A Short Reflection on Worship

Worship as Response

Simply put, worship is the response we make to Yahweh’s initiative in our lives. He created us to live joyfully in community with him and one another. Because of the Fall, this is neither natural nor intuitive. Happily, the Christian story is all about Jesus winning us back to God and giving us his own Spirit that we might learn to walk in the ways he originally intended. We can simply be with him.

I often keep a cluttered space at home, and when someone comes to visit, I have to pick up all the clutter, coats and clothing off the chair so they can sit down. Worship is somewhat like this – making a space for God to enter, by quieting our hearts and being still. The liturgy we use – this order for Evening Prayer – is a way of knocking away the clutter and inviting Jesus in.

Creating Space for the Presence

“You are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”

— Ephesians 2:19.

Christ dwells in our common life. We are the temple of the Living God; we are the Body of Christ. He is here among us not because of any good and right things we say, or bad things we don’t do, but because of who we are.

That means the pressure is off. Choose to waste time. Don’t try to figure out anything new, either in regard to him or yourself. Don’t worry about saying the right things, or saying anything at all. You can speak to him, or just sit and listen. We will create an open space for him to simply be, for no particular purpose. This is a wasted time, wasted energy that could be spent getting something done. This blesses him.

Expectations

Jesus will come to be among us. He enjoys our presence, and desires that we would enjoy his. Several of us may not. We’ve been forced to sit with destructive, exploitative images of God and sitting with Jesus while those old ideas are still banging around in our hearts can be uncomfortable. He’s really very much okay with that. Where Jesus is, he heals.

Avenues into the Presence of God

Invocation. Jesus comes to be with us because he loves us and because we need him; that’s why he first came to us. We can invite him into our midst on that basis; we need no other.

Praise and Thanksgiving. Sit. Remember the works of Yahweh. Acknowledge the good things you have received as being his gifts. Cite those moments of the day when some word, action or remembrance reminded you that you are loved and cared for. Thank him. Say, “I love you, too.” Tell him he’s wonderful.

Confession. Welcome him into the dark places. Don’t try to fix them up. Certainly don’t keep him out of them. Ask forgiveness only for actual sins: brokenness and need are not sins, and do not require apology. If you’ve got an incredible problem that you can’t seem to work out, tell him about it. Not that it will fix anything necessarily, but we need to cultivate a habit just being with Jesus in those places where we are uncomfortable being ourselves. If you’re not sure what to say to him because you just realized he’s not the horrible trickster god you were brought up with, say so. You don’t have to talk beyond that. Don’t make promises, just be there with him.

Listen. Read the scriptures. Let your friends affirm and challenge you. Sit and receive.

I utilized Richard Foster’s chapter in Celebration of Discipline to cover the bases.

Technorati Tags: worship, liturgy, prayer, Richard Foster

Vindicated: Why I Blog

…it was not done in a corner.

—Paul, The Acts of the Apostles 26:26

Living in God's New Community

The Christian community is the outpost of the Reign of God in a world that has yet to learn that its old rulers and gods have been put to flight by the Easter event. It provides a fellowship of healing and redemption in which men and women can be restored to humanity as it was meant to be.

What does it mean to bear witness that Yahweh has raised up his Christ from the grave, and also raises up men and women to a life with himself here and now?

This cannot be accomplished through mere preaching, or religious presentations, or whatever programs someone devises as “evangelism.” The good news of our restoration to God through Christ can only be demonstrated in the whole life of an entire community. Words are nice, but they just aren’t enough. Only living with people would give you an idea of what this looks like.

Captain Sacrament

So I tell my story. My life, in the context of my wounds and failings, my strengths and God’s healing, is one example of what redemption can like. Not for anyone to emulate, but simply to listen. My primary audience (to my mind) is my friends, the people with whom I share community life. I put into words parts of my story that I share with the community. Some folks I haven’t met read also this stuff, surely. God bless you. Maybe we’ve been to some of the same places in our journeys.

