Last Sunday, we gathered at Holy Trinity for some hands-on discipleship. Our Sunday morning blended liturgy in the church with some tangible ministry in the neighborhood. Young, old, and in-between worked together to make pretzels which the Lebens-Englund clan delivered to our neighbors’ front doors.

 

Why pretzels?–I asked this question before our liturgy began. Together we explored the meaning behind the Lenten pretzel tradition. Pretzels are a Lent-safe food. Made of flour, salt, yeast, and water, they don’t contain any of the fats and other “decadent” ingredients traditionally avoided during Lent. Another symbol is found in the pretzel’s shape, the crossed “arms” representing a posture of prayer. The word pretzel derives from the Latin bracellae–meaning “little arms”–which morphed in Germany to the word brezel. So pretzels capture two traditional aspects of our Lenten journey–prayer and self-denial.

 

The prayer part is a no-brainer. Most of us would admit we need to be doing more of it, more consistently. But the focus on prayer in Lent has implications beyond our personal spiritual practice. Lent also calls us deeper into community and invites us to consistency in a more demanding act–corporate prayer. Let me expand this notion by being clear that corporate prayer is not limited to the little space reserved in our liturgy for the Prayers of the People. Our entire liturgy is a prayer. Our songs are prayer, as is our our speaking or singing of the psalm. And certainly Holy Trinity’s confessional ritual–the dropping of “sin stones” into water–is a prayer that recruits our whole body into conversation with God. Praise, confession, lament, intercession–these are the threads that weave our liturgy into one comprehensive and shared act of prayer.

 

One function of the liturgy, then, is to teach us how to pray. Every liturgist–myself included–hopes that the liturgy will get into the community’s spiritual DNA and that it will sneak a ride home with those present, finding expression in the religion of our ordinary days. But there is a more important function of the liturgy–the binding of community. The bonds that make community are created, strengthened, and maintained by our praising, lamenting, confessing, and intercessing together. Participation in corporate prayer (a.k.a. Sunday worship) becomes an act not performed for one’s own benefit, but for those individuals who pray beside us and for the community as a whole–a community that has stretched itself to encompass our Dinner Table guests, the volunteers from all over who work beside us, the hungry who glean from the garden, even those for whom our courtyard is a lovely green short-cut. The fact that our community at Holy Trinity has especially blurry edges makes our participation in corporate prayer that much more a radical, even subversive, act.

 

And that brings us to our other Lenten observance: self-denial. Frankly, it’s a word and a concept that itches me like a hair shirt. It seems medieval, old-fashioned. It completely subverts everything that I–as a Gen X American woman–have been taught to seek. I’ve made the word a little less prickly by understanding self-denial as the act of getting myself out of the way. Still, the fact that the minor inconveniences associated with the blessing of our kitchen renovation routinely throw me into a tizzy reveals just how corrupted my notions of self and entitlement really are. I’ve totally bought into this “have it now and hurry up” culture of ours–without seriously considering how having “what I want when I want it” might affect others in my life or around the globe. I understand self-denial on an intellectual level, but in practice it’s like a game of Whack-A-Mole: I just manage to give self a good slap with the mallet of God’s grace and oops! there she is again–desiring, expecting, idolatrizing.

 

This is why it matters that we come together to worship and to serve. Because by forcing our prayer life and our service out of the individual and into the communal we are invited to engage in small acts of self-denial. We are asked to set aside our personal preferences in order to act as one–or, I could say, as One. In the process, we are shaped and molded by God into more of what He dreams for us.

 

All this said, it’s worth remembering that church ultimately isn’t about us. It’s about God, of course. In being about God, church is about those who have not imagined themselves as part of the community. One of our semi-regulars lives at Mallon Place–an assisted-living community for the mentally ill located just a couple of blocks from Holy Trinity. During our pretzel-making, he came up to me and with deep humility and sincerity said, “Kris, thank you for letting me participate.” At that moment, in the midst of the joyful noise we were making, the significance of his comment floated past me. Later, as I reflected on the day, it resurfaced–another slap of the mallet that took my breath away. Hidden beneath his simple thanks were intimations of being left out, rejected, shunned. But on that Sunday, God worked through us to make a place for him. And that is what a miracle looks like.

 

Take up your mallet @ www.trinityspokane.org

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