"Making Us New" by Jennifer L. Lord

Perhaps you prayed the Commendation for the deceased and cast dirt on the casket as part of your funeral practicum for the introductory worship course.

Or maybe you decided to scoop and lift water from the font as you declared the Assurance of Pardon for the Lord’s Day practicum because you remembered the connection between baptism and the Confession of Sin. Maybe on baptism day you brought your toddler to help everyone practice, or on Holy Communion day you made a bread run to HEB before your practicum, or maybe you baked your own bread. As a student at Austin Seminary, you were taught not to look like a flying superhero while pronouncing the Charge and Benediction, not to anxiously shift side to side while reading scripture, and to infuse all gestures and prayers with life.

You also, I hope, had some fun in liturgy classes! Maybe you were one of those practicing baptism at the three-acre spring-fed Barton Springs pool in downtown Austin, garnering a lot of strange looks in that public place (What are they doing?!). Were you one of the students who knew how to submerge a person in living water, showing your “asperging” (sprinkling) classmates how baptism by immersion is done? Some of you in nonsacramental traditions created rites of naming, sharing your wisdom with your peers. Perhaps you took courses on music, and you penned hymn texts, taught a song, or created your musical autobiography. Focusing on the church’s worship as a pastoral event, maybe you spent a semester marrying and burying people. Maybe you took the course requiring you to draw a “crisis” from a hat and, in less than one hour, prepare a liturgy in the wake of that crisis. At least one of you practiced the Declaration of Pardon on an attentive Austin Seminary campus squirrel.

You may have been a student during the Stan Hall Era, studying under that remarkable, rigorous, and irascible scholar of liturgics. He taught you about the sacraments and their inseparability from the Word. He inspired students who couldn’t even pronounce Triduum to create songs and banners for the Seminary’s Easter Vigil. He urged Seminary presidents to give chapel tours to incoming students and visitors. He loved to tell the story of Stuart Currie’s gift of the communion table for our chapel and how a previous president had to continuously move it out of a transept (where it was relegated on noncommunion days) and back to its place at the front of the center aisle until, finally, faculty colleagues gave up and let the table remain where it is to this day.

Maybe you helped make Stan Hall’s dream of a lab space come true. The Stanley R. Hall Liturgics Lab was dedicated in 2010 with the Class of 2009 commissioning the Reverend Derek Forbes (MDiv’08) to design and craft the communion table, baptismal font, and cross in memory of Dr. Hall. Professor Whit Bodman later hand built the casket used for funeral practica (and then someone—who, we don’t know—placed an inflatable figure inside which was declared to be Charles Robert). We’ve moved a piano into the space. One wall is lined with mirrors so we can check our orans gesture. I still have a favorite photo of a dozen of you raising your loaves of bread still in their wrappers, beaming at the camera before we began Holy Communion practica day.

I could go on and imagine you could, too. The fact is that Austin Seminary has a reputation for graduates knowing how to lead the people of God in the worship of God. This is because, in large degree, we have modeled and taught two things: to preside and to think theologically about worship.

At Austin Seminary you are up front right away, leading the actions of worship, learning to be a worship leader and a presider. You learn to do the things of worship and are taught to have oversight of the whole. Maybe you remember: the presider is symbolized by an eagle in some traditions. The presider is the eagle eye, the overseer for the entire worship service. You lead some components of worship, and you make sure that all the things that need to get done do get done: read and proclaim the word, celebrate the sacraments, pray for the whole world, gather with praise, confess sins, declare assuredness of pardon, bless to live as Christ’s own in the world.

And you plumb the depths of the theology of worship. Here you learn how every component of worship is an event where God promises to act and meet our real human needs: God’s word sustains (Is. 55:10), God hears our prayers and comforts us (Ps. 34:4), God rejoices at the repentant sinner (Luke 15:20), God feeds us (Matt. 14:19), God washes us into new life (Rom. 6:3-4), God makes us ambassadors (2 Cor. 5:20). This is when I start to rant in the classroom: worship is an encounter and we are being made new (Rev. 21:5)!

But we get caught up in our inventiveness and become focused on our efforts for good worship and forget there is more than us going on in the gathering. So I bring Annie Dillard’s words to class each year: “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? … It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

Worship is an encounter with the waking God, the holy triune God who draws us out to where we can never return. During worship, in worship, while we worship, God is transforming us, delivering us from our fragmentation and estrangement, making us, by God’s grace, more of what we were created to be: the new creation. Paradise restored. Us, and the whole cosmos. Come to worship, come expectant and vulnerable, ready to confess, ready to beg for the needs of the world, ready to hear the word addressing you, ready to be bonded with those around you, ready to be crowned again beloved of God—the waking God draws us out to make us new.

Many of you know that worship service that stretches over three days (the Triduum) where we get to the heart of it all: God drawing us into who we are meant to be by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I have especially strong memories of so many of you as we prepared for these days, creating the book-length bulletin, learning about dryer lint for the great fire, almost mastering the candles. The Triduum means the great Three Days. On Maundy Thursday we are commanded to love one another, we wash feet and share Christ’s covenant meal. On Good Friday we go to the foot of the cross and are honest about our death-dealing ways; we sit in our sorrows. At nightfall before Easter dawn, we begin the great annual proclamation of resurrection and, in a quite long Vigil, are drawn out again, through story and symbol and ritual enactment, into who we are: bearers of the light of Christ, storied in salvation, baptized from death to life, feasted in the kingdom-come. At this apex of the church’s year, through full-force symbol and song, we rejoice in the One who has trampled down death and are refashioned again as Christ’s body sent forth for the life of the world.

Thank God that our school invests in these matters of worship. The chapel sits at the center of our campus and the Ethel Lance Memorial Circle, also a place for community worship and a sign of the ever memorable Saints, is tucked right up to that center. Our resident artist made sure we have a font. Our faculty bring a fresh word in preaching and they preside each week at Holy Communion, our students and staff volunteer for worship leadership, seniors preach their “senior sermons,” student groups lead special services that have become traditions, too, like Día de Los Muertos and the Blessing of the Animals. Friends of the Seminary have endowed worship and music funds for lectures and events and for five different hymnals, ensuring a range of song and styles for our intercultural community. We have chaired faculty positions in liturgy and in music and in preaching. And we have beadles (!) who support community worship. And we keep the Feast of feasts, the Great Vigil of Easter. Austin Seminary students practice and learn the relevance of the acts of worship, and graduates continue them, giving them fresh shape in their contexts. What a ministry: bringing all things before the waking God, being re-formed as God’s own for the life of the world, that all things will be made new! Glory to God.

Jennifer L. Lord is The Dorothy B. Vickery Professor of Homiletics and Liturgical Studies at Austin Seminary. Her work focuses on liturgical theology informing preaching, presiding/worship leadership, spirituality, and renewal of Sunday worship practices. In this photo she is helping student Devonté Harris be comfortable in the act of elevating the cup for Eucharist.