over Adrian Leverkühn’s character, I shudder at the realization that his last intellectual stop along the way before choosing a career in music is theology, my own profession. Adrian’s narrator friend realizes there’s a problem. Adrian’s teachers realize there’s a problem.

Adrian is brilliant, and knows it. He turns to theology, but not to be mastered by its Lord. Adrian wishes – so intuit those who know him – to use theology as a weapon to force philosophy, the so-called “queen of the sciences,” into submission to his will.

Theology as will to power.

Bad idea.

What Adrian is after is “theology enthroned” – and himself along with it. To the contrary, precisely because theology is “the apex of all thinking,” muses Adrian’s friend, it must

be pursued in the profoundest humility, because in the words of the Scriptures it is “higher than all reason” and the human spirit thereby enters into a more pious, trusting bond than that which any other of the learned professions lays upon it. …

But I did not believe in my friend’s humility. I believed in his pride.

Goose pimples. For a theologian, pride of intellect is an occupational hazard – a plaguing and persistent occupational hazard. Though there are all kind of idols, none is more sinister, none more primal, than pride. It was through pride, as C. S. Lewis notes in Mere Christianity, that the devil became the devil. “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n,” pronounces Milton’s Lucifer.

One of the glories of Lent is the opportunity to ponder – even to enter into – Jesus’s vicarious faith. The Architect of the universe has to go out into the wilderness to trust and obey and depend. Presented with the second of the great Faustian propositions in the human story, Jesus, “the son of Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38), humbly demurs. Instead of succumbing to Lucifer’s lies, Jesus, “the Second Man” (1 Cor. 15:47), believes in his Father’s provision, obeys his Father’s plan, and trusts his Father’s timing. As the writer to the Hebrews says of him: “And again (Jesus said), ‘I will put my trust in Him’” (Heb. 2:13). Of the many wonderful things Jesus did for me, here is one of the most splendid: he believed, he obeyed, he trusted for me.

Praise be, he believes God where Adam – who lost out at the first Faustian proffer – had not. Praise be, He obeys God where I do not. Praise be, the Son of God stands firm in the wilderness and unseats pride with a simple, “It is written.”

Not the Dean’s fault, but I pretty much only half hear the message.

Then the rest of March unfolds: my beloved MacBook Pro in a slow death spiral; my plucky 90 year old mother in and out of the hospital twice (while she simultaneously deals with the death of a best friend of 50 years); a lingering fender-bender incident that has insurance companies, well, being insurance companies; a sudden Central FL squall that takes out our power for 3 days. The sum of which virtually brings my sabbatical writing to a halt.

Finally, I realize: “Oh, I’ve been put in the waiting place … and I don’t like it one bit.”

Though I don’t hear it at the beginning of Lent, I’m hearing Dean Clark’s message now. Whining about not meeting word-count goals isn’t waiting. Listening for words of deeper wisdom is waiting. Giving thanks for daily bread – that’s waiting. Taking in the sufferings of neighbors next door and across the planet – that’s waiting. Discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary – the frustratingly, non-glamorously ordinary – that’s waiting. And it is a good place to be.

Of help has been some unplanned reading, affording the opportunity to contemplate the difference between Thomas Mann’s Faust character, Adrian Leverkühn, on the one hand, and Peggy Noonan’s “spiritual father,” John Paul the Great, on the other. The former flirts with theology in order to gain power – and becomes a son of the devil. The latter embraces the world’s wounds – and embodies life as a son of God. More about each in coming days …

Meanwhile, we’re in this forty day waiting place. Jesus’s own forty days encapsulate a life of learning a Son’s obedience. According to the writer to the Hebrews, this obedience qualifies him to be the righteous priest-king the Scriptures had promised (Heb. 5:8-10). Because he waited in the wilderness he became bread for the world. Because he waited in the wilderness he indeed brought the angelic realm into his service. Because he waited in the wilderness he inherited all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.

