Sermon Dialogue

January 27, 2002                             Psalm 96, Psalm 122 

John Wilkinson: I’ll begin with a simple question, although it’s not so simple, if you might share with us some of the basic assumptions about worship in your tradition, in the tradition of Reform Judaism.

Laurence Kotok: I have my own words of greeting, though.  Thank you, it’s great to be back here again, and now I believe, it’s the sixth time that I’ve had the opportunity to be here with Third Presbyterian Church, and to carry on this historic relationship.  And I feel compelled to say I, along with you, welcome your new pastor. I’m really glad he’s in town.  I certainly had a deep affection for John Cairns and for Joe Shook, especially, but I’m really thankful that John is here.  You did a good job!  [laughter]  You should be happy.  

Our conversation today involves the way in which each of us approaches the sacred in our communities.  They are similar and yet very different.  I appreciate also the words of Psalm 122, which is common to both of our traditions, and I, of course, welcome all of your prayers, along with mine, for the peoples of Jerusalem, to be more than words but to be ultimate reality.  But it must be fair and it must be honest.

When we talk about worshipping together, it raises issues for us.  And I think today was a day that I am thankful to have been able to share with you, but we share it in different ways.  John said to me, “Well your confirmation class is getting an eyeful today,” and they are!  And I’m thankful for that.  

The experiences of this morning are commonplace to you who are members of Third Presbyterian Church, and are somewhat exotically strange to members of the Jewish community.  And that’s really where we begin when we talk about what is the purpose of prayer; because the purpose of prayer is really the same for all of us.  It’s just different.

And I want to say something that I said Friday night. Sometimes we are accused of saying the same things on Sunday morning that we say on Friday night, but so what!  You know, do you ever hear that great story about… it could be a priest, a rabbi, a minister --- it doesn’t matter what --- a person comes to a new church, a synagogue, or cathedral, and they get up for their maiden sermon.  And everyone is all excited about it, because they’re all there.  And they give the sermon.  It’s a great sermon.  And the next time comes, and they give the same sermon, and then they give the same sermon, and the same sermon.  Finally the whispering in the halls is getting a little confused. “What’s wrong with this person that we brought?  Do they only have one tape?  Or all they stuck someplace?”  And the leadership comes to this individual and says, “What is going on here? It’s six weeks already and it’s the same sermon?”  “You haven’t done this one yet?”  “Why would I change?”  [laughter]

For us, our experience of prayer speaks to the highest opportunity for human beings to reflect their longings for a relationship with God and with each other.  I’m going to stop there.

JW:  That’s pretty good.  [laughter]  I’m also struck that I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard Presbyterian worship called “exotic.”  [great laughter]

LK: It’s your doing!

JW: We’ll take it!  Thinking about it a great deal over time, we worship to do the same thing, I think:  to express our deepest and most profound yearnings, and to gather in community to say who we are, that is God’s people, and whose we are, that is God’s.  And I’ve been thinking about this a great deal in terms of our two congregations, that we do so in a particular context.  In a city, or in a neighborhood, or even along a particular street with a particular history, that allows a community to come together in unique ways, that even though the order and the rhythm can be replicated elsewhere, it would never be exactly the same, because of who we are.  And I think what we do as well as we gather together and worship publicly… (I used the word corporate on Friday evening and someone at the refreshments following said, “What did that have to do with Enron or KMart?”  And I didn’t mean that!)  What I meant was, as our common texts might tell us, that we gather together as communities to worship God and we find God acting within us as communities. We worship because we are told to (I remember what I didn’t say on Friday night, which was, because we are told to in lots of different places, biblically, but also out of our tradition), that our chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy God forever.  And worship isn’t the only place to do that, but it’s, I think, one of the best places to do that, both to glorify God, and to enjoy God forever.  

And one of the unique situations that we contribute to the broader Christian tradition, I think, is this notion, about which I’ll talk in a minute, of the centrality of the word.  That is, the word takes root, and we find our authority and our meaning not so much in other documents, or even in persons, but in the understanding that the Bible is God’s word to us, and that as we gather in community and as the Spirit works through us, that word takes root and then grows.
 
Tell us a bit about how, and in what ways, you think about the order and rhythm of worship in your tradition.

