Best of Bweinh — One Hundred Words (1)
Originally published May 14, 2008.
There comes a moment in each sports season where I begin to let go of one team and move on to the next one. The Philadelphia Flyers ”” Bweinh! predictions to the contrary ”” are not going to win the Stanley Cup.
Yet I\’m not upset, really. I feel less ticked at their letdown, and am content to release these Flyers to the haze of history, and give my heart to another.
I have developed this coping mechanism over the last 97 Philadelphia professional sports seasons, each one ending without a championship. Perhaps the 98th ”” the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies ”” will not disappoint.
–MJ
Best of Mike: Of Football, Falling Planes, and False Attachments
Originally published September 10, 2007.
Like all of us, I remember exactly where I was six years ago Sept. 11. Those were days while we were both in school, days before we had children, days for sleeping late. So I woke up around 8:15 or so and hopped in the car to the Acme to pick up my Daily News, which I planned to enjoy with a nice cup of coffee. I didn’t have the radio on, which I suppose was unusual. I went in and bought my Daily News (Bobby Abreu was on the back page and the Phillies had a crucial series with the Atlanta Braves coming up) and I saw some employees huddled around a TV. I left the Acme around 9, flipped on KYW News Radio, and it was obvious the world had changed forever. Mixed in with the grief and shock I felt that day was an emotion it has taken me six years to admit to myself, much less to any of you:
I felt alive.
Now, mind you, I don’t mean to say that I liked what was happening that day. But there was a sense on that day that, for the first time in my life, what I was living was real. There was a vitality to the day; when I went to the seminary where the students had a prayer meeting, I kissed Jill goodbye with more intention. The love I had for my colleagues was deeper, as we exchanged warmer hugs. The frustration I felt at some of my would-be prophetic colleagues for their easy answers was more than academic.
Perhaps I felt that for the first time in my life, I was part of something real. Perhaps, in fact, I felt so alive because I felt — maybe for the first time, really — that I might die.
The miracle of the day, or maybe not a miracle but common grace that God gives all of us, is that I was okay with that. I felt like I might die, but still I felt completely safe, like there was a life no terrorist could touch inside me. I felt like the course of my life was being altered by something enormous and world-shaking, that suddenly being a Christian was going to be a dangerous and underground thing again, and at the same time I felt completely assured that I would be okay as an alien and a stranger on this earth — or at home in heaven.
I still haven’t sorted out exactly why I felt that way on that day. But I think that it had something to do with the fact that, for the first time in my life, everything was up for grabs. For the first time, all the things that tied me down no longer had their power to bind. All the secret peace treaties I had drawn up with America — “You protect my body with military might and provide me with a prosperous land, and in return I’ll serve God” — all those treaties were now null and void because it became apparent that America could not keep them. I think I felt alive and safe in God on that day because everything but God was under threat.
Henri Nouwen wrote and spoke extensively about “false attachments.” A “false attachment,” for Nouwen, is when you give your emotions, your heart, to something which ultimately disappoints. In The Genesee Diary, Nouwen talks about how he so often allowed his spirits to rise and fall based on his number of speaking engagements, his perception of how others looked at him, and even whether or not he received mail. As he saw it, he allowed so many things to dominate his heart rather than the One who would free it to be all it could be. I think on September 11, 2001, for the first time, I saw my false attachments for what they really were — powerless to deliver the satisfaction I believed they would. Those terrorists intended it for evil, and indeed wrought great evil through it. Yet on that day, I think I saw what I will clearly see when the Kingdom comes in its fullness: I saw that all earthly kingdoms and peoples were powerless, and I saw that there is only One who is worthy to be attached to. This, I think, is why I felt fully alive.
Fast-forward six years to a time when I did not feel fully alive: Sunday’s Eagles-Packers football game. The Eagles are historically ill-prepared for season openers, and managed to lose a game to a vastly inferior Green Bay squad which spent most of the day unable to get out of its own way. And I was angry. In fact, I was so angry I watched the Giants-Cowboys game in hopes that somehow, someway, both teams would lose, or at least make each other miserable in the process. I wasn’t quite to the point of hoping that players got injured, but I was actively hoping to see some disappointment. The Giants scored an early touchdown on a long pass to Plaxico Burress, but then they botched the extra point and their punter got squashed in the process. This was good, as I saw it, because everyone was disappointed.
I wondered today how things have changed in the last six years, a full fifth of my life. All I know for sure is that today I am still experiencing residual anger about the capricious bounces of a football, while six years ago I felt alive even though planes were falling all around me. This is the power of false attachments, and to be honest, I have no idea when they came back. I have no idea how I got here; I have no idea when exactly I signed away my birthright for this mess of pottage. All I know is that false attachments creep back in when no one is looking, and if we are not vigilant against them, we are complicit in their power over us.
May God save us, his people, from false attachments; and may it not happen through terror, but through a re-birth only his Spirit can provide.
River to Sea
This past Saturday, a longtime dream was realized when six friends and I ran the River to Sea Relay, a 7-person, 92-mile relay race across New Jersey. Each team member ran two legs of unequal length, one in the morning, one in the afternoon.
The team members ranged from a 17-year-old local high school track runner to my 58-year-old dad. The race is a staggered start, meaning that the slowest team started first (around 6 AM) and the fastest team started last (around 10:15 AM), with hopes of a close finish. We believe many teams must have sandbagged their reported times, however, as we were the 40th to start — and let’s just say our time was not better than 39 other teams. This late start meant that we had to run the 92 miles at 8:33 per mile to finish by the mandated 8:30 PM.
Interestingly, I was the median runner on the team; three were slower than me, three were faster. I figured the fast and slow would cancel each other out if I could keep on pace.
We began at 7:25, my dad running the first leg down from the Delaware River bridge into Milford, NJ and south along the Delaware through the hamlet of Frenchtown; he ran a 4.8 mile leg in about 44 minutes. My soon-to-be sister-in-law Kristie ran 8.2 miles further south, finishing in about 75 minutes. We were slightly behind when I started the third stage, a trail run further south to Lambertville, NJ. A six-mile run took 47 minutes, getting our team closer to pace.
Then our fast runners were up consecutively. The fourth stage, affectionately known as “the Beast” for its terrible hills, saw one of the most amazing running displays I’ve ever seen. Steve Johnson, a marathoner from our church, tackled 8.7 miles, almost all uphill, in 59 minutes, moving us ahead of schedule. Mike Snyder, an 18-year-old runner from our church, ran 6.5 miles in about 50 minutes, and Steve Trimble, a friend of Mike’s, ran an eight-mile leg in about 68 minutes.
This was a fine, if unexceptional, time — until you consider he ran through a monsoon for half of it and had to run for shelter when it began to hail for a few minutes. Just keeping us on pace was a miracle, and the leg ended with him vomiting up ingested rain water from the beginning of the stage. The seventh stage, a four-miler, was tackled by my brother Chris in about 36 minutes. We were about 12 minutes ahead of schedule, halfway through the race.
Kristie took the first leg of the second half, a 5.5 miler. Exhaustion caught up with her, however, and she had to walk for a bit. However, she put up sub-10-minute miles, keeping us ahead of pace. My second leg came next — the longest of the race. I wasn’t sure if the young runners on our team were really training hard for the race, so I doubted they should take a 9.15-mile leg in the heat of the day. Even though they are far more gifted runners, I knew I would maximize my lesser gifts.
Big mistake. Continued here!
One Hundred Words (26)
Do you love to sweat? Do you love the Garden State? If you do, you will love my plans for Saturday. Six friends and I will be running the River to Sea Relay, a 92-mile relay race across New Jersey. We will be starting at 7:25 AM at Milford, on the Delaware River, and hopefully 13 hours later will collapse into the Atlantic Ocean, but not before traveling through 34 beautiful New Jersey towns. The sights, the sounds — and yes, that unique New Jersey smell — will be enjoyed by all. I’ll share pictures and a write-up next Monday.
–JMJ
One Hundred Words (20)
Behind every preacher’s confident gaze there is a wondering if she is being heard. In every sermon there is a hint of vocational crisis. Whenever someone has something urgent to say, it is equally urgent that someone — anyone! — is listening.
It often seems to laypeople that preachers treat preaching as its own reward, that preachers are a different breed somehow. Yet we rely on the same means of grace as anyone else: a kind word of thanks or specific appreciation for a new insight you got from a sermon or her example.
Hug a preacher — odds are he needs it.
–MJ
Best of Mike: Holy Sadness
Originally published on February 18, 2008.
“There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives…even in the most happy moments of our existence, we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is the fear of jealousy . . . In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance . . . in all forms of light, there is surrounding darkness.” ~ Nouwen
I read an article in Newsweek recently called “Happiness: Enough Already.” (Find it here.) Its point was that in modern times, we tend to view sadness as a condition to be corrected by therapy and/or medication. The author argued that while there of course are times when a person’s sadness overtakes them and should be managed by medicine, sometimes people are just sad naturally and it is a normal part of life.
I think Henri Nouwen, the great Catholic devotional writer, would agree. Perhaps he was just melancholy, but I think he’s on to something. Even in our brightest moments of joy, we can feel sad that the joy is fleeting, not here forever. Each embrace makes us realize all of life is not an embrace; each friendship makes us realize that there is a measure of distance between us and others. Essentially, each happiness reminds us that not all of life is happy.
Are these just the musings of a depressed individual? I don’t think so. I think this is someone who has a holy dissatisfaction with life. Each human joy brings with it a reminder that we do not yet know complete joy. All human intimacies, no matter how rare and delightful, remind us that we were created “naked and unashamed,” totally vulnerable with each other, until sin fractured our intimacy and left us alone. Each human joy reminds us that we have not yet arrived at the fullness of joy.
Nouwen’s ever-present sadness marks a man who is simply longing for his home. May such a holy sadness accompany us — not so we can mope around this world, but so that we can live all of life with the awareness that better things await.
One Hundred Words (1)
In the spirit of Proverbs 10:19, our newest regular feature will be a series of posts of 100 words — or fewer.
There comes a moment in each sports season where I begin to let go of one team and move on to the next one. The Philadelphia Flyers ”” Bweinh! predictions to the contrary ”” are not going to win the Stanley Cup.
Yet I\’m not upset, really. I feel less ticked at their letdown, and am content to release these Flyers to the haze of history, and give my heart to another.
I have developed this coping mechanism over the last 97 Philadelphia professional sports seasons, each one ending without a championship. Perhaps the 98th ”” the 2008 Philadelphia Phillies ”” will not disappoint.
–MJ
The funniest thing currently on the Internet…
…can be found here.
It\’s funny because it\’s true. Anyone who has listened to Tony Campolo or Jim Wallis has left either disappointed and angry with every Christian they know (themselves included) or wondering what the heck just hit them. Sometimes both.
I study revivalistic worship at Drew University. Revivalists are accused (and not without some merit) of perfecting a certain recipe for worship:
1. Scare people with the torments of hell that await them.
2. Offer Jesus as an antidote to those torments of hell.
3. Watch as the converts roll in.
This way of preaching works. It did for Charles Finney 200 years ago and it does for many preachers today. Many people are converted by this type of preaching.
The only problem with this recipe is that it rarely produces mature Christians. Certainly, it gets more people to “sign their name on the dotted line” for Jesus, and whether this truly makes them Christian or not I do not presume to say. But it demonstrably fails to produce mature Christians.
People who experience worship in this way generally fall into one of two categories. They see the paramount importance of the decision for Christ, and so either they decide that there\’s no need to go much deeper, since the important stuff is done; or they come down the aisle again and again, always anxious, never sure that the last time really “took.” Such Christians never know the joy God designed for us to know in Christ.
Campolo and Wallis and their ilk might not like this assessment, but I think of them as being a lot like those revivalists. They use the same recipe as above; only step one is different. Rather than scaring us with the torments of hell, these prophets scare us in other ways: “The poor are dying, you know.” Campolo once famously said, “I have three things I\’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases caused by malnutrition. Second, most of you don\’t give a s***. What\’s worse is that you\’re more upset by the fact I said s*** than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.”
Just like a revivalist scares his audience and offers an antidote, so speakers like this scare their audience and offer the antidote as a more socially-oriented form of Christianity.
Of course Campolo is right. We should not forget this. The fact of hunger, the fact of poverty ”” and not the mere facts but the human faces behind them ”” are vital to God. Wrestling with questions like these is foundational to our Christian identity. We simply cannot be content while such problems exist in the world.
Yet there is something about their technique, borrowed as it is, that produces the same results as those old revivalists. They tend to produce progressive Christians overwhelmed with social problems, who operate from a place of anxiety, even anger, and rarely know the deep joy of Christ.
Speaking as a somewhat progressive (somewhat conservative) Christian, I would love to see the church proclaim a different message. God is doing something in the world: bringing in His Kingdom, begun and incarnated in Jesus. We are privileged to be a part of it. Inasmuch as we do take part in it, we will know the joy of Christ and touch the world with his love. Inasmuch as we do not take part in it, we cheat ourselves. But we do not have to be scared that God\’s work somehow depends on our whipping ourselves into spiritual shape ”” if we fail God, he yet remains faithful.
In short, I would love to see Christianity proclaimed as a life to be lived, progressively discovered, with many layers. The Christian life is so beautiful, so profound, so challenging, such an adventure. Almost every day I find something new I am holding back and I have the joy of turning it over to God, or trying to. I am grateful and content with what God has wrought in me so far, and grateful and content that my future is in his hands and that he will do more with me in ten years than I can imagine now. That is the Christianity I love, not a series of terrifying decisions where I live in constant alarm over the state of my soul or the state of inner-city Philadelphia.
