I remember walking into our place of worship on Easter Sunday several years ago and sensing that the room was filled with an air of joy and excitement—as it should be on Easter Sunday. I was surprised and delighted by scores of brightly colored helium balloons. What joy! Christ is risen! God is with us even after the cross!
How different are my memories of the Easter Sundays of my childhood. Of them I remember Easter lilies in the sanctuary, new spring clothes, fancy hats, and listening to a room full of psalm-singers sing "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today!"
In retrospect I am hard pressed to say which of these two churches was trying harder to govern its worship by Scripture. But I'm pretty sure that the church of the balloons worships in a manner more fitting than the church of my youth.
Seeing God and Ourselves in Our Worship
We believe that in worship the body of Christ comes together to hear God speak and remind
us of his saving activity in human history. Hearing God, we respond with warmed hearts and grateful words and songs. We respond, if our worship is to be true, in words that we can own, words that are genuinely ours.
The words that God speaks, likewise, must be intelligible to us—words we can understand. To use Calvin's words, "God lisps." God speaks as does a mother to her young child. Similarly God acts in ways that are intelligible in a particular human context. That God's words and actions address the peculiarities of our context serves to affirm the goodness of our nature as historical creatures. It is good in God's providence that we are alive now, at this time, with our various histories. God's speech and God's actions confirm this.
The implication is, I think, that in our worship we ought not to deny or seek to conceal our histories and the historical character of our existence. Our worship should reflect how we see God and how we see ourselves as the particular historical persons we are—late-twentieth-century North American Christians. We should expect our worship to be identical to neither the Christian worship of Calvin's Geneva nor the Christian worship of first-century Jerusalem. The guiding principles may remain the same— that God speaks to us, that we remember and celebrate Christ's resurrection, that we pray and praise and offer our gifts to God. But these are only general principles. How these are fleshed out and applied will depend on who we are now and not who our great-grandparents were or who our great-grandchildren will be.
This means that faithful worship, like faithful work, must be approached with a knowledge of our historical context, of ourselves as members of a particular culture. Or, as Karl Barth suggested, we should approach preaching and worship with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Scripture is the lens through which we read our culture, through which we discern which artifacts and practices of our culture may be vessels of God's speech and may be transformed for Christian worship and which, because they are not compatible with God's reconciliation of all things to himself, are not appropriate for Christian worship.
Putting Principles into Practice
What does this mean in practice? Perhaps a few examples will help. Take the issue of liturgical dance. If a congregation were educated properly about liturgical dance (and I think the meaning of dance is seldom transparent enough so that this education can be forgone), I see no reason why dance could not be both appropriate and effective in a contemporary worship service. Dancers might call us to worship, reveal to us some facet of God's character, or help us respond in gratitude to God.
And what about music? Could an accordion solo be appropriate? In principle at least as appropriate as any other instrumental solo, I should think. In practice, however, I suspect that the accordion is so alien to us that it would have smaller claim to propriety than, say, a banjo, a dulcimer, or a steel guitar (although I'm sure there is a Presbyterian church somewhere made up of former Scottish woolen-mill workers in which accordion music might rightly be preferred to the electric organ).
As to flowers in the sanctuary, I must admit some ambivalence. In our culture flowers function as decoration, and as liturgical decoration, they are vastly inferior to liturgical banners and other liturgical art. On the other hand, flowers are affectively powerful. Most North Americans can associate flowers with beautiful sanctuaries, and the association of God and beauty is surely to be valued. So I suspect that flowers are acceptable insofar as they do not displace other liturgical art.
Ministerial robes are themselves an example of liturgical art. Where they are used, the congregation may require some education about their meaning. A black robe serves to distinguish the minister as the one set apart by God for speaking the word of God to the people in the service. Such meaning is more or less transparent, I think. Not so the symbolism of a purple robe. Most North Americans do not associate purple with royalty or dignity or a particular season of the church year. These things must be explained. Still, I see nothing inherently wrong about a minister wearing a purple robe unless he or she is wearing it simply because it's the robe of his or her alma mater.
We might respond similarly to questions about kneeling, burning incense, raising hands in holy prayer, and speaking in tongues. We know that these practice have been meaningful at various times in the history of Christian worship, and some may be meaningful yet today. Kneeling for prayer, for example, expresses our humility before our Maker and assists us in centering our thoughts on God- The raising of hands is, like the kiss of peace, foreign to our culture and more likely than not to be disruptive.
Scripture, then, provides us with general principles, and these principles inform and guide the content of our worship. But to take these scriptural principles as literally determinative of our worship is to deny the historical nature of our existence and leaves us with an alien worship, a worship which bears so little resemblance to our daily lives that the presence of God with us in that worship is difficult to feel and to believe.
