Worship tells a story that can cause discomfort
In contemplating pastoral identity in a secular age, I found myself thinking about liturgy—the public ritual act of worship, one of the main parts of my role as a congregational pastor. What does liturgy mean in this frame—where so few people feel God’s presence in their lives? What does this mean for Christian liturgy? Can liturgy be found elsewhere that more closely fits the realities of this secular frame and the accompanying ways of seeing God?
Gathering
One recent afternoon, I left my church office a few minutes early for the day to go to the movies. I made my way to the theater, and I sat down for about 10 minutes before the show was to start. I was reading a copy of Andrew Root’s Churches and the Crisis of Decline as I was preparing to write for the Relevance to Resonance Writing Symposium. Then the lights went down. I can’t count the number of times that I have had this experience: sitting alone or with others while reading a book, only to close it ceremoniously as the lights dim, and anticipation for the movie rises.
Going to the movies is a more familiar way of being called together as a community for most people than receiving the greeting offered by the usher handing out bulletins at the door of the church on Sunday morning. This other calling together—perusing listing times, purchasing tickets and snacks, and finding a seat for a movie—is far more common and familiar. It is the beginning of a ritual too. One that may carry fewer cultural assumptions, barriers, and unknowns than entering into the liturgical space of the church.
Calling together
For decades the second act of secular liturgy at a movie was the “let’s all go to the lobby” video promoting snacks available at the theater. For the last few years, that has been replaced by a promo video for the theater chain. Sitting in the movie theater—since I was already pondering pastoral identity, transcendence, the immanent frame, and what it means to be a pastor or church in the secular world—the words of the promo for the AMC theater chain struck me differently.
First, a high heel appears on screen and walks through a puddle outside a theater with a classic, brightly lit marquee. As it walks into an empty movie theater, it is revealed that the shoe belongs to the actress Nicole Kidman. She speaks to the camera, to you, the viewer, as she sits. She says,
“We come to this place for magic. We come to AMC Theaters to laugh, to cry, to care. Because we need that, all of us. That indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim and we go somewhere we’ve never been before. Not just entertained, but somehow reborn together. Dazzling images on a huge silver screen. Sound that I can feel.
Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
Our heroes feel like the best parts of us, and stories feel perfect and powerful … because here … they are.”
This is the formal calling together; in the church, we might call it the Call to Worship or the Opening Prayer, but the action is the same. We are reminded or told why we are here, why we have gathered in this place, who is welcome, and what experience we are expected to have. In the church we name what we are about, but so do the more clearly secular spaces that also profess to help us find meaning. Whether we are at the theater to see car chases, superheroes, romantic moments, cartoon adventures, or “serious art,” we have come here to experience community, emotions, and powerful stories. I would add to Ms. Kidman’s list: transcendence.
Kidman’s statement is so audacious that it was even parodied on Saturday Night Live. But for me, a lifelong film and TV lover as well as a follower of Jesus, it struck a different chord—it told me something about the liturgy that the world follows and asked me a question: What is the power, expectation, and weight of the work of liturgy that I do as a pastor?
Confessing
I had an overwhelming emotional experience watching this promo. It was a confluence of meaning, goodness, and a bit of shame. I realized at that moment that in my lifetime, I had attended more movies in theaters like this than worship services. When I added up all the time I have spent watching movies at home and in theaters, as well as reading plays, it far exceeded the amount of time I have spent in worship or studying Christian scriptures … I feel like I should feel bad about this, especially as a pastor.
I’m a pastor, but I also live in this secular age. I’m part of this world, so it’s no wonder that I’ve given so much of my time to secular stories. These stories live in the secular space—even when they seek to provide transcendence, they do it in and through human relationships, creating something supernatural that is visible and tangible even in its other-worldliness. The Christian story is more complex in the immanent frame than these secular stories, and therefore harder to tell. It is a story that speaks of a God both in and outside our frame—a transcendent God who is both immanently present and transcendently hard to reach or understand. This “both/and” is central to the story, and so is not accessible to those who exist in the secular frame and have no interest in transcending it. On our worst days (and even our average ones), it’s hard to push against the immanent frame. It’s hard to want to tell a different story that seems to bear little relationship to our lives as we know them. But that is precisely the point. The God we follow is one of relationship and transcendence, so we are called to tell a story that is more than the immanent frame can easily hold.
