Radical Liturgy of the Lord’s Passion (Monday)

​A ritual to symbolize the death we are all living
 
The room remains dark
All enter in silence
 
 
The Collect
(Everyone)
 
Nothing lives
Nothing binds
Nothing saves
 
 
The Liturgy of the Word
(Facilitator)
 
John 20:17
Jesus saith to her, touch me not; for I am not yet ascended.
 
For centuries religion has taught God and Jesus as perfect and without sin. And that Jesus, if touched by Mary, would become tarnished and spoiled. Modern biblical scholars interpret these same words as something more like, don’t cling to me. This differentiation is important.
Have you ever lost someone? And after they are gone, has their presence ever met you in their absence? And has this presence at times felt more real to you, than their physical presence ever had? Perhaps at the tomb, this is the presence in the nothing that lived. That what Mary experienced was a proximity, without a physical presence.
 
 
(Everyone)
One only touches the infinite
from a finite position.
 
 
(Facilitator)
John 16:7
But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the helper will not come to you.
 
According to this passage, in order for the Holy Spirit to come, Jesus had to physically leave.
This was hard for the disciples to accept. From that point on in history, churches went from a temple with a torn curtain to a steeple. Our drive to imagine big others beyond the veil, and to erect a phallus is much stronger than our ability to tarry with alienation. But the Holy Spirit creates a new social form. A networking not based on physical presence, but rather, alienation. A form of nothing, that binds.
 
 
 
(Everyone)
We ask, what does a church without a steeple look like?
 
 
 
(Facilitator)
 
Matthew 27: 45- 47
Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!”
On good Friday we learned that radical theology, it is not no God, but the death of God.
The casting of our voice into the nothingness, that is God. A guttural cry into the place where all our beliefs suffocate and die.
In that moment when Christ called out, did a big other he imagined come crashing down? To comprehend the nothing that saves, one must realize how an ideology can never save. That in reality we need salvation from what we have believed was our salvation. A church without a steeple seeks this salvation from salvation.
 
(Everyone)
Oh Nothingness, we repent. We surrender our lives to your insistence. There is no big other that is going to come and save us. Grant us salvation from salvation.
 
 
(Facilitator)
 
Many religions promise wholeness and completeness, while atheism offers determinism. Both are clever ideologies to help us disavow shame and alienation.
A more radical theology discovers a truth in the contradiction between theism and atheism. It does not wish to return to the womb. Nor does it disavow. It comes to understand that we are cursed or blessed epigenetically in the womb before we are birthed onto a bed of nails. This theology tarries with the fact that our wish for singularity is not all its cracked up to be.
Our modern world has seen the symptom of religion as a problem, and rightly so. But atheism torn down the structure only to realize the efficacy of our religious symptoms as a solution to our problem. You might ask, how else are we to survive? Perhaps the emancipatory move is to feel our shame, allow ourselves to split and in so doing, become more aware of how our symptoms hold us together. To enjoy these symptoms and not use them to bypass our shame and alienation. This, in death of God theology is grace.
 
(Everyone)
Our religious symptoms are not the problem. They are a solution to the problem. It’s not about overcoming them. It’s about enjoying the nothing that lives, the nothing that binds and the nothing that saves. When our rituals lose their meaning, we must let them go. New wine cannot ferment in old wine skins. From the nothing that insists, let us make new wine and ferment this wine in the skins of old until the church explodes. 
 
 
(Facilitator)
 
Go now: wait and work for the coming of nothing. In the religious places prepare a crooked path for the nothing that insists. Lead lives of holy godlessness, strive to be decentered, and speak freely of the big other’s inexistence. And may the nothing that insists gather you. May the absence of any physical resurrection bring you a presence in an absence; And may the Holy Spirit network a new life within and around you. Go in pieces to love and serve your fellow human beings. In the name of nothing, we pray.
Amen