Jesus redeems the waiting place for all of us. Jesus’s uncommon wilderness-waiting makes of his followers’ waiting, as James Stalker puts it, “a common instrument of providential discipline for those to whom exceptional work has been appointed.” May we all know Jesus in our waiting places – both for the exceptional work appointed for each of us, as well as for the unique “fellowship of his suffering” to be found only in the frustratingly lonely and seemingly godforsaken wilderness.

A few years ago I took up samurai swordsmanship. It has not been easy, because the sword is not just about cutting stuff. It’s as much about how you move your body. My body doesn’t do Japanese well. When my sensei shows me what I look like to him, he bounces like Tigger and sways like John Wayne. What my sensei is looking for, instead, is Obi-Wan Kenobi’s liquid smoothness. To learn fluidity of motion I have to force myself to take on a persona — almost an alternate me — when I’m on the floor of the dojo. I feel like a total phony, because I’m saying “No!” to everything that feels natural. But every once in a while when I glance at myself in the dojo mirrors, I see what my sensei is after.

The “liturgy” of the dojo reshapes me so I can take on the other me that I must be if ever I wish my swordsmanship to be samurai. Christian worship does something like that for followers of Christ. Worship shapes us to be citizens of the kingdom of heaven. Worship invites us to take on a new persona: a persona so new it feels phony sometimes, even though it’s not.

It’s simply the character of Jesus.

True Selves

In Matthew 5:3-12 Jesus announced that the Kingdom — and therefore life with and in him — belongs to the humble, the mournful, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, the merciful and peaceful, the pure in heart, the courageous in suffering. Jesus prefaced each saying with, “Blessed are….”  He was not piling on guilt to prove we need a savior. He was describing himself, and issuing a promise — on the far side of his cross — of what he had come to make us into.

In the first few centuries of the church, certain believers “followed” Jesus into the wildernesses of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, thinking the desert would be a place to free themselves from the dangers and distractions of the world so they could become more like their Lord. Unexpectedly, what many of those first monks (“monk” means “one who lives alone”) discovered was that they brought their problems with them. Thankfully, they provided a rich vocabulary of the obstacles to realizing the character of Jesus: the “seven deadly sins” of pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, lust, and gluttony.

The Deadlies

Worship reshapes me to take on the “other” me Christ says I am in him and to lose the “default” me the desert fathers describe in “the deadlies.” There are a thousand ways in which worship does this work in us. At the Table, in particular, to borrow an elegant phrase from C. S. Lewis, “a hand from a hidden country touches not only my soul but my body. … Here is big medicine and strong magic.”

The Table is indeed “big medicine and strong magic” for life-transformation. I love the fact that in many churches the entire communion portion of worship is offered in prayer: “We give you thanks, Heavenly Father, that the Lord Jesus, on the night before he died, took bread, and after giving thanks to you, broke it, and gave it to his disciples….” Accordingly, I find myself coming to the Table praying that the Lord would impart more of that new other me for my default “deadlies.”

Humility

“Lord Jesus, you came in the humility of our humanity. You freely accepted a cruel and shameful death to take away our shame and guilt. Touch me now, please, in the simplicity of this bread and wine to break my pride and give me your humble heart.

Compassion

“Lord Jesus, you wept beside your friend’s tomb and showed compassion to the shepherd-less crowds. By the cup of your sorrow, teach me to mourn my neighbor’s hurts. Forgive my envy of those who have more, who seem to be in a better place than I. By the bread of your suffering, may I long for their well-being.

Forgiveness

“Lord Jesus, in the strength of your meekness, you broke the back of evil. Forgive my bitterness towards betrayers, my self-protective ire against reality that won’t bend to my will, my offense at the merest slight. As you have drunk to the last dregs the cup of judgment, tether my anger and show me the power of forgiving love.

Involvement

“Lord Jesus, you ‘troubled yourself’ (John 11:33) to come to our aid. You gloriously rose from the dead to reign over us. Forgive the sloth of my spirit. Forgive my indifference to you — and to the good, the true, and the beautiful. As this bread and wine are a foretaste of a great wedding festival, may I rise from this Table and live as one who hungers and thirsts for all things to be made right.

