Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: John 14:15-21; Acts 17:22-31

Well, I really have to apologize to all of you. After all the hullabaloo this election season about the filmed excerpts of some sermons, most of us in the preaching profession are aware that you could pluck a couple of sentences from some of our sermons and make us sound pretty out there. And so, who knows which of you may be thwarted in your future presidential ambitions by my having agreed to Channel 9 being here filming this morning. Actually, come to think of it, it seems that recently they’ve been placing a lot of emphasis on being able to connect with working people, understanding the economy, and having a appropriate expression of faith, so maybe since I am an former steel worker and CPA, I should consider throwing my own name in the ring! Especially since we don’t have a video library of my preaching!

I’m just kidding of course, but you might be wondering why, indeed, Channel 9 wanted to film today – they are doing a report on the way clergy pray, and since some of clergy praying happens in worship, they asked if they could come here today.

And I was out of town when I received the request, but couldn’t see any problem with it, and so I said yes. And then I thought it would give me a good opportunity to talk with you about liturgy, and where it comes from.

We are a liturgical church – and usually when we talk about liturgy, people understand it to mean ritual, or even, related to church (as the liturgical calendar is the church calendar).

But the word liturgy comes from two Greek words: leos, meaning people, and ergo, meaning work, or to do. The liturgy is the work of the people, or what the people do. So when we talk about a liturgical church, we usually mean one in which there are written prayers that shape the form of worship.

As I think about planning the liturgy, I am usually thinking about the first part of the service – the words, mostly prayers, that are read by the congregation, or the congregation and the liturgist and/or the pastor. Every week, as I prepare the bulletin, I spend an inordinate amount of time preparing the liturgy. The words that are said in worship, particularly the words that we all say together, are not just a formality. If I am going to presume to give you words for your prayer, I need to take this responsibility quite seriously.

After all, within our congregation, we have a range of understandings – some of us are very traditional, and some of us are less traditional. Some of us find conventional language comforting, and others find it uninspiring. And beyond the style of the liturgy, it is most important that the substance of the words should be theologically appropriate, and meaningful to most of us.

It’s interesting to have such a conversation on the week that Paul has spoken with the Athenians about their statue “To an unknown God”. And, although Paul is using that statue’s inscription as a contrast with his understanding of God, I think many of us feel a certain kinship with the sense of God as unknown. In fact, it is one of the classic attributes that orthodox theology ascribes to God – we say God is “ineffable” which means unknowable. I remember how uncomfortable I was in one church when an elder asked a potential new member if she “knew Jesus Christ as her personal Lord and Savior” – my instant mental response was “I don’t know Jesus…Jesus knows me.” [See, here is where your presidential aspirations end, with your pastor on the news saying “I don’t know Jesus…” and the commentators saying “This candidate sat in the pew listening to a minister who doesn’t know Jesus.”] I feel comfortable saying I know things about God – again, Christian orthodox theology claims that God reveals Godself through the created world, through God’s Word in the Bible, and through being among us as one of us in Jesus Christ. Nonetheless, I think many of us are uncomfortable saying we “know God” – it feels just a little overconfident.

Anyway, thinking about this in conjunction with thinking about liturgy got me to considering all the images and names that are used for God in the Bible – can you name some of them? Father, Lord, Shepherd, Redeemer, Rock, Abba, …I found a website last night that listed 625 different names for God that occur in the King James Version of the Bible. There is some redundancy on the list of 625 – for example they include:a father to Israel, Abba Father, Father Everlasting father, Father of the fatherless, Father of glory, Father of lights, Father of mercies, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Father of spirits, God and Father of all, my Father, my father’s God, and several others…nonetheless, even once you account for the repetition, we have to understand that God is described through a variety of images in the Bible. Interesting, by the way, that this particular list didn’t include the feminine images that are used for God, such as the time Isaiah recounts God describing Godself as a nursing mother, or the time Jesus compared himself to a mother hen, or the several places where the Hebrew word for womb is used to describe God’s love.

So, the point is clear – even just within the imagery of the Bible, there are many varied descriptions of God…and some of us have images of God that come from other places as well. I mentioned the natural world, but we also have cultural ideas. Many people, especially as children, think of God as perhaps an old man, usually with a beard. I knew a Christian educator who had a lovely painting called “Grandmother God” which depicted God as a very old, smiling woman.

The Presbyterian Church urges its pastors to use inclusive language for God – not to limit God to being called He. And although most of us probably would agree that God is beyond gender limitations, many of us were raised using all male language for God and find ourselves less comfortable thinking or talking about God as “she”. I know in my own spoken prayers, I most naturally revert to using the title “Lord” although I don’t really think of God as some kind of feudal aristocrat. It’s the habit I developed growing up, but I try to use different language in our worship. Names are important, words are important. How we speak of God, how we speak to God, matters, and forms our sense of God.

