Worship – Peculiar Faith

Breaking the Fourth Wall—for Life

In the world of theatrical productions—whether live theater, film, or television—there is a concept known as the “fourth wall.”

It’s probably easiest to grasp this concept in a traditional proscenium theater: the “fourth wall” is where the stage ends and the audience begins. The “proscenium” is the arched frame around that invisible line and it marks a boundary between the actors on stage (or screen) and the audience in their seats.

Most theatrical productions respect the integrity of that fourth wall as a matter of principle. Performers act as if the audience is not there and they resist addressing the audience directly. Some believe this separation—which makes the audience a collection of “observers”—creates the conditions for a more “realistic” performance, convincing audience members that they are witnessing something from “real life” and not just on a stage.

Breaking that fourth wall, by contrast, can feel disorienting or even rude, as if an unspoken contract had been violated. Audience members are suddenly no longer merely observers but in some way participants in the action—whether they like it or not.

Ancient Greek plays toyed with that wall with the convention of a “chorus,” that collection of voices that would sometimes narrate the action for the benefit of the audience. Shakespeare did this more directly (with Hamlet, for example, and also Puck in A Mid-Summer’s Night Dream).

Twentieth-century directors of both stage and film began breaking that fourth wall more intentionally and regularly as a way to invite viewers more deeply into an unfolding story, as if they themselves were characters in the plot. (The 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is a classic example of this when Matthew Broderick’s character talks directly to the camera/audience. The more recent television sitcom Modern Family does this when one or more of the characters occasionally reflects on a plot point in a given episode by talking directly to the camera.)

Yesterday’s lectionary for Trinity Sunday gave us a classic story from Isaiah (6:1-8) that now strikes me as a wonderful example of God breaking the “fourth wall.” The story begins quite routinely, with Isaiah in the temple for worship. The temple—just like almost every church—is a carefully designed space; holy things are kept separate from most of the human beings in the configuration of all the religious furniture.

But on that one particular day, and much to Isaiah’s surprise, the invisible wall of separation crumbles. Suddenly the presence of God is filling the whole temple; Heaven itself is spilling over its banks, flooding past its borders. Angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim fill the skies, and their voices shake the very foundations of the Universe as they declare how God’s glory fills the whole Earth.

Needless to say, Isaiah is overwhelmed by this, and his first response is to feel unworthy even to be there. But when God asks whether anyone will step up and do what needs to be done—“who will go for us?”—Isaiah immediately volunteers. His “Yes” is enthusiastic even though he doesn’t even know what the mission is yet!

This vision of God is life-changing for Isaiah, which is not usually how most people think about worship. It’s much more common to imagine a “fourth wall” remaining firmly, if invisibly in place in our houses of worship, as if we are attending something like a formal concert: we watch, we listen, we observe from a safe distance.

Karl Marx once famously described religion as the “opiate of the people”; whatever he may have meant by that critique, it deserves careful scrutiny. Do religious practices merely keep us passive and acquiescent to the cultural status quo?

Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum analyzes a similar dynamic in politics. In her new book about the rise of authoritarian regimes, she suggests that dictators thrive on the apathy of their societies. In a world that is already as good as we can make it, there’s no point in agitating for change; apathy and cynicism are the cultivated virtues of controlled masses.

In rather stark contrast to sacred segregation and distant deities, John’s Jesus reveals the very essence of God as self-giving love. It’s so easy to take such words for granted, especially when they come from the overly-familiar third chapter of John’s account of the Gospel: “for God so loved the world that God gave…” (John 3:1-17).

But here’s at least one reason to pay close attention to familiar claims: rather than making us merely passive observers, encountering the self-giving God in worship should engage us, involve us, and change us.

So here’s the thing, strange as it may sound: I think the doctrine of the Holy Trinity emerged in Christian traditions for exactly that world-changing purpose. If that’s not how most people think of worship, they certainly don’t think of religious doctrine that way. But even though the purposes of doctrine are often obscured or distorted, it’s worth pondering why they might still matter.

Perhaps the doctrinal notion of God as Trinity matters like this: The self-giving God breaks the fourth wall, drawing us into God’s very own endless life of deathless love. This matters (sometimes dramatically) when we can no longer keep God isolated behind that protective “fourth wall” and when we ourselves are no longer merely observers of some distant divinity starring in a heavenly play.

