Abstract
An encounter between strangers in public space is critically interrogated from both socio-cultural and theological perspectives to uncover “operational” (experiential) connections between Christian worship and public action. The article concludes with the constructive proposal that perceiving the presence of the God of redemptive promise in public space forms the primary link between worship and witness, sanctuary and street.
How are Christian worship and Christian public witness related? For some, this is a straightforwardly doctrinal question with a fairly straightforward doctrinal answer. One might say, for example, “The God of the Bible is a ‘public’ God; that is, the God to whose redemptive mission biblical texts bear witness is thoroughly enmeshed in material human history, engaged with human sociality, economics, and politics. Therefore, Christian worship, as worship of the biblical God, has inescapably public consequences—social, political, and material. This is the case because we worship precisely the God of the biblical tradition, and no other.”
There are many useful doctrinal descriptions of the worship–witness connection; we will have occasion later in this article to turn to some of these. But ritual theorist Michael Aune reminds us that while we can talk about the impact of Christian worship doctrinally, we also need to pay attention to operational descriptions of the impact of worship in worshipers’ lives. Operational descriptions, explains Aune, are empirically derived, based on worshipers’ reports of their own worship experience. 1
From a practical-theological view, Aune’s distinction is an important one. At its core, practical theology is critical reflection, both socio-cultural and theological, on living texts of human action. 2 The ultimate goal of such practical-theological investigation of action may be to guide individuals and communities toward better faith praxis; however, the immediate goal is not to get at what human beings ought to do but simply to learn what they actually do and what they actually experience.
Paying attention to what worshipers say about their worship experience is an important piece of data in interrogating the “lived” connections between Christian worship and Christian public witness. No doubt that linkage can be improved; but first, it needs to be better understood. If we do not attend to this data, our soaring doctrinal claims about the transformative dynamics of worship may leave worshipers baffled and do little, functionally speaking, to strengthen lived connections between Christian worship and the action Christians are inclined to take in public space. 3
I suggest, then, that one way to better understand the worship–witness connection is to pay attention to a critical incident in public space—in this case, a public, critical encounter between strangers, one of them a human being expressing a particular need, the other a professing Christian (the author, as it happens) who makes a response. My practical-theological inquiry will unfold in four stages: description of the critical incident; socio-cultural interrogation of the incident; critical theological reflection on the incident; and venturing some constructive proposals about ways ordinary Christians’ experience of worship might equip them to move into public spaces better prepared to perceive possibilities for creative, faithfully Christian public action.
I. The Critical Incident: Gas-Pump Encounter
Here is what happened on a late summer afternoon at a relatively empty, urban gas station in a mid-sized city in central Pennsylvania:
I was just replacing the gas pump handle in its cradle and taking my receipt when suddenly, a man I had not seen or been aware of at all stepped between the pumps from somewhere on the other side of the “island.” Facing me at close range, and without any greeting, he said, “Hey, can you give me a few dollars for gas?” He looked to be in his late thirties, more worn down by life than somebody that age should be, clad in well-used jeans and T-shirt, with a few days’ stubble on his chin. He seemed edgy, intense. I remember thinking, “Drugs?” In the next instant, I wondered why I had that thought. My heartbeat sped up, and I felt a flutter of defensiveness, my fight-or-flight response already in play due to the startling suddenness of the confrontation. This may seem an odd reaction on my part in broad daylight—but more on that in a moment. I climbed into my car, mumbling, “I don’t feel comfortable with that,” and turned on the ignition. As I pulled away, I heard the young man shouting after me, berating me. I do remember noting with some surprise that he did not use the f-word, or any other curse, for that matter. Several blocks later I was still trembling—with what? I felt threatened, but remember thinking that my reaction seemed unreasonable. I also felt shame at what almost instantly felt like failure. Within less than half a mile, I experienced two things: first, shreds of liturgy came to mind—“Let not the needy be forgotten / Nor the hope of the poor be taken away.”