In the life I live with Christians, many of those places are considered godforsaken. They aren’t, and we aren’t. I demonstrate that with my life and explain it with my words.

Why Vindicated?

Jesus of Nazareth was Yahweh come to judge his people, and to redeem them all at once. He took the suffering of Israel and the punishment due their idolatry upon himself. In the person of Jesus, Yahweh himself became godforsaken, abandoned by the people, accursed by the law, and destroyed by the pagans.

Yahweh vindicated Jesus, and all those who are in the Messiah find themselves vindicated as well, blameless and without fault, raised up to new life in him. This is the restoration of our humanity.

Jesus the Crucified God is ever near the godforsaken.

Technorati Tags: Judgment, Vindication, Moltmann

Holiness as Action and Contemplation

The last bit of my Merton reflection.

Holiness as Contemplation

Merton warns us against thinking of contemplation in terms of separating “bodily” life from the life of the spirit, which results in dualism. He talks for a few pages in terms of the psyche and pneuma, and finding the real self behind endless activity. I’m not certain what it is he’s talking about (ask Alan; I’m no mystic), but he seems to be working on an idea of contemplation as a restful activity. Even then, contemplation is not truly inactive, for the whole purpose is to engage, know and love “the other.”

Holiness as Action and Contemplation

Right action is grounded in right contemplation. When in our contemplation we can understand ourselves as being known and loved by Yahweh, we can live in the self-forgetfulness that allows to engage, know and love the other without defensiveness or fear. In searching out and loving the otherness of people around us, we will love Yahweh. This contemplation, this being with Yahweh while being with others and our own selves, is the ground of right and holy action. Mediating on truth, knowing and loving the other, will guide us in our physically active work of speaking creative truth and building a healing society in the midst of people whose lives have been wreaked by the exercise of power for its own sake.

Holiness as Action

Is holiness found in right action, or contemplation? Perhaps both.

Merton sees in the second creation narrative humanity’s vocation to a particular kind of action. When Elohim makes humanity in his own likeness, the god who is creator, worker and father commissions these people to be that also. They will build a society, and form order from chaos in order to safeguard and nurture the Creation that brings the first Creator so much joy. They were created to be like him and do like him, but to exist as separate persons who could love and honor him. Using those creative gifts rightly, those borne from Yahweh’s own being, is, in Bach’s phrase, “a gift back to the giver.”

Merton continues:

And in the line of this thought, original sin would be a perversion of man’s active instincts, a turning of man’s creativity away from God so that he produces and creates not the society and the temple which God’s own creation demands as its fulfillment, but a temple of man’s own power. The world is then exploited for the glory of man, not for the glory of God. Man’s power becomes an end in itself (60).

I find this a helpful conception. I’ll draw it out. In such a case, living redemptively would be to continue living in and working out of that vocation following the manner of Christ. Just as the Creator brought form and a life like his own from a shapeless void, so would his Anointed One. Jesus entered that chaotic maelstrom of competing powers and through his healing works, execution and subsequent vindication brought order and the rule of Yahweh into the midst of it. Christ the second Adam did what the first Adam failed to do.

How do we continue this work? As the Church, we integrate ourselves into every aspect of human existence. We take common cause with sufferers, speaking correction and hope to victims and victimizers alike. We step into the lives of one another to speak truth that will chase away the lies, and to invoke the Spirit of Yahweh into the godforsaken places through the laying on of hands. We live as prophets, speaking order and healing into the brokenness of a fallen and chaotic creation. The Word of God created, the Word of God redeemed, and we will continue as Christ-indwelt prophets, speaking the words of God to effect his work of re-creating broken and wounded men and women.

Holiness is something you do.

Download Matt and Alan's reflections on the Schola page.

Yahweh as Ground of Being

We're reading a bit from Merton (of course we are) for the Schola this month. Here's the first part of my reflection. The others are on the schola page.