Sacrifice

“Lord Jesus, your coming was but the overflow of the eternal self-giving communion between Father, Son, and Spirit. Forgive my greed and avarice. Forgive my obsession with gaining things and financial security. As you give yourself to me in this bread and cup, may I give myself to you, to all who share this feast, and to your good purposes in this world.

Restoration

“Lord Jesus, creator and restorer of all things beautiful, you came to us in our corruption. You loved — and love — with holy passion, clean hands, and pure heart. Forgive the countless ways I corrupt your beautiful gifts. By this bread and wine, offerings of your lovely creation, give me satisfaction in you, and use me to restore honor and beauty and nobility to the creation you love.

Deliverance

“Lord Jesus, you said that it was your food and drink to do the will of him who sent you and to accomplish his work (John 4:34). You place me in a world of hunger, and all I think about is food for me. Forgive my blind eye to the way the righteous suffer and your prophets are persecuted. Fill me now with heavenly food and send me to fill others. Send me not to devour but to deliver. May this meal truly be one in which I become what I eat. May my life leave a trail of crumbs to lead others to you, life’s Living Bread.

“Amen.”

As to the samurai me, I got a vision of the long-term payoff for working at samurai swordsmanship, when my sensei (who is Anglo, by the way) got promoted to some ridiculously high rank by his Japanese sensei. One of our more senior students whispered in my ear during the proceedings: “You know what this means, don’t you? Now they consider him Japanese.”

May the Lord Jesus so feed us with his own self that we become more and more “Japanese.”

Such is the case with Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) Divine Comedy.

Many of us came across at least part of the Comedy somewhere in school. Perhaps we’ve read the Inferno, where, in the chilling words of C. S. Lewis, God says to the sinner, “Thy will be done.” Perhaps we took a course that included the Purgatorio, where those whose sins have been covered and who are guaranteed a place in heaven experience cleansing from the pollution of their sins. Fewer of us, probably, have tasted of the Paradiso, where dance and song become more and more prominent as the soul rises to God.

The Origin

Less known is the fact that the Divine Comedy is itself a product of exile. For Dante, homelessness became a permanent feature “in the middle of his life.” At about age 35 and at the height of a promising calling as poet and politician, Dante experienced a dramatic and devastating reversal of fortune at the hands of political enemies. He then spent the last 20 or so years of his life — when he did most of the writing for the Divine Comedy — away from home, “knowing the salty taste of others’ bread” (bread in his native Florence was made without salt) and “going up and down stairs” as a guest in homes not his own.

Separated from his family, and with his career in ruins, Dante awakes “alone” (literally) “in a dark wood” (metaphorically). From this vantage point, he looks anew at himself, at the human condition, and at the Christian story.

He writes about an imagined meeting with two people. In the Inferno he comes across a fellow poet-statesman, Pier delle Vigne, who found himself — like Dante — betrayed and suddenly out of favor (Inf. XIII). This soul’s response was suicide. Delle Vigne gave up on living and sought grim satisfaction through his suicide against those who had wronged him.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
In the Paradiso, on the other hand, Dante meets his own great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida (Par. XV-XVIII). Cacciaguida recounts pilgrimage to the Holy Land and his battles for truth as a Crusader. Then he forecasts in some detail his great-great-grandson’s exile, but promises that Dante’s fame will shine all the brighter “for having become a party of your own.” Cacciaguida challenges Dante to take advantage of his poetic gifts to become a pilgrim and crusader in his own right: to journey deeper into the Christian story and tell the truth about what’s wrong with us and with the church.

Chosen Journey

It was writing this extraordinary song of 14,000 lines that turned Dante’s exile into a pilgrimage. Dante sang his lament, and his forced exit from home became a chosen journey into the heart of God’s redeeming story. Not only that, but his personal loneliness drove him to realize that his true community was vast and personal, comprised of every soul for whom Christ died and who will attain resurrection life. And by writing his “new song” in the people’s Italian rather than the church’s Latin, Dante invites every one of us into his party.

