EDI: Exclusion, Delusion and Inequality… wrapped in a Rainbow Flag?
An extract from
Hearing the Other: Inclusive Liturgy for Progressive Christianity
Do you believe in inclusivity and diversity? What is the name of the person who cleans your [college] room each week? Delivers your shopping? Serves your coffee? These questions belong together. Even with the best of intention, there will always be blind spots in our moral radars, and people who do not necessarily feature within the scope of our own selective inclusivities and limited diversities. But who are the people not included? These folk represent the ‘Other’ or in George Orwell’s language, ‘unpersons’. It is among such folk that the Jesus of scripture makes himself thoroughly at home. This is why the rainbow symbol on the cover of this book includes an invisible strip at top and bottom, representing the people we look ‘through’. Jesus of Nazareth claims that in relating to such folk (he called them, ‘the least of these’) his followers relate directly to him. Hearing the Other is an attempt to integrate our worship with our social world, the mundane, routine, down-to-earth practices and habits and politics of our daily life.
Worship always has political implications. Politics always has liturgical roots. This is largely because, worship (or once upon a time, ‘worth-ship’) simply refers to those things we value, the things we treasure, to which we attach ‘worth.’ Politics refers to the way we structure our communal living around those things that we value. Long before it became a religious word, the term ‘liturgy’ itself, referred to ‘work for the people’, or perhaps today, ‘public service’, or ‘social action’. Every community claiming to be Christian, then, has a responsibility to frame and express whatever Christian convictions they may treasure, in a way that is faithful to Christian tradition, but also culturally sensitive and politically relevant.
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[This extract then offers a list of key words that Christians view positively, but which have overwhelmingly negative connotations today]
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Lord: Originally, Jewish worshippers of God dared not even utter a name for him/her because to do so is already to assume a familiarity, to domesticate the Other, to bring this unnamed something under human control. In the Bible, the word LORD (in capital letters) is used to highlight this unknown-ness of God’s name (traditionally expressed as YHWH/Yahweh). The name, Jehovah is the result of post-biblical attempts at mixing the letters from YHWH with the vowels from the word Adonai (the Jewish term for ‘Lord’). In its Anglo-Saxon origins, the Lord was literally, the Loaf-Ward – the individual whose authority was used to ensure that the people were cared for. When used in the liturgies below, it is intended to be understood primarily in this sense, namely authority granted to ensure the welfare of others.
Father: Perhaps the most problematic element of Christian worship today is the use of gender exclusive language. This, of course, is partly historical accident, since many ancient societies were exclusively patriarchal. This was profoundly true of the Roman Empire that ruled the territories where the historical Jesus lived out his entire life. The rights of every father were enshrined in law, from the marble corridors of power to the flea-ridden provinces of conquered territories. At the top of this patriarchy was the Roman emperor himself. In this light, it may well be that by using the word ‘Father’ to address God directly (rather than appealing for justice through the hierarchical chain of fathers around which the empire was structured), Jesus was being deliberately subversive. His use of the word ‘Father’ may thus have undermined the all-pervasive patriarchy of his day.
Kingdom: The Kingdom of God has long been taken to refer to heaven, the final resting place of the tediously well-behaved. For some, it refers to the so-called ‘Second Coming’ when – as some Christians believe - Jesus of Nazareth will return from heaven to draw human history to a close. For others still, it refers to the peoples and individuals conquered by Christian belief. However, in its origins kingdom referred to the reign rather than the realm of a king. In other words, it refers to a form of authority at odds with the power games of measurable human powers based on financial strength, military might, or public relations. Jesus offered a radically alternative power dynamic. When Jesus called his followers to pray, ‘thy kingdom come’, he was telling them to pray for regime change.
