Making sure that worship space is seen as sacred space

LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Mamie Broadhurst is now the pastor at University Presbyterian Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. When she served Covenant Community Church in Louisville, the church participated in a weekly ritual it called Sacred Space, which Broadhurst demonstrated Tuesday during opening worship at the Sprunt Lectures online and at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Watch the worship service here.

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Each week at Covenant Community Church, a different adult would lead the children in worship. “They all did it their own way, but the beginning ritual was always the same,” Broadhurst said. The leader and the children would sit around a brightly colored cloth and sing a song. Than the adult would take a candle and ask the children, “Why do we light the candle?” “To remember God,” the children replied. Then it was time to pose the central question: “Is God here only when the candle is lit?” “No!” the children answered, and the leader would then say, “God is here all the time, and you can always talk to God.”

Broadhurst opened Tuesday worship the same way. “I invite you to remember that over the course of the next two days, because sometimes we forget,” she said. “You may find over the course of the lectures you want to stop and have a chat with God.”

Broadhurst invited those in worship to look back two weeks, “to the time of Jesus’ death and the precariousness that ushered in. … Today we find ourselves at Good Friday at the foot of the cross, straining to make sense of how things are,” which “is not too much of a stretch these days.”

Worship included a time to consider what it means to embrace hopelessness. “Among us are some who are feeling less shocked than others, and some who would argue we are not so different from who we have always been,” Broadhurst said. “Most or all of us may be shaking our heads these days, and some of us are more used to doing that than others. Some are gobsmacked at what’s happening. Some are exercising new muscles of lament.”

This year’s Sprunt lecturer, the Rev. Dr. Miguel A. De La Torre, “is going to push us, I feel confident, to consider hopelessness and what to do in the fact of that, or with that,” Broadhurst said. “It’ll be important work, and it won’t be easy work. I invite us to come to it in a posture of worship, looking to God to guide us each step of the way.”

“There are functions of hope that are not worthy of worship,” Broadhurst said. “Some uses of hope need to die, which is why we come to worship [today] casting our eyes backward to Good Friday, to the death of hope that Jesus would rule as an earthly king, to death of hope that things would basically stay the same, just get rearranged.” Broadhurst removed the letters “HOPE” from the pulpit as she named the functions of hope that need to go. “These are brittle wooden hopes that do not serve the kingdom,” she said.

Master of Divinity student Liz Corsig joined musician David LaMotte leading those gathered in silent reflection followed by a time of sharing with a neighbor. They considered questions including: Have I invited people into a posture of hope in order to make myself feel better? When have I used hope as a means of quelling righteous anger? How have I been complicit in the suffering of people who have been taught to deny feelings of hopelessness because they are unfaithful? In what ways have I benefitted from a hope that asks harmed people to wait for a better future in the sweet by and by?

Selected verses on the death of Jesus were read from Mark 15:33-47, followed by Broadhurst noting a shift in focus to Holy Saturday, “an in-between time made holy on our calendar. It is the day our lectures and gatherings will take place. Our worship is not over.”

Presbyterian News Service will present additional reporting on the 115^th Sprunt Lectures.