I do not have to be bullied into walking down an aisle of conversion. I do not have to be bullied into walking into a “bad” neighborhood and sharing Jesus\’ love in an incarnational way. Preachers do themselves a disservice by bullying their congregations. We live in an angry, drab, gray world where people are imprisoned by their ways of living and don\’t even know it. What is needed in such a world is not more bullying, but beauty. What is needed are preachers who can speak transparently, who recognize the Kingdom has its own beauty that can speak to this world if we will but let it.
Best of Mike — Pied Beauty
Originally published on July 16, 2007.
Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Glory be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.
I am not a poetry person, usually. Yet I ran across this poem a couple years ago and it captured me and has not let me go. I love how it images the “useless” things in creation: freckles, the play of clouds in the sky, the chestnuts that fall to the earth. All of these things are “counter, original, spare, strange” and yet their beauty cannot help but point to the greatness of the One who made them.
Romans 8:19 says, “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” Why? Why bother? Why would creation wait for us? Isn’t the creation Hopkins describes perfect on its own? What possibly could creation want from us?
I think creation longs for us because the children of God are to be the pinnacle of all this wonderful creation. We, of all people, can afford to be counter, original, spare and strange to a world which lives in captivity to itself. When God set us apart to be his people, he made us beautiful and strange in the same way so much of his creation is beautiful and strange. We do not have to reflect the tired gray of those around us; instead, we can be dappled and beautiful and strange and point the world to the Beautiful One.
It was a wonderful revelation when I realized that part of our call as Christians is to be beautiful, the pinnacle of a beautiful creation. Not what the world calls beautiful, not silicone or sinew, but the simple beauty of being what we were created to be. I struggled (and still struggle) to have the world see me as pious, knowledgeable and wise, but at my best I am simply focusing on being beautiful, on settling for no other agenda for my life than finding who I am and being that person. This is a personal task, to be sure, but never individualistic — I discover myself best in community, when other beautiful people are gently alerting me to what is beautiful in me.
What about you? Will you settle for being virtuous in another person’s eyes? Will you allow the Democrats or the Republicans to sell you their version of the beautiful life? Will you allow the tabloids to tell you who is beautiful? Will you allow Pottery Barn to define beauty for you?
Or will you follow the One who dared to say the beautiful life always begins with a crucifixion? Will you be children of that God? Will you be counter, spare, original, strange? Will you be a playful part of the way God is redeeming creation? The chestnuts and the finches, the trout and the skies — all of dappled creation awaits your answer.
A Few Thoughts on Vocation
A person knows when she has found her vocation when she stops thinking and begins to live . . . When we are not living up to our true vocation, thought deadens our life, or substitutes itself for life, or gives in to life so that our life drowns out our thinking and stifles the voice of our conscience. When we find our vocation — thought and life are one. — Thomas Merton
All of us know how difficult it can be to feel like we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Our desires are at war with our reality; we find ourselves wishing we could spend more time on some activity but feel unable to give it the attention we want. Or, worse, we’re unsure what we really, deeply want in life. If life is about finding the unique purpose God has charged us with, that is of course the deepest desire of our heart; and yet often we don’t know what that is.
Catholic mystic Thomas Merton gives us a clue. When Merton speaks of “vocation,” he is speaking more deeply than our paid employment. He is speaking about the deep callings of our hearts, that unique way of being human that both encourages your heart and touches the world with God’s love. When we are living out our vocation, Merton holds, there is a certain integrity to our lives. If we are living out God’s call on our lives, our thoughts and desires will not be at war with reality because we will be living out the deepest desires of our hearts.
In other words, suppose your vocation is “brother”; that is, suppose God’s plan for your life is that you are a brother to other people, to be a faithful, brotherly presence to others in the world. You will know the most peace in your life when you are actually acting as a brother to other people, and when you construct your life in such a way that you are leaving time for this deep calling and desire of your heart.
If you are fortunate, your paid employment and your vocation will overlap. If not, you have to be creative and find a way to live out your vocation and still keep your job! Still, you must live out your vocation if you want to know this sense of wholeness in your life. If you spend your life chasing other goals, wealth, self-fulfillment, or even some other form of Christian ministry, you will never know the same peace and integrity you will know when you are living as a brother.
The natural corollary to this is that we need to be aware of when we are feeling that sense of joy and wholeness. We need to be attentive to our spirits, to get to know that feeling of deep joy that comes when we are doing exactly that task for which God created us, and to begin to discern patterns in our lives. Is there a behavior that interrupts or hinders that sense? We must lay it aside. Is there a behavior that prompts or increases that deep wholeness? We must encourage and increase it. In so doing, we begin to learn more fully what it is to enter into God’s vocation for our lives.
Dateline: Houghton
I am here at my beloved alma mater for the first extended length of time since my graduation almost (gulp) nine years ago, working on the beginnings of my doctoral dissertation. I am in a strange building which resembles a large Country Inn & Suites except for the London Underground-style sign over the door that assures me this is actually the College Flats. Good to see the Anglophilia of recent years is intact.
Coming back to a place after so long brings memories back and makes me reflect on myself and my journey. Some random thoughts:
1. I’m different than I was then. For one thing, I had a wife and almost-two-year-old daughter in tow. They dropped me off here and continued on to Jill’s parents, where they’ll spend the week while I work here on my paper. Grace, my daughter, gleefully announced, “This is where Daddy lives now!” Yeah, I’ll miss you too, kid.
So much is different in my life than when I was here last. The people I love are different. Some are gone, like my Grandpa Lindley who taught at Houghton. Some are forgotten. Some are loved more intensely than I thought possible when I was here, like Jill and Grace. My outlook on life is different; I realized how much of my four years here were spent in crisis mode. Sometimes, I ran from the crisis, and sometimes I romanticized the crisis and wrote poetry about it, but I always felt like I was in crisis. I always wanted to prove myself as a student, as a popular guy on campus, as a spiritual leader, as a friend, as a boyfriend, as a comic. I had to be the best at everything, and it had to appear effortless.
As I ran tonight around campus, I was at times painfully aware that I am 30. Flecks of gray, the whole thing. But I was also relieved not to be 20 again. I was relieved that I’m out of that stage where I feel like I have to separate myself from the pack, that so much depends upon every little move I make. I’m relieved, frankly, that I have learned the spiritual value of inertia: that sometimes there is real value in simply staying put, in not doing anything but simply being and listening where you are. I’m relieved that I don’t feel like I have a future to create anymore. I have a future, but it is entirely in God’s hands. In my case, this was a lesson I could learn only from the passage of time; perhaps some 20-year-olds have it down, but I think my experience is not uncommon.
2. God is so much better than we ever realize. As I reflected further on my 20-year-old self, I realized how little I would trust that person if I met him today. And yet, when I think about the major life decisions that 20-year-old made, I’m stunned at how well they turned out. I married wisely. As a pastor, I know how many people lament their marriage choices. Blinded by hormones and inexperience, in the fishbowl that is Houghton life, it can be difficult to choose a spouse well. And yet no other decision besides my decision to follow Jesus has shaped me so profoundly for the good as my decision to marry Jill. She balances me, teaches me, learns from me, supports me and gives me someone to support. We have the tools to raise children well who will help in building God’s Kingdom, and we have complementary gifts to do our own Kingdom-building with our time here. A 20-year-old can only make such a decision well with God’s help, and He has been faithful and good.
Same with my decision to enter seminary. That decision was made about 2 in the morning as I worked overnights at a gas station between my junior and senior years in college. I had hoped to go to grad school for history, but came to a realization at a certain moment that I simply could not do that and needed to focus my energies on something related to the church and worship because those were my real God-given passions. How the heck does a 20-year-old know what those passions are? Perhaps some 20-year-olds do, but I didn’t. But God was faithful and good and opened up a door I never could have imagined, leading me into graduate work in Liturgical Studies, which I literally did not know existed when I decided to go to seminary. This work has given me life and God uses me in it to bring life to others; and my decision to do it was not of my own strength, but completely God’s.
3. I still don’t know very much. There are enough 20-year-olds who write for this website that I want to be careful to say that I’m not now endowed with perfect perspective on life that you don’t have. On the contrary. As I ran tonight, I realized that things will be different when I am 40, and that the little dreams I dream today will probably die and be replaced by better dreams than I can imagine. That’s simply the way of the God we know, who called Jeremiah to buy a field in the middle of a war, who called Noah to build a boat long before the flood started, who called Peter to eat dirty food and bring dirty people into the Kingdom. It is, in fact, the same God who chose to bring salvation into the world through the womb of another confused teenager, the young virgin Mary.
May God continue to do great things through unwitting people; may he continue to sow life in the world through the blind, faithful flailing of youth, and old age; may he use you in all your inadequacies, all your anxieties, all your flaws.
A “Baptismal love letter”
A priest whose blog I read writes “baptismal love letters” to the infants she baptizes and posts them on her blog. (FYI: her blog is here, and those of you who think I’m liberal should read this lady.)
Anyway, I’ll be doing a baptism Sunday for three of our young people, and here’s my letter to them, which will be featured in our bulletin on Sunday. Hope it is meaningful for you too.
Tyler, Melissa and Patrick,
Today you join a ragged band. As you are baptized, I am mindful that Christians have not always lived up to their baptismal vows. Too often, we have been indifferent to truth and to love; too often, we have pursued our own agendas instead of “following Christ in word and deed throughout our lives.”
And yet, here you are. Splendid, youthful, and each of you beautiful. Each of you with God’s Spirit living in you, refracting differently through each of your hearts and personalities. Each of you is a shining testimony: that despite our shortcomings as Christians, God’s Spirit is still active and touching hearts through His church today. Somehow, sometimes despite His people, God still works! Each of you is proof of this.
Today, as you are baptized, the old heads will sigh and cry, and you will be hugged and cheered and loved. But if we are careful, we might forget (and even you might forget) why we cry great tears of joy. We cry, not because you are so young and full of possibility (though you are).
We cry because despite it all, God is still good. We cheer you because you are the most recent evidence that God is still active.
My prayer for you is that you reflect this truth your whole life long. May it not be just for a day when you are young, but throughout your whole lives, may God’s purposes and love be seen in your life. As you grow up and grow old, may you be the hands and feet of Christ, bringing hope and joy to a dangerous world.
~ In Christ’s love, Pastor Mike
Best of Mike — The Clamp
Originally printed April 23, 2007.
Here is something I came across in my reading for school this week.
The clamp in which evangelical Christianity perpetually finds itself is that it simultaneously wants to define itself over against modern culture and yet be convincing or persuasive with respect to that culture.
~ Graham Hughes, Worship as Meaning
Hughes does not write as an evangelical Christian, but I think he lays a finger on the evangelical dilemma and perhaps the reason for so much evangelical ennui.
On the one hand, we reject much of modern culture. We decry it as hedonistic or relativistic or insufficiently grounded. Yet, on the other hand, we are the masters at imitating that culture and twisting it to other ends.
So we can go to our local Christian bookstore and find a chart that says, “If you like U2, you might like (insert flavor-of-the-week band here).” Or we can stress the ease with which a person becomes a Christian, saying, “You’re still the same person; it’s just, you know, you have Jesus now.” Or we can create thoroughly consumerist modern Christian churches which offer all the music and good coffee you could want, so long as you’re willing to accept the Gospel as part of the bundle.
I have to admit that I am both fascinated and repelled by our ability to use culture so well. It demonstrates a certain flexibility and resourcefulness that is commendable.
Yet I wonder if it does not cost us. In our desire to make the gospel so accessible, we often play up its similarity to modern culture. Yet it makes the next, vital step of Christian discipleship extremely difficult, perhaps impossible. That next step is being able to self-differentiate from modern culture, asking critical questions of it. How does the modern way of living bring Christlikeness, bring true life? How does the modern way of life bring death and distance between us and Christ? Sadly, we know that there are too few ways modern culture brings life, and too many where it brings death. Mature Christians have to be capable of detecting and avoiding that which is dangerous in the culture around us.
But because we are so wedded to the similarities between our churches and modern culture, all too often our churches (clergy included) are ill-equipped to help people navigate these waters.
Perhaps our church music and architecture and our very ways of evangelism and living should not seek to impress the world with how much like the world we are, but how very different we are.
Holy Sadness
“There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives…even in the most happy moments of our existence, we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is the fear of jealousy . . . In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance . . . in all forms of light, there is surrounding darkness.” ~ Nouwen
I read an article in Newsweek recently called “Happiness: Enough Already.” (Find it here.) Its point was that in modern times, we tend to view sadness as a condition to be corrected by therapy and/or medication. The author argued that while there of course are times when a person’s sadness overtakes them and should be managed by medicine, sometimes people are just sad naturally and it is a normal part of life.
I think Henri Nouwen, the great Catholic devotional writer, would agree. Perhaps he was just melancholy, but I think he’s on to something. Even in our brightest moments of joy, we can feel sad that the joy is fleeting, not here forever. Each embrace makes us realize all of life is not an embrace; each friendship makes us realize that there is a measure of distance between us and others. Essentially, each happiness reminds us that not all of life is happy.
Are these just the musings of a depressed individual? I don’t think so. I think this is someone who has a holy dissatisfaction with life. Each human joy brings with it a reminder that we do not yet know complete joy. All human intimacies, no matter how rare and delightful, remind us that we were created “naked and unashamed,” totally vulnerable with each other, until sin fractured our intimacy and left us alone. Each human joy reminds us that we have not yet arrived at the fullness of joy.
