‘Sounding Board’ guest stresses the importance of embodied worship
The Rev. Dr. Ron Byars shares his love for liturgy during an hour-long discussion
LOUISVILLE — Current podcaster and former pastor and seminary professor the Rev. Dr. Ron Byars came to his Presbyterian faith in part because of a Catholic friend who enjoyed theological debates with young Byars from the comfort of the friend’s 1941 Plymouth.
Byars, a retired pastor and Professor Emeritus of Preaching and Worship at Union Presbyterian Seminary, was the most recent guest of hosts Sarah Abushakra and Jeremy Roberts on “Sounding Board,” a podcast of the Presbyterian Association of Musicians. Listen to their 58-minute conversation here.
Byars recalls his friend, who attended parochial school, driving up in his Plymouth “honking from a block away. He would tell me what he was learning in parochial school, that the Catholic church was the only true church. Well, I was suspicious of that.”
Byars was convinced his own Sunday school teachers “were people of some honor and some faith. I couldn’t imagine they were not part of the one true church, and so I began to figure out how I could respond to this.”
He began by reading the New Testament. “By the time I got to the end, I had moved from being someone just looking for ammunition to use against my friend,” he said. “There was a change that had happened, but I couldn’t give you a time or a date or a specific experience.”
He’d been baptized at age 9 in a “believer’s baptism: I pretended to believe, and they pretended to believe me,” Byars told the hosts. “When I [returned to church] it was after this discovery. Simply being in worship meant something to me. … I felt engaged, and I was paying attention to what the person preaching was actually saying.”
Byars had read the Catholic liturgy, which “seemed alien to me, and yet there was something appealing about it,” he said. “When I became a pastor, it became even more important for me to think, what is the nature of this kind of assembly that we’re having? It’s not a classroom. It’s not a place for entertainment, although there are overlaps in that. What’s it all about? That’s where my focus began to develop.”
In Byars’ podcast, “What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith,” he looks at worship language use that can be subjective, including music.
At the church he attends, worshipers often sing David Gambrell’s version of the Apostles’ Creed, he said. “When you sing it, people don’t have the same kind of response that they do when they say it aloud. Each [approach] has its own purpose,” Byars said. “Music is one of the ways language can be shaped in a way that makes people feel it with the heart as well as the head.”
“When we sing words of our faith, it has a way of working its way down into our hearts and becomes what we believe,” Abushakra said. “As church musicians, it’s an important job to choose the music that we choose for our congregations. We’re placing words onto people’s lips that eventually becomes what they believe.”
Musicians “often know more about liturgy than pastors do,” Byars said. “What kind of music might help us to gather? Sometimes it’s between the lines and not exactly in the text itself.”
One pastor Byars knows doesn’t appreciate the congregation’s tradition of saying the Apostles’ Creed together in worship every Sunday. “It’s deeply embedded. They can say it without thinking about it,” he pointed out. “When they’re in a nursing home and they don’t recognize anybody, they’ll be able to participate in it. They’ve made it their own, and that has value.”
Byars also spoke of the importance of embodied worship.
“I like it in our church when we go forward for communion and the bread is placed in our hands. That’s a physical thing. You’re making a statement of faith simply by getting up and moving,” he said, “and you’re re-enacting the whole journey of life, which is headed toward the new creation, the wedding banquet that’s being prepared for all of us.”
“That’s why I also believe so firmly, and I’ve spent so much time trying to convince people of weekly Eucharist,” he said. “Word and sacrament go together.”
He said he’s grateful for the option of worshiping via livestream, “but if you can find a way to be there [in person], it matters. It feels different, and I can’t tell you exactly why.” After Covid, when he and his wife returned to worshiping in person “and we saw people in the pews even though they were all masked, it was all I could do to hold myself together.”
“We don’t worship a God who’s somewhere else,” Roberts pointed out. “The worship of Jesus is God made flesh, among us and present.”
Over the last few decades, biblical scholars “have rediscovered eschatology, which is in store for the Creation when God makes a new creation,” Byars said. “Our hope is not just in going to heaven one by one. Our hope is in this gathering from north and south, east and west, at table in the kingdom of heaven.”
When worshipers head toward the communion table to receive the elements, “it exemplifies that banquet,” Byars said. When they pray the Prayer of Thanksgiving and sing together hymns like “Christ Has Died, Christ Is Risen, Christ Will Come Again,” they can, like Byars has, “rediscover the theological and biblical recovery of eschatological hope.”
“The hope is that we don’t know how things are going to turn out. They may be awful today. God’s not going to magically fix it,” Byars said. “But somehow or another, in the end God has the last word, and it will be a good word.”
Abushakra quoted Byars from his podcast: “It’s sometimes all one can do to get out of bed in the morning. My expectation is not that the one responsible for preaching will explain it all to us, diagnose the problems in the news and announce a prescription for what ails us this week, but that we might be enable through the voice of the one leading us in prayer to lay before God the suffering of refugees, the failures of governments, the victims of droughts and hurricanes, forest fires, floods, earthquakes.”
“When such intercessions are actually named, it doesn’t reduce my responsibility to be concerned, or even define concrete ways of expressing my concern,” Byars said. “But it does take the edge off the bitterness and hopelessness that can so easily extend into a sense of helplessness. In this simple way, praying together our intercessions, we are taking the first step of actualizing our vocation to be a priestly community.”
Abushakra noted her father is a Palestinian who grew up in Jerusalem. She told her father, “I could never in my life remember a time people have prayed for Palestinians until recently,” when she’s heard prayers “for families in Gaza experiencing horrible tragedy. It means something to me when I hear people praying for Palestinians” because “people who are family members are being seen and heard and loved by God.”
In worship, “there’s the sense that I’m in a larger world, not a smaller world, not a narrow world,” Byars said. “I feel I am in this great assembly far beyond anything in my own hands. I don’t know why that matters, but it matters some way, somehow, that I’m connected to that with these people seated with me, some whom I know and some I do not know.”
“Paul said we should be discerning the body of Christ. When we go forward for communion, I look at people’s faces and whatever distinguishes them. It’s that sense of connection,” Byars said. “It’s there, and it’s real.”
Previous editions of “Sounding Board” can be heard here and here.
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