Many names, gathered into one.

I have a confession to make: I am a church junkie.

I was raised, as you all know, going to church every week, unless I was throwing up.  I was born Baptist, raised Methodist, worked for Presbyterians for three summers, and have been attending an Episcopal church going on six years, and I know that because I started attending that church in Year C of the lectionary.  I took a bit of time off in that six years, during one of my years of college, where I experimented with not going to church every week.  I also, later, experimented with “attending a church but not getting involved”.  Both of these experiments were, ultimately, failures, because I truly love going to church, to the point where, when we planned a family trip to start the Sunday after Christmas this year, I insisted on going to church in the morning.  My parents looked at me like I was crazy, so I took the car and went, not just to church, but to the EARLY SERVICE, because I am weird.

Recently, I have decided that waking up at 6am (which becomes 6:30 and, today, 6:45) to get to church before 8am for choir rehearsal and singing (and now often reading scripture and being the crucifer) at the 9am service, followed by the Adult Education Sunday School isn’t enough church for me.  Oh, no.  No, I have now added another service, an 11:15am service at another church, that goes until 12:30 or 1.  And since I’ve added on this other church, my Sunday mornings have become quite the spectrum of church-going.

The Episcopal church I’ve been attending for a while is Grace Church, on 10th and Broadway, known to NYU students as “that really pretty church across the street from that freshman dorm.”  Grace is a beautiful Gothic revival church, designed by James Renwick, who designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, when he was 23 (I am 23 and OH NO WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE?!).  That’s, honestly, why I first stepped through the door, my second Sunday living in NYC.  I was church-hopping, trying to figure out a church I could call home in NYC.  The week before I’d attended one of the few Methodist churches in my walkable range... and while it was comforting by being so familiar, it was a bit too familiar.  While they got me to coffee hour the first time I ever visited (a feat), I knew all the hymns, had sung soprano, alto, AND done liturgical dance to the anthem, and wasn’t challenged by the theology.

So I found myself at Grace, and while I continued checking out area churches, I had a good indication after that first service that this was the one.  Besides the sheer beauty of that building, Grace has a very strong music department (clearly important to me) and solid, confrontational theology.  While I doubt the Rector would himself use the word “confrontational” to describe what is preached at Grace, I clearly remember the first sermon I heard there.  It was on a section of Luke (Year C, I told you), that has since become one of my favorite Bible verses, Luke 14:26: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate mother, father, wife, child, yea, even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”  It is a hard text that most people won’t touch with a ten foot pole.  They will preach on any other text they possibly can that week.  And at Grace, they tackled it in all its complexity and difficulty, and it is that kind of delving into scripture, liturgy, and theology that I have found at Grace--they do not push anything aside because it’s uncomfortable, or dumb it down, they face it head on.  Their Sunday Forum (the adult education Sunday school) is also an EXCELLENT spot for this, for us church nerd types, often having guest speakers from local universities on topics such as the evolution of the Book of Common Prayer (actually fascinating), Ignatian spirituality, or issues of the church in society.

Grace is also a great church for an introvert.  This is not to be taken lightly--I’ve been to churches that are so outgoing that I’ve become very uncomfortable.  Grace allowed me to ease in, and slowly but surely, I became very involved.  (I also have to note that Grace is a big church in NYC, and I was a frequent but uninvolved member, and the Rector remembered my name after I was gone for 9 months in Montreat and Ghana.  I was totally impressed.)  It’s a church where I can indulge the more thoughtful side of me, that stays a bit restrained, and loves order, a classic liturgy, ritual and... Bach.  It is one of the more traditional churches, but in a very rich way.

Also WE ARE GETTING A NEW PIPE ORGAN.  NOT EVEN CAPSLOCK CAN EXPRESS HOW EXCITING THIS IS.

Recently, I have started to attend another church, a church that is, frankly, pretty far out of my comfort zone in some ways.  I am now attending Sunday morning worship at Middle Collegiate Church.  Middle is one of the Collegiate churches of NYC, that were the Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in the good old days before the American revolution.  They are now four churches, all technically RCA (Reformed Church in America).  These Collegiate churches are essentially the REALLY LIBERAL sidearm of the much more conservative RCA.  And Middle, which is in the heart of the East Village, is one of the most diverse-- no, wait, THE most diverse church I have ever seen.  many races, ALL kinds of people... it seems like the one of the least represented groups is straight white men.  The extremely tattooed folks you see on St. Marks?  If they go to church, they go to Middle.  Middle is passionately involved in social justice efforts, they are radically inclusive, they are particularly artistic.  On any given day there might be a church choir, a gospel choir, a sermon that’s a story, a sermon told through drama, non-traditional prayer, etc. The building is basically in an Arts and Crafts style (windows by Tiffany), which is one of my favorite artistic movements.  And slowly, different parts of my life have led me to Middle.  A couple years ago, a group of my friends were hired to do theater with the children there, which got me through those doors for the first time.  Then this past summer, I found out that the Senior Minister there, Jacqui Lewis, was going to be speaking at the 2013 Montreat Signature Conference, Imagine, and when I told Pete, the President of Montreat, that I knew that church, he insisted that I go hear Jacqui preach.  Then I found out this fall that they were doing the Missa Gaia by Paul Winter, and since I love that work, I came to worship for the first time.  Due to my rehearsal schedule, I couldn’t go back for a while, but I started attending again a few weeks ago.  Then I visited Princeton Theological Seminary and immediately connected with someone, later to find out that he also attends Middle.  Today I found out that one of my teachers from when I studied abroad in Ghana attends Middle when he’s in NYC.