LK: Part of the dilemma of this conversation is defining context.  And that has to do with what each of us takes for granted in our communities.  Your service has a certain kind of rhythm and pattern to it, as does ours.  But they’re different.  They’re different in form, and they’re different also in substance.  And those reflect, as they should, who each of our communities hopes to be.  

Over and over again in your experience this morning is terminology specific to Jesus.  And that is appropriate for you as a community who has found something unique and special in that commitment.  That commitment is absent and that concept is absent from Jewish prayer and Jewish experience.  And it’s almost begging the obvious, but it needs to be said, and I will repeat something which I mentioned Friday evening:  worshipping together speaks of commonality.  And commonality is not necessarily apparent or real.  I’m struck by the window up here, which depicts Jesus and has on its left side a statement “I am the true vine.”  Well, statements like that certainly have their place in the historical reality of Christian thinking and behavior, but even in the best of it, it is a differentiation statement from that which came before it, and that which continues along in a parallel way, and that is the life of the Jewish community.  How that reflects itself in ultimate experiential reality is found in ways that are very subtle.  

When you, as members of Third Presbyterian Church, come to be part of our Friday evening or Saturday morning experience at B’rith Kodesh, you have the ability to engage and participate in our prayer experiences.  I don’t think any of you would say that you find it to be awkward, foreign, or in some way leaving you out of it --- maybe the Hebrew --- but then again there are members of my congregation who feel the same way!  [laughter]  Clearly, and most profoundly today, those of us of Jewish faith who come into this magnificent sanctuary to share with you, do it in a more observer status than in any way possible of being participants.  That is the introduction and the claims and the concepts that really demark us, and that has to do with Jesus and Jesus’ role in the world.  They’re very different.  There are other issues, but that is probably the big, big one.

So, in our worship model, our prayer service has a set form to it.  One of the pieces we spoke about Friday evening and we’ll continue to talk about today has to do with the concept of liturgical and non-liturgical.  In Jewish tradition, regardless of whether you go into an Orthodox synagogue or a Conservative synagogue or a Reform synagogue, when you are greeted (and hopefully you are greeted when you come in), you receive a book.  And that book, known as a “prayer book,” is also known in Hebrew by the word siddur, which comes from the word which you also know from the Passover period seder.  The verb, the concept word, reflects an order.  And there is an order that has evolved in Jewish prayer that moves itself through it, which means that any individual going to any synagogue anyplace in the world is going to be greeted with a familiar path and rhythm of the prayer model.  That is not the case within the Presbyterian community.  We have a book that has a certain kind of format to it.  And that book reflects not only our relationships to God, but the role of human beings in that.
 
Some years ago a friend of mine, an Episcopal priest, came to services to my place in New York, and afterwards he was rather frustrated, I think.  He said, “How would you know what God wants you to do?  Don’t you think it’s hubris that you write within your prayer book about human beings having a role and responsibility in doing what we refer to as tikkun olam, in repairing the world.”  And I said, “Absolutely not.”  The concept of human beings in Jewish life as reflected in our prayers says to us that we are partners with God in the ongoing perfection of the world.  Our prayers are not merely God-centered, without a reflection and an understanding that we must act within the world.  Belief and action are never uncoupled in Jewish life.  They are always reflective and continuous as motivations.  And our prayers reflect that.  The dilemma is, you just don’t pray and find yourself doing nothing.  Nor should you just do a whole lot of what people might refer to as “good acts” and not care about the issue of prayer.  It’s in striking some kind of a balance that one becomes whole and one becomes responsible in the covenant that we are to have with God and other human beings.  So the books, my friend, are different.

JW: We are a non-liturgical tradition, although anybody who receives this massive bulletin every Sunday morning might argue otherwise.  But it is a different kind of liturgy in which we undertake, a liturgy where form follows function. Prayers happen, but in some Presbyterian congregations prayers will be written out word-for-word, and in others they would be prayed in an extemporaneous way.  We do think order is important.  As you know, Presbyterians have tattooed on them somewhere “Do everything decently and in order,” but that commitment to order is because we think, and our forebears thought, that chaos was a bad thing.  So whether we are liturgical or non-liturgical, I do think we approach worship with a sense of order.  (I hope we do.)  And it is ordered around the gathering. That is what we do as we come together, and as we confess to God our sins and hear that those sins are forgiven.  And then as we encounter the word, the word both read and then explicated: preached, proclaimed, interpreted. And then again to the notion of prayer in action, responding to that word, first in this place, with a responsive prayer and the giving of gifts, and then as we depart from these doors out into the world to try to enact what we have said we would enact in this place.  There is order.  It doesn’t have a particular liturgical tradition to it, as do other traditions within the Christian community, but it is about order, it is about responding to the word.  

