A sacrament, broadly conceived, is a physical means of grace -- it's a way of God drawing us into the very divine life of the Trinity. In a sacrament grace meets us in and through the material world. Grace comes to us in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Graces comes to us in the water of baptism.
Most of the Protestant tradition speaks of two sacraments (just mentioned), though Lutherans count a third (confession). Catholics count seven. And Orthodox resist counting all-together.
But I'm thinking we Protestants miss one -- the actual gathering together on Sunday, the Lord's Day.
Marva Dawn rightly insists that worship is "a royal waste of time" (to use the title of her book). And I think the most sacramental act of that "waste of time" is the strange and graceful act of getting out of bed and getting together.
This sacramental act, of course, sounds to most like a duty, an obligation, more than that sacramental means of grace. So bear with me here.
Church services, Dawn also maintains, are an act of formation in refusing consumerism. Church is never supposed to be entertaining. Church isn't even supposed to be interesting. Church isn't supposed to be helpful or useful or impactful. Church isn't there to "meet your needs".
When we encounter those sentiments, Dawn says, we're supposed to respond with blank stares. Because worship in which "we're getting something out of it" is, to borrow a phrase from Neil Postman, a form of "amusing/entertaining ourselves to death". Why would you expect to "get anything" from church? Such an assumption betrayed a deep flaw in your theological understanding of what church was about. Church isn't about you. Church is not about your boredom or your needs or your feelings of fulfillment. The fact that you are bored is perfectly irrelevant. Church is a duty. You go regardless. That is all.
So I go. Simply because going is what we Christians do. Expecting to get something out of church is egocentric, consumerist, self-absorbed.
Consequently, this is why liturgical churches are stubbornly uninventive. Whatever "reaching out" you do, you do without "dumbing down" to the culture's whims (to allude to another of Marva Dawn's books on worship). Congregations that try to please the crowds have missed the essential liturgical point: Worship is about God, not us.
And it's right here that we bump into the real irony of most of contemporary worship. In striving to be more and more about God contemporary Christian worship has, ironically, become more and more about the preferences and tastes of the audience. True, when church is boring your numbers will be small, but you can be much more confident that the people showing up are showing up for God and not for themselves. Because they would, probably, rather be somewhere else. Yet here they are because they see it as their duty to God. God expects the gathering and they are obliging.
Now, I know how folks are horrified by this vision. I hear it often. There really is something masochistic about dragging yourself and your wife out of bed on Sunday morning to sit through a service in which all the attention is taken off you and put onto God. Trust me, I know.
I myself rebelled against this idea in college. I wanted church to be "meaningful" and "impactful". I saw the "duty" of going to church to be an example of a mindless and spiritually hollow legalism.
Which, I now realize, was a sinful rebellion, because it means I was taking the focus off God and putting it onto me.
So here's the crazy thing. The more I've lived in ministry, the longer I've pulled myself out of bed because of this obligation, the more I've found Sundays themselves -- a day set apart for Jesus in the act of getting together as Christians -- to be a physical, tangible means of God's grace in living the triune life of outward reaching love.
So here's a confession for you: I delight in worship that's boring! I enjoy getting together and going through motions -- very bodily motions like singing, hearing, speaking, praying, shaking hands. I most feel the Spirit of God when there's all this banality that I'm used to doing without even thinking about it. Spiritually speaking, the worst thing that can happen to me is for me to "like" church.
Church isn't Facebook. Shouldn't be Facebook. Can't be Facebook.
I want to be bored. I want drudgery.
I'm exaggerating, of course. But not by much. Church really is just showing up. It's what we do.
Regardless. We show up.
I love it when church is stimulating, impactful, meaningful and thought-provoking. But for me, more and more, the showing up part is the most important part. I'd like the other stuff to happen of course, but I'm going to show up regardless.
Why?
Because I think the gathering itself -- let me make that really clear, the gathering itself -- is sacramental. I experience grace in the gathering. And when I look back on my early experiences of church, where we very dutifully gathered every Sunday, I now realize that the grace I experienced was due to the gathering, the simple act of gathering, week in and week out.
Grace came to me, sacramentally, in the material act of congregating. Grace came to me in the bodies and faces of those who greeted me at the door. In the bodies and faces of those who sat beside me in Sunday School class. In the bodies and faces of those who prayed and sang beside me in the pews.
The content of the service varied. Sermons were variously interesting or boring. Songs were variously uplifting or ear-splitting. Prayers were variously inspiring or rote. But week in and week out all that proved to be irrelevant. Grace came to me through the gathering. Church may have been a duty but it taught me that gathering, the simple act of gathering, was an experience of grace.
So we drag ourselves out of bed and to church.
It's a duty, sure, but more to the point it's a discipline. Who wouldn't rather sleep in on Sunday morning? But we go. Because the sermon will be great? Maybe, I hope so. But that's not why we are going. Because the praise will be uplifting? Maybe, I hope so. But that's not why we are going.
We're going simply to experience the grace that comes with the sacrament of gathering. That is all.
And that, I've discovered, is enough. Because it's grace-full.