Nouwen’s ever-present sadness marks a man who is simply longing for his home. May such a holy sadness accompany us — not so we can mope around this world, but so that we can live all of life with the awareness that better things await.
Advent Devotional — Tuesday, December 25
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Christmas Day
“This is the revelation of God’s love for us, that God sent his only Son into the world that we might have life through him.” (I John 4:9, in the Midday Reading in The Divine Hours)
Christmas Days come and go so fast. This year, I will be celebrating my 30th Christmas and I cannot tell you in detail about any single one of them. I only have snippets of memories here and there. I can remember being about 7 or 8 and arriving home from my grandparents’ house after midnight, sitting bleary-eyed before the lighted tree, trying to squeeze another few minutes of joy from the day. I can remember being 12 and starring in our church’s Christmas pageant, The Sixth-Grade Scrooge, and experiencing the rush of making an audience laugh for the first time. I can remember being 23 and visiting Jill’s parents, listening to her sister ring handbells at the local Methodist church.
Because Christmases are so fast and furious, it is vain to try to use them to communicate very much. We say that Christmas is about family. And about love. And about Jesus. And about giving. And about feasting. With all these Christmas ideals swirling about, it’s no wonder we don’t know any of them very deeply! We try to make the holiday do too much.
This year, I invite you into a deeper idea of what Christmas is. Because, first and foremost, Christmas is not about any of those things I have just mentioned. Most of all, Christmas is about God showing us how much He loves us. When we look into the manger, and we see the Baby lying there, we see God’s love more fully than we see it anywhere else. God gave us many good gifts before Jesus: water and food, summer and winter, the Law, the Prophets. And God has given us many good gifts since Jesus — our families, our homes, our churches, each other. Yet all those gifts point back to that one Greatest Gift, sending His Son to earth for our sake. His presence with us is the best evidence that God indeed loves us and longs to draw us to Him.
May you know that deep love of God this Christmas, and may the Baby of Bethlehem remind you always of how deeply God loves us.
Advent Devotional — Monday, December 24
Monday, December 24, 2007
Christmas Eve
“Come now and look upon the works of the Lord, what awesome things he has done on earth.
‘Be still, then, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth.’
The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.” (Psalm 46:9, 11-12, from the Vespers Psalm in the Christmas Eve reading in The Divine Hours)
Psalm 46 is a hymn to God’s strength. “We will not fear,” reads v. 2, “though the earth give way, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.” At times, this language about God’s strength turns violent: “He breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire,” reads v. 10.
We don’t often associate Christmas Eve with God’s strength. It is a cozy holiday; in the eyes of the world, it is a time to celebrate the universal beauty of mother and child. In the eyes of the church, it is a time to celebrate God’s humility, not divine strength.
Yet what if we were to recognize that Christmas Eve was in fact the greatest show of God’s strength the world has ever known? It was not earthquake, wind, and fire; it was not the raising up of one nation and the dashing of another; it was not the divine voice atop the mountain, frightening the people of Israel. Instead, it was the conscious laying aside of those things. In the coming of Jesus, God was strong enough not to rely on His “brute force,” His ability to cause the rise and fall of people and empires; instead, God was strong enough to come as a helpless Baby, convinced that what would conquer the world and steal away every human heart would not be thunder, but self-giving. Of all the works of the Lord, none was more awesome than this.
What if we learned to define strength in this way? We Christians sometimes believe the lies of the world, that the truly strong are those who can assert their will upon others. We tend to believe, like everyone else, that the strong are those who can punish with shock and awe, that the strong devastate the world. But what if we started to believe that the strong don’t always look strong? What if we believe that the true strength of God lay not in His ability to overwhelm us, but to give Himself completely away for us?
It is the weak who must constantly demonstrate to others how strong they are. It is the strong who are so sure of their strength that they don’t have to constantly put it on display. It is the strong who are comfortable giving themselves away, knowing that in God they will always have enough.
The divine strength of God, the strong arm of Israel, lays in a manger tonight and begs to be held and nursed and cuddled. Can we find it in our hearts to give ourselves away like our strong God?
Advent Devotional — Sunday, December 23
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Fourth Sunday in Advent
“Purify my conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in me a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.” (The Prayer Appointed for the Week in The Divine Hours)
Do you ever wonder about the innkeeper who provided a stable where the baby Jesus could be born? I’m never sure if he’s one of the good guys because he provided some place for the baby Jesus when the inn was completely full, or one of the bad guys because he didn’t rustle up something a little better for this very pregnant little family. I suppose, as with most people, it’s a mixture of both. Perhaps he had kind intentions — he could have done more, but he could have done less too.
Whatever the case, the innkeeper provides a challenge for us today, because so many of us are like the innkeeper. We’re on the fence in our lives. We’re not ready to totally throw God out of our lives into the cold; but neither are we ready to fully embrace God, bringing Him into the inner sanctum, especially if that means disturbing some prestigious guests like pride and arrogance. And so we choose a compromise, a stable if you will: God is welcome, but only on the margins of our lives.
It is always tempting to offer Christ a stable. It means that we can view Him from a distance, from inside the inn, where it is warm and cozy, and not have to deal with the cold and hay and straw and animals of the manger. It means that we can enjoy the “Christmas story” without really having to make the reality of Christ’s birth a permanent, year-round part of our lives.
This prayer perfectly expresses the sentiment of Advent. As Christians, we should not want to find just a stable for Jesus, a place on the periphery of our lives where we can enjoy Jesus from a distance. Instead, we want to provide Christ with the mansion of our hearts. We do not want to keep Jesus on the outside, but fully invite Him in so that He can change us. And so we pray for purity; we pray that God, by His constant presence in our lives, will purify us so that Jesus will have a fitting home to come to. We pray that God will touch every corner of our hearts during this season and make them a place fitting for the King of Heaven to come and live.
Advent Devotional — Saturday, December 22
Saturday, December 22, 2007
“Praise the Lord from the earth, you sea-monsters and all deeps;
Fire and hail, snow and fog, tempestuous wind, doing his will;
Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars;
Wild beasts and all cattle, creeping things and winged birds;
Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the world;
Young men and maidens, old and young together;
Let them praise the name of the Lord, for his Name only is exalted, his splendor is over earth and heaven.
He has raised up strength for his people and praise for all his loyal servants, the children of Israel, a people who are near him. Hallelujah!” (Psalm 148:7-19, from the Midday Psalm in The Divine Hours)
When the Psalmist wrote these words, who knew that they would come to a culmination in a stable, on an ordinary summer night, in the village of Bethlehem?
Creation has always risen to praise its Creator. With the exception of humanity, gifted with the power of choice, creation cannot do otherwise. Birds flying north for the summer and south for the winter, rhythmic waves beating the shore, trees shading from tender pink to lush green to burnt orange to bare brown — all these things give the Creator praise, for they live their lives exactly as they were created. Of course, we can choose to live a life that does not give praise to God, which we do frequently and with disastrous effect. But there is nothing quite like a human being living the life God has created him or her to live; just as with the rest of creation, it gives silent testimony to the goodness of God’s design in our lives. Psalm 148 envisions just this scene: creation rising up to praise God, led by the capstone and culmination of creation, human beings created in His image.
It seemed an idea too cosmic to happen on earth; and yet here it is, happening. The Son of God lays in a manger bed and all around him is creation, bearing Him silent praise. The canticle O Magnum Mysterium says it well: “O great mystery and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the Son of God, lying in their manger!”
In their lowing and braying, and in the gentle breeze, creation continued on, exactly as it was intended. But humans, too, gave Him praise: Joseph and His mother Mary, the shepherds, and soon the wise men came, and of their free will, gave honor to the newborn King. The vision of Psalm 148 finally was realized as all creation came into God’s presence in a new way to give Him praise. Let us join our voices with all creation.
Advent Devotional — Friday, December 21
Friday, December 21, 2007
“Now His mother and His brothers arrived, and standing outside, sent in a message asking for Him. A crowd was sitting round Him at the time the message was passed to Him, ‘Look, Your mother and brothers and sisters are outside asking for You.’ He replied, ‘Who are My mother and My brothers? Anyone who does the will of God, that person is My brother and sister and mother.’” (Mark 3:31-35, from the morning reading in The Divine Hours)
In our culture, Christmas has taken on a variety of meanings. One of the dearest meanings to many people is “family”: Christmas is a time to be with family, to re-connect with relatives that live distantly and to forgive old grudges that may be standing in the way of the family being all it could be. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this sentiment, and Jill and Grace and I are very happy to be spending the time before Christmas through Christmas Day with my family, and some time after Christmas with her family. People’s families are (or at least can be) wonderful gifts from God.
Yet we should not push the point too far. Jesus is teaching a crowd when He was alerted that his (biological) mother and brothers were outside. Jesus uses their visit as a teaching moment. He stresses that what truly creates bonds between people is not blood, but a shared willingness to do the will of God. While blood kinships can be great, true kinship is found between people who share a passion for seeing the Kingdom of God advanced.
Maybe this will shape the way you approach this Christmas. Perhaps circumstances force you to celebrate this Christmas apart from family. This Christmas could be a time for you to discover new relationships, thicker even than blood, in your church or your Bible study. The world looks at those separated from family at Christmas as pitiful; don’t fall victim to their sympathy! Instead, take a chance and deepen these essential, eternal relationships with other Christians.
On the other hand, you may be fortunate enough to celebrate Christmas with your family. In your case, my counsel is to remember your relationships with other Christians. Don’t fall victim to the cult of family. Love them, honor them, respect them, but don’t limit your celebration to time with them; instead, remember to support and honor your relationships with others in your churches and communities during this time of year.
Advent Devotional — Thursday, December 20
Thursday, December 20, 2007
“Enlighten, Lord, and set on fire
Our spirits with Your love,
That dead to earth they may aspire
And live to joys above.” (Adapted from The Short Breviary, from the Vespers Office in The Divine Hours)
Dying to earth is heavy language. The hymn (and the Scripture that inspired it) does not encourage us to co-exist with the world, or to critique the world; it says to die to it. What does it mean to die to the world?
We often forget that sin is not just a personal choice, but a deeply ingrained reality of human life. Suppose you live in a town where the only grocery store is operated by a man who is known to abuse his wife and family. Should you shop there and support this man or not? This man’s sinful behavior puts the rest of the town in a bind, where no action is really “right” — you hate to put money in the man’s pockets, but you hate to put his family at further risk by not supporting him. Further, you have the dilemma of how exactly you’re going to get your food if you don’t support him. One man’s sin means that the whole town has to reckon with his sin and choose the lesser of several evils.
If you look at the world in this way, you will soon sense something of the enormity of sin and the impossibility of “solving” it, humanly speaking. We cannot root sin out of the world simply because, like the grocer above, its present reality ensures its future reality. As long as one person is sinning, we all will be pushed into sinning. “As sin entered into the world through one man…” said Paul, and we can see how that is the case.
Part of what we must do as Christians is to die to this reality. To the extent possible, we should “opt out” of such a death-dealing culture. This is not to say we become total separatists, and live our lives in total denial of the earthly world in which we live. But it is to say that we are self-conscious about our way of life as being separate and incompatible with a sinful world.
We do this when we create and strengthen our churches to be little outposts of the Kingdom of God, little places where the Way of Christ is followed and there are different rules. We do not deny there is sin in our midst, but rather than blindly following a culture where sin is an established fact, we seek to be different. We seek to lay aside one way of living completely for another.
Advent Devotional — Wednesday, December 19
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
“The voice of the Lord breaks the cedar trees; the Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon.” (Psalm 29:5, from the Midday Psalm in The Divine Hours)
My daughter Grace is now at the age (20 months) where she loves to hear stories of when she was a newborn. “Do you want Daddy to tell you a story?,” I say as we settle into the rocker before her afternoon nap. “Yeah,” she nods.
And so I do; I tell her the story of her first night in the world, where her grandparents and parents took turns holding her and eating pizza in the Birth Center. I tell her that her grandparents came to stay with us for a week after she was born, and all we did was watch her and eat chocolate. Now, she’s started to provide sound effects for the stories; and so when I say how relieved we were to hear her cry for the first time, she mimics the sharp staccato of a newborn cry: “Weh! Weh! Weh!”
It is this voice that we are accustomed to associating with the Lord at this time of year: the precious little yelps from a newborn to be nursed or held. And yet we dare never forget that the voice that cried like this is powerful beyond measure. This Psalm envisions tall cedars being broken, not by the strong arm or might of the Lord, but merely by His voice. What love the Father has for us, to choose to limit Himself to humanity for our salvation!
The Author of the universe, like my daughter, begged His earthly parents to tell him stories; the voice that broke the cedars has become a baby’s cry.
Advent Devotional — Tuesday, December 18
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
“Because you have kept my commandment to persevere, I will keep you safe in the time of trial which is coming for the whole world, to put the people of the world to the test. I am coming soon: hold firmly to what you already have, and let no one take your victor’s crown away from you. Anyone who proves victorious I will make into a pillar in the sanctuary of my God, and it will stay there for ever; I will inscribe on it the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem which is coming down from my God in heaven, and my own new name as well.” (Revelation 3:10-14, from the Morning Reading in The Divine Hours)
Sometimes, we think of Advent as just a precursor to Christmas. If we use Advent for spiritual preparation, we think of it as preparing the way for Jesus to come into our hearts in a new, spiritual way.
