Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy
Orthodox Worship in the Flow of Time
Essay on the Jewish Roots of Orthodox Worship
September 6, 2005
Note: This essay was mostly written in southern Wyoming waiting out a mountain blizzard in the spring of 2006. I just recently finished it up and got it ready for publication.
This spring I attended Great Vespers and Divine Liturgy at Sts Peter and Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church in Salt Lake City, Utah. Worshiping there brought me into touch with the unity of the people of God through time. This is something I’ve known about, but to experience that unity of history was quite remarkable. I do not know how long Sts Peter and Paul has been a parish in the Antiochian Archdiocese, but their temple is old; a plaque near the entrance that says it is an historic building in Salt Lake City. According to the plaque, it was originally a Jewish synagogue built in the late 19th century. This situation (an Orthodox parish using a former Jewish synagogue) is not unknown, but it was new to me.
What was striking to me at an experiential level was how comfortably and perfectly this former Jewish synagogue was transformed into an Orthodox temple. It appeared that no significant renovations had to be done. The altar area and icon screen fit naturally into the front of the worship space. The icon of Mary and Jesus, that normally is found midway between altar and ceiling, found a perfect home on the east wall (ie, the front of the church), as if the east wall was originally designed for the icon. The east wall curved smoothly into the ceiling, naturally drawing the eye from the icon screen to the icon of Mary and Jesus above it and then upward to the icon of Christ the Heavenly Ruler of All painted on the ceiling directly over the nave, and above the worshipers.
On an intellectual level there was no surprise in all of this. There is a natural continuity between Jewish and Christian worship. There is also a natural continuity between synagogues and churches. There are basically two styles of Orthodox church buildings. The more common one is cruciform architecture (also called a basilica). The other common architectural style does not have the space extending to the north and south that are the cross bars of the cross that form the floor plan of the basilica style. These buildings are typically long and narrow. They are designed to be reminiscent of Noah’s ark. This latter style is not only rooted in Jewish synagogue architecture, it is the synagogue that the earliest Christians would have been familiar with transformed into a Christian worship space, replete with Christian sensibilities that are obviously a continuation of Jewish sensibilities from which they were drawn.
Of course, that is precisely what happened in Salt Lake City. That remarkable sense of the building’s history flowed over me as I entered into the narthex and ascended the stairs toward the nave. I was not only entering a church to join others in worship, I was entering into the very flow of history that stretched back beyond Jesus and his grandparents, Anna and Joachim, to the Maccabees, and Jeremiah, and David, and even Moses and Abraham and Sarah. As the chanter intoned the opening words, “Blessed is the kingdom . . .” with people moving around lighting candles, and others already standing in the nave prepared to pray, there was a palpable sense that similar tones, candlelight, and smells, the same sorts of prayers, the same psalms, the same actions had been going on, not for decades (the way Americans count time) or centuries (the way the West counts time), but for millennia, even back beyond the birth of Christ. It was truly awe inspiring.
Properly speaking the church or the synagogue is not the building, it is God’s people gathered together. People move as circumstances change and as such, there are times when worship spaces (whether churches or synagogues—the buildings, not the people) are no longer needed. My understanding, based on a very brief conversation with a sub-deacon at Sts Peter and Paul, is that the Orthodox Jewish community became so small they no longer had enough men to form a synagogue. At that time the building was closed up and eventually sold.
There is a Protestant church building between South Sioux City and Omaha in the town of Herman, Neb, that has been converted into a house. Every time I drive by that building I think of the community of believers that used to gather there, probably beginning a hundred to one hundred fifty years ago. I imagine their struggles to make it in this unsettled land just west of the Missouri River and wonder about the role of their Christianity and their church fellowship in that process. Having served on the Presbyterian Committee on Ministry for many years, I’ve been involved in closing churches and I know first hand the pain involved in the process. I wonder at the sense of loss for the people in that area. Are they disturbed by the fact that their church building is now a house, or are they glad that the building is well maintained and useful? Are there any members who remain to even observe the life of the worship space now transformed into home?
There are still thriving churches up and down U.S. 75, so the people of Herman are still well served by a variety of different churches. I suspect the Herman congregation is the casualty of two realities: First is the slow emptying of the rural Midwest. As farming has become mechanized one family can now farm land that required many families only a couple of generations ago. Second, given the modern mobility, it is now perfectly reasonable to drive ten, or even thirty miles for groceries, school, entertainment, and church. The result is that congregations have shrunk and been merged into more viable congregations in larger population centers.
It has already been observed that the church is not the building nor the location, but the people of God. If that’s all the church is, then it would be simple for people to simply move on to another location and not worry about the past. But that’s not all the church is. People live in time; people are rooted in places; people hold on to things in order to remember other people and events. People are physical, and when they are removed from their physical contexts there is often a deep and painful loss because people express their lives in things, both large and small, both grandiose (a multi-million dollar house) and seemingly insignificant (a small painting given by a spouse twenty years ago). And so it is with the church. The church is the gathering of the people of God, but since they are people, inevitably the church expresses itself in space and time through physical manifestations that become markers of God’s presence and action in history. Like the piles of stones that the Patriarchs put up in order to connect them to the presence of God in time and space, as Jacob did at Bethel (Gen. 28:18, et al). Even though the church building in Herman is a house, one recognizes it as a church, and with that recognition is both a sense of well-being—that God is alive and well and involved in our history—and a sense of loss—that God’s people have dispersed from this place and moved on to new and different lives with new and different associations.
And this sense of well-being and loss is multiplied in a setting like Sts Peter and Paul in Salt Lake City. That old Jewish building with its new Christian congregation not only represents demographic changes, but also the radical change in the economy of God with the coming of his Son. There is a continuity in God’s work in the world. The people of God have always been the people of God, whether Noah’s family, or the Hebrew wanderers who settled in Canaanite territory to grow a new nation, or the Christians who spread from Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria to around the world. One can feel that very continuity in the worship, the chants, and the candles that have been a part of that building since it was built. It is a worship that transcends time and even transcends Christianity to include God’s work throughout time. But there is also a radical and tragic break. That building, built for Jewish worship of the One True God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is now dedicated to the Holy Trinity and is full of icons and praises to Jesus Christ the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, who is consubstantial with the Father and the Son. It is tragic because, as Paul describes in Romans, the once glorious people of God have been set aside because of their unbelief. But their rejection and sorrow is cause for our acceptance and joy. It is a bittersweet reality.
The Apostle Paul says he wished he could have been accursed in order that his countrymen might be saved (Rom 9:3). I can’t say I share the same radical commitment as Paul to his kinsmen, but there was certainly a sense of loss, knowing that this great tradition in which I now worship is drawn wholesale from the very worship that went on in that building in Salt Lake City when it was still a synagogue. And yet I was deeply moved and unspeakably grateful for those generations that went before me stretching back beyond Jesus of Nazareth, and even beyond the Holy Land to Persia, the land of exile and Ur, where God’s call was first heard by Abraham. Praise be to God for this glorious heritage.
Copyright © 2005 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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