“The devil has had all the best liturgies.”

Sometime in the near future, a few of my friends and I will be reviewing James K.A. Smith‘s newest book, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works. (I’m rather excited about this as we are three church planters from different parts of the US – Los Angeles, Syracuse, and Burlington, Vermont – with different communities, different contexts, and different backgrounds. Through this diversity, however, we have some strong commonalities, which should make for an interesting time of review and discussion.) It is his second volume in what will eventually be a trilogy aptly named “Cultural Liturgies.” The first volume, Desiring The Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, gave feet to a lot of things I was noticing and working on at the time of its publication. I’ve been anticipating this volume, and now that I have read some of it, haven’t been disappointed in his picking up of where he left off.

Below is a short excerpt that scratches at some of the more central elements of this follow up volume. Without going into all the details, which will happen at a later time and date, may it be suffice to say that I think he is rather correct in his assessment. Having spent my entire life in the Evangelical, conservative Christian world – those who have done the same will know what I mean – his indictment of the rampant intellectualism found at the core of much Christian discipleship is spot on. To borrow from his initial volume, we have become a people with “big heads and tiny bodies” meaning we have overemphasized, in our Protestant, Enlightenment tradition, on the intellect, leaving affect, imagination, and our bodily habits/desires rather untouched. As this excerpt illuminates, the devil has not done likewise.

Having fallen prey to the intellectualism of modernity, both Christian worship and Christian pedagogy have underestimated the importance of this body/story nexus – this inextricable link between imagination, narrative, and embodiment – thereby forgetting the ancient Christian sacramental wisdom carried in the historic practices of Christian worship and the embodied legacies of spiritual and monastic disciplines. Failing to appreciate this, we have neglected formational resources that are indigenous to the Christian tradition, as it were; as a result,we have too often pursued flawed models of discipleship and Christian formation that have focused on convincing the intellect rather than recruiting the imagination. Moreover, because of this neglect and our stunted anthropology, we have failed to recognize the degree and extent to which secular liturgies do implicitly capitalize on our embodied penchant for storied formation. This becomes a way to account for Christian assimilation to consumerism, nationalism, and various stripes of egoism. These isms have had all the best embodied stories. The devil has had all the best liturgies. (p. 39-40)

I hope you’ll join my friends and I as we dive into this important work. See you then.

Humility, Place, and the Everyday: Lessons in Mission from John the Baptizer: Lent Day 7

This morning’s Lenten reading was the entirety of Luke 3. Here we find Luke’s version concerning the beginnings of John the Baptizer’s public ministry. I was struck by its missional attributes of humility, place, and the everyday.

Humility

John takes up some prominent space in the gospels. He has an angelic proclamation to his parents in preparation for his birth. Zacharias, his father was a priest, which made him known in their region. And his mother, Elizabeth, was Mary’s cousin. He even had his own group of followers, disciples, living and learning with him. If someone was looking for an impressive CV, you wouldn’t have to look much further beyond John.

Yet when it comes to wielding this recognition and authority, John deflects to Jesus. For the sake of mission, John understands his role as one pointing to Jesus. This comes to a head when he is asked if he is indeed “the Christ.” “No, but he is coming and he is mightier than I.” Personal limitations were well-known to him.

This stood out to me because I know I am a competitive person. Henri Nouwen says of our current culture,

We are living in a world where even the most intimate relationships have become part of competition and rivalry.

How true and frequent this is. Unfortunately, it happens within Christian community – read: family – and puts mission at a stand still.

It takes humility to know that we have a role within the family of God. We are not all called to be hands. No, some of us are called to be feet. We have different skill sets, giftings, and personalities, that together allow for the mission of God to flourish.

When we give into power and pride, we often assume roles that we have no part in taking. We bad-mouth, become overly critical, and, typically, ragingly jealous. I wonder how badly John wanted to say, “Yes” to the crowds’ question of him being Christ.

Humility isn’t merely a private posture; its effects are communal as we either live into humble love or arrogant power with others.

I wonder how often we assume the role of Christ – in our own lives or the lives of others – when we should humbly point beyond ourselves to Jesus and his unifying mission.

Place

John had an astute understanding of the role of place. It wasn’t by coincidence that he was meeting people and baptizing them in the Jordan River. The Jordan had (has) a special place in the social imagination and memory of the Jewish people. It was the geographic boundary the Israelites crossed over as they entered into the Promised Land. Found in the wilderness, John called people to repentance and baptism for the forgiveness of their sins. Now, we shouldn’t think of this as personal salvation, but as a renewed call to be the community of people they were meant to be. And this would have been obvious to the people there as they knew how place was intimately linked to themselves and their story.

John evokes a dual call to both coming judgment and hope by placing himself in the wilderness and baptizing in the Jordan. It was this rootedness within his place that allowed him to enter the social imagination and memory of his people. He didn’t just know his role, his people, and his story. Rather, they all combined with his knowledge of place to make one coherent proclamation.