But Advent is more than that, because the Bible talks repeatedly about Christ’s return, a time when Christ will come back to the earth in a tangible, physical way. By paying deeper attention to matters of the spirit at this time of year, we also are preparing ourselves for that return of Christ, making room for Him in our hearts and minds.
The New Testament was written in a time when people expected that return to come imminently. Much of the New Testament, including this passage, is taken up with urging Christians to persevere until that day comes. Though we do not expect Christ’s return soon (but who can say?), the word of perseverance is a good one. Like the early Christians, we find ourselves in a society that is increasingly hostile to our beliefs. The ignorant vitriol of the new crop of atheist writers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins has swayed the hearts of many people against God.
There is also a more subtle sort of secularism at work in the suburbs, which treats Christianity with a velvet barbarism, so if our children will play sports or go to birthday parties, they must do so on Sunday mornings. In such a world, we as Christians should always be striving to represent Christ well. Our lives should be characterized by gentleness, honor, nobility, and discipline. In the midst of a culture that glorifies self-destruction in so many ways, Christians must persevere in living an abundant life, even when that life is peculiar or out of place in the world. Could our life seem anything but strange to people who have not known the joy of knowing God?
Ancient Christians sensed this tension between the Christian and pagan ways of life. The Desert Fathers withdrew to solitary living in order to preserve the Christian way. Eventually, monasteries developed with the same goal: to establish and preserve some community on earth that would live out the ideals of Christ.
Maybe a good call for us modern Christians is to reclaim a streak of those early monks and nuns. Even as we go about our daily lives, we must preserve a way of living and not capitulate to a death-dealing culture. In doing this, we prepare ourselves to receive Christ with joy rather than fear when He comes again.
Advent Devotional — Monday, December 17
Monday, December 17, 2007
“Blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.” (Luke 1:45, from the Morning Reading in The Divine Hours)
With these words, Elizabeth commends Mary for her faith. When Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel and notified of God’s plan for her life, she does not rebel but says, “May it be with me according to your word.” She accepted God’s plan meekly because her faith was great: she believed without reservation that God would do with her child and herself what the angel promised.
As they always do for unwed mothers, Mary’s prospects seemed bleak. Her fiance considered leaving her. The townsfolk whispered. I’m sure her family wasn’t universally happy at this turn of events. And most of all, the questions of how she could ever support and adequately raise a child ate at young Mary.
And yet, despite all this, Mary clung to the promise God made to her through Gabriel: that God would raise up her child to be a mighty one, called the Son of the Most High; and that he would be the ruler in an eternal Kingdom. She stubbornly clung to this belief before this baby was born, and as he grew into a man. Even when he suffered the indignities and pain of crucifixion, there stood Mary at the foot of the cross, weeping and believing.
We Protestants ignore Mary at our peril. May we be so quick and tenacious in our faith that God will deliver on all he has promised in our lives and in this world.
Advent Devotional — Sunday, December 16
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Third Sunday in Advent
“Look, he is destined for the fall and for the rise of many in Israel, destined to be a sign that is opposed — and a sword will pierce your soul too — so that the secret thoughts of many may be laid bare.” (Luke 2:34-35, from the Morning Reading in The Divine Hours)
Last year, I had the privilege of pronouncing a blessing on our first daughter, Grace. “May He make you brave and beautiful,” I said. “May God use you to speak beauty to a cold and dead world.” A blessing I found lovely, and one I was proud to give our daughter.
In contrast, I’m not sure I’d want to pronounce on Gracie the blessing Simeon here pronounces on Jesus. It reveals that from the very start God had a purpose in Jesus’ life: to cause the rise of some, and the fall of others. In a sense, Jesus was to be a flashpoint: the central question of how one viewed God would be answered by how one viewed Jesus. Those that rejected Jesus, despite their piety and religious standing, were found to be rejecting God. And those that accepted Jesus, despite their sin and notoriety, were found to be accepting God. Indeed, Jesus’ life and person caused the secret thoughts of all these people to be laid bare; how a person looked at Jesus was a far more reliable indicator of their spiritual state than their actions.
To be a flashpoint, to cause some to rise and others to fall, to cause great social upheaval, is to live a life that rarely ends peacefully. Laying bare the thoughts of those that have a vested interest in keeping those thoughts secret is not a rewarding task. Setting up a Kingdom which is opposed to the kingdoms of this world inevitably will bring the wrath of those worldly kingdoms against you. In a sense, Simeon’s blessing on Jesus was not completely a blessing.
I am beginning to understand why Simeon told Mary that Jesus’ life would cause a sword to pierce her soul as well. When I prayed that God would use this baby girl to speak beauty to a cold and dead world, I was giving her a double-edged blessing. A pornographic and death-dealing world does not understand beauty. A world where art is a consumer product, or just another instrument to titillate and shock, is a world that does not know beauty. A world which misunderstands beauty will not understand someone who speaks beauty to it; such a world may even dislike the one who speaks beauty to it.
I, of course, do not want Gracie to be disliked by the world. Like Mary, I wish more than anything for my child to have a peaceful, ordinary life, with prosperity, peace and many loved ones. And yet for her life to be meaningful, for her to speak beauty to a world which does not understand it, or do whatever worthwhile task God calls her to, her life cannot always be easy. I pray that both Gracie and her parents have the strength to endure whatever faint echoes of the cross and the sword we have to face.
Advent Devotional — Saturday, December 15
Saturday, December 15, 2007
“Grant us grace to heed their [the prophets’] warnings and forsake our sins, that we may greet with joy the coming of Jesus Christ our Redeemer…” (The Prayer Appointed for the Week, in The Divine Hours, from The Book of Common Prayer)
Well, we have reached the ten-day countdown to Christmas Day. My feelings as a kid and as an adult on December 15 are very different things. As a kid, December 15 felt like a day when you could officially start believing Christmas was near. I’d counted days since the middle of October, keeping a lonely vigil over the calendar even when no one else was interested. But by December 15, reality was beginning to sink in everywhere: school was beginning to slow down for the Christmas break; even delinquent present-buyers were requesting my wish list; and even the snap in the air said that Christmas was near. And so I could respond with the joy of childhood abandon.
Fast-forward 20 or 25 years, and my response to December 15 is altogether different. For one thing, church responsibilities sink in hard and heavy at this time. Is the concert together? How are things looking for church this week and next? Christmas Eve falls on a Monday, which is just cruel to a pastor, because you basically have to have everything ready by the end of the previous week, as well as the regular Sunday service. By December 15, reality begins to sink in everywhere: you’ve got job responsibilities to attend to, as well as all the usual family and travel arrangements, and Christmas is coming soon, like it or not! No more do I respond to that inevitable date with childhood joy; now it is greeted with a healthy dose of adult dread (OK, with some joy mixed in). The reality of Christmas’s coming is different for different people; for some, it is a cause for joy and celebration, and some dread its arrival.
This prayer realizes that there is a spiritual truth that parallels this common feeling. The coming of Christ means different things to different people. For those who are prepared for his coming, it is a cause for joy; the prayer identifies this group as those who have heeded the prophets’ warnings and forsaken their sins. Their hearts are emptied of all selfish and fearful motives, and there is room for Christ to come in and take control; Christ comes as the deepest longing of their hearts. But for those who have failed to prepare spiritually for Christ’s arrival, for those who are still clinging to selfish and evil longings, the coming of Christ is not a cause for joy but for fear. Because they have loved rather than renounced things that are not pleasing to Christ, His coming is most unwelcome, interrupting their lives.
This is part of the meaning of Advent. We are called on to spiritually prepare ourselves anew for the Christ who is always coming. As we would do in our homes before a visitor arrives, Advent asks us to clean up and prepare our hearts so that Christ’s presence in our heart will not be an unwelcome intrusion, but an occasion for joy.
Advent Devotional — Friday, December 14
Friday, December 14, 2007
“The glory of this new Temple will surpass that of the old, says Yahweh Sabaoth, and in this place I shall give peace — Lord Sabaoth declares.” (Haggai 2:9, from the Midday Reading in The Divine Hours)
It’s hard for us to imagine the devastation the citizens of Judah must have felt. During their almost 50 years of exile in Babylon, the old men and women had kept hope alive by telling their children and grandchildren stories of their homeland. Now, finally allowed to return, there is merely rubble where the beautiful temple once stood. Their homes are all gutted or gone; their neighborhoods have become fodder for jackals and squatters; nothing is as it once had been.
Along comes Haggai, who probably registered in the public mind as something of a cruel nuisance, whipping his followers into an excited frenzy, convincing them that they could restore their home to a glory which even exceeded the glory of the past. Perhaps this was a nice notion, but common sense said it could not be achieved, at least not anytime in the near future. And there was no need to waste the efforts of young men and women on rebuilding old buildings when they needed to tend to their families and prepare for the grim new reality they all faced in their situation.
There is something of the dreamer in every faithful Christian, which is not satisfied simply by coping with “reality,” but re-imagining it completely. The Christian questions the wisdom of the world, because the world’s wisdom essentially boils down to coping as best one can with the reality that life is grim and that nothing of eternal import exists. So we tend to our retirement accounts, the things that give us pleasure, and enjoy a few fleeting moments whenever we can.
But the Christian cannot be satisfied by existing peacefully within this the grim worldview. The Christian has to look forward to the coming of the Kingdom of God, has to believe that it has started in a unique way with the coming of Jesus and will be brought in its fullness when He comes again. The Christian has to believe that the desolation we see with our eyes is not the whole story, and that life is so much more than simply coping as best we can with this reality. The Christian has to believe that the Kingdom is here and is coming. Like the faithful in Haggai’s day, we assure others that what we see is not all there is; and like them, we keep building even when it doesn’t make sense. We work on building a Kingdom that cannot yet be seen because it is that Kingdom that has given us life.
Advent Devotional — Thursday, December 13
Thursday, December 13, 2007
“Of the Father’s love begotten, ere the winds began to be,
He is Alpha and Omega, he the source, the ending he
Of the things that are, that have been and that future years shall see.”
(Of the Father’s Love Begotten by Aurelius Clemens Prudentius; from the Evening Prayer in The Divine Hours)
This hymn illustrates Christ’s eternal nature: He is both Alpha and Omega; both the source and the capstone of all things in all times.
What does it say that such a One chose to take on flesh and to lay in a manger? This is the question that will confront you if you choose to face it in the next couple of weeks. We, who know all too well the limitations of the human experience, have to ask what it means that God would willingly take on those limitations. What does it mean that the Almighty decided to need diapers? What does it mean that the one who called together God’s people from the four corners of the earth suddenly had to walk like the rest of us, plodding over the soil?
Perhaps the message is this: before we follow Christ to the cross, we must follow Him to the manger. Before we, like Peter, assert our ability to follow Christ to death, we must first demonstrate our ability to follow Him into a seemingly lesser life, a life the world does not always understand. In fact, maybe our inability to follow Christ to the cross is directly related to our unwillingness to follow Him to the manger. Maybe we are incapable of following Christ to death if we have not first followed Him to a new kind of life.
Perhaps the call of the manger in our lives means willingly giving up income in order that those around us may have more. Perhaps it means moving out of a privileged neighborhood into another. Perhaps it means a call to sexual chastity, even celibacy, in a promiscuous world. Perhaps it means choosing to drive in less car than you could, live in less house than you could, and eat less food than you could. Perhaps this is what is involved with going to the manger: taking the things the world calls power and laying them aside, taking your birthright and giving it away.
Advent Devotional — Wednesday, December 12
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
“As the deer longs for the water-brooks, so longs my soul for you, O God. My soul is athirst for God, athirst for the living God; when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?”
(Psalm 42:1-2; from the Morning Psalm in The Divine Hours)
The praise chorus which was inspired by this psalm is a quiet sort of song which conjures up the pastoral scene of flowing streams and verdant meadows. Of course, to the deer, the desire for flowing streams is not a romantic longing — it is a matter of life and death. The deer needs water to survive; a self-replenishing source like a brook was life to a deer. A deer would frantically, desperately search for water just to survive, to get by. It is this image that the Psalmist uses to talk about his own thirst for God; a frantic, desperate thirst, as yet unrequited.
Advent asks us to cultivate that same thirst for God. That thirst is a difficult thing to grow. For one thing, we live in a culture that assures us God is unnecessary and quite possibly even harmful to our happiness. But for another, many Protestant churches have stressed God’s availability to us. The concept of the priesthood of all believers, for instance, has (rightly) told us that we do not need a priestly mediator to interact with God–that each of us has access to God for our own individual selves. And of course we have and treasure that access; but it is difficult to cultivate a thirst for anything that is always available — even God.
So how do we cultivate this thirst? In his providence God has given us many ways. One meaningful Advent-sort-of way is fasting, taking away the delight of a beloved food (or all food for a short period of time). When we treat that self-denial as a spiritual discipline, prayer accompanies our fasting: Lord, let me long for you in the way I’m longing for doughnuts. Our spirits are trained to desire God again; through denying ourselves smaller pleasures, we learn to associate that longing with our greater longing for God. Let me encourage you to find a way of fasting, be it through food or some other gift of God you wish to give up for a time; in it, you will learn to thirst for the living God.
Advent Devotional — Tuesday, December 11
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
“He (Zechariah) asked for a writing tablet and wrote, ‘His name is John.’ And all of them were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God.”
(Luke 1:63-64; from the Morning Reading in The Divine Hours)
Zechariah is one of the more fascinating characters in the Christmas story. Because he fails to immediately believe the angel’s promise of a son, he is struck mute for nine months. When his son is born, he is freed from his muteness when he agrees with the angel and his wife Elizabeth that the baby is to be named John.