A friend once told me about a comedy bit, “Facial expressions you don’t want to see from Jesus.” The comedian proceeds to frown, grimace, and manifest plain bewilderment, presumably in response to whatever it is you’re up to this time. It’s funny, because for many of us, that’s a real fear. Merton, it seems, would tell us that we’ve nothing to worry about, because the very existence of a creature is an act of praise to Yahweh (“Image and Likeness, in The New Man, 51ff.).

Yahweh himself exists as a Trinitarian community, outside of time and space. He wills that others exist as part of that community, to be loved by it, and to love within it. It is the nature of the Trinity to exist and love in community. Therefore the creative act by which Yahweh spoke the universe into being is the inevitable consequence of his own nature. The Creation praises, for it exists out of obedience and the knowledge that it is known and loved by Yahweh. To exist, any creature must first be conceived and loved in the mind of Yahweh. Therefore anything that exists in the original created order is intrinsically and irrevocably an object of Yahweh’s love.

Only non-existent creatures can be unknown to and unloved by Yahweh. If I exist, I was created by Yahweh. Yahweh creates solely out of creative love. If I exist, it is because I was conceived as an object of Yahweh’s love. Therefore the intrinsic ground of my own being is the reality that I am loved by Yahweh. Ecstasy and forgetfulness of self are normal for the Creation, Merton says, because self knowledge rests entirely on the truth of being loved by Yahweh. On such a foundation there is not need to hide or protect oneself.

Who can comprehend or explain the mystery of what it means to awaken to one’s own reality as an existential consequence of the fact that we are loved by Reality Itself? (54)

This is a god who will not grimace at our failings.

Ordinary

I visited the 12th street community

veni spiritus sanctus

on Monday, gathering with them for dinner and prayer for the first time in awhile. We ate and talked, enjoying the company of one another. We lit some candles and listened and began to pray. We prayed for one another, friends present and absent. And I thought

this is ordinary

Last night was our final Tuesday gathering for the semester. We read from the lectionary

with terrible recompense He will come and save you

and just talked. Told some inane stories and shared some frustrations, and looked to YHWH with hope,

redemption stares at you

in the mirror from behind

the glassy eyes and the

cold, barren face

becoming more and more aware that in our life together we reflect the glory of YHWH, that these moments are not fleeting, that they do not need to be protected or guarded jealously, that they are

ordinary

And I see that grace does not run out, that restoration is not a weekend project, and that some things really ought to hurt and pain is not always bad

this veritable power is not transitory

i tire of the old ones the hollow men and women who being blind try to describe light behind their glassy eyes stares nothing

::the - candle::

they say

::the - candle - you - lit::
::in - the - dark - place::
::is - not - so - bright - as - you - think::

what if you were dead and nobody told you
i would tell you if you would listen but you hate when we disturb your sleep
(i'm sorry; you see, no one else ever will)

blind ghosts hiding among their pretty tombs whose whispers echo and drown the whimpers of those of us who are getting up our of our graves

i won't fear truth
i won't shirk correction
i will not deny our life

these gods need to die
these gods who do not raise the dead

In God's new world, resurrection is ordinary.

Reading Athanasius: Talking About Sin

It is also helpful to differentiate the brokenness and rebellion that spring from the corruption Athanasius describes. Our previous enmity with God emerged because of rebellion, not brokenness. He does not despise the weak. Not all sin is symptomatic of rebellion, but rather a manifestation of deep brokenness – some part of the personality still in need of Christ’s redemption. Perhaps we can differentiate between sin (as a condition of rebellion) and sins (as symptoms of brokenness or rebellion). This speaks to the insistence of some Christians that their sins yet separate them from God.

They do not.

Rebellion needs to be forgiven, but weakness requires an infusing of grace and strength. Sins (understood as symptoms) cannot separate the individual Christian from God, because in baptism one is sealed with Christ. The righteousness of the Messiah is imputed to the Messiah’s people, after all. As Athanasius illustrates, our restoration and healing are a matter of God’s honor: he has redeemed us, and there is a big sign at the trading post that says “no refunds.” (Groan) But it’s true.