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Next, visions of the Communion rail crowded with friends and strangers at the church I attend with my husband. Soon after that, a clear picture of a better (and perfectly reasonable) response to the stranger presented itself on my mental screen as crisp as a film clip: I imagined myself locking my car, walking over to the little glassed-in, locked kiosk a few pumps over from which an attendant watches the pumps. I imagined handing her some cash and asking her to allow the stranger to pump gas, and staying nearby to see that it was done. (Why not just hand him the cash? More on that in a moment, too.) That “imaginative rehearsal” of a better response was followed by an immediate sense of having failed not only to do something, but to perceive the situation adequately.
II. Interrogating the Critical Incident: Socio-Cultural Lenses
The New Face of Poverty
Readers with even modest experience walking the streets of major US cities will have experienced being addressed by beggars on the street. This incident differs from the typical street encounter in several ways. First, this young man has a car (although I did not know whose it was). He may have been homeless, or not. He could have been living in the car and had his belongings stowed there, but the brief glimpse I had of the vehicle didn’t suggest that. In any case, the young man had transportation.
Also somewhat unusual is the fact that he did not back up his request with a compelling narrative of need, whereas many who solicit money in bus stations or train stations do. This time, there was no story about a baby needing formula or a sick mother in a distant city. This young man offered no narrative. Perhaps he was new to asking for money.
He may represent the “new poor” of smaller American cities, whose numbers increased astronomically in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis. Notably, the city where this took place has been featured in national news as a dubious “poster child” for urban bankruptcy. The city is also notorious as a Northeast drug-trafficking center.
Impact of a Multilayered Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Both on the visceral and cognitive level, there is evidence in my reaction of a high level of defensiveness and suspicion. How can this be interpreted?
These reactions may seem overdrawn to many readers; they seemed so to me although I could not deny them. Certainly this was not the first time someone had asked me for money. Having been a pastor for eighteen years, I am accustomed to strangers turning up at the church to ask for everything from a few dollars for food to airfare to Los Angeles. In the parish, of course, the situation of being asked for money was constructed quite differently. My role as a pastor in the situation was clear. People in need came to the church knowing they could expect some kind of help; and an outer office with skilled receptionists buffered these encounters, giving me time to think through the situation and possibly even consult other staff members before responding. These structural elements were all lacking in the gaspump encounter.
Reflecting on the incident and my reactions within it, I recognize the influence of several overlapping, mutually reinforcing vectors of a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” These derive from the gendered nature of the situation, past experience of being confronted suddenly by a male stranger, and cultivated professional caution against either being scammed or being induced to enable addiction to alcohol or drugs.
The gendered nature of the situation. Women in American society are taught—in fact, sad to say, must be taught from an early age—to be suspicious of men who confront them, particularly strangers. A habitual response of resistance and flight is well ingrained by one’s early twenties, let alone late midlife. I will note here that the stranger was Euro-American, as I am; many vectors played into the situation, but the text of race was not among them. Past experience of being confronted by a male stranger. In my sophomore year of college, I was walking home to my apartment at dusk when I was grabbed by the neck from behind by a male stranger who poised a stiletto knife under my chin and hissed, “Drop the purse.” He threatened that if I screamed, he had a friend down the street to deal with me. I abandoned my purse, walked steadily to the corner of the block (with the knifepoint pressing between my shoulder blades for about half that distance), then ran to my apartment and to safety. My visceral reactions to the stranger at the gas pump were surprisingly similar to my visceral reactions to that long ago hold-up. Professional stance of suspicion toward scamming or addiction. As a pastor, I learned to check and double-check stories. Failing to do this had led to the church being scammed for cash by individuals or couples that regularly “worked over” churches. Pastoral staff members rarely handed out cash, lest in doing so we promote a person’s addictive behavior rather than their well-being. Assistance typically took the form of a purchased meal, carrying rent checks to landlords or cars towed and repaired.
Summary
My interaction with the stranger at the gas pump activated a multilayered “hermeneutics of suspicion” fueled by all of the above constructions of the situation—suspicion related to gender, past traumatic experience, and professional pastoral experience with scamming and with the ploys of the addicted. Justified or not, these layers of suspicion contributed to an impulsive, help-withholding response to a person expressing need.
