Mr. Miyagi on the importance of Liturgy

 This morning in Genesis God instructs the Israelites through Moses in the details of the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. They are about to be expelled from Egypt by an exasperated Pharaoh and spared from the final plague of death and destruction. How? By participating in a strange new liturgy that involves painting your doorposts with lamb's blood and excluding Egyptian yeast from your diet for a week. God is teaching his people the meaning of his actions and forming their ability to participate in his life through these liturgies- activities that the people do together.

 I wish I could remember the reference, but someone pointed out that most church services are formed on a modern 'Crusade' model. A big concert and a big name speaker (maybe an altar call) and you go home. This was a specific model with a specific purpose: mobile evangelism. On the other hand, churches used to shape their worship around formational practices called liturgies. Things like responsive reading, unified singing, shared silence, kneeling, creeds, prayers, teaching, offering, communion, and a beautiful variety of creative participatory practices to shape the Body through rehearsal.

 For the most part now we have a big music component and a huge speaking component. Probably an offering. The songs we sing most likely will have been provided via a corporation thats main focus is to make money off of Christians (don't fool yourself, the Christian music industry is very much an industry). The music will likely be led by a powerful solo vocalist that most people cannot follow (Most Christian worship music is actually written to showcase solo vocalists, not to accomodate congregations. The Gettys would be just one familiar exception).

 The sermon will be around 40 minutes out of an hour long service. It will be a monologue - a single-voiced expression of worship. Participation in the sermon is mostly passive, like watching a TV program. In fact, in some churches the sermon literally is a TV program projected onto a screen from a remote location with no flesh and blood presence.

 What do solo worship performances and huge monologues do to congregations? I want to ask how these models shape us? How do they form us? How do they form us physically, mentally? How do they form our imaginations (the imagination is the place where capacity for action is cultivated). In my opinion this model of worship is shaping a passive individualism. The singing is about me (solo performer) and the sermon doesn't involve me (passive monologue) and there's an offering (consumers were provided a service, please tip your servers).

 How do you think about liturgies? Are they boring? Pointless? Worn out by repetition? How does simultaneously saying a series of statements of belief over and over again for years shape one's imagination (capacity for action)? How does kneeling as a congregation train your body and mind? What does hearing all the voices in a room sing together do to your soul over time? What happens when the words of a certain prayer become a part of your DNA? We know that childhood trauma and abuse can radically distort human formation and leave a person wounded-possibly for a lifetime. We call them wounds and they are, but aren't they ruts in the road to get stuck in left by sad family liturgies? What if the church's 'worn out' liturgies have the opposite, positive formational power to heal and form real humanity in us? What if they accomplish this so incrementally that the only way it can happen is without us noticing until much later?

 I think of Mr. Miyagi teaching Daniel-son in Karate Kid. Mr. Miyagi gives Daniel-son seemingly disconnected but very particular tasks. Painting the fence, waxing the floor, paint the house and so on. Daniel-son does them over and over and is frustrated because the Karate teacher is not teaching him anything, he thinks. When Daniel-son confronts Mr. Miyagi he finds that all those worn out repetitive patterns were slowly working the 'yeast of karate' into the dough of his own muscles and imagination. He couldn't see it, but he was actually being formed into a karate champion by a very wise teacher who spent almost no time monologuing. Mr. Miyagi knows liturgy's formational power. So does Israel's Deliverer who not only delivers Israel from Egypt but also from the ways of Egypt. Real transformation into the People of God.