Worship and Resistance: Definitions and Examples – by Laura Mariko Cheifetz

Worship is one of the spaces where we learn how to relate with God and each other.

Worship often reinforces what need not be reinforced (comfort, prosperity, white supremacy, misogyny, heterosexism), but worship that illuminates the gospel and our life together in faith differently is resistance. Worship can be an act of resistance in a world that worships individual over collective, independence over interdependence, scarcity over abundance, miserly loathing over generous delight, dominant tales of winners and losers over stories of all God’s people.

Worship liturgy that emerges from a context of minoritization is resistance. Preaching and liturgies that lift up people of color, events significant for people of color, women, and LGBTQ people in the context of Christian worship is not to exclude those from dominant society but to broaden the story of God’s people to include those of whose lives are typically left outside the doors.

I have planned worship services when I worked with Asian American young adults, full of liturgies and prayers lifting up the specificity of Asian American culture and history, services specifically around Japanese American internment, put together services lifting up the gifts of women, participated in services affirming environmental stewardship, or lifting up the contributions of LGBTQ Christians, and worshiped with African American/black, Hispanic/Latinx, and Native American congregations and events. If we are talking about immigration, the prayers lift up the ways in which the Bible speaks of immigrants. If we are talking about women, the liturgy lifts up the women of the Bible and of our Christian tradition.

It is the specificity of this worship, naming the oppression and lifting up the gifts, that makes worship into a site of resistance.

We are beloved, created in the image of God. And so we worship like it.

Below are three examples of liturgy grounded in a context of a diverse and unjust world. The first is a two-part litany of awareness, the second an invitation to the table, and the third the beginning of a Great Thanksgiving.

 

• A two-part litany of awareness, by Mamie Broadhurst, for the DISGRACE conference in 2016 at Montreat Conference Center.

 

Part I

We remember Jesus’ crucifixion, and we lament that his was not the last

Right now:

* Tribal leaders on the Navajo reservation struggle to attract job opportunities

* A domestic violence victim is unable to locate services to help her leave in her own language

* A Chinese American scientist is falsely accused of espionage

* Another child is skyping his dad who is being detained indefinitely by immigration officials

* An elderly African American is told he has the wrong form of ID to register to vote

* A native Hawaiian struggles to pay for expensive diabetes medication

* A Puerto Rican realizes the only way she can make a living is if she leaves her island

* A white family can’t locate treatment options for their teen struggling with opioid addiction

Together we cry: How long, oh Lord?

 

Part II

God offers never-ending hope in the face of hopelessness, and we can see signs of resurrection.

 

Right now:

* Native American water protectors are blocking the construction of an oil pipeline

* Diverse Asian American communities come together to support inclusive policies toward Muslim communities, immigrants, and refugees.

* Pastors of all racial backgrounds organize to accompany protesters in Charlotte

* Black Lives Matters activists plan their next action

* A Latina writes a blog post about her community as a place of strength and life-giving identity

* A native Hawaiian is organizing his community to fight for federal recognition of his people

* A group of kids plans a spring break trip to visit sites of racial injustice so they can face their past and change our future.

* A predominantly white church is wrestling with how to dismantle long-standing racist structures.

God, with our help, continue to roll away the stones!

 

• Below is an invitation to the table by me, for a Martin Luther King, Jr. service at the Presbyterian Center in 2016.

 

Friends, this is the joyful feast of the people of God.

They have come from east and west, from north and south.

They came in great joy and with great suffering.

They were invaded, colonized, abducted, trafficked to generate wealth for others, their governments overthrown so that others might profit, their lands stolen from them and their children.

They are the ones who spread suffering throughout the world, colonizers, invaders, traffickers, and enslavers, overthrowing governments for their own small-minded desires of material gain.

They left their countries because they were desperate, or because they wanted their children to have more opportunities, or because they wanted to live in safety.

Too many never wanted to leave their countries, but were forced to do so.

They are people who trade in the lives of others

They are people who fight for the lives of others

They are people fighting for their own lives every day, and for the legacies their children will inherit.

Yet all of them, all of us, inhabitants of this world house, sit at table in the kin-dom of God,

Drawn together by one who was crucified, dead, and buried, and who rose again in defiance of the powers of death.

 

This is the Lord’s table, and the Savior invites those who trust him to share the feast he has prepared.

 

 

• The first part of a Great Thanksgiving prayer for communion, written and modified over the years by Jessica Vazquez Torres, me, and Jose Francisco Morales. This particular version was used at a wedding.

 

The Lord be with you!

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts!

We lift them up to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give our thanks and praise.

 

For you, O God, have created us in your image as your own people,

Questioned about where we have come from and who we are.

We claim that we come from you, we are your people,

Languages, customs, flavors, are your grand design and desire for us.

With our images and stories of you, we come, Creator of the universe.

 

Laura Mariko Cheifetz serves as Vice President of Church & Public Relations and editor of These Days at the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. She has served with the Forum for Theological Exploration and at McCormick Theological Seminary. She grew up a double pastors’ kid in the Pacific Northwest and holds an MBA from North Park University and an MDiv from McCormick Theological Seminary. Her claim to fame is having lived in the Pacific Northwest (both east and west of the mountains), California, the Midwest, New York City (plus a summer on Shelter Island), the Deep South, and the Mid-South where tea can be ordered “unsweet.” She enjoys her nieces and nephew, her dogs, books, snark, bourbon, and television.