Today’s eccentricity from Dale: Stop recycling church bulletins! You’ll walk out of church on Sunday and there’ll be someplace to get rid of your used worship guide. It even happens in the Seminary’s chapel: Come in, pick up the order of service, do it, drop it. Bugs me.
I’ll try to explain. The other day I started reading a scholarly article about Jewish public prayers in the first centuries B.C. and A.D. Scholar Daniel Falk writes: “The language of prayer is to a great extent conventional. Because of this constraint, a straightforward reading of a prayer text cannot always be assumed to represent accurately the pray-er’s theology.” (in “Justification and Variegated Nomism,” p. 7). That means the public prayers used back then, or the prayers and liturgy prepared for your worship this Sunday, don’t necessarily reflect what you and I, the pray-ers, believe about God. Makes sense, doesn’t it? I imagine three possibilities when we use conventional prayers and liturgy. 1. They may reflect what we truly believe (we’re into these words head and heart). 2. They may not (we’re just going through the motions). 3. Something in between.
Some pastors begin their sermons by saying, “The Word of God that engages us today is….” That’s the challenge of public worship, to engage ourselves with those conventional readings, prayers and liturgies. What does this mean? For me that means marking the bulletin when something strikes me. Think more about this, Dale. Use this thought, Dale. And so on. I fold the bulletin, put it in my pocket, and recycle the spiritual engagement in my head and heart during the week. There’s just too much in every order of service for me to drop it at the door. Thank you for letting me share my eccentricity as you prepare for Sunday’s worship!
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