In early March, my colleague Jorge Lockward invited me to preach at Church of the Village in New York City, as part of a series focused on worship. You’re welcome to watch the sermon, “Holy, Wholly Worship,” beginning at 26:00. The text of the sermon is below.

I vividly remember my first visit to a spiritual director. I was a young church musician in St. Louis struggling to discern my calling. I remember spending the bulk of that session sharing my journey as an unsure and angsty 20-something.

And I remember her stopping in a moment to ask, “Paul, what comes to mind when you hear the word holy?”

Though I was growing in confidence as a queer person of faith and my theological imagination was beginning to expand, my Pentecostal roots kicked in. I said that I imagined holiness had something to do with perfection, with getting it right and pleasing God, or this idea of living with a kind of elevated spiritual energy where you aren’t distracted or bothered by “the world” or “the flesh.” Like a saint or a hermit. Maybe you can relate?

And then she asked another question that shifted the earth on its axis for me, “How does your understanding of the word change if you spell it w-h-o-l-l-y?” It’s subtle play on words, yes, but the implications were profound and began a journey of discovery that engaged my whole being.

Let’s reflect briefly on these two words today as they relate to worship – holy, wholly – and to notice in this moment how we are present to God and each other.

Some of you may have heard of the late children’s choir conductor Helen Kemp. She was well known around Princeton and Westminster Choir College for her incredible skill with young singers, her memorable (if slightly cheesy) choir anthems, her perfectly coiffed hair, and a chant she would often use to warm up singers:

Body, mind, spirit, voice… it takes a whole person to sing and rejoice!

Will you echo that with me (in true Helen Kemp style we’d chant it like we were at a stadium!)

She was eager to remind us that singing invites our whole person –being fully present matters at any age.

Matthew 22 has a similar sort of feeling to me. “Heart, soul, mind… (in Mark 12 the word “strength” is added)

Heart, soul, mind, strength… it takes a whole person to love God and neighbor. It doesn’t rhyme but it works.

Jesus’ words here echo a passage from Deuteronomy 6 that speaks to the way the Israelites were called to be in relationship with God, the quality of relationship God was inviting them to. It wasn’t enough for them to know about God’s faithful love, but they were invited to remember and rehearse and internalize it, to make it real again and again through daily activity and rituals. They were encouraged to tell stories to their children and grandchildren, to walk and talk about it, to share it over meals, to even add reminders to their clothing and to the doors of their homes.

There’s something here that feels profound and totally ordinary and accessible. A relationship with God is not just for those privileged enough to reach for or achieve it, but it is lived into through practice in community. God can be experienced and known by us (taken into us), not just through our minds but through our bodies and our senses.

Isn’t that what we’re doing when we gather for worship each week?

We are practicing, sometimes in very ordinary ways, speaking to and listening for Divine. Worship joins breath, voice, and body in words and action, as we seek wisdom and guidance to help us live with integrity, mutuality, and care. Worship is a place of nourishment – not just our bodies in a meal we’ll share later but our imaginations nourished and sparked for new ways of being, for new ways of seeing and knowing God and knowing neighbors.

Worship is one of the most formative things we do in Christian community. It integrates us. As neuroscientists might say, it brings together the right and left hemispheres of the brain. We know (and you might know firsthand from being in a faith community for a time) that what we say and sing, how we speak and move, shapes our thinking. It shapes our feelings and ultimately it shapes our actions.

And so, listening, sharing, loving, and forgiving people are formed over time and through practice – through worship. Through encounters with the Divine and others. Worship can be a primary place of encounter as it welcomes and engages the whole person - heart, soul, mind, strength - in practices of listening, responding, and moving. Think of all the ways we have come to know God or have yet to know God in worship.

But I notice can be easy to forget the formative potential of worship and find ourselves focused instead on form, style, or aesthetic, even language – worship as a means to an end rather than an invitation to be and be transformed in the presence of the Holy. We might even push toward a kind of rigidity or perfectionism that limits or diminishes our capacity to taste and see the fullness and goodness of God. It’s a bit like the understanding of holiness or whole-i-ness I shared before.

I have sometimes found myself too focused on getting it right or on realizing a specific goal, rather than embracing surprises, detours, discomfort, and the slow evolving journey that is part of spiritual transformation. I’ve also noticed my tendency as a white-bodied person to privilege the texts, liturgical experiences, or music that fits into frameworks I understand or think I can manage effectively. But to welcome whole-i-ness does not necessarily mean welcoming certainty but instead listening, awareness, patience, and questions that might not have easy or even immediate answers.

Maybe you’ve had similar experiences as a worshipper or worship leader, as you have come in touch with those spaces in your own life where your expectations and body are in tension with each other.

