Christianity, in the rise of the secular in recent times, in the shrinking proportion of Christians in the world by virtue of the

population explosion. Further, when with respect to these conditions things were the reverse of what they are now, God supposedly was at work then too. He was in the 19th century progress of Christianity, in its former widespread influence and acknowledgment in the West, in its worldwide expansion, and so on. In short, God is in the peace and God is in the war; God is in what is stable and God is in what is revolutionary; God is in the good and God is in the bad. And where does all this wise and knowing talk really leave us? It leaves us where we've always

been largely ignorant but full of hope in the God who rules and overrules. The prophet put it this way: My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. Professor Ian Ramsey puts it somewhat differently: "Let us never talk as if we had privileged access to the diaries of God's private life or expert insight into his descriptive psychology so that we may say quite cheerfully why God did what, when and where."7 Whether put the prophet's way or Ramsey's way, this is something well worth remembering.
7 From Religious Language, by Ian Ramsey. Student Christian Movement Press. Quoted by permission. (Reprinted in paperback form by Macmillan in 1963.)

Liturgy as Political Event

In its true observation our humanity, as well as that of all other men, is sacramentally affirmed.
WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW

+ WE LIVE in a time when the church of Jesus Christ is pathetically afflicted with worldly distinctions of class, race and nationality; beset by historic schisms and inherited divisions of other sorts both among the separated communions, denominations and sects and within each of them. We are all witnesses to the brokenness of the body of Christ in this world. At the same time, we live in a time of some humility and good will and, I think, adventure; a time in which the many who call themselves Christians acknowledge each other's presence and sincere intention, when they have at least begun to listen to each other's claims to orthodoxy and authority; a time when Christians Protestant and Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic have even been beheld embracing in public! God knows what such Christians may be up to in private I Thanksgiving for the contemporary friendly disposition among Christians and among the several churches should, however, tempt no one to minimize either the profundity or the pathology of the estrangement to which all who are baptized are heir. The experience of renewed contact and mutual respect should not lead the conscience of any Christian to be easily appeased; rather, it should provoke in all Christians an uneasy conscience about the unhappy divisions which still
A New York attorney, Mr. Stringfellow has long been active as a concerned layman in the affairs of his own (Protestant Episcopal) and other churches.
DECEMBER 22, 1965

aggravate the body of Christ in this world, and about the poignant consequences for the world of that disunity. In truth, all of us meet in shame and scandal and we will continue to do so until that day when every baptized person is welcomed to any altar in the church of Christ, until, in the end, every person is baptized. This is obviously one way of affirming that the mission and witness of the church to the world consists essentially of the unity and wholeness of the church in the world. The urgency of the modern ecumenical enterprise stems not from the need to enhance the grandeur and influence of the church, as if the churches were called to organic reunion merely for the sake of the church as church; biblically speaking, it stems from the need for the church to become the pioneer and the archetype of that unity in society which the world so desperately needs. The ecumenical hope is that the church may live in the midst of this world's fragmentation, conflict and alienation as the one reconciled community in which the world can see and foresee the reconciliation vouchsafed for all the world in Christ. At no other point in the church's witness to the world is its integrity as such a reconciled community more edifying and more self-evident, more radical and more cogent, than in the liturgy. For the liturgy is both the precedent and the consummation of that service which the church of Christ and its members render to the world. I recognize that some Christians regard the 573

