At the core of our being we long for another or others to share our life with. Our first inclination as humans is bonded and intimate community which begins with our family. In our earliest moments we bond to our mother as we nurse, her hand caressing our head, cradling us to her. We recognize the smell of our father, the roughness of his face against ours. From the start we reach out and latch on with our hands when a finger is presented. Our instinctual desire is connection, intimacy, and belonging.
As we grow so does our community, starting with our parents and siblings, then our extended family, next our neighbors and community, and then school friends. As we live we throw and ever larger net that establishes our community. Some of course are closer, and others more distant. This net however is only one abstract layer in many layers that we establish. These are layers of affinity, of attraction, of like-minded and mutual story.
At the core of these communities lies ritual; our Sunday morning brunch of bagels and coffee, every June at the cabin, always turning our ball-cap backwards in the 9th inning when our team is behind. Ritual, in it's broadest sense, is any observance or practice that connects us deeper into our communities. Through our rituals we grow, we understand, we are.
Without rituals, or without understanding the ritual others are engaging in, we are missing out on what it means to be a member, a native, of a community or tribe. Followers of Christ were provided a ritual by our Lord, Jesus Christ. On the night of his betrayal Jesus celebrated the passover feast with his disciples, and in that time he established the ritual of Holy Communion, the Eucharist. Through observing this ritual we identify ourselves not just as a disciple of Jesus, but as part of the broader community of the Christian church.
When we are at a baseball game we expect certain things to happen. The seventh inning stretch, the singing of 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame'. Baseball isn't just a spectator sport, it is a community of baseball faithful observing and participating in the rhythm and ritual of the game.
What would happen if we removed the seventh inning stretch because our fast paced society has decided that ritual takes up too much time? What if we removed the traditional songs and chants because they made no sense to a person from another community or culture? We might have men out on the field hitting a ball with a bat; but it could be argued that they are not really playing baseball as there is no observance of ritual, of the narrative rhythm of the game that makes it unique and links it to tradition. In other words by bifurcating ritual from community we destroy them, destroying the tangible meaning they share when celebrated together.
Many Evangelical churches have lost sight of this simple truth; by removing ritual we destroy what makes our gathering a community. If you had never witnessed a baseball game before you might wonder why certain things are done, why certain words are said. Likewise if you were a protestant entering a Catholic mass you might be caught off guard by the ritual of the service. In a misguided attempt to turn sabbath, the celebration of the Eucharistic community, into an accessible and evangelical medium those of us in the evangelical world have actually done those outside a church a disservice, we have watered down the Good News in favor of pluralistic and secularized interests. Rather than making the community more open, we have gotten rid of anything that makes us uniquely the followers of Christ.
No doubt that John Wesley, a founder of my tribe (as Leonard Sweet might say), was evangelical in is Sunday sermons, but he realized that the mission of the church wasn't to be found in the pulpit, but in the streets. Wesley and the methodists were condemned by the Church of England because rather than catering to the genteel and domesticated patrons of the church he would descend into the work places of those far from faith. If they could not attend the church on Sunday he would follow God's mission into the world, to where people were at. Evangelism takes place out in creation, in the day-to-day places. Sabbath and it's rituals are meant for the faithful and those seriously exploring faith. Sabbath and Eucharist are peculiar, but also compelling.
Through the systematic removal of our peculiar rituals as followers of Jesus in favor of pluralistic appeal we have not expanded the body of Christ; rather we have stretched it thin, watered it down, domesticated it so that we are palatable in the mouths of those not yet part of the Jesus tribe. We have replaced the call to Eucharist (community) with something devoid of the calling cards that make Christian worship what it should be. Through our attempt to provide a seeker-sensitive approach we have altered Sabbath beyond it's original intent. As Alan Hirsch would say we have tried to be an extractional force; attempting, like a vacuum cleaner, to pull folks out of the world and into the church. We have asked them not only to do all of the work of entering the community, once they braved the waters we have nothing compelling to share.
I am concerened that we are failing as churches because we have become the exact thing we tried so hard to avoid. Through the removal of ritual we have created a community devoid of anything inspiring, challenging, and peculiar. What attracts people to baseball, more so than the act of a bat hitting a ball, is the community of the faithful, their peculiar ways of being baseball fans. In short baseball (and sport in general) offers a far more compelling narrative to be a part of than the average evangelical church, and it is largely rooted in the evangelical church's desire to be more like the world than like the Eucharistic Jesus Tribe of the New Testament.
I am not advocating an exclusiveness; rather a uniqueness of being that incarnates the gospel. If the evangelical church is to survive it must begin the act of reclaiming it's place as a peculiar community in which ritual; scripture reading, prayer, and Eucharist are a vibrant and visible part of their narrative. It is only by embracing our peculiarities as followers of Christ that we have anything compelling to offer the world. We can't water down our wine and expect anyone to drink it, let alone come back for more.
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Within literature and theater there exists the archetype of the tragic hero, or the tragic character. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Melville’s Captain Ahab. There begins at some point a hope that they will be redeemed, that some good will come and they can hold their head up high; however this hope is maligned by the character’s own actions. Within Scripture we have no better (or worse?) example of a tragic character than in Saul, the first King of Israel.
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