If the God who knows to expect so much more failure of us than we do ourselves has already accepted us in Christ Jesus and sealed us in him through baptism, we don’t require more forgiveness just because we are more aware of our brokenness. I do all kinds of sinful things I don’t know to be sinful (just ask my friends!), but they don’t separate me from God, or my community. We confess to be known as sinners, and to appropriate healing and restoration in the dark and lonely places of our souls.

Jesus does not despise the weak. He does not find us lacking and so cast us away. He knows what we lack, and so has stood for us, and does stand, on those parts of our lives where we are unable.

Technorati Tags: sin, theology, athanasius, church history

Reading Athanasius: Why YHWH Redeems

For VBCC’s October schola, we read Athanasius’ On the Incarnation. Ancient theologians are loquacious suckers, often needlessly so. I feel a certain kinship. That aside, I found one of his arguments compelling and possibly fruitful for discussion. Athanasius argues that the salvation of humanity is required for God to maintain his personal honor. In his view, not only are the divine image-bearers sinful and rebellious, but they are descending into nothingness.

…death had them completely under its dominion. For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again (1.4).

Since the Logos brought creation into being as a reflection of Himself, it would dishonor Him to surrender it to nothingness. Further, because sin results in the unraveling of human nature to death, it became necessary to renew and re-create human nature by exchanging places with men and bearing their deaths in his own body (2.7, 9). The Incarnation was necessary for this needful redemption:

The Word of God came in his own person, because it was he alone, the image of the Father, who could re-create man made after the image (3.13).

Athanasius illustrates this as a model posing again for the restoration of a painting. What we couldn’t be in our brokenness and rebellion, Jesus becomes for us, so that we can become like him. May God empower us to be his restored people.

In terms of comprehending the love of God and his dedication to people, this is a powerful idea that understands our help and healing as a matter of God’s honor and consistency with the works he has already purposed to perform. Those of us who have difficulty understanding how or why God would go to any lengths to love, heal and free us can see: God has staked himself on us completely.

More later.

Technorati Tags: sin, theology, athanasius, church history

Living in a Body

Resurrection is not the sequel to death.

It is its reversal.

— overheard in a lecture last year

Heroes

We commonlife folks shared worship with Vine and Branches last week. We relaxed, shared a little brie, talked about our lives in Christ and engaged the liturgy.

It was good. It was good just to have that reminder that we are not the only ones doing what we do.

Something I’m trying to get my mind around – should being a presbyter be like any other profession? Is it really like being a professional counselor? Is that any more appropriate than the model of pastor as CEO?

We lit candles for significant (to us) saints at the All Saints Celebration over the weekend. I tried for a few minutes to think of a dead person whose faith and work had impacted me. I could only think of one: Geoffrey Anketel Studdert-Kennedy. I read quite a bit of his poetry while at Oxford, and was struck to find the candor with which his “rough rhymes” expressed and mourned the suffering of the post-WWI era, both of men and of God. He was called “Woodbine Willie” because he (against regulations) entered the trenches with the men on the front lines, handing out Woodbine cigarettes and saying the burial office while covered in muck. He was an early leader also of the Christian Industrial Fellowship – I’ll leave you to suppose what that was all about in 1920s England.

I was struck by something else. I read bits of theology and the history of the ancient Christian church, try to understand the stuff of the original gospel proclamation and how it first came to bear in particular cultural contexts and get excited about that work. I want to be involved in the conversation and do the needful and hard work of faithfully translating the ancient faith into contemporary practice. I want to do that as a presbyter and teacher, looking after people, offering the sacraments, helping them live into and practice God’s vision for their lives as the Body of Christ, and speak healing into dark and empty places.

I’m not sure I’ve yet seen a model of professional ministry that put those things at the top of the job description. I’ll keep giving “traditional church” the benefit of a doubt (I have been, really!), but that doubt is shrinking.