liturgy in quite different ways. Some Protestants, for instance, disdain the liturgy as peripheral to the Christian life. Some even ridicule it by boasting that they have no liturgical life. Such Protestants only betray their ignorance of what liturgy means, what it is. Put simply, liturgy means style of public life. Thus, in the broadest sense, all of life is liturgical. The conventions and ceremonies of courtship are a liturgy articulating and dramatizing, hopefully, the love between a man and a woman. Or, to cite an even more mundane example, I recall listening with fascination as the chief witness at the so-called Valachi hearings before the United States committee expounded at length on the peculiar actions and symbols and rituals which constitute the sophisticated liturgical fabric of the Cosa Nostra. All of life, even that of the organized crime syndicate, is liturgical I So also with the church: all forms of corporate churchly life from the silence of the Quaker meeting to the venerable and elaborate rites of the Eastern Orthodox are liturgical. The only serious question is whether a given liturgical practice has integrity in terms of the gospel. Some people of the churches, both laymen and clergy, regard liturgy as an essentially religious exercise separate, disjoined, self-contained and confined to the sanctuary, having nothing to do with the world. Some even regard liturgy superstitiously, as something having an intrinsic efficacy, as a means of procuring indulgences as if God were so absurd, and so ungodly, as to be appeased by the redundant incantations of men. There is, however, nothing either spooky or lucky about the liturgy, nothing magical or mechanistic about its performance. On the contrary, the liturgy of the gospel is a theatrical form of the ethical witness of Christians in this world. In this sense, though there may in different times and cultures be much variety in its language, music, action and movement, the liturgy is always characterized by certain definitive marks: (1) Scriptural integrity. The liturgy of the gospel is the theatricalization of the biblical saga of God's action in this world, relating concretely the versatility and ubiquity of the Word of God in history to the consummation of the Word of God in Jesus Christ. In other words, liturgy which is at once biblically authentic and historically relevant is always a celebration of the death and resurrection of the Lord, a celebration in which this most decisive event in all history is remembered and memorialized in a context wherein God's every action in this world since creation is recalled and rehearsed, and by which the hope of the world for the final reconciliation is recited and dramatized. 1574

The scriptural integrity of the liturgy requires that the laity be not spectators but participants, and that they participate not as a matter of piety, not merely for their own sake, but because they gather as a congregation, as delegates, indeed as advocates, of all humanity. That is why the traditional Protestant "preaching service" even when, on occasion, the preaching is an exposition of the Word of God and not some religious diatribe is an impoverished, an inadequate liturgy for the church. By the same token, that is why the mass recited in the absence of a congregation or, for that matter, celebrated in a language not familiar to the people, represents a compromise of the liturgy's scriptural integrity. II (2) The historicity of the liturgy. The liturgy of the gospel is both a transcendent event and a present event. It shatters the categories of time and space and location because, on the one hand, it recalls and dramatizes the estate of creation in the Word of God and, on the other, it beseeches and foretells the end of this history becomes for the world, as it were, a mirror of the eschaton. As a transcendent event the liturgy recollects all that has already happened in this world from the beginning of time and prophesies all that is to come until the end of time. But the liturgy is also a contemporary event involving particular persons gathered in a specific place in a peculiar way. The reconciliation celebrated in the liturgy is not only a reconciliation remembered from creation or expected eschatologically but also an actual event here and now: the reconciliation of those gathered as a congregation and society within and among themselves and between each and all of them and the rest of the world. That is precisely why both the confessions and the intercessions of the people of the congregation within the context of the liturgy are so indispensable to the integrity of the liturgy. This is the time and this is the place and this is the way, in a most immediate sense, in which the whole manifold, existential involvement of the members of Christ's body in the everyday life of the world not only all that seems good and which men are tempted to honor or praise but also all that seems evil and which men are fond of rationalizing or denying is offered and consecrated for the discretion of Christ himself, the redeemer of all men and all things. Thus the liturgy is the normative but also the most radical ethical commitment of Christian people to the world; it is the epitome of the service which the Christian renders the world. All authentic witness in the name of Christ, all exemplifying in the world the virtue of Christ, which Christians undertake in their dispersion in everyday life has
T H E CHRISTIAN CENTURY