We tend to think of this as a punishment, and perhaps in a sense it was. But maybe it was more for Zechariah’s sake than anything. I believe that the deepest need of Zechariah’s heart at that time was silence. Think about it: he had just seen an angel appear before him, a supernatural messenger of God before his very eyes. This angel had given him good news, and instead of receiving it with joy, Zechariah demanded a sign: “How will I know that this is so?” So an angel stood before him, and still this was not proof enough for him that this was true; he demanded something more than the appearance of a supernatural being!
As remarkable as this seems to us, it reveals something about the human condition: we are able to miss even the most obvious messages God sends to us. The noise of our world renders God’s voice inaudible. The confusion of the world makes God’s good gifts look restrictive, makes our own self-destructive paths look appealing. Of course, the antidote to this is silence. When we intentionally shut off the noise of the world, we hear the voice of God without distraction and then we become more able to hear that voice amid the world’s noise. Intentionally choosing times of silence is a key to hearing God clearly in the world.
Of course, we cannot be trusted to intentionally choose the gift of silence; neither could Zechariah be so trusted. So he had silence graciously thrust upon him. And after nine months of imposed silence, finally he was able to recognize a good gift of God when he saw it. “His name is John,” he wrote, and finally he was able to move from silence to proclaiming the good news of God.
Likely you will not have silence thrust upon you these next two weeks. But I pray that silence suffuses your very being until Christmas Day. Live as one set apart from the world; live as one who observes it. Make a conscious effort to drown out the noise of the world, so that you can hear the Incarnate Word when He is spoken. And in so doing, may God equip you to proclaim the good news of that Boy to the ends of the earth; and may God’s vision for your life be born in this time of silence.
Advent Devotional — Monday, December 10
Monday, December 10, 2007
“Once he came in blessing, all our ills redressing;
Came in likeness lowly, Son of God most holy;
Bore the cross to save us, hope and freedom gave us.
Still he comes within us, still his voice would win us,
From the sins that hurt us, would to Truth convert us:
Not in torment hold us, but in love enfold us.”
(Hymn by Jan Roh; in the Vespers Reading in The Divine Hours)
“The sins that hurt us.” We don’t often think about this reality: sin hurts. Even us Christians think of sin as something really hard to avoid because it’s so much fun. Illicit sex, a life of stingy, self-satisfied wealth while the world starves, an ability to take advantage of another without uneasiness: these things may seem wrong to us, but equally they seem thrilling. We channel these feelings into healthier, or at least less destructive, activities: we may watch them on a movie screen, but at least we don’t act on our feelings. Yet we often forget that sin hurts. And not just in the sense of where you’ll land in the afterlife. Sin hurts here, in this world.
Think about your body. It is a marvelous machine, capable of so much, especially at a young age. Yet when we fail to use our bodies for their intended purposes, we actually harm them. For example, when we treat food as an emotional crutch rather than as fuel for the purposes of God, our bodies often reflect it in being overweight. When we fail to exercise our bodies, while working at jobs where we sit all the time, our bodies are incapable of being all they can be — all that God created and intended them to be.
Sin works in the same way. When we fail to act on God’s intentions for our lives, we bear the scars here and now. When we make a habit of degrading our neighbor, something in our conscience goes numb and it becomes more and more of an effort to love our neighbor. We retreat into ourselves, trusting fewer and fewer people, until ultimately we are incredibly lonely. When we make stingy and selfish decisions, we are less and less inclined toward the generosity God intended us to display. We turn further and further to possessions and money for happiness, and live our lives in a constant state of disappointment that they cannot deliver.
It is for this reason that God’s voice still “would to Truth convert us.” It is not because God wants us to live a life of renunciation where we sign away our rights to enjoy anything. It is because God wants us to see what we Truly are, the purposes for which we were created. And if we live in that way, if we live with an eye toward taking on behaviors which reinforce those purposes, and rejecting behaviors which work against those purposes, we will live truly happy lives.
Imagine owning a shiny, sleek convertible and insisting it was actually a Land Rover. You’d take the convertible off-roading for about 30 seconds, until you tried to drive over a rock or through a creek. Then you would realize the folly of treating something that was created to be one thing as something entirely different. So it is with us; when we pretend that we were created to achieve, or to gain possessions, or to exalt ourselves, we are headed for disaster.
Advent Devotional — Sunday, December 9
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Second Sunday in Advent
“Fling wide the portals of your heart;
Make it a temple, set apart
From earthly use for heaven’s employ,
Adorned with prayer and love and joy.” (From Lift Up Your Heads, Eternal Gates by George Weissel; in the Vespers Reading in The Divine Hours)
This hymn expresses almost perfectly the sentiment of Advent. The first verse essentially says, “Jesus is on the way;” and our response is summed up in this second verse. Because the Savior is here, our response must be to open our lives completely to Him. We “fling wide the portals of our hearts,” giving Him complete access to our lives, to tinker in whatever nooks and crannies He wishes to change. The goal of all this is holiness, that is, we wish for our hearts to be “set apart,” different from the rest of the world. We have different purposes: we have moved from “earthly use” to “heaven’s employ,” trading in human purposes for God’s purposes in our lives. We also have a different sense of what makes us beautiful: “prayer and love and joy” serve as our adornments rather than whatever the world is calling beautiful at the present moment.
In what ways are you pursuing holiness today? Let me suggest that the hymn’s message is a wise one. In order for us to become set apart, in order for us to allow God’s purposes to shape and mold our desires, we first need to “fling wide” open the gates to our heart. Our first step has to be to allow Christ unfettered access to our lives.
We often pay lip service to this without realizing what it really means. It means that in a sense we can never be at home here, as many in the world are. Our sense of security cannot come from our jobs, our homes, our nation, our possessions, for allegiance to Christ may (probably will) threaten these things from time to time. Instead, our sense of security has to come from its best and only source: from God himself. “All other ground is sinking sand,” says another hymn, and this is true. To become truly holy, truly set apart, can be a painful process of letting go of other allegiances that are comfortable to us.
May the next few days of Advent be for you a time of “flinging wide” the gates to your heart, and allowing Christ access. Even when it’s scary, even when it’s painful, may you find your security not in created things, but in God himself. May this be so not for your own sake alone, but for the whole world you can touch with the hands of Christ.
Advent Devotional — Saturday, December 8
Saturday, December 8, 2007
“Yes, I know the plans I have in mind for you, Yahweh declares, plans for peace, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. When you call to me and come to me, and pray to me, I shall listen to you. When you search for me, you will find me; when you search wholeheartedly for me, I shall let you find me.” (Jeremiah 29:11-14a; a midday reading from The Divine Hours)
On the face of it, this passage is part of a letter from Jeremiah to the people in exile in Babylon. The first paragraph of the letter is downright depressing: to the people who had hoped that this exile would be short-lived and that they’d be able to return home soon, Jeremiah says, “Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease” (Jer 29:5-6). In other words, settle in; you’re going to be there a while.
But then Jeremiah delivers this word to the people, that God still has plans for them, plans for a future and a hope. Though many of them would not live to see it, God still had their best interests in mind. There would be a future for God’s people.
I remember during my time in college, we would sing a song where the words were simply the NIV version of this Scripture: “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for good to give to you a future and a hope.” The song caused many sentimental tears as seniors contemplated life beyond Houghton and reflected that God would take care of them wherever they went.
Of course, this is true. But in that setting there was something supremely foreign to the original text. We were college students, many of us children of privilege, graduating from a school known as one of the “Evangelical Ivies.” We were going into a world where job prospects were bright, where a degree could take us a long way in business, ministry, or graduate school. Most of us were returning to homes where our parents would put a roof over our heads and food in our bellies as long as we needed them to, while we got our feet under us.
This word was not written to children of privilege; it was written to foreigners and aliens in exile. And it did not tell them that if they just held on, they would see evidence of God’s faithfulness; it assured them that they would not see such evidence. And even though they would not see such evidence, still God was faithful. It assured them that even though they would live and die as foreigners, God was still in control and had a plan bigger even than their individual lives and success.
One cannot hear this passage as it was intended until he is in exile. One cannot understand it until she has given up their need for resolution in their lives; we cannot grasp it until we have given up our need to understand, reconcile, or be satisfied with their lives. Only when we have given up happiness as a main goal can we know, as those ancient exiles did, that God has a plan bigger than ourselves.
Advent Devotional — Friday, December 7
Friday, December 7, 2007
“Lo, how a rose e’er blooming
From tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse’s lineage coming,
As men of old have sung.
It came a floweret bright,
Amid the cold of winter,
When half-spent was the night.” (Lo, How A Rose, 15th century German carol; part of a reading from the Vespers Office in The Divine Hours)
Jesus as a rose; it is a decidedly non-Scriptural thought, but worthwhile. The passage to which the hymn alludes is, of course, Isaiah 11:1: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” The idea is that the line of David, long since considered dead, would again gain life in a coming king, a king we Christians understand to be Jesus. Of course, Jesus is depicted as a young shoot which will grow into a strong tree, noble and majestic, even more so than the stump which preceded it.
And yet those 15th century German Catholics (Christians were all Catholics then) took this verse and made Jesus not a strong tree, but a tender, beautiful rose. Not a sapling rising up from a dead stump, but a gentle, defiant rose poking through the snow in the dead of winter, even in the middle of the night. As I say, the image is not Scriptural, at least not exactly. But I think it is an important image nonetheless. In a way, they are quite similar; each points to Jesus embodying life even in the midst of death all around him. Both dead tree stumps and long German winters are inhospitable to life, and both saplings and roses point to life in the midst of such inhospitality.
But I think the analogy of the rose is an important one because it is beautiful, and if I may say it, feminine in a sense. Often, we characterize Jesus’ life and mission in stereotypically masculine terms: conquering death and hell, vanquishing demons, achieving our salvation and rescuing His people. Yet Jesus’ life was more than a contest won, more than a task accomplished.
His was also a life that embodied beauty. Can we not say that the Christian life is the most beautiful life there is? Can we not say that the Christian vision of a life rightly lived, using the gifts He has given us for His sake and the sake of the world, is not just effective but also beautiful? Was not His self-sacrifice on our behalf not only justifying but beautiful?
Christ came to do more than the simple accomplishments of tasks that needed to be done; He came to embody this beautiful life and to allow us to enter into it more fully than we ever could on our own. For that we need more than a utilitarian tree; we need a beautiful Rose.
Advent Devotional — Thursday, December 6
Thursday, December 6, 2007
“But there is one thing, my dear friends, which you must never forget: the Day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then with a roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and melt away, the earth and all it contains will be burned up.” (2 Peter 3:8, 10, part of a reading in the Midday Prayer in The Divine Hours)
Peter wrote to a congregation in crisis. The church had been targeted for whatever reason by a group of teachers espousing false doctrines; Peter wrote to set the church straight and to encourage them to hold fast to the truth.
One of the doctrines these false teachers taught was that Christ was not going to return. One can understand how such a doctrine would make sense to this congregation. Christ had come and gone at least 30 years prior to the writing of this letter, and as the first generation of Christians were dying out, no doubt it was tempting to rethink this vital Christian doctrine and try to make sense of it some other way.
2 Peter argues strongly that Christ will indeed return, and offers another reason for Christ’s delay: that God reckons time differently than we do, as “with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day” (3:8). God’s time is not necessarily shorter or longer than ours, it is just different; and it is impossible to predict when Christ will come back. But Peter ramps up the intensity a bit by reminding his listeners to be aware that the Day of the Lord was coming with apocalyptic signs and suddenness. Since the time was impossible to predict, Christians needed to live in a constant state of readiness.
The paradox of Advent is that on one hand, we are awaiting the coming of a helpless baby; on the other, we are awaiting a day in which the sky will vanish and everything will burn up. Whether or not we take the passage literally, the point is clear: the coming Day of the Lord will be a day of tremendous apocalyptic upheaval in which nothing will be left untouched. This seems far removed from the pastoral scenes that decorate our Christmas cards.
This paradox is a healthy thing, because it forces us to realize anew that Jesus was no ordinary baby. Here is one destined to cause the rising and falling of many people. Here, in the stable, is the chief cornerstone of the New Jerusalem; here, in the stable, is the stumbling-block to the Jews and the foolishness to the Gentiles; here, in the stable, is the first-fruits of those who have died; here, in the stable, is the one who will rend the sky and bring forth the Day of the Lord, when we all will stand in His presence, as our advocate and judge.
Advent Devotional — Wednesday, December 5
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
“Cease doing evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, discipline the violent, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow.” (Isaiah 1:16b-17, part of the Midday Reading in The Divine Hours)
Isaiah here gives us quite a difficult to-do list. In the context of a passage where God has grown tired of his people’s offering, what Isaiah is essentially asking us to do is to repent, to re-orient our lives — and this is done through active steps of discipleship.
Our Christian subculture assures us that the important thing is what we believe, not what we do. Check the bumper stickers at your local Christian book store: “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” “No Jesus-no peace. Know Jesus-know peace.” And these are true as far as they go. But here Isaiah makes the point that what makes our worship acceptable to God is also a matter of what we do. It is a matter of ceasing one way of life and beginning another. It is about knowing goodness and justice rather than self-aggrandizement. It is about caring for the weak in society (the widows and the orphans) and about the violent (notice the command to “discipline” rather than “punish” the violent).