In many ways Middle is ideal, for that social justice bent and inclusiveness, but in many ways it also makes me uncomfortable... particularly in worship style.  For those of you who know my church background (particularly those who know my mother) know that I actually really like a certain amount of tradition in my service.  I don’t like boring, but I love richly traditional, and there are some “rules” that are bred into me, and some things that because of parts of my past, make me a little queasy.  I don’t do well in Pentecostal churches, or churches highly focused on emotions, because I have been emotionally manipulated by worship services before and let me tell you, that feels awful when you crash from it.  My denominational background is all in traditions that don’t really talk, that might give an appreciative “hmm” after something particularly moving, but otherwise, we are composed and orderly.  Middle is not.  Middle is loud and sometimes people stand up and sometimes people hold their hands in the air and sometimes people dance and often... people... clap.  Not just clapping along with songs (which thank GOD, this is my first time not being in a congregation of rhythmless white people, it’s awesome), but... when things are done, people... applaud.  (Mom I’m so sorry I’ve been applauding in church please don’t disown me please I promise I’ll always say “een” not “in”)  Furthermore, one of the longest parts of the service is the Passing of the Peace, where people get completely out of their pews, cross the aisles, sometimes even travel around the entire church saying hello to people.  It’s an amount of extroversion that makes it difficult to hide, which is good, but also scary for some of us, and I don’t think I could do Middle without the counterbalance of Grace.  Grace fills me with spirituality for myself, Middle fills me with spirituality for the world.

So this morning, I went to choir at Grace, where we joked about not being able to say “alleluia” even though Sundays aren’t a part of Lent, and lovingly made fun of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”, then we sang in the service--the first Sunday morning service completely done on the partially-finished new pipe organ.  I went to the Sunday Forum, where we had a lovely session about Mary Daly the radical lesbian feminist theologian, where the person leading the Forum passed around the course offerings booklet for Union Theological Seminary (which I have in my apartment, since I’ve applied there).  Then I headed over to Middle, where the sermon was a collaboration between Jacqui and a Rabbi friend of hers, talking about Exodus and liberation and Black History Month and how none of us are free until everyone is free.

Are any of these styles of worship better than the other?  No.  Not at all.  I am so glad God is big enough for all of them to exist.  It’s like last week, in the Sunday Forum conversation about the Book of Common Prayer, where I was torn about which was better: having one liturgy that you can delve deeply into over years, or having different liturgies enriching the service with new ideas every week?  The conclusion I came to was that I was glad that both of them exist in various churches.

Here is something that I started writing during one of the anthems at Middle’s service, based on this, based on the Sunday Forum and Mary Daly trying to find alternate images of God, and on ideas of God as “unchanging” that I encountered in a systematic theology class at Princeton:

I praise an ever-shifting God,
who slips through the fingers of any hand that tries to grasp it and pin it down.
My God is found in silver croses and pipe organs,
in long robes and candles--
and my God is found in drums and clapping and dancing and loud “Amen!”s.
My God forgives debts, trespasses and sins,
whether you believe in One God or God the Father Almighty.
My God sings through raised soft palates
and speaks in tongues.
My God penetrates the words of the great theologians,
and lifts up the voice of the testimony,
and sparks the questions of the doubting.

I worship the God of the mountains; majestic, eternal, unchanging.
I worship the God of the sea; unfathomable, unknowable, unpredictable.
I worship the God of the desert; harsh, purifying, searching.
I worship the God of the city; vibrant, busy, colorful.
I worship the God of the home; comforting, intimate, warm.
I worship a human God, who laughs and weeps as all humanity does.
I worship a separate God, who sees what I cannot.

And I sing to a God that left the church’s doors
to weave in and out of all the world
to appear in blue jeans
and on cardboard signs begging for money
a God that found its way into the synagogues, the mosques, the temples, the yoga classes,
who appears to the churchfolk through the voice of the atheist
who finds a strain of love in the world
and wraps itself around it, multiplying its light,
for my God is everything and anything that is based in love.

My God dances away from my reaching fingertips
but is somehow in my hand.
And I spend my life trying to glimpse it,
only to hear it laugh and say, “I am right here! Open your eyes!”

If your God is an idea you can easily grasp,
a one-gendered, unconfusing, comprehensible idea that seems to hold much power in that simplicity,
I would like to challenge our Gods to a duel.
For how could my big God lose against your tiny one?
For if we believe God is all-powerful,
how dare we restrict God to one image?

Is it not the gravest sin to limit this lively, playful, mysterious, abundant, loving thing we call God?