Together We Turn to the Glory of God
Awet Andemicael ’10 M.A.R., ’22 Ph.D. is Associate Dean of Marquand Chapel and Lecturer in Theology at YDS. As a wide-ranging theologian her focus includes music as well as the relation of early Christian thought to contemporary constructive theology. Her current book project is a monograph on the political thought of Irenaeus of Lyon, based on her doctoral research. Other publications include a co-edited volume of Studia Patristica on Irenaeus as well as articles in Anglican Theological Review, Pneuma, Worship, and The Christian Century. Her research study, Positive Energy: A Review of the Role of Artistic Activities in Refugee Camps, was published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2011. With degrees in music from Harvard University (A.B.) and University of California-Irvine (M.F.A.), and an M.A. in theology from the University of Notre Dame, she is also a recorded concert and operatic soprano who has sung at festivals and other venues across the US, Europe, and Japan.
Reflections: How has Irenaeus, born in Asia Minor in the 2nd century, helped you reflect on the possibilities of worship nearly 2,000 years later? What is his idea of the glory of God?
Awet Andemicael: Irenaeus was one of the earliest theologians after the New Testament to express a rich theology of divine glory. And for most people in his time, and in ours, the most obvious and consistent context in which we experience God’s glory is in worship.
It’s very easy to creep into that commodification and craft selectively the God we want to believe in. The other possibility is to have an encounter with the living God whom you can’t control and whom you don’t get to shape—but whom you actually get to know and come to love.
This is something I’ve thought about a lot—how do we create an experience of worship as an encounter not just with some sort of general divine being, but with God in the fullness and radiance of God’s presence? Sometimes this happens, and when it does it’s an extraordinary thing. You might be in Marquand Chapel or somewhere else at worship, and something is sung or something is said, and you’re so touched by the beauty of it that you have the feeling of God’s radiating presence.
Or we might sense the Holy Spirit at worship when people are praying in a particularly powerful way. Or when all of us are really of one heart in worship and we feel connected to each other, as if God’s glory is emanating from among us—a sense of life-giving energy, which is the fullness of God communicating God’s self to us. In the Christian context, we say this is specifically made possible by Christ, who becomes the bridge between God and creation.
Reflections: Is a communal experience of divine glory possible in a world where individuals harbor their own notions or expectations of the divine?
Andemicael: At Marquand we do many different kinds of services from day to day, and it would be very easy for worship to become a platform for us to express strictly what’s on our minds, our worries about what’s going on in the world, our worries about what’s going on in our own lives.
Certainly we bring who we are—our daily realities—into worship. But the goal of worship is always to turn, in community, toward God and somehow feel grounded in God’s presence. When that happens, it contextualizes everything else. It allows us to enter into that space—not leaving behind our daily world, but bringing it into a different framework. The concerns we bring become transformed by this encounter with God in glory. And in that moment we are reminded of God’s faithfulness across time. We’re reminded that no matter how bad things get, or no matter how wonderful they are, there have been people of other times and places who have turned to God in equally joyful and equally terrible times, and have found God to be steadfast.
We’re always seeking a balance when we plan a service. Worship needs to speak in a fresh way to every generation, to every person. At the same time, the worship experience benefits from a kind of continuity: the body of Christ as the community of all believers of all time in all places.
Reflections: Does this experience depend on a particular sort of worship template or liturgy or order of service?
Andemicael: No, definitely not. Going back to Irenaeus again, I think his idea of a “rule of faith” (regula fidei) or “rule of truth” (regula veritatis) is so helpful. This regula consists of three key ideas to ground Christian interpretation and experience:
1. the unity of God (as Creator and Father of Christ),
2. the unity of Christ (as human and divine), and
3. the unity of God’s action in creation (especially through the Holy Spirit: God is intimately at work in the lives of human beings, in the one human race, through the different ages or “economies” of creaturely history).
As long as Christians agree on these key matters, there is room to celebrate a wide range of interpretations, liturgical expressions, and cultural particularities.