John the Baptist took all this one step further: “Repent,” he said, “for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” God is coming and if you want to be able to stand in his presence — if you want this to be good news instead of bad news — you will need to purify your lives. You will need to take on certain practices, and you will need to let some dear things go.
During Advent, the call is the same: God is coming! And for much of the world this is a threatening truth. The story of Santa and the elves provides a non-threatening alternative to the story of the coming of God into the world. Santa doesn’t demand much except a passable week of good behavior close to Christmas; but God sees through our souls with the Creator’s eye and longs for us to live up to the capabilities with which he created us.
In order for the coming of the baby Jesus to be good news and not bad news for us, we too have to re-orient our lives. It will mean thinking of ourselves as owned by and submissive to God, as opposed to the freedom-loving autonomous moral agents most Americans conceive themselves to be. It will mean thinking of the world as a holy, flawed place, as opposed to the romantic ideas of nature harbored by some, and as opposed to the unimportance placed on the world by others.
But even more than thinking differently, it will mean acting differently. It will mean decisively leaving behind old practices and embracing new ones, knowing that if we can get our hands and feet to act differently, our hearts and minds will catch up.
Advent Devotional — Tuesday, December 4
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
“The days are coming — declares Yahweh — when the plowman will tread on the heels of the reaper and the treader of grapes on the heels of the sower of seed, and the mountains will run with new wine and the hills all flow with it. I shall restore the fortunes of my people Israel; they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them, they will plant vineyards and drink their wine, they will lay out gardens and eat their produce. And I shall plant them in their own soil and they will never be uprooted again from the country which I have given them, declares Yahweh, your God.” (Amos 9:13-15, reading from the Midday Office in The Divine Hours)
Often, we picture eternity of the Lord as a time of total rest. That certainly is one picture of heaven that we get in the Scriptures. This is quite another picture. Here, the day of the Lord is pictured as a day, not of rest, but of incredibly fruitful work. The ground is so fertile that the minute the grapes are picked, someone comes through to plow the land to prepare the next crop; the minute the grapes are sown, someone is coming along to pick and stomp them for the new wine. People rebuild cities, not like today’s cities, but cities where people will own their land and have a connection to it, growing their own food and their own wine. In all, Amos pictures a people rooted in a country given them by God, working the precious gift of the land and always seeing a reward for their labors.
This is one of the busiest times of the year for a pastor. The season causes all sorts of pastoral issues for people, ranging from the first holidays without loved ones to Seasonal Affective Disorder because of the short periods of daylight. There are services to get together, bulletins to print, sermons to write, parties to attend, and the list goes on. Most frustrating is when I feel that I’m barely keeping all the balls in the air, doing everything but not able to do it as well as I’d like.
The vision that keeps me going through this time is the thought of vacation at Christmas time. After the last service Christmas Eve, we buy take-outs at the Exton Diner (a yearly tradition for us) and eat at about 10:30 at night. We get up Christmas morning and suddenly there are no responsibilities. We join my parents for Christmas dinner and then sometime in the next couple days we usually make a pilgrimage to western New York to spend time with Jill’s family until after the New Year. Then I am rested and rejuvenated for the next season of the year. Often, we think of the Christian life in this way — a season of work here on earth to be followed by rest in heaven.
But I’m not sure I’d want that kind of heaven. Haven’t you known a time on earth here where your work was so meaningful, so right? Haven’t you known a time when you were working and saw the fruits of your labor right in front of you? I have. There are times when I preach and the words flow off my tongue and right into the hearts of people who need to hear it, and I know they receive it because they tell me so. In those moments there is nothing I would rather be doing than working, than practicing the craft that God has given me to practice. And I’m sure that as it is for preachers, so it is for bakers and salesmen and writers and accountants.
The point of Advent is to look forward to the Day of the Lord, which came in Jesus and is coming again some day. As we await Jesus, let’s not simply await rest, though we need it; let’s look forward to a day when our work will be fruitful and meaningful.
Advent Devotional — Monday, December 3
Monday, December 3, 2007
“Listen now, House of David: are you not satisfied with trying human patience that you should try God’s patience too? The Lord will give you a sign in any case: It is this: the young woman is with child and will give birth to a son whom she will call Immanuel. On curds and honey he will feed until he knows how to refuse the bad and choose the good.” (Isaiah 7:13-15, a reading from the Midday Prayer in The Divine Hours)
Traditional Christian interpretation has held that this passage is a Messianic prophecy, that the child named Immanuel, to whom we are to look forward, is indeed Jesus himself. Despite historical criticism that looks for another figure closer to Isaiah’s day to fulfill this saying, this meaning has persevered. Today, many Christian scholars take the approach that this saying may well be double-layered: it may refer to a person in Isaiah’s day as well as to Christ, in some mystical way.
This double meaning makes a lot of sense when we look at our lives. “Immanuel” means, of course, “God with us.” And whatever the exact nature of this prophecy, the Christian is able to say with confidence that, in Jesus, God is with us to the full. And yet there are innumerable other ways in which our lives hint at God’s presence each day: in the dying of the earth in the fall and its rising in the spring; in the presence of a mother at a cradle; in the presence of a daughter at a death-bed; and primarily in the word of Scripture rightly read or proclaimed. Yet none of these hints of God’s presence takes away from the fullest expression of God’s presence among us through Jesus. In fact, all of these hints gain fuller meaning when we see them in light of Christ; in fact, these hints can even point us to Jesus and the fullness of God’s presence with us.
This season is a particularly fruitful season to look for those hints of God’s presence. A selfish world suddenly turns (at least partly) generous; themes of family, hospitality, and giving resound with this time of year. May God use these hints to point you to the fullness of his presence through a relationship with his Son.
Advent Devotional — Sunday, December 2
Sunday, December 2, 2007
“Restore us, O God of hosts; show the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.” (Psalm 80:3; part of the Vespers Psalm, in the Vespers Reading, p. 6)
Part of the reason Advent and Christmas speak so profoundly to our spirits is the fact that they echo the eternal battle between darkness and light. In many of the world’s religions, darkness is a metaphor for confusion, chaos or sinfulness, while light is a metaphor for viewing the world rightly, in order, in holiness. Christianity is no exception. Throughout the Gospel of John, for instance, we read about the struggle between darkness and light, starting in the very first chapter: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (John 1:5). In this verse, Jesus is described as the light, the very embodiment of holiness and wisdom, the one the darkness can not overcome.
This verse from Psalm 80 is a profound statement. It is written from the perspective of a person who is being severely tested. In the words of verse 6, “You have made us the derision of our neighbors, and our enemies laugh us to scorn.” It is certainly more severe testing than most of us have ever known; it is a psalm written from deep darkness. The writer’s nation is the laughingstock of the known world, and daily people fear for their lives.
In the midst of a life like that, it takes great faith to say, “Show us just the light of your face, and we shall be saved.” We have a hard time saying it even in our little trials! We beg God for solutions we can see: a windfall of unexpected money, a negative test result from the doctor, a letter of acceptance from the grad school. We often need these resolutions to prop up our failing faith.
And yet it is not the resolutions of difficulties that save us. Only the presence of God can save us; only the light of God’s countenance can cut through the darkness. What we need, though often we cannot express it, is not money, health or acceptance. What we need is the light of His countenance more than any of these things.
What will come at Christmas in your life is anybody’s guess. You may have a Christmas straight out of a Currier & Ives scene: the whole family gathered, a great feast on the table, three inches of snow on the ground and more falling, even a couple of Clydesdales outside. Or circumstances may force you to spend the holiday alone, watching re-runs, eating instant noodles in a dark, lonely family room. You may even spend it with a sick relative. Who knows?
But what makes Christmas special, and amazing, is not the fact everything is just so. It is the fact that the light of Christ is cutting its way through the darkness. And darkness has no answer for the light which is to come.
But for now, during Advent, we symbolically enter the darkness, and wait. And our heart’s cry, “Show us the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved,” is a cry heard in heaven.
Does your branch of Christianity celebrate Advent? What does it mean in your tradition? Is it, as suggested here, a symbolic entrance to the darkness in order to wait anew for the light? If so, I hope this devotional is a good guide on the way. If not, welcome to the darkness! Maybe these devotions can make this Advent a time of reflection for you in a way the season has not been before.
Advent Devotional — Introduction
Each day from Sunday, December 2 until Tuesday, December 25, Pastor Mike will share with Bweinh! a special Advent devotional!
One of the things I have come to realize as a young man is the power of rituals. The process of repeating the same behavior again and again — sometimes “meaning it,” sometimes not — often has the effect of putting new layers of meaning into those actions. So a school fight song ceases to be simply a collection of syllables and notes but causes memories and friendships long dead to flood back. Or seeing a baseball game makes one nostalgic for youth, and time spent at the ballpark. Or even finding a rerun of a beloved TV show brings back the family and friends with whom you used to watch it.
Most American churches are long on inventiveness and short on ritual. “Ritual” has a bad connotation, meaning something empty and not heartfelt. We relentlessly invent new ways of doing church, new songs to sing, new prayers to pray, new approaches to preaching. We design contemporary, clean churches that self-consciously resemble office parks. But in so doing, we forget the simple power of repetition in rituals. Change in a human being is rarely like dynamite blasting away rock; more often it is like the slow erosion of water on that rock, gradually shaping and smoothing the rock into something different. It is that type of change–gradual but no less real–that ritual is designed to work in us.
All this is to say that as a kid, I grew up loving Christmas. It was the one time of year when a good evangelical Protestant boy could experience all the ritual he could handle! At Christmas, everything was a ritual — the Christmas Eve service, the kinds of cookies my mother baked, the reading of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, the food on the table Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; all these were rituals. Even new Christmas behaviors were evaluated on whether or not they’d make for good rituals. A new TV Christmas special, for instance, was judged on whether or not it was worthy of being part of the tradition, like Rudolph and Frosty, or whether it was fly-by-night and would be ditched next year. Having grown up in a culture that did not ritualize easily, Christmas was a breath of fresh air.
It is with this in mind that I present to you this daily Advent devotional. It is my sixth (!) such effort since becoming the pastor at Exton in 2002; I suppose that just writing these is becoming another Christmas ritual for me! Regardless, I hope that it builds in you a desire to make this a ritual: a time spent with the Lord each day during Advent. I know there will be some days you feel like it, and some you don’t. There will be some days you reach the end of the devotion and feel that the text or my reflection has spoken directly to your soul, and there will be some days you wonder why on earth I’ve chosen what I’ve chosen or written what I’ve written. I hope you enjoy and appreciate the days that touch you, and I hope you keep with it after a day which does not seem particularly meaningful, so that God can shape you with the power of ritual.
This devotional can be used in one of two ways:
1. Use it on its own. Just read the text printed for the day, and the reflection.
2. As part of a larger daily process of prayer. Those of you who know me well know that I find prayer books very useful. They help to keep my prayer life structured. One book that I have used is The Divine Hours by Phyllis Tickle. This book has four short times of prayer, written out, for you to repeat out loud or silently each day: in the morning, midday, evening, and before retiring. It is actually a three-volume set that covers the whole year. However, the author has also released just the Advent and Christmas season in a little paperback called Christmastide.
Each of my daily reflections will be taken from a piece of the prayers printed there. So if you want to join me in a deeply prayerful Advent, pick up the book and use it for your personal devotions and use this set of reflections to amplify the process of prayer there. (If you prefer, The Divine Hours are printed online each day here.
I hope this little book of reflections helps you in reflecting on the greatest gift of God — his Son!
I need the wisdom of Bweinh!ers…
…to help me with my sermon this week.
It’s on Luke 16:1-13, the parable of the dishonest manager.
Any insights into the parable that readers/contributors have would be welcome, but I’m especially wondering if you think it’s fair to treat this parable as an allegory. I can’t find any reputable commentary that says it is, but it just seems so logical to me that when a master and a steward appear in a parable, it’s likely about God and religious leadership (see the parable of the vineyard, Mt 21:33-45).
To me, one of the messages of the parable is that wise Christians share the good news that the crushing debt the world thinks it owes God is much less onerous than it seems. The shrewd and generous Christian reflects the shrewdness of God, who is not so much about exacting punishments that fit the crime but showing deep love to His creation. So God commends us when we do this, because our “shrewdness” reflects his “shrewdness.” We are cunning and unfair in the same way God is cunning and unfair–always working quietly to give us more than we deserve.
Is this a fair reading of the text? What do you think?
Of Football, Falling Planes, and False Attachments
Like all of us, I remember exactly where I was six years ago Sept. 11. Those were days while we were both in school, days before we had children, days for sleeping late. So I woke up around 8:15 or so and hopped in the car to the Acme to pick up my Daily News, which I planned to enjoy with a nice cup of coffee. I didn’t have the radio on, which I suppose was unusual. I went in and bought my Daily News (Bobby Abreu was on the back page and the Phillies had a crucial series with the Atlanta Braves coming up) and I saw some employees huddled around a TV. I left the Acme around 9, flipped on KYW News Radio and it was obvious the world had changed forever. Mixed in with the grief and shock I felt that day was an emotion it has taken me six years to admit to myself, much less to any of you:
I felt alive.
Now, mind you, I don’t mean to say that I liked what was happening that day. But there was a sense on that day that, for the first time in my life, what I was living was real. There was a vitality to the day; when I went to the seminary where the students had a prayer meeting, I kissed Jill goodbye with more intention. The love I had for my colleagues was deeper, as we exchanged warmer hugs. The frustration I felt at some of my would-be prophetic colleagues for their easy answers was more than academic.