I want to be faithful, but I don’t know in which direction I ought to walk, at least in terms of professional clergydom and denominational polity.

From T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday:

Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

Tim LaHaye feels "disappointed," betrayed

A little bit of justice in the world: Tyndale's publishing a new fiction series founded on an honest and reasoned reading of Revelation, which hold that the book is symbolic of things that were happening in the first century.

Rev. Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind books, called the decision by his publisher "stunning and disappointing" and said he felt betrayed. "They are going to take the money we made for them and promote this nonsense," he said.

Still more:

"The Bible, in particular the Revelation of John, is open to many dramatic readings," said Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard Divinity School. "Unfortunately, some are merely a paste-up of what the Bible actually says, a pulling from various passages to craft a theology that the bulk of New Testament scholars do not support. [Revelation] was a polemic against the corruption, debauchery and greed of the Roman Empire ... meant to be an encouragement for the people who were living under persecution. Christians were being fed to the lions. John was writing in exile, fearful for his life."

Dr. LaHaye said the viewpoint expressed in his books is backed by "300 years of church teaching." But Dr. Cox said dispensationalism was considered heresy in ancient times and suppressed. It re-emerged in the 19th century, thanks to "a New Age-y, mystical type sect in Scotland."

Read it all, courtesy of the Dallas Morning News

christlife : not there yet

I attended the Renovare conference at Asbury with a couple of the guys two weekends ago. It helped me get my bearings on a few things, among them:

The point of discipleship is to become more like Jesus. Not prayer or good works in themselves, but to belong to him and be re-formed in his image. To show justice and mercy like him and effect healing like him, we must live like him.

The spiritual disciplines aren’t meant to be herculean demonstrations of spiritual strength. It’s not like a body building competition. It’s more like going to the gym to get in your cardio workout: it’s maintenance.

Contemplation, for example, is not done for its own sake. It’s a way of relating to Jesus. It’s good and right to go for slow, sustainable change. Fifteen minutes a day of quiet and meditating on something true and right isn’t second best to spending three hours a day. The latter may never be feasible. If it is, great. A balanced Christian life is more important.

Bozo: "The World's Only Mind Reading Dog"

And pretty much still the world's only mind-reading dog

I found this being used as a bookmark in a 1933 bank ledger in the College Archives. See, I do neat things all day. More details on Bozo here.

Windsor Commentary II: Conservatives, Liberals and Gay Theology

As I read and listen to reactions to the Windsor Report given by the various voices on the 'Net (and a few I get to overhear) I am struck by a particular theme: the inability (refusal) to recognize that that not only do people on various sides of these issues have different perspectives, but entirely different worldviews.

Many on the left take for granted that a theology that will pronounce homoerotic relationships as part of God’s creative and redemptive intention for his image-bearers is ultimately an issue of gay liberation. The oppressed are finally being listened to, and that will change things. Let me clarify here that violence against others is always wrong, and that homophobia is wicked and evil. The problem is that the oppressed are being granted epistemological priority: their narrative is now to be super-imposed over everyone else’s, and it will be the overarching story into which every other story fits.

Beware the tyranny of the oppressed: forcing everyone to conform to the (felt, experiential) truth of the oppressed is not a reasonable corrective to the former practice of everyone conforming to the (felt, experiential) truth of the oppressors. What’s more, not everyone buys into the narrative of oppressor/oppressed. While you find elements of liberation in the Christian story, it must be said that classical recapitulation / Christus Victor (freeing the Creation from the principalities and powers and placing it under the headship of Christ) is not the same as post-modern liberation: God-empowered self-actualization over and against those who would keep you down.

I hear often that the decisions at ECUSA’s 2003 General Convention (encouraging the blessing of same-sex unions and confirming the election of Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson to the see of New Hampshire) represent a step forward with the Holy Spirit, and that the Africans (and American conservatives) are asking “us” to step back. Not all steps are forward or backward. I think it’s a step down from the kind of life Christians are intended to live together.