The God of Isaiah and the God of Jesus is the God who is with us and among us, the God who is for us and also ahead of us, who is inviting us ever deeper into that great drama of creating and redeeming and sustaining the wonders of God’s whole wide world of life.

Clearly, this is not how most people speak in a Trinitarian way about God. Like most people, even lifelong Christians, I was surprised to learn some years ago that Christian traditions offer more than just one way to name the Trinitarian character of God. “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is the most familiar way to name the Trinity but there are others.

St. Augustine in the fifth century proposed a whole sheaf of ways to name God, including this: the “Lover, the Beloved, and Love itself.” In my own life of prayer and occasionally in the liturgy produced at All Saints’ Parish, I am fond of yet another way: God as “the Source of Life, the Incarnate Word, and the Abiding Spirit of Love.”

We could also draw more directly from the performing arts: the Holy Trinity as the divine dance of grace; the Trinitarian God as the sacred song of hope; the Triune God as a troupe of improvisers, who tell fantastical stories inspired by the wild and wooly creatures they relish making.

None of these ways of speaking about God is perfect, and each has its own problems. I mean, of course they do; we cannot possibly speak “correctly” about the infinite mystery of the living God. But let’s make sure our theological language is always wildly expansive and thoroughly inviting, recalling above all else that God is not a solo performer alone on stage. What we mean by the word “God” is always and forever an ensemble, urging, luring, and drawing us ever deeper into God’s own life.

Worship matters, as beloved Isaiah discovered, and the way we worship can make a difference in how we live, which is John’s point throughout his account of the Gospel. Our liturgical life is not a spectator sport; it’s supposed to change us so that we can change the world.

All of this is why I embrace life in the Church as a performance, but never with a “fourth wall.” The whole world is the stage, and we are performing together—with God—for a better world.

The world Christian worship invites us to imagine is a world in which every performance is directed by love, produced by grace, and every actor is committed to peace with justice for the flourishing of every creature of God.

Worship not only invites us to imagine such a world; worship equips us to build it.

Many Beautiful Names in an Idolatrous Nation

Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?

Quite honestly, I often wonder if I worship the same God as some of my fellow Christians.

In some respects, the answer is quite obviously yes, Muslims and Christians do worship the same God. Allah is, after all, just the Arabic word for “God” (which many Arabic speaking Christians use), like Dios in Spanish or Theos in Greek. The one God is known by many exquisitely beautiful names – at least ninety-nine of them, as Muslims would say.

allah_99_names — The Ninety-Nine Beautiful Names of Allah

But there’s more at stake here than theological precision for its own sake. Theology always makes a difference beyond its own confines. Theological ideas wriggle their way into cultural customs, social policies, and lynch mobs. Those ideas can also shape, I constantly trust, communities of radical hospitality and social justice.

For more centuries than anyone can count, religion has provided the tempo for the drumbeat of war and the music of peacemaking alike. There are so very few “innocent” or “agenda-free” religious questions. And those questions can show up in unexpected places.

Consider the recent imbroglio over a “hazing” incident at Wheaton College, my alma mater, which included occasional references to what happened there to Prof. Larycia Hawkins. A tenured professor, a woman of color, and a Christian, she was dismissed from the college in 2016 after standing in solidarity with Muslims. The official reason for her dismissal was her supposed violation of Wheaton’s statement of faith, her insistence that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.”

The “hazing” of a student by some of his football teammates happened just one month after Prof. Hawkins left the college. The details are fuzzy and contested, but some reports of the “hazing” indicated that “Islamic music” was played during the incident and Islamic slurs were used to taunt the student. Whether or not any of this is true, it has re-ignited a social media conversation about Christianity and Islam in America.

So, do Christians and Muslims worship the same God? It matters to think about that question carefully and to respond with more than a “yes” or “no,” especially in today’s American cultural climate and the wider global realities where so much depends on how we humans live with religious difference – or whether we can.

I’d like to offer some observations about that question in two steps. First, I would propose a distinction worth making between prayer and worship. They certainly overlap, but worship always remains vulnerable to idolatry, to which the United States has recently fallen prey in particularly virulent ways.