Perhaps I felt that for the first time in my life, I was part of something real. Perhaps, in fact, I felt so alive because I felt–maybe for the first time, really–that I might die.
The miracle of the day, or maybe not a miracle but common grace that God gives all of us, is that I was OK with that. I felt like I might die, but still I felt completely safe, like there was a life no terrorist could touch inside me. I felt like the course of my life was being altered by something enormous and world-shaking, that suddenly being a Christian was going to be a dangerous and underground thing again, and at the same time I felt completely assured that I would be OK as an alien and a stranger on this earth–or at home in heaven.
I still haven’t sorted out exactly why I felt that way on that day. But I think that it had something to do with the fact that, for the first time in my life, everything was up for grabs. For the first time, all the things that tied me down no longer had their power to bind. All the secret peace treaties I had drawn up with America — “You protect my body with military might and provide me with a prosperous land, and in return I’ll serve God” — all those treaties were now null and void because it became apparent that America could not keep them. I think I felt alive and safe in God on that day because everything but God was under threat.
Henri Nouwen wrote and spoke extensively about “false attachments.” A “false attachment,” for Nouwen, is when you give your emotions, your heart, to something which ultimately disappoints. In The Genesee Diary, Nouwen talks about how he so often allowed his spirits to rise and fall based on his number of speaking engagements, his perception of how others looked at him, and even whether or not he received mail. As he saw it, he allowed so many things to dominate his heart rather than the One who would free it to be all it could be. I think on September 11, 2001, for the first time, I saw my false attachments for what they really were–powerless to deliver the satisfaction I believed they would. Those terrorists intended it for evil, and indeed wrought great evil through it. Yet on that day, I think I saw what I will clearly see when the Kingdom comes in its fullness: I saw that all earthly kingdoms and peoples were powerless, and I saw that there is only One who is worthy to be attached to. This, I think, is why I felt fully alive.
Fast-forward six years to a time when I did not feel fully alive: Sunday’s Eagles- Packers football game. The Eagles are historically ill-prepared for season openers, and managed to lose a game to a vastly inferior Green Bay squad which spent most of the day unable to get out of its own way. And I’m angry. In fact, I was so angry I watched the Giants-Cowboys game in hopes that somehow, someway, both teams would lose, or at least make each other miserable in the process. I wasn’t quite to the point of hoping that players got injured; but I was actively hoping to see some disappointment. The Giants scored an early touchdown on a long pass to Plaxico Burress; but then they botched the extra point and their punter got squashed in the process. This was good, as I saw it, because everyone was disappointed.
I wondered today how things have changed in the last six years, a full fifth of my life. All I know for sure is that today I am still experiencing residual anger about the capricious bounces of a football, while six years ago I felt alive even though planes were falling all around me. This is the power of false attachments, and to be honest, I have no idea when they came back. I have no idea how I got here; I have no idea when exactly I signed away my birthright for this mess of pottage. All I know is that false attachments creep back in when no one is looking, and if we are not vigilant against them, we are complicit in their power over us.
May God save us, his people, from false attachments; and may it not happen through terror, but through a re-birth only his Spirit can provide.
Through with exams
Hi all–I know some of you were praying with me through the ordeal of my comprehensive exams at Drew University. I finished two of them this past week and have one left in November. This is the kind of exam that essentially boils down to “Write everything you know about…” The exams were 6 1/2 hours long; my Reformation Liturgies exam was just over 10,000 words and my Revivalism and Frontier Worship exam was about 12,000 words. Pastors can say a lot without saying anything, though, so I’m just hoping I did well enough to pass!
Anyway, thanks for your prayer and concern on my behalf!
Best of Bweinh! — The Palms
Originally published on April 2, 2007.
I was talking with our church’s associate pastor yesterday. Steve and his wife Francesca served as missionaries for eleven years — four in the Dominican Republic and seven in Bolivia. We were talking about the palms, as yesterday was Palm Sunday. I’m not sure if the churches of other Bweinh!tributors hand out palms, but our church does.
As Steve and I broke apart the palms to hand out after the service, he told me that in Bolivian Catholicism, the tradition is that the palms are woven into crosses and then kept all year. The following Ash Wednesday (forty-six and a half weeks later), the palms are brought back to the church and burned to make the ashes for Ash Wednesday. I knew that in some Catholic traditions, the palms were burned for their ashes, but I figured the palms were kept at church. I didn’t know that individuals took them home and kept them on their own.
Palm Sunday is one of those holidays I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with. I love it, but all the same, it leaves me uneasy. All it does, really, is remind me how fickle people can be. One minute we’re waving palms and singing, “Hosanna!” The next minute we’re just itching for an execution.
Watching a palm desiccate and crumble throughout the year might just remind me of that. In our church, kids use palms as swords and then leave them, forgotten, on the playground or the floor of the fellowship hall. But keeping it and watching it lose its green, watching it become brittle and guarding that it doesn’t completely fall apart — that might just remind me of how fleeting emotions are. You can shout “Hosanna!,” but if that’s all you have, then before long, your spirit will look much like this dry palm, and maybe crumble just as easily.
To employ a phrase one scholar uses (about something completely different), Palm Sunday is a holiday that “carries the seeds of its own destruction.” The minute we make worship solely an emotional event, we ensure that there will be a time when worship is impossible. Like a palm, our emotions too will wither and come to life in cycles, through the seasons of our lives, and worship will mean something different in each of those seasons.
This is not to say that emotions are unimportant in worship. I have had deep emotional encounters in worship with the living God, some ecstatic, some devastating. But we must realize that the reality of worship does not depend on emotion–it depends on whether or not we have met with God. How will we know if we have met with God? A simple test is whether or not we have changed as a result. When people meet God in the Bible, lots of different things happen, but everyone changes. When you encounter the Almighty, the Unchangeable One, you change.
In the end, the message of the palms is deeply prophetic. When we rely simply on emotion or intentions, our efforts fail — sometimes slowly, sometimes spectacularly. Eventually, our good intentions borne of emotion burn up, and then they mark us as human, as fallen, as made of dust and returning to dust. Perhaps this is when the real change starts, when we see God and our first impetus is to repent in ashes, rather than to wave the palms.
Pied Beauty
“Pied Beauty”
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Glory be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced–fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him.
I am not a poetry person, usually. Yet I ran across this poem a couple years ago and it captured me and has not let me go. I love how it images the “useless” things in creation: freckles, the play of clouds in the sky, the chestnuts that fall to the earth. All of these things are “counter, original, spare, strange” and yet their beauty cannot help but point to the greatness of the One who made them.
Romans 8:19 says, “The creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” Why? Why bother? Why would creation wait for us? Isn’t the creation Hopkins describes perfect on its own? What possibly could creation want from us?
I think creation longs for us because the children of God are to be the pinnacle of all this wonderful creation. We, of all people, can afford to be counter, original, spare and strange to a world which lives in captivity to itself. When God set us apart to be his people, he made us beautiful and strange in the same way so much of his creation is beautiful and strange. We do not have to reflect the tired gray of those around us; instead, we can be dappled and beautiful and strange and point the world to the Beautiful One.
It was a wonderful revelation when I realized that part of our call as Christians is to be beautiful, the pinnacle of a beautiful creation. Not what the world calls beautiful, not silicone or sinew, but the simple beauty of being what we were created to be. I struggled (and still struggle) to have the world see me as pious, knowledgeable and wise, but at my best I am simply focusing on being beautiful, on settling for no other agenda for my life than finding who I am and being that person. This is a personal task, to be sure, but never individualistic–I discover myself best in community, when other beautiful people are gently alerting me to what is beautiful in me.
What about you? Will you settle for being virtuous in another person’s eyes? Will you allow the Democrats or the Republicans to sell you their version of the beautiful life? Will you allow the tabloids to tell you who is beautiful? Will you allow Pottery Barn to define beauty for you?
Or will you follow the One who dared to say the beautiful life always begins with a crucifixion? Will you be children of that God? Will you be counter, spare, original, strange? Will you be a playful part of the way God is redeeming creation? The chestnuts and the finches, the trout and the skies–all of dappled creation awaits your answer.
The Road to Emmaus
Apologies should be sincere.
My last apology for my infrequent postings was sincere.
So is this one.
The difference is, I hope, that I’ll actually be better about posting more often.
To encourage me to do so, I hope you’ll pray that my pastoring and studying time is more efficient so I have more time for this worthy project.
Or you could send a love gift.
Large bills are fine.
Anyway, onto my thought for today:
The story is told in Luke 24 of a time when Jesus met two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. Jesus had risen from the dead, but these two disciples did not yet know this; they had heard that the tomb was empty, but nothing was at all clear or certain at that time.
The trouble was, in the words of verse 16, “Their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” So Jesus asked them what they were talking about, and they told him the story of the crucifixion and the empty tomb. Jesus was amazed that they still didn’t get it and began to explain the story to them. “Beginning with Moses and the prophets,” we read, Jesus “interpreted to them the things about himself in all the Scripture.” Finally, the three arrived at home, where Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to them. Then, and only then, did they recognize him.
I wonder if it would be too big a stretch to see this as a model for church. I think not; Luke was that great chronicler of early church history and I think he here is laying a foundation for how we are to see the church.
Word. And Table. And then we see Jesus.
Like those two disciples, we arrive into the presence of the Lord on Sunday confused. Like them, we hear rumors of God stirring, but for all intents and purposes, the evidence points to God being dead. We come into the Spirit’s presence, call for God to be with us, but like those two disciples, we don’t even know He’s here.
But then the Word is broken open; psalms are read, the gospel is spoken, the words explained and taught, the divine Word demonstrated. And then, likewise, we come to the Table and the bread is broken, and there–finally–we see Him clearly, in the Word and the Table, in the truth and in the fellowship; there we see the Broken and Spilled Out One.
I wonder if you have thought about worship in this way: not as entertainment, not as edification, but as encounter. The kind of encounter that leaves your heart “burning within you,” as it did for those disciples on that day. Be open to the encounter of the Word and the Table.
As the Deer
Hi all — first, a public apology for being such an infrequent Bweinh!tributor lo these many weeks.
I am in the midst of studying for comprehensive exams at the end of the summer and that and pastoring a church and being a husband and dad is taking a bunch of time these days!
But — enough excuses.
Some thoughts on a familiar psalm and song:
Psalm 42, begins “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O Lord.” Most likely, you are familiar with this through the song “As the Deer.”
It’s sort of a romantic image, bringing to mind Bambi sipping away while another fawn lays close by, not a care in the world.
Such a pretty image — but it misses by just a little bit. A deer truly, deeply longs for flowing streams. In a desert culture such as the one the psalms were written in, flowing water was vitally important. Animals may find a bit of standing water here or there, but there was no guarantee that standing water would be available. But flowing water — spring water bubbling up from the ground, that was a guarantee. If you found flowing water, you were guaranteed a reliable water source. A spring of flowing water was something you could count on.
I wonder if you long for God in this way. I wonder if you long for God not simply as a deer hanging around a beautiful stream in verdant country. I wonder if you long for God with the wild excitement of a helpless deer desperately seeking water who finds it — and not just standing water, but flowing water which guarantees life indefinitely. I wonder if you long for God with such wild excitement because you know you need him to survive, to live another day.
Bweinh! Soundtrack — Michael Card
Every weekend, a different Bweinh!tributor will discuss a song or songwriter that inspires or interests them. Read the first six soundtrack entries here.
Those of you who know me well know that I like music that sounds authentic. It could be almost any genre, as long as it feels pure and grounded somehow. I also like a clever turn of a phrase, and informed, nuanced lyrics.
So it may be somewhat surprising that I hadn’t really listened to Michael Card before I won a cassette tape copy of his “Poiema” album from a radio show at Houghton. If I’m not mistaken, the show was hosted by Bweinh!’s very own Josh Jones and his roommate, Hubie Hostetter. (If I’m mistaken, guys, I’m sorry–it’s been 8-9 yrs.)
I fell in love right away. Now I own a lot of Card’s music, and still have a lot more to collect. Of all his work, I’ve grown to like his album with John Michael Talbot, “Brother to Brother,” the best. Here, the two perform duets of the songs that each wrote independently. Card took quite a hit in the evangelical community for this album; many canceled concerts and wrote harsh letters decrying him as one who compromised and sold out. But for Card, it was a chance to work with a musical hero as well as someone he admired in the faith. The step looks downright prophetic today, as evangelicals and Catholics continue to discover areas of common concern and ministry while still maintaining sharp differences.
My favorite Michael Card song is “In the Wilderness.” It is a meditation on how God calls his children to “wilderness times”–painful times in our lives that we cannot understand. But he believes that God calls us to those wilderness times to shape us and change us more radically than any other way can.
It is reminiscent of the idea of the “Dark Night of the Soul,” as St. John of the Cross put it: we are given times of suffering in order that we might learn to love God and not merely the things God gives us. God is so good at giving gifts that we often fall in love with the gifts and forget the Giver. When the gifts are removed, only the Giver remains and we are thus trained to love the Giver more completely and fully.
My mom
This may seem a bit early for Mothers’ Day, which after all is not until Sunday. But my next piece will not come until after the holiday, and then it will seem a bit like leftovers.
So I just wanted to remember and honor my mom today. My mom has always been really good at giving direction to my life.
When I was in high school, I wanted to play basketball. My mom knew that I was not much of a basketball player (even though she was too nice to say so), and she told me that she really thought I’d like to act in the school play more. Of course, I didn’t want to do that and so I slogged through one miserable season of freshman basketball, but the year after that I was acting in plays and I found my niche.
