Of Hearing what the Spirit is Saying to God’s People

We are making a liturgical change beginning this Palm Sunday. It is a small change, but I think most meaningful. At the acclamations following the readings, instead of the reader saying, “the word of the Lord,” the reader will instead say, “hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.” This form of versicle was used extensively in the second century church according to the Didache, a second century manual for liturgical practice and moral behavior. In my view it bids the hearers to engage their own imaginations as to the interpretation of these ancient texts we read Sunday after Sunday…bids us to hear critically and make studied judgement as to what the Spirit is saying in our own day, amid the changing circumstances of our 21st century world….prayer in short, prayer being both speaking and hearing. Simply saying, “the word of the Lord” offers no such invitation. It reminds me of my father’s distaste for Walter Cronkite’s (former CBS News anchor way back when) signature signing off of the evening news saying, “and that’s the way it is,” to which my father would ritualistically reply as he tapped the tobacco ashes out of his pipe, “well, not necessarily.”

You hear me preach a great deal about our Christian lives being lived for the good of the whole….an ethic of sacrifice for our neighbor….to be the “good servants” living our lives for a better world…a world that God envisions for us all. I believe that, but there is more for us as the gathered people of faith…we are to read what it is the Spirit is doing, and name what the Spirit is doing…there is energy and authority (authority meaning confidence derived from practice and experience)….energy and authority in such work….The reason we gather as the church is to name and celebrate our lives in the Spirit….to sing and pray and praise our vocation into perspective….It is why we put so much emphasis on our liturgy….liturgy being artistic expression of what the good looks like….hearing and seeing what the Spirit is saying and doing in us. My children ask me, “isn’t it just enough to do good in the world?”… and my answer is that we need as often as we can gather and through the expression of beauty, in readings, in prayer and singing and procession name the profound importance of our being vessels of the Spirit, oracles of truth no less, truth that is still becoming, never in stone….and sharing a symbolic common meal as sacred nurture in the Spirit for the way ahead….and most of all we need a place and time as community to give thanks for such a high calling.

Another way to put it is that ours is to make visible as well as audible the Spirit, and to celebrate our role in that work…this is no passive task, but a life of paying rapt attention to the Spirit ‘s presence all around us, a life of continuous prayer, as it were…prayer being the rigorous art of paying attention…paying attention in each other, in nature, in the stranger, even in the shameful corners of our world, wherein most importantly we are to hear what the Spirit is saying and doing, and then our artful articulation of it… and our vital response to it. This is no solitary enterprise, but a collective and collaborative one that the Spirit requires…the Spirit that thrives in enlightened community.

“O wide embracing love, we read thee in the sky above; we read thee in the earth below, in seas that swell and streams that flow; we read thee best in him who came to bear for us the cross of shame; we read thy power to bless and save e’en in the darkness of the grave.” (from de Tar Hymnal 1982) Read , mark, learn and inwardly digest…think and act in the Spirit with our fellow pilgrims along life’s way….and forever hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people….and give thanks to God for it.