Many of us have experienced exiles not unlike Dante’s. Not everybody who shows up on a Sunday morning has had a great week. Many are in marriages than make them feel they’d be less lonely single. Some will have heard from a boss that week, “We’re moving in a different direction…” Nearly all are acutely aware they are not the person they wish they were.

What can we offer? Well, we can make sure not to skirt the painful and difficult parts of the Bible’s story in worship. We can make sure the psalms of lament are read and sung. We can use art that tells the truth about the Christian life as journey. We can offer generous opportunity for the most basic of Christian prayers: “Lord, have mercy.”

Perhaps the most important thing we as worship leaders can offer is ourselves as “living epistles” of what it is to live in pilgrimage rather than exile. Perhaps there are artists or poets who draw profound emotions or deep thoughts from you, who point you to Christ’s suffering and glory and your place in them. “Alone and in a dark wood” not long ago myself, I found in Dante a soul-mate and a guide through the dark wood. Maybe he could be the same for you, or — perhaps you have your own song to write.

Occasionally, an ancient writer hits you with a jaw-droppingly fresh insight. The first theologian to discover the power of the idea of Jesus as God’s “New Song” was Clement of Alexandria in the early 200’s: “I have called Him a New Song.”

This is the promise He (Jesus) made to the Father: “I will declare your name to My brethren: in the midst of the congregation will I sing praises to You” (Heb 2:12).

Clement then asks Christ:

… to sing praises, and declare to me God Your Father. Your story will save, Your song will instruct me.

Clement ministered in a city that had been founded 500 years earlier by Alexander the Great as the portal for bringing Greek “reason” and “culture” to the “unenlightened” and “uncultured” East. In addition, Alexandria had long been home to a large number of Jews in permanent exile. Alexandria was the place where the Old Testament was translated into Greek. Alexandria was also the center of an intellectual approach to Judaism that had come close to reducing Israel’s story of redemption to a mere philosophy of moral improvement.

The genius of Clement lies in his ability to take an Old Testament motif of a New Song (see Isa 42:10; Ps 33:3) that is fulfilled in the New Testament (Rev 5:9; 14:3) and apply it creatively and redemptively in a non-Christian world that already had its own thoughts about music.

Magic of Music

Ancient Greece was fascinated with music, imagining the cosmos itself to reverberate to various musical modes. Personifying the magic of music was the Greek hero Orpheus. His music was supposed to have tamed beasts and moved inanimate objects. In classical Greece, great contests of song — of Olympian proportion — honored Orpheus’s memory. By the time of the emergence of Christianity, however, buffoons like Nero (who rigged musical contests to make himself the winner) made a mockery of this memory. Still, the games went on — an unending run of American Idol, despite a talent drain.

Everlasting New Song

There is a “harmony” to the universe, grants Clement in his extended tract Exhortation to the Greeks. But that “harmony” has nothing to do with speculation about musical modes, and everything to do with the “symphony” of being that has constituted the Trinity from eternity.

With the fatherly purpose of God … and by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God arranged in harmonious order this great world, yes, and the little world of man too, body and soul together; and on this many-voiced instrument of the universe He (the Word of God) makes music to God.

This eternal “harmony” and “symphony” between Father, Word, and Spirit became concrete when the Word became a human being. Christ came to make us like himself and to draw us into the eternal relationship — the eternal “harmony” and “symphony” — that has always existed within the godhead.

Jesus the New Song

Thus, Clement proclaims: “Because the Word lately took a name — the name consecrated of old and worthy of power, the Christ, I have called him a New Song.” And while ancient Greeks mythologize and fantasize about a revered hero of the past taming beasts through song, Christians know a more powerful Singer:

He is the only one who ever tamed the most intractable of all wild beasts — human beings. For he tamed birds, that is, people who are flighty; reptiles, that is, those who are crafty; lions, that is, the passionate; swine, that is, those who are pleasure-loving; wolves, that is, the rapacious. … All these most savage beasts, … the heavenly song of itself transformed into gentle people. …

See how mighty is the New Song! It has made … humans out of wild beasts. They who were otherwise dead, who had no share in the real and true life, revived when they heard the song.