Second, there is nearly as much religious diversity among Christians today as there is between “other” religions. It behooves us to ponder how we manage (embrace?) our own diversity before trying to address a religious tradition not our own. In doing so, I’m convinced, we find fresh ways to learn from and admire religious “others.”

But first, a brief preface.

I offer these reflections as a Christian priest and theologian. As such, I live with some convictions about God, and why my love of Jesus matters in those convictions (a love, by the way, that many Muslims also share, but differently). The longer I study Christian traditions, however, my list of certainties about God grows shorter.

Whenever I crave just a tad more certainty, I try to remember fourth and fifth century cautions. Like this one from Augustine: “If you understand something, it’s not God.” Or this, from Gregory of Nyssa: “Concepts create idols; only wonder understands anything.”

I do love the many texts of theology, both ancient and contemporary. I love them, not because they sharpen my conceptual acuity but because they invite me and then lead me (if I let them) ever deeper into the fathomless mystery of deathless Love.

So, the question at hand, it seems to me, is not about God but about us and our varying conceptions of the one God (at least in the Abrahamic traditions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims). How might we think about this? Here are my initial two steps:

Prayer and Worship: A Venn Diagram
Grant for the moment that there is but one God. When we’re fervently praying for healing, rescue, discernment, courage, love, or countless other things, I don’t think she cares whether we get her name right – there are at least ninety-nine of them, after all.

Pray with all your might to the Source of All, Deathless Love, Wonder-Beyond-Words – just pray. In due time, *God* may well reveal a divine name just for you.

Worship, on the other hand, carries some risk. The word itself comes from Old English and means, simply, “acknowledging worth.” My own list of people and places and things deserving such acknowledgement is endless. I’m still moved (often to tears) when hearing the phrase from the marriage rite of an older version of the Book of Common Prayer. The vows taken by the couple include this: “With my body I thee worship.” What a glorious declaration of God’s wonderful creation!

Here’s the risk: assigning worth to something that is dangerous, harmful, or violent. Biblical writers were, to put it mildly, preoccupied with this risk. They called it “idolatry.”

Rather than pondering whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God, more than a few Americans might want to ponder whether they are assigning worth to the modern nation-state – the kind of worth that belongs only to *God*.

This has been a constant danger in American history (“In God We Trust” stamped on our money), but it now appears unashamedly around every corner – fetishizing the flag, covering one’s heart to swear allegiance to that flag, making “America first.”

Whom (or what), one must ask, do Americans worship?

Diversity Starts at Home
The canon of Scripture used by most Christians includes many more names and images and symbols for God than appear regularly in Sunday morning worship. More of us might engage in respectful encounter with religious difference if we engaged with our own religious diversity more honestly, as Christians.

Drawing on ancient Hebrew texts for a Christian insight about this, consider Leviticus and Isaiah.

The writer of Leviticus portrays a warrior God who demands absolute covenantal purity and strict distinctions between Israel and all other nations. The writer(s) of Isaiah, on the other hand, portray an amorous God of social justice and peace-making who invites all the nations to the holy mountain for a banquet.

isaiah_abigail_sarah_bagraim — The Holy Mountain of Feasting in Isaiah (Abigail Sarah Bagraim)

I believe these various biblical writers are writing about the same God, but their perceptions and understandings could not be more different; and the implications of the difference are actually quite profound. (If a space alien landed and was given only those two biblical texts, that alien would likely conclude that they refer to two different “gods.”)

The gospel writers portray Jesus as deeply rooted in the faith of his Israelite ancestors. But in which ancestral understanding of God was he rooted? Luke gives an unambiguous answer: In the fourth chapter of his gospel account, he has Jesus quote from Isaiah to launch his ministry.

If at least Luke rooted his perceptions of Jesus drawn from Isaiah’s perceptions of God, then it seems to me that Christian mission ought to focus on inviting all the nations, all the religions, all the races, and creeds, and ethnicities to the holy Mountain of God to feast at a banquet. And this, I am convinced, would actually change the world.

jesus_isaiah — Jesus reading from Isaiah to inaugurate his ministry (Luke 4)

The change will come by focusing less on whether African-American football players obey their white owners and stand for the national anthem, and more on where anyone’s true allegiance ought rightly to belong.

