On any given Sunday, many churches across the world pause toward the beginning or middle of the service for a time of greeting or “passing the peace.” We rise from our pews and chairs to shake hands, fist bump, elbow tap, wave, and side hug, however awkwardly. Sometimes we are given a phrase to say, such as “Peace be with you,” and sometimes simply offering smiles all around is enough. In some sanctuaries, it’s a rather quiet and somber affair, while in others, the din of chatter swells as old friends shout their greetings and children chase each other in circles.
Since the time of the Apostle Paul and his holy kisses, many churches have incorporated this moment to greet one another as part of worship. But one does not have to have been a church member for long to realize there’s a dark side to the greeting time as well. Often it can mire us in trivialities, setting the tone for a general church culture of banality, or worse, hurling us into the throes of exclusion. Sometimes a person who craves to be known more deeply can feel frustrated by years of shallow brushes with how-do-you-do’s and well-wishes that never go beneath the surface. And sometimes a lonely person can feel even lonelier when there is no one to turn to, Sunday after Sunday, an increasingly silent island left behind in a sea of animated conversation.
Greetings, perhaps more than any other part of the service, affirm our basic human need for communal interaction. Even the least spiritual person can agree that greeting another is a universal trait of a social creature. Adam Kendon at Cambridge University says that “the essential point of greetings is to negotiate a basic social problem: how to move into each other’s presence and initiate interaction.” In his book One Kiss or Two?, Andy Scott writes, “It’s at this micro level, among the trivialities of everyday life that we don’t usually think about, that social order begins.”
When in the sanctuary, greetings beg an answer to the question of how we move into the presence of God, not just on our own but as a corporate body in worship. In this way, the greeting puts legs on the theology we sing and hear and speak, for it is one of the only parts of the service in which we speak and listen not just together as a body, but to each other as common members.
As we prepare to sing together, confess together, and take the Lord’s Supper together, we first acknowledge that we must be at peace with one another. Our fist bumps and smiles may seem trivial, but it is here, at this “micro level,” that worship and community begin.
Insa: The Work of the People
The principal at our children’s school has an uncanny knack for remembering people. He knows not just every student but every student’s parent, grandparent, sibling, and dog by name. But it is not only their names—he knows each of these by who they are, where they are from, and the paths they are walking. Each day at after-school pick-up I watch him and marvel.
“Your back feeling better today, Ken?” he might say to one man, as he turns and waves at another man, shouting, “A lot colder here than in California!” I can be so bundled up that all he can see is the tip of my nose, and he’ll still pass by with a smile and warmly say, “Hi, Sara.”
When I recently came across the rich etymology behind the Korean word for greeting, insa, I thought of how perfectly it fits this principal’s daily calling to greet students and their families. Insa is made up of two Chinese characters, “person” and “work,” with the character for “work” comprised of the humble symbols for “farming tools” and “hand.”
Greetings, then, are the work of cultivating people, akin to the slow, demanding, messy work of the garden or the farm. It is a call to grow relationships, to know the land so intimately that we can distinguish every furrow and every plant, recognizing that in the process we will muddy our knees and get dirt under our nails.
The greeting as person-work evokes another kind of work—that of Adam in the garden of Eden, when his allotted task was to name each creature. To name them, he first had to know them. I imagine Adam taking into his hands the turtle, the lion, and the dove, pondering them in turn for the unique qualities they possessed and their interactions with him. Henceforth, when he walked through the garden, he could greet each creature by name; a practice that enforced not just a label, but a quality of being and a relationship.
When we greet people in the church during the service, we begin to know their names. We see them no longer as nameless faces but as individuals glowing with the grace of God. The common act of greeting, tied so closely to man’s original vocation, is what holds together a church community.
In saying, “Peace of Christ to you, Susan,” we are enforcing what Tish Harrison Warren describes in Liturgy of the Ordinary as “a liturgical enactment,” a reality that “we cannot approach the table of the Prince of Peace if we aren’t at peace with our neighbor.”
Are we at peace? Insa give us space to recognize that peace with our neighbor is not easy work. It is back-breaking labor at times, tedious and repetitive and at times discouraging, and like the farming image it conjures, much can be outside of our control.
But for something to be a liturgical enactment means that it is grounded in and fueled by hope. It means that one day, a relationship that has seemed to have gone nowhere for years suddenly blooms under a moment of vulnerability and openness; the field we took for being fruitless is covered in green shoots. It means that one day, we will turn to an old enemy and say “Peace of Christ,” and suddenly understand why the English word “greeting,” from the Old English gretan, also carries the connotation of weeping.
Life Begins and Ends with a Greeting
When my son was born, I heard him before I saw him. Before I felt him in my arms or traced his face with my eyes, what marked the moment of his entering the world was his cry. A new sound, one that no one had ever heard before; a silver trumpet breaking the sky, a new world rising.
When the doctor placed him on my chest, his whole body seemed to be emitting the cry, from his impossibly tiny mouth to his clenched, marble-sized fists. But the moment my son felt the warmth of my chest, heard the pounding of my heart and the coo-ing of my voice, he quieted completely. Here on the outside of me, he recognized a deep familiarity with what had been within.
In this way, a mother greets her newborn and her newborn greets her. Every day I have held him since, we have reenacted that first greeting when we met—each nighttime kiss, each handhold across the car, each embrace in moments of pain, each farewell and homecoming.
In the opening pages of Scripture, before the first words are spoken, the Spirit of God hovers over the unformed waters of the earth like a bird with her wings outstretched over her brood, like a mother whose head is bowed over her newborn child. In this way, God greets us, long before we could ever greet him. Even at this very moment, we can feel his gaze. And even more astonishingly, it is in greeting each other, as children of God, that we can feel that gaze most dearly.
While the English word for greeting is reserved for the beginning of social interactions, the Korean insa holds nuance to also implicate the ending of a social interaction. Growing up, my mother taught me to wait at the door when guests were set to arrive, to properly insa as they entered. And when guests left, she would direct me to the door again, walking our guests out and waving from the front step until we could no longer see them. This parting, too, was proper insa; cultivation of a relationship that begins and ends with intentional care. My mother herself modeled this for me every day when she sent me off to school, waving goodbye as I watched her from out the school bus window.
This, to me, is a more complete way to view a greeting—one that does not stop at the wave and hello, but stays with us until the end, walking us right up to the door. It simply isn’t enough for us to pass the peace for a few minutes on Sundays; we must learn to speak peace into each other’s lives during fellowship time and in the parking lot, through email and text on Wednesdays, over coffee and boxes of Kleenex on Fridays.
We must speak peace at the beginning and middle of our lives—but also at the end. Several months ago, my husband and I visited a dear friend who was at home in hospice care. Her fight against a brain tumor was ending, and her care team predicted she had but weeks, possibly days, to live. Mary had walked with our family ever since we arrived at the church, greeting us not just on Sundays but throughout the week, praying for us, offering to care for our children so we could go on dates, and inviting us to join in their family’s swimming parties and dinners. Somehow she had known without us ever telling her how much we needed this.
There on the threshold of life, we sat beside her on the sofa, and her every word was an effort. But she turned to me and said with the biggest smile she could muster, “You’re part of our family.” Those were her final words to me, her parting insa.
God plants within each of his children a desire to speak peace over another’s life and has ordained it so that all of life begins and ends with a greeting. And so we turn with gratitude and holy awe to neighbor and friend and say with all our hearts, the Lord be with you.