In Reformed worship liturgy, the next order of business is confession. It is corporate, it is universal—we acknowledge that we all are broken, distractible, sinful, and in need of a return to right-relationship. This is one of the hardest and most often skipped parts of worship. I suspect this is because we don’t have the story quite right. We tell this story, and accidentally or purposefully, we avoid any sense of responsibility. We are consumers in worship, and God is our commodity. If we tell the story of the transcendent God, then we become people in relationship, instead of consumers. If we are in relationship with a transcendent God who is also present with us, then, just like in our human relationships, we must be honest and open with one another. We must tell the truth about where our actions and words have fallen short, where we have become overwhelmed or exhausted, and so we confess. This is truth-telling; it is returning to relationship, it is what God calls us to do, and is central to being followers of Christ.
In the secular frame, confession doesn’t make sense. The call to confession causes defensiveness and guilt instead of freeing us to be together. This is because to confess means becoming vulnerable, trusting that the one receiving the confession loves us, cares for us, and wants what is good for us. Instead, it often sounds hollow or like we are being falsely self-deprecating because we do not have faith enough in the present/transcendent God to know that our confession will be received as a hopeful return to relationship.
Holy words
I don’t think my experience with film and TV is unique. We search everywhere for the transcendent, since we can’t or don’t find it in the expected places. This is the truth of living in the secular world—we can’t find the transcendent when we stay in this frame. It is no wonder that art and storytelling are where we connect to transcendence. In art and storytelling, careful words and logic are not in charge so we can reach for something beyond this world.
I come from a theater family. We attended church each Sunday morning and the theater on Saturday for the matinee. We spent every Friday night going to a Blockbuster or the movie theater. Each of us has spent time making shows and telling stories ourselves. Telling stories to connect to human experience, beauty and love, and the transcendent is the project our family loves most.
We are not alone.
There are so many places where popular fiction has taken on the questions of the Christian story in a fantastical way. These shows have offered an interpretation of the Christian story that is often divorced from the scholarship that is expected of a preacher or teacher. Even so, they are very much grounded in the experience and understanding of those in the secular world who are still concerned with transcendence, if not God, and who are passingly familiar with Christian theology.
- Lucifer places the devil himself in the police procedural world of Los Angeles to explore what ways punishment, repentance, and love are meaningful.
- The Good Place takes a broadly framed idea of heaven and hell and adds the human spirit to play in how it works. What would it mean if human ingenuity and care were applied to the points system that sends someone to reward or damnation?
- The work of Neil Gaiman in American Gods, Good Omens, and Sandman takes questions of faith and belief and God and adds grit and struggle to point out the hypocrisy, humanity, and selfish way we speak about God. What does it mean to be divine or human? To be good or evil? To love or to hate?
- Superheroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: these stories range from aliens, to science experiments gone wrong, to gods, and all of them, hero or villain, show us what is possible to imagine about the human need to fight for what we believe in.
These narratives from pop culture push against the immanent frame and reach for transcendence. They all tell a better story, or at least one that is accessible to more people than the church seems to be able to reach for this time and this era of humanity. This is because they live and function in the secular immanent frame. They don’t question the veracity of the frame or try to say that something else might be true. They yearn for transcendence, but they never really look to tell a story other than the one we are all comfortable with inside the secular frame.
Our story-telling
So then, what is our job in telling our story?
Our job is to remember that as followers of a triune God—one whose nature is not tangible in a way we can understand, or wholly divorced from the immanent either, that the story we tell does not live, at least not wholly (or even halfway) inside the immanent frame. If we are telling a different kind of story, the ears that listen to it must be prepared for that reality. Instead, the story we tell often aims to make people comfortable, to make us feel good about ourselves and God, which helps us to be better people and in better relationship with God and one another.