Those who awake to God’s song of redemption

will dance with angels around the unbegotten and only imperishable and only true God, the Word of God joining us in our hymn of praise.

What an amazing thought! Clement compellingly contextualized biblical imagery to speak to a culture of disbelief at the beginning of the 3rd century. May we at the beginning of the 3rd millennium be as faithfully creative. Because the story Jesus tells still saves, and the song He sings still instructs.

As the credits roll in the movie I Am Legend, Bob Marley sings:

Won’t you help to sing
These songs of freedom?
‘Cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs,
Redemption songs,
Redemption songs.

An artful choice. Marley’s reggae music provides the movie’s central character, Robert Neville (played by Will Smith) a slender line of hope. He’s reluctant to believe that in his post-apocalyptic world there’s a God with a plan, reluctant to believe even that any other non-zombie humans exist. Marley’s voice from a healthier world helps him fend off despair.

Many of us know what it is to feel cut off — to have no sense that there’s a master plan. The driver from hell nearly runs you off the road. Cash flow is negative. A relationship unravels. Evil reigns in the world, good is thwarted at every turn. And you go: “Am I left alone?”

Will Smith had Bob Marley’s reggae. I have the book of Psalms — and I have them in the ancient church’s plainsong.

Echoed Cries

The Psalms invite me to tell God’s people’s story as my own:

• The betrayals of David, then of my Redeemer, and now, to my astonishment, of me — I find I share — I mean really share — by virtue of taking David’s and Jesus’ words as my very own: “Even my best friend, the one I trusted, … has turned against me” (Ps 41:9 NLT).

• Warnings made to others become warnings I send to my own unbelieving heart: “… they did not wait for His counsel” (Ps 106:13).

• Promises made to others, I take for myself — “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps 34:8).

• Wisdom aimed at people three millennia ago I sing as though I had discovered it myself: “… I almost lost my footing … For I envied the proud” (Ps 73:2a,3a).

The power lies not just in the Psalms’ words, though. It lies also in their music. “He who reads the Torah without chant, of him can it be said as it is written, ‘the laws that I gave you were not good,’” says the Mishnah’s Rabbi Johanan. How much more true of the psalms. Ancient Israel chanted the psalms. The ancient church chanted them as well. “A soul rightly ordered by chanting the sacred words forgets its own afflictions and contemplates with joy the things of Christ alone,” maintained Athanasius of Alexandria in the 4th century.

Fact is, when truth becomes song, you know it at a deeper level.

Spanning Time

This past Advent, I began chanting psalms in my daily devotions. I’m doing so using the eight ancient plainsong chant tones that have their origins in the Gregorian musical revolution of the middle of the 1st millennium, as recovered and restored in the late 19th century. James Litton has adapted them for church and individual singing in his handsome volume, The Plainsong Psalter (Church Publishing Inc., 1988; ISBN: 978-0809691627 — hardback, quarto-sized, $40).

A couple of friends on the other side of the country have bonded with me in an arrangement of spirit. We’re simply following the course laid out in the Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer (which serves as the text base for The Plainsong Psalter). It takes seven weeks to chant through the psalms, a pace of about three psalms per day. It’s a tempo that works for me.

The great thing about chant is that you don’t have to force the text into an artificial meter. Chanting allows the text to take its own meter and rhythm. In a given line, singers stay on a chanting tone all the way up to the last note (or two or three) of a phrase.

Indigenously Christian

The plainsong music is lovely. Tone 1 is the basis for the tune most of us know as “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” And if you’ve admired Allegri’s Miserere, you’ll recognize Tone 2 to be the cantor’s melody.

In the early hours of the morning I enjoy the fellowship across 1500 years or so with folks who have shared these psalms in similar fashion. I love the bold aspiration of the original Gregorians: to create a music that all believers could sing and that was trying to be indigenously Christian, but that was in positive dialogue with the best music theory of its day.

In this world that is beyond crazy I enjoy having my “soul rightly ordered” as I sing redemption songs, plainsong-style.

