Thursday was not the first time the retired professor and I had debated the form and function of the liturgy in worship. We had previously discussed - and argued - the necessity (or not) of beginning worship with confession, the ecumenical versions of the creed and Lord's Prayer, the elements that make Lutheran worship Lutheran and the characteristics that make liturgical worship liturgical.
The arguments at Thursday evening's Worship and Music meeting were no different. After too much time had passed in debate, and knowing myself to be faithful to our denomination's worship resources, I wearily offered the last argument I could muster:
"Everything that we do is faithful to our hymnal. We do the liturgy in the prescribed order. We include the required elements, and we make seasonal decisions about the optional elements. Our decisions come right from the hymnal."
"But see, I disagree with the choices that they made when they put together this current hymnal. The historic liturgy always includes a 'Kyrie' and now it is optional. The liturgy keeps getting watered down. What makes us different than Presbyterians or Methodists or generic Protestants these days? We might be following the book, but I disagree with what the book says."
Oh.
There's the heart of the matter.
I say, "we're doing it by the book."
He says, "you're using the wrong book."
This might be the clearest way I've ever been able to conceive of the term "paradigm shift," which describes a movement of thought and progress that does not exist within a framework, but instead leaps ahead to a new framework. To my professor friend, the problem was that I had jumped frameworks, and no amount of faithfulness to the boundaries of that framework could make up for the fact that he had not made the leap.
In the church and in the wider world of faith, God often puts before us both kinds of movements - the tweaks that we make within our worldviews, our understandings, our hearts, and also the giant leaps that launch us out of everything that we took for granted, dropping us from a helicopter onto a new island, tasked with doing the work of learning the new landscape and exploring its boundaries.
You only have to look at something like Martin Luther and the Reformation - where an outspoken monk uncovered a theretofore hidden seed of truth about God's unbounded grace - to know that paradigm shifts happen, and when they do, they rock the faith. You only have to look at the recent decisions made during official assemblies of mainline denominations regarding the church's stance on the marriage and ordination of GLBTQ clergy to know that paradigm shifts happen, and when they do, they rock the faith.
We stand on the cusp of a new civil rights era, as our communities and congregations struggle to find a way to address a rise in violence against persons of color. We live in a world where there exist fewer and fewer rules of war, but instead where war pops up from underground and burns all land under its feet. We watch temperatures rise and ice caps melt, droughts and floods and storms ravaging the land and seas, and we wonder what changes we can make as a human race to slow down the earth's march toward total destruction.
The hard truth is that the big issues of our existence cannot be addressed by tweaks within the system. Our comfortable ways of doing faith are not sufficient to tackle racism, violence, war, climate change. If we want the world to change, then we'd better be ready for our faith to change, too. God sometimes calls us to giant leaps.
I was thinking this morning about how, when the disciples asked Jesus for more faith, he told them, "If you had even as much faith as a tiny mustard seed, you could cast the mountains down into the sea."
So often, we read this passage as a judgement, as if Jesus is saying, "All you need is a tiny amount of faith, and you don't even have that!"
Except that perhaps Jesus is, instead, warning them that if he were to give them what they asked for - "Increase our faith!" - that it would give them extraordinary power...and it would destroy them. And then rebuild them. Maybe Jesus, before giving them even a whisper of faith, wanted them to know that faith can change the world, but that changing the world is as scary and full of rubble and flooding as mountains that landslide into the river.
Faith happens in leaps. It launches us outside of ourself. It blasts through barriers. It drops us into new and unfamiliar territory. Faith shifts paradigms and destroys the comfort of our old frameworks. Are we prepared for that? Are we prepared to keep praying, "thy kingdom come?" Because when it does, everything changes. And change hurts.
Ask anyone going through physical therapy and they will tell you that along the trajectory of recovery and improvement, there is significant pain. Getting better takes hard work. You have to tear down and retrain and break and stretch before you can build up again.
Friends, I am in no place to gloat. I might have taken the leap into this current hymn book, but look at me. I am comfortable to play by the rules within it. Someday there will be new books, and new callings, and new ways of worshiping, or new ways of serving, or new ways of being the church for the world. And I, too, will have to pray for a tiny speck of faith, knowing that what I pray for will, in some ways, destroy me and everything I know and love, for the sake of moving me - and the world - into the future that God builds.
My professor friend and I are not too different from each other. We both want to have arrived at equilibrium. He and I, and most of us, probably, would prefer that we could settle into God's comfortable now, and not have to lurch ahead into the uncomfortable future.
But this is the life of faith: trusting that the Book of Life is always being rewritten, and that God will keep tearing up the pages of the old books and leading us into each revised edition, for each one brings us closer to the truth, closer to the end, closer to the final chapter of God's restoration, resurrection, and reconciliation of all things.