The Fundamental Sacrament

Growing up, I had my fill of preachers ranting on about how people should be in church on Sunday mornings and how worshipping on the golf course or out fishing was just not an adequate way to return thanks to God for God’s blessings.

It always seemed odd to me that those preachers were preaching to the converted. Those who did worship out on the golf course or fishing obviously were not there. Perhaps those preachers were employing the pulpit to vent a little frustration.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I do believe that gathering as a church to worship presents us with a unique opportunity to explore our relationship with God, each other, and ourselves. Gathering with the intent to worship makes us the fundamental sacrament of Christianity, the church, and seals God’s promise to be present. That is hard to duplicate on the golf course, at your favorite fishing hole, shopping at the mall, skiing the diamond course, or—well, you fill in the blank with any activity that calls you away from our gatherings on Sunday mornings.

Yet I also strongly believe that worship is not limited to a specific physical structure, nor does it require specific accouterments like patens and chalices. Heather Elkins, in her book Worshipping Women: Re-forming God’s People for Praise, writes, “The assumption of commonplace grace and holy ordinariness is the primitive basis for worthy worship.”

There have been those moments where I have been overwhelmed by grace and the beauty of the holy, causing worship to happen spontaneously—and it wasn’t just at a predetermined time, at 8 a.m. or 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

The point is freeing ourselves from the compartmentalization of worship. Gathering in community for worship is important. However, limiting worship to that time of gathering leads to a poverty of spirit and a life that has effectively closed doors to the presence of beauty in our ordinary walks and ways in life, be it in the boardroom or the classroom, the grocery store or the department store, the kitchen or the den.
 
Heather Elkins points us toward an astounding truth: Grace is commonplace, and the holy can be found in what appears to us as the ordinary routines of life. All it requires is an awareness of God’s presence in this moment, and this one, too—and, oh, yeah, this one, too! In the breath of a moment, worship can happen.

Awareness is what gives our gathering as the fundamental sacrament, the church, such potency. We gather for the purpose of tasting the beauty of holiness. We gather with intent to luxuriate in God’s promised presence. We gather to know grace and holiness that will follow us in the ordinary byways through which life carries us.

Joel t