III. Theological Inquiry
Association to Fragments of Liturgical Practice
Fragments of liturgical practice flooded my consciousness within moments of this encounter. I have prayed the lines of Suffrage A—“Let not the needy be forgotten / Nor the hope of the poor be taken away”—almost daily for years. The immediate association to the Communion rail is also unsurprising. At the church where I most often worship, the church’s long-standing weekday breakfast program and other forms of outreach to its urban neighborhood have affected worship; the gathering at the Communion rail can be highly diverse, socially and economically. Thus, weekly Eucharist has become one of the few places where I regularly find myself in the company of persons similar to the young stranger at the gas pump.
Absence of Association to Doctrinal/Catechetical Concepts
Like most Presbyterian pastors, I am very familiar with this statement in the Presbyterian Church (USA) Book of Order:
Christian worship, at particular times, in special places, with the use of God’s material gifts, should lead the church into the life of the world to participate in God’s purpose to redeem time, to sanctify space, and to transform material reality for the glory of God.
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Sense of Conviction: Failed Action Based on Failed Perception
Why would my sense of failure to act lead quickly to a sense of failure to perceive something about the situation (which evidently blocked my being able to imagine a more creative course of action until I had long since left the scene)? What was there to see or sense that I failed to perceive? My hunch is that lying just outside my consciousness was a sense of divine presence in public space.
In ritual practice research, reports Michael Aune, most respondents to post-worship interviews or questionnaires cannot remember specifics of the sermon, or, for that matter, even the sequence of actions in a worship service they have just left. Few describe their experience of worship in even rudimentary theological terms. More often, worshipers’ language for their experience in worship is highly emotive and relational. They speak of a heightened sense of closeness to God, a personal sense of belonging and acceptance, and in some cases, a sense of deeper connection to persons around them.
Truth be told, those of us who regularly teach, plan, or lead worship tend to be discouraged by, or even resentful of, worshipers’ emotion-laden reflections on their worship experiences. It is easy to dismiss these reactions as the all-too-predictable takeaway of persons steeped in North American narcissism, emotionalism, and individualism. We hope for more. Aune suggests we think again. The power of worship to connect, and reconnect, worshipers with God and with one another is significant. Does such experience of connectedness with God and other persons in fact have more public import than we imagine?
Recall that after driving away from the gas station, I regretted my failure to act creatively and then my failure to perceive the situation in a way that would have prompted me toward faithfully imaginative intervention. I am persuaded that for creative participation in the missio Dei in such a situation, these two verbs—“perceive,” “act”—need to be reversed. Had I been able to perceive God’s active, redemptive presence, preceding me and already engaged, I would have had a better chance of feeling “held” in divine presence (therefore less inclined to react like a victim—the irony of which astonishes me still) and a better chance of seeing myself as co-agent of caring, non-judgmental outreach to this man.
IV. Constructive Proposals: Public Space Reframed by Divine Presence and Divine Promise
Bridging from Sanctuary to Street: Limits of a “Faithful Practices” Perspective
Some scholars working within a “faithful practices” framework for understanding Christian identity and action see social practices as the key connector between worship and public action, sanctuary and street. 6 Practices of worship like greeting and being greeted, forgiving and being forgiven, expressing need and meeting need, baptism and Eucharist, function archetypically, say proponents of this perspective, to shape justice-making, love-enacting practices in private and public life. Welcomed on Sunday, we can welcome on Monday. Fed by God whose Table is for all, we feed neighbor and stranger alike.
Yet, the connection between liturgical practices and public forms of action may be less direct than we imagine. Critically reflecting on the links between liturgical actions and actional possibilities in sudden encounters is difficult, at best. It is easier to explore connections between worship practices and public practices where there is time and space for pre-meditated planning—say, at the mission committee meeting, where exploring the relevance of Eucharist to neighborhood poverty can be very constructive, both theologically and strategically. In a one-on-one encounter like mine at the gas pump, the mental focus required to “translate” whatever is salient about confession, praise, or Eucharist into a responsible, calm response may be hard to come by. Something deeper, more intuitive, and more visceral than a menu of possible practices is needed to counter the equally deep, intuitive, and visceral defensive reactions an encounter may trigger.
