As the Deer

06/11/2007, 12:45 pm -- by | No Comments

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

05/13/2007, 7:05 am -- by | 1 Comment

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

05/7/2007, 7:06 am -- by | 2 Comments

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

04/30/2007, 3:35 pm -- by | 10 Comments

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

04/23/2007, 8:34 am -- by | 9 Comments

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

04/16/2007, 3:30 pm -- by | 2 Comments

“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…

04/4/2007, 4:19 pm -- by | No Comments

….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

04/2/2007, 9:51 am -- by | No Comments

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

03/26/2007, 8:00 am -- by | No Comments

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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