The change will come when American Christians think differently about refugees from Islamic countries, about Muslims building mosques in “our” cities, and how to stand in solidarity with our Jewish siblings when their synagogues are defaced. The change would come from seeing all of them and us trying to pray to and worship the same God.

The change will come when we extend our vision beyond Abrahamic traditions and realize a common quest shared by all humans (and likely other animals, too): to find our place in a universe utterly beyond anyone’s understanding and to make meaning from our lives together, in a world where only wonder understands anything.

Are we worshiping the same God? It doesn’t matter to whom the word “we” refers. The only way anyone will know the answer is when everyone lives a world of justice, bathed with peace, and where all creatures thrive and flourish.

peaceable_kindgom_swanson

Just Say Yes

It sounds so easy and so good. Indeed, so much seemed to hinge on what Nancy Reagan advised during the 1980s: Just Say No. She meant of course to say No to drugs.

Okay, sure. That’s good advice. But if all we ever do is say No, we are a sorry species.

One of my best friends ever (T. Michael Dempsey, a theater and philosophy and theology guru) helped me to see some years ago now that the best and most important thing human beings can do is to say “Yes.”

Mike is a genius in many respects, not least in his ability to teach improvisational theater. Among the many exercises he facilitates with his students is the “Yes Game.” This is disarmingly simple and profound. In this game, people take turns suggesting some activity that the whole group can do, like running around the room, or rolling around on the floor, or hopping on one foot while chanting “bacon, bacon, bacon.” It doesn’t matter what it is, when someone suggests something to do, everyone says, “Yes!” And then we all do it.

I cannot describe the profound effect this “simple” game can have. To say Yes to life, to people, to love, to opportunity, to risk, to relationship, to relaxation…to God. This is what we are made for.

Tomorrow on the Christian calendar is Trinity Sunday. Many Churches will be hearing from an ancient Hebrew prophet in their worship services. It will be a portion from Isaiah, the one in which the prophet has an astounding vision of God’s presence and glory (see chapter 6).

In the midst of that praise-filled vision, the divine voice speaks: “Who will go for us, and whom shall we send?”

It’s important to note here that Isaiah’s society at the time was in something of a mess. Isaiah’s account of this moment is signaled rather precisely in the first verse of that chapter, “In the year that King Uzziah died….”

His society was unraveling, in other words. And someone had to do something. Someone had to speak some hard truths. Something had to change. (Sound familiar?)

Caught up in that astounding moment of divine worship that Isaiah describes, when the divine voice speaks and seeks someone – anyone – to make a difference, Isaiah doesn’t hesitate: “Send me!”

Isaiah said yes. And that’s all that matters. Whatever comes next, whatever details need to be worked out, whatever plan needs to be negotiated and executed – all of that can come later, and indeed God provides all that stuff, as Isaiah later learned. The most important thing is that Isaiah said “Yes!”

I love Trinity Sunday and I am happily a Trinitarian Christian. That doesn’t mean that I “understand” the Trinity or that I think all other views of the divine life are somehow “wrong.” It means for me what I think it must have meant for Isaiah: the God who is above all things is also in all things; the God who is transcendent also dwells among us; the God who cannot be captured in doctrines nevertheless speaks: “Who will go for us?”

The time is now for all of us to say “Send me!” And I truly believe that worship can help each of us say that kind of Yes, just as it helped Isaiah.

That might be the most peculiar thing of all about Christian faith and life today: worship matters. In an age when “spirituality” trumps “religion,” I believe there is still much to be said for the religious rites of worship. Both Jewish and Christian ancestors attest to the life-changing, world-transforming character of worship. Praising God with others can actually change the world. I believe this. I’ve seen it. And I want to find ever new ways to say “Yes!” to it.

Let us therefore worship the unfathomable mystery of God tomorrow, and may our worship help us to say Yes to the divine call. Our world is in desperate need. Now is not the time to say No. Now is the time to say Yes to that Mystery no one can comprehend but which calls to each of us nonetheless: Will you go? Will you do it? Will you change the world?

May our worship inspire us anew to say YES!