We also regularly fail to accomplish these goals because we have not prepared ourselves as liturgists or preachers (or as whole congregations) for the ways that God is both within and beyond the frame we inhabit. Metaphorically speaking, how do you explain to a fish that there is an animal that both swims and flies? I’m not sure I have the answer to this any more than anyone does. I know it will involve dreaming outside our everyday lives; it will involve the conviction that we know our story of a God who is not wholly knowable (within the immanent frame); and knowing we can tell that story with energy and love. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine; I’m swimming in this frame right beside you.
Response
What is next? What do we do with this experience? When I arrive at the theater, I check in on Facebook. After the movie is over, I check to see if anyone has responded to my post. Usually, they have, looking for a review, sharing impressions, or asking questions. So I engage in sharing my experience. I talk with my family about the movie and what I took from it; even when it is horrible, it can lead to great conversation and connection. Sometimes the response is to see the movie again or find more content about it in podcasts or documentaries. No matter what, there is always a response.
In Christian liturgy, after the Word has been preached, we respond with action. Those actions include prayer, affirmations of faith, and the celebration of sacraments.
Our response to the word invites us to act beyond liturgical actions. Our hope is that prayer, affirmation and sacraments will change us and shape the actions we take once the liturgy is over.
In the world of popular entertainment, we respond by coming together to share about our experiences. This can be as simple as saying “I hated that,” or as complex as buying clothing or toys from the movie or TV show, dressing as the characters for a pop culture convention, following the actors or creators on social media, or creating podcasts or writing about what we have seen, felt, and learned.
The active response of both Christian liturgy and pop culture entertainment includes sharing, responding, and connecting with others about what we have experienced. The secular action takes the form of making ourselves part of the story—by purchasing costumes, buying toys, going to conventions, and more. In the world of Christian practice, we know we are already part of the story, so our action is instead about affirming that belonging and, beyond that, inviting others to know they belong too. It is a strange invitation asking others, “come be a part of a relationship and a story that will be hard—that will call you to reach beyond what you can touch and hold and know, but that will give you transcendent relationship and love.”
Sending
Once the show or movie is no longer in theaters or being produced for TV, or most people have watched it on the streaming service, what happens? If it was wildly popular, everyone waits in anticipation of a sequel or next season. If it was awful, it moves into the category of conversation topic, “do you remember XXX, how bad that was”? Either way, it is not gone, only finished for now. This is true in worship too. The role of the blessing and sending at the end of a service is not only to conclude things but to remind those present that their work has just begun and that we will gather again soon. There is a twofold challenge to the participant:
- What will you do with this experience?
- When will you join us again?
It’s not actually an ending.
The end of worship is not the end—it always leads to more. And isn’t that itself a glimpse of the transcendence we are looking for, something that goes beyond our frames, our understanding, and our time? There is always more. In the secular frame, that “more” focuses on spending more money or consuming more media. In the Christian story, “more” means being open to more love, more transcendence—the abundance of God that is enough and goes beyond what we can see. With God, the story is not over, it’s not even paused; it goes on into the whole of our lives. The story is the story of everything. And this is precisely what makes us uncomfortable. As Annie Dillard pointed out:
The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.
The act of telling our story, of liturgy and worship, of being a community, is an act that should make us not just uncomfortable but should be dangerous if we are doing it well.
So preacher siblings, sister liturgy leaders, fellow followers of Christ: is the story of Christ that you tell transcendent? Is it dangerous? Does it give you pause every time you try to do it? If not, then perhaps you, like me much of the time, are trying to fit the story of the triune, transcendently immanent God into the immanent frame. Take a cue from pop culture entertainment and tell a more dangerous story —not a more palatable and safe one.
Give yourself permission to do more.
Works referenced
Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 40-41.
Jessica Dixon is an ordained minister in the PC(USA). She serves churches as an interim pastor and is currently serving at Old Tennent Presbyterian Church in New Jersey. This article was previously published by Faith+Lead as part of a series.