Just as I was ordering my Big Mac, a woman came into McDonald’s yanking on the arm of a young child. Ugliness leaped from this slovenly woman. Dragging on a cigarette butt, she yelled at her kid: “Shut up and tell me what you want to eat, or I’m going to kick you from here to Kingdom come!”

But then I noticed this distinctive shape to her face …

Suddenly, I realized this face was identical to that of one of the prostitutes French artist Georges Rouault had once painted. This woman could have served as his model.

Dark Times

Though he lived from 1871 to 1958, Rouault’s most notable working years spanned WWI and WWII. Many artists of his day heard in the turmoil of their times the death-knell of Christendom and of the Christian faith. For Rouault, though, the times were proof of our need for Christ.

His art became the means of bringing together God’s story and our pain.

As a teen, Rouault had apprenticed as a stained glass artisan. He learned to tell a story through simplicity of line and color. In his early adult years he studied the realistic technique of Rembrandt, in quest of that master’s psychological depth. Rouault’s early work, not surprisingly, reveals an artist who has not yet found his voice.

Then, around 1903 when Rouault was in his early 30’s, he had a happenstance encounter with an off-duty clown. Everything changed. It is the moment, as he puts it, “that marked the beginnings of poetry in my life.”

Self Portraits

Rouault comes upon this old clown “mending his glittering and colorful costume.” He sees the jarring contrast of “brilliant, scintillating things, made to amuse us,” on the one hand, and the infinite sadness in the man’s unguarded face, on the other.

I clearly saw that the “Clown” was me, it was us. … This rich and spangled costume is given to us by life, we are all clowns more or less, we all wear a “spangled costume,” but if we are caught unawares, as I surprised the old clown, oh! Then who would dare to say that he is not moved to the bottom of his being by immeasurable pity.

Rouault begins to paint pictures that tell us the truth about ourselves: sorrowful clowns (“Who does not paint himself a face?”), imperious kings (“We think we are kings…”), self-absorbed bourgeoisie (“The well-bred lady thinks she has a reserved seat in heaven.”)

He drops his realistic technique for the look of the stained glass of his youth: thick, simple lines. Vivid colors. Simple but penetrating truths about ourselves.

Stained glass is above all the church’s art. Here’s where Rouault’s art becomes poetry. He uses his stained glass effect because, in pity, he would point us to Jesus, to him who had become “like us in all things, save sin” so he could redeem and heal us. In Rouault’s hands, one portrait of Christ looks as ugly as the sinners with whom he identifies, while another portrait is iconically transcendent, a promise of peace and resurrection.

Deeper Similarities

Standing at that McDonalds counter, I realized that despite all that made us different, this woman and I were the same. Same ugliness. Same dignity and beauty for which we were created, but from which we have fallen so hopelessly and seemingly irrevocably.

Then came the epiphany, unbidden. In a flash, I recalled Rouault’s famous Head of Christ. I think it was the shape of the jaw. In my imagination, the woman’s face morphed, first, to that of Rouault’s sad, angry prostitute, then second, to his sadder, compassionate Christ.

Art of any sort — from painting to music to worship design — has this extraordinary power: it can bring a whispered promise or a shouted call from another realm. The incarnation itself brings, after all, God’s permanent residence in our reality.

Rouault’s portrait of the prostitute said: “Doesn’t she look a lot like you and me?” His portrait of Christ said: “Didn’t he come for the likes of her and you and me?”

I should have talked to this “Fallen Eve” (a term Rouault sometimes used). But the words wouldn’t come. All I knew to do in that moment was pray: “Lord, have mercy. On her. On me. On this sad world you love. In your own time and in your own way, show yourself to this dear child of yours, and save her. And Lord, forgive my blindness to what, or rather Who, makes us one.” I pray for her still.

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Also I’m pondering what the French Catholic artist Georges Rouault has taught me about God’s wedding of medium and message. About a Christ who came bearing the likeness of angry prostitutes, sorrowful clowns, proud kings, imperious judges, self-feeding shepherds.

“Then in the fullness of time,
out of your great love for the world,
you sent your only Son to be one of us,
to redeem us and heal our brokenness.”

• From the Great Thanksgiving (Book of Common Worship).

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