Discerning the Public Presence of God
No doubt practices of worship—welcoming and being welcomed, forgiving and being forgiven, hearing and being heard, eating and drinking—will sometimes provide us with strategic clues. But whatever we may say doctrinally about their relevance to public action, in terms of operational effectiveness, my sense is that their role is secondary, not primary, in guiding on-the-spot action in a public encounter. In other words, it may be that the most important issue when an encounter in public space calls for immediate response is not whether we can stay cool-headed enough to inventory our experiences of worship for fitting action paradigms, or recall moral maxims that will prompt us to act rightly. What matters most is our capacity (despite vectors of distraction, suspicion, and the like) to discern the public presence of God—the active, seeking God intent on a passionate mission of redemption.
Doctrinally speaking, Lutheran theologian Thomas Schattauer reminds us that what connects worship and public witness is actually not anything we do, but the seamless redemptive activity of the Triune God. The seamlessness of the worship–witness connection is not something we supply, nor does it depend on us; it is the missio Dei that determines that integral connection. 7 Our part is to perceive this already-present reality and respond to it. If we can recognize God’s public presence, we have a better chance of holding apprehension at bay and participating in God’s redemptive drama in the moment.
A caution is in order here, however; it is not, after all, some generalized feeling of intimacy or even divine goodwill that equips worshipers to sense the public presence of the world changing, justice making God. Worshipers need to be drawn by worship into the presence of the God whose promise to make all things new has laid claim to every private and public space of human life.
What Christian worship celebrates is God’s world changing promise to redeem creation, kept and being kept in the life, death, and risen life of Jesus Christ. It is this God whose presence precedes us into public space, and whose promise reframes every situation.
Our worship needs to be tested, then, against this criterion: worship that strengthens worshipers’ capacity to discern the public presence of God will foreground in prayer, preaching, praise and sacrament God’s promise, kept and being kept in the life, death, and risen life of Jesus Christ, to make all things new and will nourish imagination of the difference this makes. Such worship will foreground God’s world claiming promise of redemption, keeping that promise connected to the costly shape of redemptive transformation expressed in baptism and Eucharist.
We who plan, lead, and teach worship can do three things to strengthen worshipers’ capacity for creative, faithful public action. First, we can bring ourselves to rejoice, instead of going on the worship warpath (when instead of making sophisticated theological connections after a worship service, worshipers can only grope for words to express their sense of divine presence and human connection after worship). Such awareness is prerequisite to fitting public witness at every level. Second, we can shift the rhetoric of our worship services—prayer and praise, petition and proclamation—so that the divine indicative (“This is what God has done, is doing, and will do to make all things new!”) outweighs the numbing drumbeat of heavy imperatives (“we must, we ought, we should”) that dominates many a worship service. Third, we can summon arts of poetry and song, image and dance to alert worshipers to the presence of the promise keeping Triune God.
The God who gives life to the dead not only sends us, but precedes us, into our urban streets, suburban playgrounds, and coastal flood plains. With eyes wide open to God’s presence and promise, we can move into such spaces filled not with apprehension but with courage and creativity, ready to act as agents of redemptive hope.
Footnotes
1
Michael Aune, “Ritual Practice: Into the World, Into Each Human Heart,” Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission, ed. T.H. Schattauer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 151–59.
2
Clearly, there is overlap between the socio-cultural and the theological perspectives. Theology, of course, is not an abstraction, but a lived reflection undertaken in specifically constructed socio-cultural spaces, freighted with particular interests. Technically, then, we might rather speak of a critical, ethno-theological perspective.
3
Aune, “Ritual Practice,” 157.
4
Suffrage A, “Morning Prayer II,” The Book of Common Prayer According to the Use of the Episcopal Church (New York: Oxford, 1990), 98.
5
W-1.3040, “Mission,” The Book of Order (Louisville, KY: PCUSA), 83; emphasis added.
6
For a collection of essays representing this perspective, see Miroslav Volf and Dorothy Bass, eds, Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001).
7
Thomas H. Schattauer, “Liturgical Assembly as Locus of Mission,” Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission, ed. idem (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999), 1–21.