It’s not about scriptural interpretation. It’s about worldview, and whether one considers New Testament sexual ethics to be normative and binding for the Christian Church. I don’t think anyone’s questioning what the NT norms are themselves.

Check out Oliver O’Donovan’s thoughts on the left/right extremes as well as the state of “gay theology” (and see here for the entirety of his essay on the Windsor report):

Nobody reading Resolution 1.10 of Lambeth 1998 – and I am among those who read it sympathetically and appreciatively – could seriously pretend that it was supposed to represent the last word about homosexuality or about the church’s pastoral practice in relation to its homosexual members. It simply set responsible bounds within which we could approve one another’s pastoral practice in good conscience to Scripture and tradition while continuing to explore together a phenomenon of extreme cultural and anthropological complexity. The difficulty the church faces with such an exploration is that left and right wings, in almost equal measure, seem to think that there is nothing to explore. Either Scripture and Tradition have Settled it Once and for All (though how well our phenomena match those that Scripture and tradition addressed is an open question until we have learned to describe our phenomena better); or else Science has Taught us Better, (though no one can quite remember what the scientific experiments were, or what they were supposed to have demonstrated). Our greatest difficulty is that we all follow faithfully the ironic advice of Hilaire Belloc: O let us never, never doubt What nobody is sure about!

If anyone thinks that a prolonged exploration would simply hand a victory to revisionists, let me recall that in 1997 a group of British theologians (“traditionalists” as the press would call them) put some questions, chiefly about theological anthropology, to advocates of the gay cause in the churches – hoping for a reply that would bring to clear expression gay thinking about the gay position and so provide something to discuss. I was among the authors of the so-called “St. Andrew’s Day Statement” – and to the best of my knowledge the questions I and my colleagues then asked have not received the first shred of an answer. The Christian gay movement is not, by and large, a self-theorising movement. For that reason the distinctive experience it wants to attest is often inarticulately expressed, and easily swamped by a well-meaning liberal social agenda of championing all minorities in sight, an agenda which is precisely uninterested in what makes the gay experience different. All this poses a problem for the church, since it means that any possibly helpful pastoral initiative risks signing up, unwittingly perhaps, to a dogmatic revolution. In a world where nothing is clearly explained, all cheques are blank.

(The above emphasis is mine) I’ve read some theology done by the Christian gay movement, and must point out (I don’t think many people know this) that there isn’t a consensus of those thinkers that civil unions, marriages, or “long-term relationships marked by full fidelity” is what homosexual men and women ought to be striving for in church and society. Such arrangements are considered by some to be a product of heterosexist norms and to strive for those is still a way of conforming to the desires of the “oppressor.”

All cheques are indeed blank: can any of these well-heeled, educated, guilty white liberals draw boundaries on what “liberation” ought to mean?

It’s Overcast Today: Elections and the Will of God

The actions and policies of President Bush are not “closer” to the will of God than those of John Kerry. Neither would the opposite be true. Neither of these men is concerned with embodying the reign of God in their decisions, and this is evidenced by the words and actions of both men. Whether or not, then, the reign of Bush or Kerry would be “more Christian,” is a dead question. Neither would be Christian, because only the Reign of YHWH is “Christian.” There is, however, room to discuss whether or not particular policies or actions follow charity and justice. But the role of government can never be seen as a building block or capstone for the mission of the Church.

Remember that the reign of George W. Bush is not the Reign of God. Nor would the Kerry administration have been. As soon as we start using language that allies the reign of any Caesar to that of YHWH, we are guilty of idolatry.

George W. Bush is not “God’s man,” no matter what election he wins. God’s man was and is Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, who came to put to rights everything that went wrong in the Fall of Creation. He, and by extension the Christian Church, are God’s preferred, primary, and quite possibly only means for the redemption of the world. Bush will not put things to rights, and neither would Kerry.