Gathering for Worship
A theological question for you to ponder: when does worship actually start on Sunday morning? There are a few different ways of looking at this that are worth considering, and as much as this might seem like an unnecessary detail, a time-wasting discussion, there actually is an important point here.
According to Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW), our red service book, the standard service of Holy Communion has four parts: Gathering, Word, Meal, and Sending. Obviously, we should suspect that worship properly begins in the Gathering segment of the service. This section includes everything from Confession and Forgiveness through the Prayer of the Day, after which we move into the Word section with the first Scripture reading. But at which point specifically during the Gathering do we actually begin worship?
Some may argue that worship really begins with the Greeting, just before the Kyrie. The point here would be that Confession, the opening hymn, and any other liturgy up to the greeting are preparing us to properly begin worship. With a clean slate, assurance of forgiveness, and a hymn praising God’s loving act of forgiving us and gathering us to worship, we bring ourselves into the proper mindset for worship. If this is your view, then worship properly begins with the Kyrie, calling upon God’s mercy for ourselves, our community, and for the world.
The problem with this view is that the opening hymn doesn’t really feel like an introduction to worship. It feels like worship. We could say that worship begins with Confession and Forgiveness. This isn’t an introduction to clear our conscience before worship begins, but confessing our sins is in fact an act of worship. By acknowledging our fallibility and weakness and calling upon God for help, we are glorifying God. By recognizing that we are not God, we acknowledge that God alone is God. That itself could be an act of worship. In this view, Confession and Forgiveness isn’t something boring to recite before we can get to the opening hymn, nor is it a time for negative self-accusing and displeasure. Rather we can see it as an act of praise and a reminder of the powerful Gospel which we gather to share. I suspect that most people would agree that this is the true starting point of worship. It makes sense to say that worship begins as soon as the pastor, or vicar in our case, speaks of the Trinity and makes the sign of the cross. However, we can potentially see worship starting even earlier.
It would almost seem wrong to say that announcements are part of worship. If that were true, then we could reasonably argue that any public declaration of any kind could be considered worship. If updating people on important upcoming events and singing “Happy Birthday” is worship, then that means that work meetings and family birthday parties have elements of worship in them. That seems wrong, a failure to maintain the boundaries of sacred space. If everything is worship, then it certainly feels like nothing is. However, we can point out that there is a difference when we do announcements in Church.
According to ELW, the Gathering isn’t really our work. We don’t gather ourselves for worship. Instead, as the red book puts it: “The Holy Spirit calls us together as the people of God.” Gathering the people of God is God’s work; as such, it is out of our hands. Whatever we do in church is different from what we do outside because God is gathering us as God’s people. In that case, even the prelude and announcements could be part of worship, if God is the one gathering us together to hear them. We could say that the invocation of the Trinity is when worship begins, but we all know why we are gathered together. The Trinity is implicitly invoked by our presence together because the Triune God is at work in bringing us together. The fact that we are there and ready to worship God means that God has begun the gathering. If this is the case, then worship begins when the first two people walk into the worship space, even if they arrive twenty minutes before Confession begins.
If we want to be really mystical about it, we could even argue that one person in the worship space is enough to make worship begin. Of course, Jesus said that he would be present where at least two are gathered in his name (Matthew 18:20). However, we could argue that the sanctuary is a sacred space with a memory of its own. The sanctuary holds the worship lives of those who have worshiped there before. People who have been present in the past and those who will show up later that day are expressed in the worship setting. Because one member of the worship community cleans and puts new light bulbs in, turning on the lights in the sanctuary reminds you that they are present in the space through their contributions even if physically absent. The more we know about the history of the worship space, the more we can point to the various gifts and contributions that community members have offered to make the space what it is. With that in mind, one could argue that their presence is felt, even in their absence, in the sanctuary. Worship begins as soon as a single person enters the space and remembers the community there.
This last idea may go a little too far for some people, but certainly we could see worship beginning much sooner than when the pastor, or vicar, speaks. When a few people gather and begin talking about the rain, or lack thereof, before the pastor even arrives, worship has begun. The start of worship isn’t about what we do, but rather about the act of God the Holy Spirit bringing us together as a community of God’s people.
Because of the way the timing works out with our partner church, Grace often starts the service late. There are about fifteen minutes of people waiting for everything to be ready. The unfortunate result is that people lose their entire morning, only getting out of church around noon. However, we don’t have to consider that time spent in waiting wasted. I’m not suggesting that we should have a miniature ten minute Bible Study while waiting for the prelude to start. No one needs to give some personal testimony to save time. Of course, if someone is so moved, it wouldn’t be a bad thing to do. But feeling the need to fill the time with some act of worship misses the point that worship is something that God begins for us. We don’t need to dress up the time with anything that we wouldn’t normally do. But while we are waiting, we can patiently discern the presence of the Spirit in our Gathering. In casual conversation, in friendly greetings, in little debates about sports or politics, God is already there and in some sense worship has already begun. Again, we don’t need to change anything aside from the way we look at things. Perhaps, believing that worship begins when the Holy Spirit gathers us will guide us to reinterpret the announcements, prelude, and the casual conversation before to be sacred time as God gathers God’s people to simply be alive together.