Sin and Forgiveness: Sin is widely deemed a convenient tool for controlling the mindless masses of the Christian era. It is often assumed that it refers only to those elements of human behaviour that do not reflect the nature of the God they claim to worship. For this reason, in order to guarantee a place in the afterlife, and to ensure God does not unexpectedly grant you early access, sin has to be forgiven – otherwise God will be angry and you will spend eternity being punished. In its ancient origins, sin referred first and foremost to debt. Forgiveness referred to debt cancellation, debt amnesty being a widely observed practice in the Ancient Near East. These political elements of sin and forgiveness cannot with legitimacy be excluded from whatever religious uses these words may later have accrued.
Confession: Similarly, confession is often deemed to be the means by which Christians ‘-fess up’, own up to the terrible sins they have committed, so that God, in turn, will forgive them. This conviction still finds its way into most liturgies. However, confession originally meant simply speaking with integrity, ‘saying the same thing’, so that our lips and our lives are in harmony. Confession then, as understood in the liturgies of this book, is used to encourage worshippers to face the truth about themselves and their place in the world. It is in so doing, that worshippers might grow in their own self-awareness, and awareness of the world around them.
Holiness: Widely mistaken as just another word for piety, righteousness or purity, holiness is often viewed in very negative terms. Hence the phrase, ‘holier than thou.’ And yet, it denotes that which is set apart, different, separate. A major element of this idea would be expressed today with the word, Otherness. In a positive sense, the Other – or in biblical terms, the Holy - is that which stands over against us. It is the being or the reality that threatens our assumptions, undermines our knowledge, and hangs the question mark of doubt over all our certainties. The Other, in this sense, can be both a threat to our current mindset and an invitation to inhabit a new mindset. It is precisely that shift in mindset that the bible describes using the word, repentance.
Sermons: Jesus of Nazareth never once ‘preached’, nor did he ever give a ‘sermon’. Such a practice seems to refer to little more than pious individuals with over-inflated self-opinions delivering belittling advice based on iron-age mythologies. For this reason, the talks heard in our Chapel are not referred to as ‘sermons’. Jesus himself delivered prophecies. These were not necessarily supernaturally granted predictions of the future, but much closer to the practice today known as ‘speaking truth to power’. When addressing his fellows, Jesus sought to initiate a change in mind set. Since minds are not easily changed, the goal of those invited to speak in Chapel is to evoke the reaction, ‘that made me think.’ Since thinking involved the mind, the heart, the bowels, the genitals, and entails our past and future, along with our self-understanding, encouraging people to think is no easy task. It is our hope that those invited to address the congregation of Robinson Chapel will seek to do just that.
Intercessions: Prayer takes various forms, one of which is ‘prayers for the world’, also known as ‘intercession’. Traditionally, the role of the ‘priest’ would be as a broker between God and the world. Praying would be representing the people to God. Preaching would be representing God to the people. Several traditions, however, adopt belief in the ‘priesthood of all believers’. This does not mean so much, that every individual is their own priest. Rather that the gathered community as a whole has a priestly function of representing God to the people, and the people to God. Several Christian traditions today have ceased to include prayers of intercession (i.e., prayers for anyone other than those present in church), because they ‘interrupt the flow of worship’. Other traditions often seem to pray dispassionately for the world, as though waving a liturgical wand over the headlines of world news, and asking God to fix everything. At Robinson, our hope is to pray in such a way as to feel the plight of those for whom we pray, do what we can to make their plight known, and offer ourselves as a means by which our prayer might be answered.
The Lord’s Prayer: The prayer that Jesus taught his followers, known as the Lord’s Prayer, includes many of the elements of worship outlined above. The present book has several separate translations of this prayer. Some of these are simply translation from one language into another, and may sound familiar even to folk who rarely attend church. Others are translated also into our host culture, taking into account some of the elements of worship outlined above. Historically, it is likely that this prayer also served as a creed, an identity marker outlining the ethical stance to which the followers of Jesus might be held accountable. This book includes little in the way of creeds, partly because of the problematic nature of their history, partly because of their exclusivity, but mainly because the Lord’s Prayer fulfils all the functions of a creed, and more.