I’m not here to question or critique how you worship at COTV. I’m joining a conversation you’re having over the next weeks. And I want to express gratitude for the lively engagement and playfulness and creativity I experienced in planning for this and other services in the past. I am so heartened by your willingness to engage new models and modes.

So instead of offering prescription or advice, I wonder if today I could offer both personal and communal encouragement for the days ahead, in especially hard work of regathering and renewal we face in the late stage of this pandemic?

And I have to say, we’re at a moment given the scale of the challenges, and the scale of the trauma we have been through personally and collectively, where it might be easy for us to default what we’ve known, to what is comfortable or safe. In the interests of getting it right or predictable outcomes, we might miss some spaces for growth, personally and collectively. So, I would invite you to listen in today as we imagine what will facilitate, or what will encourage and support generosity, vulnerability, and sharing as you continue to make hospitable, transformative, holistic spaces of worship.

Thomas Keating offers a powerful reminder in the text we read earlier – a mystic vision that may delight or confound you, and either is ok. I wonder what you felt or heard as you heard his words? I believe they reorient us at a deep level, especially in a culture focused on action or getting it right, that’s in the church and in our wider culture. Listen again:

“God is not just with us, not just beside us, not just under us, not just over us, but within us, at the deepest level…”

This resonates deeply with what we read and see in the Hebrew Bible – this conviction that all of life is worship - every waking moment is an opportunity to know God, from rising, dressing, eating, and studying to our relationships. Everything from the mundane and the miraculous is an opportunity to know God.

And implicit in this passage is a sense that our relationship with God is inherent. It won’t ever change. Grace can’t be earned. Belovedness cannot be achieved. But we can practice deepening into an awareness of our “in-God-ness.” Our senses, our whole being, can be a part of that – a piece of what it is to be reminded, “I am in you, and you are in me, and we are in God.” And worship is this time, this sacred space where we remind each other of that… and give witness to the ways God is present in our lives and in the world.

If God is in it all, what do we have to fear? If God is suffused through all things, what part of us is not fully and eagerly welcomed into the presence of Divine? What part of us would not be welcomed into worship.

So today my first encouragement is to deepen into an awareness of our union with God individually. As we find ourselves welcomed and called forth, we will be able to bring more of authentic and whole selves to each other - a shift away from getting it right to being whole, in process.

And in that discovery of our “in-God-ness,” I we can even hold or embrace the discomfort of learning new skills, of learning to be vulnerable and to share our needs, being able to both give and receive grace… trusting God is with and within us all.

Think about what it might look like for you to bring the wholeness or fullness of yourself – heart, soul, mind, and strength – into God’s presence, including the questions and doubts you imagined might not be welcome, knowing that you are and always will be in the presence of God?

Then, from that place of personal awareness and a growing sense of our “in-God-ness,” gathering in corporate worship is a remarkable opportunity for us to unfurl, to risk, to dream, and imagine what and how God is meeting God’s people. We can, out a place of “in-God-ness” welcome ourselves and others more deeply into places of liberation, of exploration, of discovery, and even learning that might look like failure. Because friends, if we are “in God,” we cannot fail.

Jorge and I were reflecting in conversations prior to this service, that if we know ourselves in God, seen, known, and fully welcome, it makes space for worship to welcome even more richness, even more embodiment, even more diversity of practice and language.

Could we and will worship be a space where we find new words? Use fewer words? Or maybe none at all?

How can worship be place where our bodies are welcomed to show up in new ways - rituals, dance, movement, and embodiment?

How can new sounds and songs be welcomed, listening deeply to the voices that have been silent or silenced?

As we develop our capacity to listen, knowing “in-God-ness” in community, can we hear and welcome the experiences of others, holding spaces of dissonance and challenge?

In our being together in God can we be present to the questions, doubts, and pains of others, as we taste and see and smell the healing balm and tender goodness of God in community?

I pray these are spaces you expand into in this late pandemic time, and that COTV becomes a liberative and joyous place of exploration, of worship that invites the kind freshness that renews faith, that nourishes faithful questions, and nourishes doubt. A faithful worship that does not ask for easy answers but holds the messiness and fulness of becoming – not perfection but wholeness.

And I want to encourage you, COTV, to expand your imaginations as you engage your whole person – heart, soul, mind, and strength – and continue to shape worship that welcomes the discomfort and challenges that come from new and unfolding visions of God.

And it’s not something that will come easily or quickly, but it will come with and through practice and reflection.

I conclude with these beautiful words of Fr. Richard Rohr, and they echo what so many of us who have been in 12-step communities have come to understand. “We don’t think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”

So, friends, live into the beauty and messiness of holy, wholly worship. Live into spaces of vulnerability, learning, dialogue, and trust, knowing that you and I and we are all in God, and nothing can and nothing will change that.

And for that, friends, we give God thanks. Amen.