This might look restrictive, but to me it’s incredibly liberating. He proved it’s possible to have a kind of dynamic and organic unity without agreeing on everything. You can have the beautiful diversity of interpretation, of experience, of perspective, and still be part of the same body.
Historically, Irenaeus functioned in a sort of diplomatic role to hold together different branches of the church that were arguing, for instance, about celebrating Easter on different days (the Quartodeciman controversy). He was one of those who said, look, as long as you all agree on the essentials of the faith, it’s fine if you have differences in the way you worship. He was actually helpful in creating a rapprochement that might otherwise have led to a split in the church before the third century began.
As for an approach to worship, I would say the foundation for preparing worship has to be prayer and a praying community—prayer as a form of listening to God, trying to sit with that individually and as a group, listening with a kind of humility. If we are in love with our own ideas and our own agendas and are not genuinely responsive to the worship space, our community life, then it becomes about us and is not genuinely about the glory of God.
Reflections: The truism now is that people have far more choices (spiritual and material) than simply to land at church on a Sunday morning. Can congregational worship still claim to provide a unique experience unavailable elsewhere?
Andemicael: One thing we discovered in the pandemic is how technology supercharged our ability to have a virtual sense of community—and how we could fill our lives with more things if we physically don’t have to be present. That opened up rewarding possibilities. It was so valuable in many ways. But the challenge is that it further pushes us into a kind of commodification of community, where we start thinking about human relationships and church as just another product alongside others to choose among as individual consumers.
I appreciate how this sort of church experience allows huge numbers of people to worship together across vast distances, which is lovely. But what might really be happening, theologically and spiritually, is each of us connecting to God just one on one, in an individualized way. Realistically, it is all too easy to inhabit a physical or virtual worship experience as a group of people having parallel experiences of God, without a sense of facing God together.
But there’s another model of church, where we are called by the Holy Spirit and drawn together with one another, worshiping God together. Together, we become part of a net, so that we are both linked to each other and linked to God. Now, in a worship setting, we can do things to encourage that to happen, or not. For example, we can create a space for this in the way we choose hymns. Lyrics that are about me and Jesus can be balanced by lyrics that feature collective pronouns … “we worship you, we give you thanks …” Something as simple as that can signal the idea that worship is not just each of us in parallel, but all of us together. This is what the church is: the body of Christ joined in Christ. I think it is a lot more difficult to foster that experience without some in-person component.
Reflections: But isn’t it human nature (at least in America!) to think we can worship God, have a relationship with God, on our own, without the presence of others or accountability to others?
Andemicael: To be fair, the individualistic model certainly has the advantage of giving you a lot of freedom to make a spiritual decision. But this is tricky. God gets commodified very quickly, and I think we’re all vulnerable to that possibility. The question is whether I am actually submitting to Christ and actually worshiping God, as opposed to some idea that I might have of God, unconsciously trying to custom-build a God who fits into what I want or need. It’s very easy to creep into that commodification and craft selectively the God we want to believe in.
The other possibility is to have an encounter with the living God whom you can’t control and whom you don’t get to shape—but whom you actually get to know and come to love. If you are going to worship the living God and not someone you just create out of convenience, then it involves being accountable. You still have your agency and your freedom, but you don’t get to call all the shots.
With this model, when worshiping at church, you will end up spending time with people you may not be thrilled about. You will end up spending time with people who don’t necessarily raise your social profile. You will be a sibling to someone who is scruffy, or to someone who is elite, either of which might feel really off-putting! But in this way you are being accountable to God and accountable to one another, learning to love one another. So you give up one kind of freedom in order to receive a different kind of freedom. It’s a giving up of control. It’s not a giving up of agency—absolutely not. It’s leaning into our agency, but allowing ourselves to admit our own finitude and the limits of our control and the danger of trying to manipulate others and manipulate circumstances to fit some sort of personal optimization.
This new freedom sets us free in order to be able to live in community and worship God and access a deeper life. No matter how much the individualistic commercialized lifestyle promises, it cannot deliver. It can deliver short-term gain. But in the long run, it cannot deliver meaning or happiness. It can’t deliver any of the things that we think it will.
Author photo credit | Chris Buck