Sunday Worship 3 May | Practicing Ritual

John 4:1-26

Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?” Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

“I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.” The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

Over the last couple of weeks we have been exploring holy habits or spiritual practices, beginning with ‘deepening prayer’ and ‘thinking scripture’. Although I think I might like to rename the last one ‘engaging scripture’. I wanted the title to convey a sense that we are not meant to passively receive scripture but actively work with it, but the word ‘thinking’ perhaps prioritises an intellectual approach, and so falls into exactly the same sort of trap I was trying to avoid when I moved away from the language of ‘reading’. The point is that there are many ways of engaging with scripture, and I hope that was the main take away from last week.

This week we are thinking about ‘practicing ritual’. Perhaps ritual suggests superstition or even something more sinister, but it is really about pattern that has meaning. Activist and minister Kathleen McTigue describes it as something that combines intention and attention and repetition. You’ll hear those words a lot this morning! It is something we do on purpose, something that we fully engage with, and something that we do regularly.

There are plenty of rituals in the life of the church. Perhaps those that spring most readily to mind are those we sometimes call sacraments. Different church traditions define those differently, but for Baptists they are baptism and communion. In many ways they are quite different. Baptism happens for one person at once, although it is important that it happens within the life of the community. Communion is usually something that is shared, although participation is the free choice of each person. Baptism generally only happens once in our lives, and is what we might also call a rite of passage. Communion happens more frequently, and forms part of the rhythm of our gathering. Both though are connected by a sense of embodying faith, performing actions that have meaning and create connection and so nourish our souls.

Those of you who were here for the Tenebrae service on Maundy Thursday will have heard the retelling of the Last Supper which I read from The Book of Belonging. I want to share some of it again now, because I think it captures the heart of our rituals so beautifully: “Sometimes things happen that are so important and mysterious that we simply can’t fit them into our human heads and hearts. They weigh us down like big heavy stones as we puzzle and wrestle. It helps to do something with our hands and our time, to give those big feelings a place to rest. We call that a ceremony.”

These rituals of water and wine and wheat give us something to do with our bodies, creating a space in which we can connect with feelings that words alone cannot do justice to. But they do not just connect us to our own selves, they also connect us to the God we find in them, and creation we take them from, and the people we share them with. For me these rituals are most precious and powerful when all of those connections are present, like a circuit being completed and a light bulb turning on.

There are other rituals we share, which together create the liturgy of the church. We might not think of ourselves as liturgical, as we do not have a fixed set of words we use every week, but every church has a liturgy because it is simply ‘the work of the people’, what we do when we come together. Our liturgy is made up of singing and praying and learning together. It sometimes makes space for silence and discussion and creativity. It includes our notices and our refreshments and our meetings too. And it stretches out to encompass our fundraising and our campaigning and our inclusion. We certainly do all of these things with repetition, and I hope wo do them with intention and attention as well - at least most of the time!

It is these rituals that create this community. They shape who we are, how we belong together, how we live out our calling to be the people of God in this place. If our rituals were different, we would be different too. Having said that, I think we are also shaped by the rituals we choose not to practice. We do not tap our watches at people who arrive after the first hymn, because we’re glad they have come at the time that they could. We do not insist on standing or kneeling, because those things are not possible for everyone. And we do not put any barrier in the way of communion, because it is not our table to gatekeep.

If we were a monastic community, we might collect these rituals and ceremonies and liturgies together as a rule of life. A rule of life is a shared framework for living, a pattern of being and doing that a group agrees to and holds one another accountable to. When I started training for ministry, one of the colleges I trained with encouraged us to write an individual rule of life, with commitments and targets in different areas of our lives. I can see why they thought it would be valuable, but to be honest it really lost something without the communal aspect. I'm not saying every community needs a formalised rule of life, although it may be something that would be interesting to explore here, but I do think every rule of life needs a community.

That's not to say that we can't have our own personal rituals, things that bring meaning to our lives and nourish our souls and strengthen our sense of connection - to ourselves and to others and to creation and to God. Indeed some things do need to be personal because we find meaning in different things and our souls need different nourishment and we connect in different ways. Any of the things that we are talking about in this series can become rituals if we practice them with repetition and intention and attention, and I hope the last couple of weeks have given you some tools to be able to develop your own rituals around prayer and scripture, whether you are forming those rituals for the first time or refining your existing practice.

I particularly want to encourage you to develop some rituals around the idea of sabbath. It is the first ritual given to us in scripture, and I believe God established it not as an arbitrary rule or a restriction on our lives, but as something that is entirely necessary to our wellbeing. We need to rest for the good of our minds and our bodies and our souls. And this is a moment where I really am preaching to myself. Rest is not easy with a busy mind and an active family, and I’m still figuring out what sabbath looks like when Sunday is a work day. So this is something I want to return to in more detail after my sabbatical, which I hope will give me a greater appreciation for and understanding of patterns of rest. In the meantime, I will direct you to a couple of books about sabbath on the bookshelf, if this is something you would like to read and think more about.

So far we have focused on more obviously spiritual or religious rituals, but I think there is also deep meaning and nourishment and connection to be found in things that feel rather more mundane. If God is in all things then all things are sacred. We just have to look at them in the right way. On the windowsill in our kitchen, sits a framed poem by David Gate, which says this: “Doing the laundry / and the dishes /  and meal preparation / are not tasks of the mundane / because being clothed / and clean / and fed / declares the dignity / of human life / and nurtures us / into new days / into new eras / they are not mundane, no / they are the rituals of care”. I don’t want to stretch the meaning of ritual so far that it loses all definition or usefulness, but I do think there is something to be said for bringing intention and attention to these sorts of acts of repetition too. Alongside the books on sabbath, I would also recommend Caspar ter Kuile’s The Power of Ritual, which is about turning everyday activities into soulful practices, often drawing on spiritual traditions in order to do so.

I've talked for a while now but I still haven't said anything about the Bible reading we heard earlier. To be honest, I'm not going to say very much about it at all. I chose this passage largely because I wanted us to hear what Jesus says at the very end, that a day is coming when the true worshippers will worship in spirit and in truth. Whatever our rituals look like, whatever form they take, what matters most is that they are truth-full and spirit-full. The translation we are using capitalises Spirit, suggesting that it is God's Spirit they must be full of, but those capitals are not original. There is actually a degree of ambiguity in the text, which I suspect may be deliberate. Of course God's Spirit is present in our rituals, but our own spirits must be present too. We must bring the all fullness of ourselves to them if they are to nourish us and bring meaning and connection.