This is my antepenultimate sermon with Peace Covenant Church, and in my last few sermons, I’m sharing lessons I’ve learned from being their pastor for almost 8 years.

I’ve told this story before; maybe you’ve already heard it.

A decade ago, I worked in a church whose worship was very formal (formal, that is, for our low-church Brethren tradition) and very planned. It was *good* worship, with regular rhythms and good preaching and meaningful rituals, and I learned a TON about planning and facilitating God’s people gathering for worship in that place. 

One Sunday, I was away, working at another job. I was helping to train summer ministry interns, and we were visiting a local congregation as part of the orientation week. During the service, there was a piece of special music planned – a guitar and vocalist accompanied by a beloved drummer who lives with some developmental disabilities. The drummer was poised and ready to begin, but the guitarist had lost the tune and the key. The entire congregation shifted in their pews. The drummer smiled – but was clearly annoyed at his co-musician. We all waited a few minutes as the guitarist picked through chords. I started to get anxious, even though I was not in charge of anything in the room, just a guest in the service. No one else around me was anxious, though. A woman in the pew in front of me pulled out her cell phone (WHAT!? in WORSHIP!?) and opened YouTube to find a version of the song that was to be played. She stood up, where she was, and said, “here it is,” hit play and held her phone aloft. The first few chords of the song filled the sanctuary, the guitarist nodded, the cell phone woman sat down, the service proceeded without another hiccup.

What I remember about those moments in worship was my own startled reaction: that I would be so anxious on behalf of other people, that what I had just experienced was very unlikely to happen in the formality of the congregation where I worked, that I loved this casual, relational, confident, inclusive tone in the sanctuary. I realized, in those few moments, that I was chafing under the formality of my current worship life.

I wrote those paragraphs a while ago, and when I read back through them for this morning’s sermon, I shook my head at how uptight I used to be. Here at Peace Covenant, we’ve done SO MUCH MORE informal things than sharing the opening chord from a cell phone, haven’t we? But that was Dana of a decade ago. I hadn’t met y’all, yet.

At the House for All Sinners and Saints, a Lutheran congregation in Colorado, worship is very traditional and liturgical but also, somehow, informal. The chairs are in a round, and people volunteer for worship leadership duties as they enter the sanctuary. The church declares that they are “anti-excellence and pro-participation.” When I heard their former pastor use this phrase to describe how their worship operates, I immediately took it to heart. YES! Anti-excellence and pro-participation is what I want to be a part of, what I want to facilitate, where I want to be.

Before I arrived here at Peace Covenant, you all had already started self-identifying as “informal but competent.” I think that was a Dave Minnich phrase, and it was and remains a pretty accurate description of this congregation’s personality. When I heard it – and then experienced it – I knew that we were going to get along.

This value isn’t just about being low-key and going with the flow, though. Our informality happens because we want everyone who joins us to feel comfortable participating, to know that they are welcome and can belong, here.

And somehow, people do regularly find us and join us on Sunday morning. When I introduce myself and greet new folks, I always tell them that we’re pretty informal and that they are welcome to join in the conversation during worship. And even though I have issued that invitation very sincerely, I’m still usually surprised when first-time visitors DO contribute!

A year or so ago, a first-time visitor came to worship. We were sharing in joys and concerns about the joys of Buckee’s, an amped up gas station and convenience store, because several of you had recently had your first Buckee’s experience. Trying to translate the excitement to the whole congregation, I tried to explain: Buckee’s is a gas station….but this first-time visitor, who had yet to speak other than to introduce herself, piped up: “AS a TEXAN, I want to make it clear that Buckee’s is MUCH more than a gas station; it’s an EXPERIENCE.”

And a few weeks ago, another first-time visitor joined us on Sunday morning because he had driven by another Church of the Brethren congregation and was curious about who we were. I was preaching about this summer’s events around my ordination, and when I asked for your reflections and responses, this man opened his mouth to speak, but could barely get anything out because he was so overcome with emotion. To this day I do not know what or why he was feeling such strong feelings – I could guess or assume, one way or the other – but I do know that our informality and hospitality here invited him to be open and vulnerable with those feelings.

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The prophet Amos is absolutely fed up with the Israelites’ inability to live faithful lives. They’re super focused on the details of liturgical worship and sacrifices, making burnt offerings and observing all the religious festivals, but they have trampled on the poor, gotten invested in unjust practices like bribes and cheating and generally assumed that if they went to church and observed the rituals of religion, they’d be absolved.

But God is super unhappy about that: 

I hate, I despise your festivals, 

and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. 

22 Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, 

I will not accept them; 

and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals 

I will not look upon. 

23 Take away from me the noise of your songs; 

I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

And this, the insistence that faithful worship trumps ethical living, is the context for Amos’ famous lines. I do not care about how you’re worshiping or sacrificing or singing to me, God says. No, the whole point of being faithful is to let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Amos isn’t the only prophet who makes this comparison. Isaiah says the same thing, in the very first chapter:

Your new moons and your appointed festivals
    my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me;
    I am weary of bearing them.
15 When you stretch out your hands,
    I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
    I will not listen;
    your hands are full of blood.
16 Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
    remove your evil deeds
    from before my eyes;
cease to do evil;
17     learn to do good;
seek justice;
    rescue the oppressed;
defend the orphan;
    plead for the widow.

Every congregation worships differently. That’s partly personality, partly theology, and partly tradition. But over the last few years, as Covid changed so much of our lives, these texts from the Hebrew prophets about the value of worship relative to the importance of living full, just lives have become important to me. As American congregations and church leaders smugly refused to adapt their worship practices in the face of a deadly pandemic, my gratitude for this congregation and its already-existing identity as being informal but competent deepened.

What is the point of worship? If worship endangers people, then it isn’t faithful. If communities spend all their time and energy on making sure worship is formal, perfect and well-produced but fail to consider how they are participating in injustice or doing evil, how their practices are excluding siblings and neighbors, then what good is that pitch-perfect worship?

Peace Covenant joyfully shifted our worship practices when Covid made gathering in the building dangerous. We figured things out, made Zoom work as well as we could, and discovered that actually, in some ways, the changes helped us become even more of who we knew ourselves to be. Worship got even more informal. Our music practices shifted. We found ways to include people from all over the world, and moving the sanctuary around so that the people on Zoom are part of the congregation meant that we now worship in the round – like the House for All Sinners and Saints. 

And, during that time when some others were spending *immense* time, energy and expense on perfecting one hour of weekly worship, do you know what this congregation did? We poured ourselves into interrogating our own white supremacy and then, on the heels of that transformation, entered into prayerful communal discernment about becoming fully inclusive of LTBTQ+ siblings and neighbors. We turned our energy away from the “show” and toward being people who live God’s own justice.

We are, in addition to being informal but competent, also anti-excellence and pro-participation. It is more important that whoever shows up gets to be a part of what we’re doing than it is that what we’re doing is done “well.” That is a deep, core value that Peace Covenant helped me name and live into, and the practice of it in this congregation has meant that folks who show up find a place where they are not only welcome to observe but fully welcome to contribute and participate, too. Thanks be to God.