There was a blanket of unlit candles on the altar. The call to worship pressed against the air and people took their postures of worship depending on their current orientation: the cynical sat with their heads buried in the liturgy, leaning on elbows; the expectant sat up straight and joined in the collective voice with a certain measured pleasure; the mystics and contemplatives among us sat back in the chair seeming to anticipate the rhythm of the spoken words with the whole of their body and breath. It was what I expected. The interruption to the normalized liturgy came as an invitation, an invitation to tell stories. We redefined our paradigm: we didn’t come to experience God or get our God-fix for the week. We certainly didn’t come to escape from the very real parts of our world. But… we did come to draw the light towards what God was doing in the world with or without us—to find our place in a kingdom reality. We did come to affirm (and incidentally, to remind ourselves) those moments in our last six days where we’d grazed against grace in the form of beauty, compassion, subversive awakening—whether as a witness or a sideways recipient.

Over and over again people told stories and lit their altar candles to give light to the mysterious incarnation of Christ, to the idea of of living in an unseen reality, an invisible principality. I was blessedly relieved that the stories were rich in “non-spiritual” encounters: nature, art, relationship, even grief. As a worship and teaching pastor (and a very post-church, post-evangelical one, at that) I was expecting the usual barrage of God-saved-me-from-a-car-accident, my-friend-stopped-taking-antidepressants, so-and-so-got-saved kind of sharings. Not that these are illegitimate or not Divine, but they are definitely of the culturally programmed variety and flow from the idea that “kingdom” work is somehow more shiny, sanitary, and objective-driven than other kinds of work.

We continued on after this, but there is no definitive way of explaining the shift in the room. Moving on with the flow of the service was easy, effortless, thoughtful. Communion had more of a celebratory and mysterious air to it than I had experienced in a long while.

I don’t mean to imply that we performed the right magic spell or worship formula. In fact, I think the idea that we conjure up God in our worship is both superstitious and arrogant. But I do think that we woke ourselves up. We started to shift our own expectations—of worship and of God. Perhaps better said, we confronted our expectations of worship and of God by thinking about something bigger.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about… when that element of our worship began, an element I had planned and mapped out in the liturgy, I didn’t know what to say or what to expect. My own stories failed me and my own personal and private fears—fears that the congregation I served wouldn’t engage—threatened my thought process. And yet the stories were unremarkable and brilliant and sparked my own stories, my own affirmations of God’s amazing, subtle imploding into the world. I was led by the people I was leading. It was humbling and beautiful.

It was the piece of our worship that stayed with people as we went out into our week. It was the piece that would spark more recognitions of God-in-the-world as we move in our path-worn rituals of the week, that we would be moved to honor God, join God in “kingdom” work—or those things that were formed in a place governed by mercy, grace, and beauty.

This is Romans 12:1. Fitting that we brought this to our own community altar, that we re-enact it in a micro way in the worship. Isn’t that what the worship hour should be? A re-enactment of God’s revelation?

It was more than talking and postulating. It was more than Christian nirvana and “entering in.” It was beautiful. I’m so glad I could light my candle to acknowledge the Presence of God—not only right there or right in that perfect combination of worship elements, but now and then. It’s changing the narrative for me. It’s changing for the community that worshipped together and created that beautiful mosaic of encounter.

I hope that you will have stories to tell at the end of the week. I hope that you and your communities are shining lights of the ever-moving hand of God in those places that exist outside our own clichés and our own Christian expectations—because the kingdom of GOD is hard to find inside our own Christian culture. I hope that you find yourself surprised.

Image © Dominik “Dome”