This is part of the reason that I am most comfortable, in my personal prayer, with wordless prayer – I am acknowledging that I don’t really know God, that I don’t know best, that I most want God to shape me, to form me, to fill me. Before God, I am very aware of my own inadequacy and emptiness, and I want to be energized, taught, and more than anything, loved by God. And what I really bring to God is my own desire for God, which I believe is an echo of God’s desire for us.

But in our prayer together, I use words. And I decided about 12 years ago, when I was still a seminary student, that part of my ministry would include not writing out the prayers in advance. I use written prayers most of the time at communion, and certainly for the prayers we say together, but in the pastoral prayer, when I am speaking the prayer alone, I decided that most of the time I would not pre-write it. The reason for this is that many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of speaking to God. They feel that their words should be perfect, and flowery and grand, and formal. But I think that God most desires us to be genuine in prayer…and I think that part of my ministry is to model the ordinariness of prayer. So the pastoral prayer, you may have noticed, often has pauses (as I think about what to say), or it has ums and uhs, and sometimes I get halfway into a sentence and can’t figure out where to go with it. And I used to get embarrassed by my public imperfect prayers…but I know that many members are uncomfortable praying, and feel that they don’t know how to do it, and so I think it’s important for me to model that it doesn’t have to be done perfectly. Our prayer to God isn’t a speech, or a performance, it’s a conversation. And when we pray together here, our prayers are not only connecting us to God, but also to each other.

I don’t know if I mentioned, by the way, that last fall when I was in Tanzania, at two of the churches that I visited, there was a time for congregational prayers, and both times, everyone prayed out loud at once using their own words. It was quite marvelous – it was a cacophony of hundreds of voices all speaking to God separately, at the same time. And each of us really had privacy, because no one could hear about the hubbub, yet there was still a shared quality to the prayers.

Our prayer should not just be about giving God our own to-do list – we should be opening ourselves to God, listening to God, and letting God tell us who we are. This is what Jesus was talking about in the section of the Gospel that Susan Gingrasso read. This is written about the final teaching Jesus did with the disciples, before he died. And he is letting them know that he will be leaving, but that he will not leave them alone. He says, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth….”

Some people have said that Jesus, in describing the Holy Spirit as an Advocate, is using a legal term, and suggesting that the Holy Spirit acts as our lawyer – that the Holy Spirit is speaking, then, on our behalf to God, who is acting as judge. While I think that the advocacy role is clear, I think it is less clear in this passage that Jesus is describing the Holy Spirit talking to God on our behalf – after all, God already loves us, and God sent Jesus – not to gather information about us, but to give us information about God, and about the possibilities we have in life. What if Jesus intends here that the Holy Spirit is an advocate who comes to us on God’s behalf – which makes far more sense than the idea of the Spirit going to God on our behalf. God is already sold on us! We’re the ones who need to be sold on ourselves, and sold on God. What if the Holy Spirit comes to us to whisper to us that we are loved, that we are children of God, that we are claimed and called by God? What if the heartbeat of the universe, the Love that calls forth life, comes alongside of us to draw us out, to call us into becoming who we were created to be, to fill us with the love that already knows us? We are not unknown to God, and sometimes I think we misdirect a lot of energy in making our quest to understand God the center of our spiritual journey. There’s nothing wrong with understanding – theology is important – but there should be more to our faith than an intellectual effort – our faith comes in response to that lively Love that is already calling us, always loving us.

Blaise Pascal said that “Love has its reasons which reason cannot understand.” When we allow ourselves to bring our openness to God, when we are willing to face our own desire to be loved, and we bring that desire to God day after day in wordless prayer, we find ourselves more centered, more comfortable with ourselves, more peaceful. And yet, it doesn’t come through understanding, but through allowing God to fill us. Perhaps we come closest to knowing God when we let go of knowing God – when we recognize that God is the unknown One who knows and loves us, and when we start trusting the love instead of the knowing. This is how we trust God. Trusting the knowing really is trusting ourselves. Trusting and welcoming the Love is the beginning of knowing God. And love is not an intellectual proposition, but a way to be in relationship, and a basis for action. Jesus reminds us that living the love is the beginning of loving God. When we find ourselves filled by God, it’s easier to reach out to others in living that love. But our own awareness of God’s love doesn’t work automatically in the background like a computer utility. As in every other relationship, we grow in our relationship with God by spending time paying attention to God. Let us learn to trust the Love that loves us, and then love the world that God loves. Amen.