precedent in the liturgy celebrated in the gathered congregation. (3) The sacramental authenticity of the liturgy. This transcendence of time in time and the scriptural integrity of the liturgy of the gospel constitute the sacramental essence of the liturgy, in which the actual, visible present event retains all its own originality and contemporary significance as a particular reconciled community and at the same time is transfigured to embody and convey to the world the cosmic enormity of the reconciling accomplishment of Jesus Christ. Thus the liturgy as sacrament is inherently distinguished from the vanity of mere religious ritualism in which the propriety of the ritual practice itself is all that matters. Such may be sufficient for initiation or elevation in the Masons or the Knights of Columbus, but ritualistic piety is entirely inappropriate in fact, it is profane in the eucharist. Thus, too, the liturgy as sacrament appropriates as its ingredient symbols, among others, the ordinary things of the common existence of the world bread, wine, water, money, cloth, color, music, words or whatever else is readily at hand. So, sacramentally, in the liturgy we have a meal which is basically a real meal and which nourishes those who partake of it as a meal. Yet at the same time this meal portrays for the rest of the world an image of the Last Supper at which Christ himself was host, and at the same time a foretaste of the eschatological banquet in which Christ is finally recognized as the host of all men. Much the same can be affirmed about the use of money in the liturgy. I suppose many lay people, not to mention clergy or bishops, regard the

offering of money liturgically as a crude interlude in worship, as an appeal for funds of much the same nature as appeals from conventional secular charities. But that is not at all the case when the liturgy is observed with appreciation of its sacramental character. Then the offer of money is sacramentally the very offering of our lives: it represents, in the most lucid and honest way available in our society, the total involvement of the people of the church in the life of the world. For in the world today virtually every contact of the Christian with the world is symbolized by the exchange or the mention of or at least the regard for money. So it is most fitting that money be placed upon the altar as an integral part of the liturgy, as a sacrament, in order to represent concretely just as with the bread and wine and water the offering of all this existence to God. Ill So now we end where we began: the liturgy, wherever it has substance in the gospel, is a living, remarkable, political event. It is the very example of salvation. It is the festival of life which foretells the fulfillment and maturity of all of life for all of time. The liturgy is social action because it is the characteristic style of life for human beings in this world. Therefore rejoicel Come and let us beckon all others to do the same to the altar of Christ. Come for the fun of it for this is the way our mere humanity is confirmed, the way the humanity of every other person is affirmed.

Gift
+ NOT THEN; and never since Have we quite reached the stable, King and Prince, Nor clearly seen the manger As shepherd saw it, and as money-changer, Nor worshiped with our hearts the small Body which bore the weight of miracle; But stand, have stood forever in our night While the beloved Baby made of light Sleeps in the stillness that his Father sent Where animals' eyes are eloquent. And if (O God) I move from my self and come And call the stable suddenly heaven and home And bend my scarred unvirgin knee: Receive, O Word, dumbstricken me.
MARION ARMSTRONG. DECEMBER 22, 1965

Flight into Egypt

+ AT dawn I saw them rise out of the east, A trinity of figures in the dust: In robes of gray, before a jogging beast, A strong-stepped man paced quickly on his way. Upon the donkey's back There rode a dark-eyed, limber girl Wrapped round in black. Such was their haste They seemed to flee Across the desert To a foreign soil. They passed so rapidly I could not see If in the woman's arms There was a child.
STANLEY K. FREIBERG.

1575

^ s
Copyright and Use: As an ATLAS user, you may print, download, or send articles for individual use according to fair use as defined by U.S. and international copyright law and as otherwise authorized under your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. No content may be copied or emailed to multiple sites or publicly posted without the copyright holder(s)' express written permission. Any use, decompiling, reproduction, or distribution of this journal in excess of fair use provisions may be a violation of copyright law. This journal is made available to you through the ATLAS collection with permission from the copyright holder(s). The copyright holder for an entire issue of a journal typically is the journal owner, who also may own the copyright in each article. However, for certain articles, the author of the article may maintain the copyright in the article. Please contact the copyright holder(s) to request permission to use an article or specific work for any use not covered by the fair use provisions of the copyright laws or covered by your respective ATLAS subscriber agreement. For information regarding the copyright holder(s), please refer to the copyright information in the journal, if available, or contact ATLA to request contact information for the copyright holder(s). About ATLAS: The ATLA Serials (ATLAS) collection contains electronic versions of previously published religion and theology journals reproduced with permission. The ATLAS collection is owned and managed by the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) and received initial funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The design and final form of this electronic document is the property of the American Theological Library Association.