When I was in college, she thought I would really like to go to seminary. I was wrestling with whether to go to grad school for history or to seminary. She helped me to see that if I was going to spend my life studying, it may as well be studying something I felt was of life-or-death importance.
I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today without my mom, who knew me better than I knew myself as a young person.
How about you? How has your mom shaped your perception of who you are?
I’m slowly becoming catholic
Not Roman Catholic, mind you. Just small-c catholic.
Catholicity has to do with understanding the church as universal, as full and complete. In a catholic vision, there are not multiple churches with which we may choose to cast our lots — there is one and only one church, fully God’s. While other churches may imitate and even reflect the light from the true church, there remains only one church.
So growing up, like most evangelicals, I was not catholic. I hoped people would join a church, not the church. I didn’t understand the full unity of the church as a goal worth pursuing — I mean, sure, it would be nice, I suppose, but it was not worth the expenditure of effort the ecumenical movement put into it. Now I’m a Baptist minister, among the group perhaps least concerned or committed to catholicity in the whole Christian spectrum.
But I find myself re-thinking catholicity.
I’m becoming catholic because of how tightly consumerism and denominationalism have become bound in our culture. Denominations (and now, frequently, congregations within denominations) have become brands competing for human souls. Don’t like the worship at my church? Go down the street, you’ll find one there more to your liking. If you don’t like that, if you like “smells and bells,” go visit the Episcopalians. If you like raising your hands, go visit the Pentecostals. Eventually, just like we all settle on a brand of deodorant we like, we all can have a church we like too.
I’m becoming catholic because I don’t know if we’ve ever considered how much this harms the gospel. When the church plays by a consumerist model like this one, the results are every bit as serious as heresy.
Why do I say this? Because the moral force of the church depends on beings something more than a spiritual Wal*Mart. Our ability to demonstrate and decry the dehumanizing effects of consumerism depends on our willingness to play by a different model.
Think of it this way: when have you grown the most spiritually? Likely it was during a moment of crisis, when you were forced to think differently about yourself than ever before. For some people, that comes during a life transition: the death of a parent leaves you next in line for the grave. The birth of a child makes you realize a spiritual responsibility for the next generation.
For other people, though, we are forced to think differently when we meet a challenging idea. I had a huge spiritual growth spurt when a mentor in seminary told me she had always considered me a very spiritual person. I was working so hard, desperate to prove myself an academic, and she saw a side of me that I never saw before. I didn’t want to see it at first but now it deeply shapes how I see myself.
We all run into these sorts of challenges — when an unfamiliar hymn is sung; when a preacher is more conservative or more liberal than we are used to; when a service does not seem Holy Spirit-anointed to our way of thinking and yet lays claim to God’s Spirit being there. In all of these times, our consumerist mindset tells us we need to go seek a new brand of worship, because this one is no longer satisfying.
Of course the reality is that spiritual growth only comes when we stay in those situations instead of running away. Spiritual growth depends on getting past the “fight or flight” reflex and dealing constructively with issues that confront us. This does not mean we are relativistic — on the contrary, when we rub up against differences, we find out who we really are and we begin to articulate it with conviction and depth.
Catholicity in this context is a virtue. Because it terrifies us, yet re-assures us, with the news that there is nowhere else to run. You cannot take the spiritually perilous step of looking for another church, because there is only the church. You cannot run away to find a more suitable brand, because there is only one brand, the Church.
We can question what form of catholicity is most authentic to the gospel. I do not believe that it means we all must become one church institutionally, or that it demands a rigid top-down hierarchy. This is why I’m still a Baptist and not a (Roman) Catholic.
Yet Protestants have to be more serious about thinking creatively about catholicity. What does an authentically catholic church look like? If not institutionally (as in Rome), what? How can our churches be more welcoming and hospitable to the idea of catholicity? How can we better work in concert with other churches, even churches with which we may disagree on important issues? These questions are especially important to free-church evangelicals; for one thing, it is our tradition that needs a heavy dose of catholicity, and for another, our way of thinking is so dominant in Western Christianity that for us to ignore the virtue of catholicity has major consequences.
The Clamp
Here is something I came across in my reading for school this week.
The clamp in which evangelical Christianity perpetually finds itself is that it simultaneously wants to define itself over against modern culture and yet be convincing or persuasive with respect to that culture.
~ Graham Hughes, Worship as Meaning
Hughes does not write as an evangelical Christian, but I think he lays a finger on the evangelical dilemma and perhaps the reason for so much evangelical ennui.
On the one hand, we reject much of modern culture. We decry it as hedonistic or relativistic or insufficiently grounded. Yet, on the other hand, we are the masters at imitating that culture and twisting it to other ends.
So we can go to our local Christian bookstore and find a chart that says, “If you like U2, you might like (insert flavor-of-the-week band here).” Or we can stress the ease with which a person becomes a Christian, saying, “You’re still the same person; it’s just, you know, you have Jesus now.” Or we can create thoroughly consumerist modern Christian churches which offer all the music and good coffee you could want, so long as you’re willing to accept the Gospel as part of the bundle.
I have to admit that I am both fascinated and repelled by our ability to use culture so well. It demonstrates a certain flexibility and resourcefulness that is commendable.
Yet I wonder if it does not cost us. In our desire to make the gospel so accessible, we often play up its similarity to modern culture. Yet it makes the next, vital step of Christian discipleship extremely difficult, perhaps impossible. That next step is being able to self-differentiate from modern culture, asking critical questions of it. How does the modern way of living bring Christlikeness, bring true life? How does the modern way of life bring death and distance between us and Christ? Sadly, we know that there are too few ways modern culture brings life, and too many where it brings death. Mature Christians have to be capable of detecting and avoiding that which is dangerous in the culture around us.
But because we are so wedded to the similarities between our churches and modern culture, all too often our churches (clergy included) are ill-equipped to help people navigate these waters.
Perhaps our church music and architecture and our very ways of evangelism and living should not seek to impress the world with how much like the world we are, but how very different we are.
From the Anglican File
“There is no greater argument in the world of our spiritual danger and unwillingness to religion, than the backwardness which most men have always, and all men have sometimes, to say their prayers — so weary of their length, so glad when they are done, so witty to excuse and frustrate an opportunity: and yet all is nothing but a desiring of God to give us the greatest and the best things we can need, and which can make us happy — it is a work so easy, so honourable, and to so great purpose, that in all the instances of religion and providence (except only the incarnation of his Son) God hath not given us a greater argument of his willingness to have us saved, and of our unwillingness to accept it, his goodness and our gracelessness, his infinite condescension and our carelessness and folly, than by rewarding so easy a duty with so great blessings.”
Jeremy Taylor, a seventeenth-century Anglican priest, authored these words in The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living. Essentially, he holds that the most compelling argument that we are in spiritual danger is our desire not to pray.
Common sense would seem to dictate that if an easy behavior results in great reward, then people would perform that behavior at every opportunity. If, for instance, there were a “steak dinner” button on my computer, I’d be pushing it constantly — far more often than I should. Yet prayer — so easy a duty rewarded with such great blessings — often is neglected, in my life, and I’m sure in many of yours as well.
I cannot think of one solitary time — literally, not one time — in my life when I have prayed and regretted it. On rare occasions, God has answered my prayers in obvious and stunning ways. At other times, God has not changed the situation, but has radically changed me by shaping my heart. Never ever have I regretted it.
And yet it is still hard to get up the willpower to pray at times; still I go through dark stretches where I don’t want to pray at all, and more often than not I don’t. Though prayer has never disappointed me, I still am “witty to excuse it,” proud of my mental acuity in finding an excuse to “get me off the hook.”
The very fact that we want to “get off the hook” when it comes to prayer demonstrates our spiritual weakness. When my more liberal friends wonder why I am comparably conservative, this is often what I think about. I know our ability to convince ourselves that wrong is right and right wrong — and there is no more obvious example than our desire not to pray.
Ummm…
….wow. Those of you with a taste for ’80s TV and/or revisionist Episcopal theology may enjoy this link wherein Mr.T and Rev. John Shelby Spong square off.
The rest of you, well…sorry.
The Palms
I was talking with our church’s associate pastor yesterday. Steve and his wife Francesca served as missionaries for eleven years — four in the Dominican Republic and seven in Bolivia. We were talking about the palms, as yesterday was Palm Sunday. I’m not sure if the churches of other Bweinh!tributors hand out palms, but our church does.
As Steve and I broke apart the palms to hand out after the service, he told me that in Bolivian Catholicism, the tradition is that the palms are woven into crosses and then kept all year. The following Ash Wednesday (forty-six and a half weeks later), the palms are brought back to the church and burned to make the ashes for Ash Wednesday. I knew that in some Catholic traditions, the palms were burned for their ashes, but I figured the palms were kept at church. I didn’t know that individuals took them home and kept them on their own.
Palm Sunday is one of those holidays I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with. I love it, but all the same, it leaves me uneasy. All it does, really, is remind me how fickle people can be. One minute we’re waving palms and singing, “Hosanna!” The next minute we’re just itching for an execution.
Watching a palm desiccate and crumble throughout the year might just remind me of that. In our church, kids use palms as swords and then leave them, forgotten, on the playground or the floor of the fellowship hall. But keeping it and watching it lose its green, watching it become brittle and guarding that it doesn’t completely fall apart — that might just remind me of how fleeting emotions are. You can shout “Hosanna!,” but if that’s all you have, then before long, your spirit will look much like this dry palm, and maybe crumble just as easily.
To employ a phrase one scholar uses (about something completely different), Palm Sunday is a holiday that “carries the seeds of its own destruction.” The minute we make worship solely an emotional event, we ensure that there will be a time when worship is impossible. Like a palm, our emotions too will wither and come to life in cycles, through the seasons of our lives, and worship will mean something different in each of those seasons.
This is not to say that emotions are unimportant in worship. I have had deep emotional encounters in worship with the living God, some ecstatic, some devastating. But we must realize that the reality of worship does not depend on emotion–it depends on whether or not we have met with God. How will we know if we have met with God? A simple test is whether or not we have changed as a result. When people meet God in the Bible, lots of different things happen, but everyone changes. When you encounter the Almighty, the Unchangeable One, you change.
In the end, the message of the palms is deeply prophetic. When we rely simply on emotion or intentions, our efforts fail — sometimes slowly, sometimes spectacularly. Eventually, our good intentions borne of emotion burn up, and then they mark us as human, as fallen, as made of dust and returning to dust. Perhaps this is when the real change starts, when we see God and our first impetus is to repent in ashes, rather than to wave the palms.
The Word cannot be spoken
Our priest exulted, “How wonderful His ways,”
then climbed his pulpit’s Calvary. The tide,
lit by the after-dawn had brimmed the bay’s
calm space, reflecting light on the roof inside.
What boy, by a choir-loft window, could resist
turning to look? A seal swam round a trawler
whose lantern-masts were moored above in mist,
and rippled sparkling water-lap down all her
salt-rust length. Past diesel pumps and dock.
the sun unpicked the nets by the fish-house door
as I watched the seal clamber on Pollock’s Rock.
The mist had almost dissolved and a green pour
of ocean swelled and turned by the harbour stair
while the priest struggled, explaining God’s design,
and the seal shook his watered quaff of hair,
slicked down for Sunday morning, just like mine.
~ Oliver Murray
I am a “struggling priest.” And so are most evangelicals, really.
“Struggling priests” try — usually unsuccessfully — to give words to that which cannot be expressed, only experienced. In Murray’s poem, the priest climbs into the pulpit to “explain God’s design.” And yet the little choir-boy begins to experience God’s design not through the sermon, but through the green pour of the ocean, the play of dawn upon the bay, a swimming seal, and the sights and sounds of people at work. In all this, the boy sees God’s design and thus knows it far more than he would after any didactic sermon. It must be experienced to be truly understood.
Don’t get me wrong. I am no hopeless romantic. I know that words are necessary to fully understanding the gospel. I treasure those who hammered out the core of the faith at Nicaea and other councils. I value those who write great works of scholarship to defend and promote the faith once delivered. I honor those who make their living with words today, through sermons and writing and even librarians who organize these countless scores of words we manage to produce. Heck, I even hope to be a person who uses words to God’s glory.
But we must confess that sometimes words imprison the Word. Sometimes, our words render the Word inaccessible. Sometimes, my struggling to explain God’s Word renders it harder for someone to truly understand the Word. Making it as accessible as possible, as plain as possible, sometimes turns it into something it’s not.
In the language of this poem, for every boy lucky enough to sit outside and watch fishermen, sea, and seals, there are hundreds of people who can see nothing but a struggling preacher and desperately try to make heads or tails of what he’s saying, but end up further from God than when they started.
More broadly, sometimes our struggle as evangelicals to effectively communicate the gospel ends up altering the gospel. Many think of evangelism as making a sort of “sales pitch” for the gospel, drawing heavily on wisdom from the corporate and marketing worlds in order to make the gospel easily understood and digested. While there is something laudable in those attempts, we have often failed to ask the question, “What does trying to ‘sell’ the gospel do to the gospel?” If, in the way we speak of the gospel, we lead others to think it is a transaction we make with Jesus, have we not diluted the call of the gospel to the point it’s no longer recognizable as the good news of Jesus?
Drawing up four spiritual laws and other formulae to “explain” the gospel may just have the opposite effect from what we want: they may just push people away from the good God of light-play and labor, of seals and seas.
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