And I was going to throw in one more thing, because I don’t have many mnemonic devices in my life, but around the issue of prayer, I learned one a long time ago. The fact that it reflects a book of the Bible makes it even better:  A C T S.  It’s the kind of prayers we engage in every Sunday morning, whether we know it or not.  A Adoration, that is, praising God for who God is and for what God has done.  And then a Confession, every Sunday morning, on our own behalf, and on behalf of the world in which we live, a fallen humanity.  And then Thanksgiving, thanking God again for all that God has done and returning a portion of what God has given us.  And then Supplication, again, prayers for others, prayers on behalf of the world, where there might be fighting in the world, or warfare, or oppression, or poverty, and also prayers very locally for the people whom we love, who might be suffering in body, mind, or spirit.  And that, again, suggests its own kind of rhythm in our life.  Prayers for us never happen in a corner by themselves, but happen within the context of community, even if we are praying in a corner by ourselves.  That notion of the rhythm of things, as it leads to prayer, and then as prayer leads to action in the world, is what we try to do. If one of members is in the hospital, we pray for them in places throughout the congregation, but also then exercise a ministry of presence by visiting them. So there is this ongoing sense of rhythm, of call and response, of gathering and dispersal, of being by ourselves and then enacting those things in community.
 
Speak a moment about prayer, and I think then we can continue on.

LK: I think one of the challenges for all of us, whether we have a set prayer book or we have a kind of an eclectic re-creation, is the dilemma of normalcy or knowledge.  What I mean by that is how does the concept of awe enter into this?  How does the potential for spontaneity and reality come to be part of it?  The rabbi said, “Don’t make your prayer fixed.”  It’s an interesting concept.  I think they were talking about intention, because very clearly Jewish prayer as it evolves through the Biblical experience, in many cases, was freeform and spontaneous.  The words of the Psalms, Hannah’s prayer, other experiences in the Bible were just open and without form.  And now we have this structure, this kind of set piece.  And what they spoke of, and what they instruct us, and which is the hard part, really, is not saying the words just to say the words, it has to do with a concept known as kavanah.  In Judaism and in Hebrew, the word kavanah means direction.  And what it teaches us is that prayer without direction is useless, it doesn’t work.  Say the words, it doesn’t mean anything.  You have to, in some way, integrate your heart, your soul, your mind, and your lips in a way that brings them all together in a direction to what it is that you are doing.  So that if you are just mumbling words, it’s like mumbling words.  But if in fact you bring yourself to the prayer, even if it is a prayer that you say every day, it changes and it becomes something different.  

I think for us also our communities are challenged by a concept of truth.  Is our prayer true?  And if my prayer is true, does it mean that yours isn’t?  Or if yours is true, does it mean that mine isn’t?   That is one of our challenges.  Can there be multiple truths?  Does one truth have to necessarily evaporate the other, or in some way overload it?

One of the pieces that we studied this past week was a reaction to some of the interfaith services which took place --- prayer services --- after September 11th. There are some religious communities in America who are now feeling terribly uncomfortable with that, because they somehow think that their presence or their participation has now leveled everybody to be equal. Yet they claim some kind of exclusivity of truth of experience, and they want no part of it.  September 11th has changed, hopefully, all of us for the better, but it has also provided an opportunity for us to clarify who each of our communities is and how we relate to the other.

JW:  Allow that to be the last word this day. Again, expressing on all of our behalf our gratitude for this relationship, for Rabbi Kotok’s presence with us, and for his leadership in the community, might we conclude with a word of prayer.

Blessed are you, O God, for calling us into being, and for calling us to this place.  May our worship have integrity, may our prayer be true, and may our witness to peace and justice and reconciliation find firm root and blossom like the flowers in the field.  

Amen.