to know or not know your audience
(deciding to go left, right or straight at the crossroads of holy week services)
i cannot condemn anyone on this, because i have been just as guilty as the next worship leader. emphasizing the "passion" of jesus so hard during holy week that i kind of felt bad about myself if i didn't make at least one person cry out of sheer will. jesus dying for us is a hard concept to deal with anyway. any person, let alone jesus, being faux-tried, beaten and crucified even though he did nothing wrong is an incredibly hard pill to swallow. and when you are telling the story to a congregation of any size the first time (or the second or the third or the fourth...), you want to make sure that the congregation feels the IMMENSE WEIGHT of jesus' experience. you can do this any number of ways. you can ridicule the congregation for wanting to "skip right to easter". you can make many, many dramatic pauses. you can dance around in mime. you can turn off the lights. you can play a mel gibson movie. among who knows how many other things. but what do you do when the audience knows the story already? what do you do when the audience has already grieved for jesus at last year's funeral? is it really fair for you to chastise their love for their god because the experience of holy week is different this year? because they aren't loosing grasp of their emotions and crying uncontrollably at the reading or hearing of the story as documented in scripture?
i've had a difficult time with these thoughts this year and in past years. i remember hearing (second hand, of course) that a young person and their parent didn't agree with having a lock-in after the good friday service a couple years ago. they didn't agree that it was time for us to start "the celebration of life" part yet. it was "too soon". and i respected those thoughts. i truly did. i just didn't agree. the best memorials (to me) are the ones that understand and acknowledge the impact of the person we are grieving and celebrate that impact. can i not be sad? of course you/i can. i am sad every time i think of my lost grandparents, but i celebrate their memory now. i don't grieve it on the anniversary of their passing every single year.
the same idea can be applied to easter morning services. i'll admit my expectations were low (having heard the preacher a couple times before) yesterday, but i will say that i was looking to be inspired yesterday morning. but what was presented was a retelling of the first easter morning experience. and while i appreciated the retelling, i wasn't inspired in the least. i knew that story too. i wanted more.
so, what are worship leaders to do? do you prepare for the "easter only's" and preach on easter morning to the folks that pack your sanctuary once, maybe twice a year? should pastors use their super-serious voices and pick emotional people to read scripture on good friday? or in both cases, are there "outside the box" ways to put a new spin on a very familiar story. i would argue the latter. i definitely wish for that.
i don't want to be jaded towards holy week and easter morning. lord knows, literally, that my convictions and beliefs tell me that easter is and should be the most holy of any day on the calendar. but i also have no interest in being ridiculed about wanting to "skip to easter" when that is exactly what i want to do. it's not that i am want to gloss over jesus' sacrifice. it's that i get it. and i've mourned it. and i do remember and appreciate it. but i want to be inspired. and i don't want to feel like i am back in third grade sunday school.
from experience, i know how hard it is to walk the line between creative and traditional. i hope it's not bad to hope and wish for more of the former and less of the latter.
but i do.
3 comments:
You can remember without mourning on Good Friday. I realize what you're saying, and, you're right, most churches don't get. It's why I try to do something different on Good Friday every year. I think the big problem is too often the week leading up to Easter turns into "Passion Week" and not "Holy Week." It's not the we jump straight to Easter, it's that we jump straight to Good Friday. We don't talk about the meaning and implications of the rest of the week. Too often every service, as you pointed out, is an attempted tear jerker, but that's not appropriate. I don't think we should skip straight to Easter, but nor do I feel we need to bury ourselves in Good Friday. All of it is part of God's story. We need to celebrate the various elements of it and not get too hung up on just one element, whether that be the grieving or the celebrating.
As for who do you preach to? I can't speak for other pastors, but my opinion (and I specifically said so in my sermon yesterday) is I don't preach for those who show up just because it's tradition or their family guilted them into coming. I preach to those who came to find Jesus. I just hope those folks outnumber the former.
"passion week" vs. holy week sums up nicely what i feel like i've grown accustomed to. things like the seder meal that we did when you were at huffman were twice as cool as anything we could have done in the sanctuary.
"I don't preach for those who show up just because it's tradition or their family guilted them into coming."...
this message works until you are one of the people there out of tradition or because you've been dragged. if i fall into one of these categories and my presence is downplayed by the preacher, i never come back. unless it's to throw tomatoes at the door. it's just a fine line, but one i wish preachers would try harder to balance on. it's just too easy to go one way or the other.
Yeah, I didn't make myself clear - I don't downplay those who show up just for Easter. I don't get up and say, "You're a bunch of losers." I believe my exact words on Easter were, "My sermon this morning is geared towards people who are already believers. If you hear some concepts that are a little foreign to you or that raise questions, don't check out on me. Please email me or call me and let's talk about those." My point is that I don't try to do "sermon-lite" on Sunday morning just because a bunch of people who only darken the door of the church twice a year showed up. I want every sermon to be one that challenges people to grow deeper and think more about their relationship with God and the world. I can't stand Easter sermons that just say the same thing you heard last year. The folks who do only show up once or twice a year will begin to think you have no new material. It confirms their belief that God hasn't done anything new in the last 2000 years.
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