Bowing down

All Saints’, Dorval
Lent I, Year C
March 9, 2025

 

Grant, Almighty God, that your people may recognize their weakness and put their whole trust in your strength, so that they may rejoice forever in the protection of your loving providence; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

This is the Lenten prayer over the people, which I will say at the end of the service in place of the usual blessing. There was a similar prayer to conclude the Ash Wednesday service, and there will be a different one each Sunday of Lent, as well as one offered at the end of worship on both Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. (The liturgies on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, of course, don’t have dismissals, because the worship service doesn’t actually end, it is simply paused, and resumed the following day.)

These prayers over the people from the Episcopal Church’s Book of Occasional Services (don’t tell the Bishop) and they are not without controversy, principally because of the way that they are introduced: the celebrant says to the people, “Bow down before the Lord.” Some feel that this is too directive, and that telling people to bow could be humiliating and could make them feel that God is judging and condemning them.

I can see their point, but I think it’s worth doing anyway. So let’s think, together, about what bowing means.

When you think of bowing, you probably think of rigidly hierarchical social systems like pre-Revolutionary France or feudal Japan, where the style and level of the bow could convey volumes about the relative statuses of the people involved (and in Japan, to a large extent, still does). Bowing has also been religious pretty much from the beginning, and it persists in our tradition in everything from the quick nod to the altar as one passes in front of it, to the full prostration of candidates for ordination before the bishop lays hands on them.

In our scriptures today, the Israelites are instructed, when they make their offerings of first fruits to the Lord, to “set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God.” The bow serves as a bridge between the offering, with its retelling of the story of what God has done for the people, and the celebration they are commanded to have with their neighbours and with the strangers who dwell among them.

Then, in the gospel reading, the devil offers Jesus authority over “all the kingdoms of the world” if Jesus will only worship him, but Jesus replies, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’” Worship, of course, is frequently demonstrated by bowing; whom or what we bow to is a shorthand for what we might be willing to worship.

So, on the most basic level, when we are instructed to “Bow down before the Lord,” it is simply an invitation to worship, and since we’re in church already and have sat through almost the entirety of a worship service to God, that doesn’t seem like a particularly unreasonable thing to do.

Still, it’s always good to examine what is going on under the surface. And goodness knows it’s an all too common human experienced to be asked – or told – to bow to that which is unworthy of our worship.

I think we all, on some level, know the difference between demonstrating our humility in the face of something genuinely great, and being humiliated by a force that seeks only power and control.

The best example of this that I could find, is the picture in the slide that’s on your screens right now. For those who may be calling into Zoom and can’t see it, it’s a photo from the 2024 Paris Olympics, of the three medalists in the women’s gymnastics individual floor competition, on the podium where they have received their medals. The gold medalist, Rebecca Andrade of Brazil, at the centre, is standing and raising her arms in triumph; the silver and bronze medalists, flanking her, are Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles of the US, and they are playfully bowing down to Andrade in recognition of her excellence. All three women are wearing expressions of pure and spontaneous joy.

It’s a beautiful photo, but even more if you know the backstory.

Simone Biles is, of course, the greatest gymnast, male or female, of all time. Tiny in stature but enormous in talent, dedication, and drive, she has overcome more trauma than most of us can imagine, including spending time in foster care, being one of the survivors of abuse by the US gymnastics team doctor, experiencing a very public bout of “the twisties” which caused her to have to withdraw from the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, and being the target of pretty much constant racist and sexist vitriol online. The 2024 Olympics were Biles’ redemption tour, and she won both team and individual all-around gold medals as part of an almost unimaginably deep and brilliant US women’s team that also included Chiles, the bronze medalist in the picture.

Andrade, the Brazilian gold medalist, is perhaps the only gymnast in the world with any chance of beating Simone Biles head-to-head, as she did on this occasion. Even the greatest of all time performs better with a competitor nipping at her heels, and Biles and Andrade have tremendous respect and affection for each other. So during the individual events, when the two of them, both at the top of their form, came first and second in this particular floor competition, there was only joy as Biles and Chiles bowed down to the woman who had bested them fair and square.

Apart from the individual storylines, it’s also instructive to set this photo against pictures of some of the women’s gymnastics teams from the Olympics of thirty years ago. In those times, the competitors were barely more than little girls, looking strained and anxious, often competing injured, and being harangued, or worse, by their coaches. They were also almost entirely white.

A revolution in the sport – led by Simone Biles and others, often at great personal cost – has led to what we see today: adult women, including many women of colour (of the five Americans in Paris, only one was white), supported but not dominated by their coaches, competing on their own terms and showing the world an extraordinary example of excellence, sportspersonship, and joy, and bowing down, not to coaches or the public, but to each other.

So I offer this as a parable for situations in which bowing makes sense: is the thing you are bowing to worthy of your adulation? And does it give you joy to do so?

I will continue to invite you, throughout this Lent, to bow down before the Lord. And I’d be interested to know how it feels.

I also wonder whether, perhaps, this Lent, you might make it a discipline to think about people in your life you might think are worthy of bowing down to, and give them some token of that appreciation – a note, a hug, a heartfelt conversation, a donation in their name.

Let us bow down, but let us do it thoughtfully, with authenticity, in gratitude, humility, and joy.

Amen.