With his humble call to the One Coming After Him, he offered this hope and called into being a picture of (finally) entering into the true Promised Land. Through his recapitulation of the ancient Israelites’ dealings in the wilderness, he was calling people to a life of justice and peace. It began with an understanding of the role of place in the mind of his people. From there, he called them into the continuing mission of God.

I wonder how we might understand place in our own contexts and by doing so tap into the social imagination and memory of the people around us as we join God in his mission.

The Everyday

I have found over and over again how enamored people are with the glamorous and the spectacular. We like things done big and done well. We’d rather make a huge splash than tiny ripples.

I’ve heard many times of peoples’ dreams of going big. People chase after the title, the organization, the complex social issue. Within the Church world, I have heard many people say they want the title of Pastor, the Homeless Shelter non-profit organization, and that they’re going to stop the social issue of human trafficking.

We tend to chase after the grandiose while missing out on the everyday. We reach for the stars, but forget the dirt we’re standing in. We’d rather flirt with the universal and reject the particular.

This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but I think we often lose sight of where God has us now in lieu of pursuing something else. If we don’t start with the small, we will have a much, much more difficult time attaining the character and skill required for the large.

This was a temptation for John’s listeners as they heard and saw ancient words coming true before them. Their longings were finally being met and now the show could get started. Let’s do it big and do it now.

Our participation in the mission of God, however, always begins where we are in the everyday. 

John reminds us of this when he tells his questioners to start with themselves in the regularity of the everyday. “If you have two tunics, give one of them to someone who has none.” To the tax collectors, he says, “Collect no more than what you’ve been ordered to.” To the soldiers, he says, “Don’t take any money by force; be happy with your wages.”

N.T Wright says,

What we discover at this point is that the sorting-out process begins here and now. We’ve come to hear about the big picture, about the whole world being put to rights. But we are brought down to earth with a bump by the questions people are asking and the answers they’re receiving. People ask: ‘What are we to do?’ Answer: ‘Straighten your lives out in the simplest, most direct way.’

And by doing so, they would begin to be the people they were created to be with Jesus as their Christ.

I wonder what would happen if we began to cultivate eyes to see and ears to hear God’s missional movement in the everyday.

Connecting the Dots

I have found that these three qualities intersect and overlap in mission. Often it is our lack of humility that pushes us into seeking after the grandiose. This seeking often results in a relegation of our everyday and our place as we yearn for the prideful position, organization, or eradication of the social ill. It takes humility to realize our placedness and to begin there by seeking God’s voice and movement. I think John was on to something as he deliberately prodded his community into humility, place, and the everyday.

May we do the same as we participate in God’s mission.

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Other posts in this Lent series:

Moving Beyond Immediate (and) Affirmation or Why I Will Be Blogging Through Lent

“Divine Sorrow” and Remembering: Ash Wednesday

Longings, Presence, and Vulnerability: Day 2 of Lent

Being Led by the Gentle Voice of God: A Notebook and 3 Questions: Day 3 of Lent

Lent Around the Blogosphere: 10 Links: Day 4 of Lent

First Sunday of Lent: A Prayer

Psalm 91 and Cliche: Day 5 of Lent

Community and Prayer: Henri Nouwen on Pushing Through Individualism Via Communal Prayer: Day 6 of Lent

Community and Prayer: Henri Nouwen on Pushing Through Individualism Via Communal Prayer: Day 6 of Lent

The other week my good friend Dan posted about how the missional movement will survive into the future. I think he is spot on in his pushing us away from individualism and into community.

Individualism is running rampant in our culture and the Church has fallen prey to its tendencies. We have lost vital connections between salvation and community. We push people into evangelistic practices all alone. The list goes on.

One area I have seen this individualism run free is in prayer. As with many areas, we have studies and programs describing and analyzing prayer which fills our informational warehouses. Yet when it comes to learning through imitation, we have produced anemic lives of prayer. As I’ve said before, many people intellectually agree and yearn for justice, but don’t know how to engage in it because they’ve never seen a community faithfully practice it. I think the same is true regarding prayer: many of us have never had a community patiently and persistently model, lead, and invite us into prayer. We know we need to live lives of prayer, but we get stuck in the gulf between “book” knowledge on prayer and real life, hearing with our ears, resounding in our souls prayer.

We need these communal rhythms to enrich and guide our everyday individual ways of life. And vice versa.

Our lack of communal prayer has left us bereft of any individual prayer. And our lack of individual prayer has left us shortsighted in the need for communal prayer. The relationship is cyclical.

This seems especially true in many of our current models of Church where entertainment is our mode of being and doing. Prayer is often a bewildering thing, riddled with emotion, and, at times, seemingly fruitless. Sometimes, it rattles us into a deepening sense of God’s absence. It takes time, honesty, and vulnerability. Let’s be honest: it isn’t always the most attractive thing.

Yet, it is what connects us as a “waiting community.”  “Prayer is the language of the Christian community” says Henri Nouwen. “Prayer is not one of the many things the community does. Rather, it is its very being…But when prayer is no longer its primary concern, and when its many activities are no longer seen and experienced as part of prayer itself, the community quickly degenerates into a club with a common cause but no common vocation.”

Prayer – both communal and individual – is the essence of community and mission.

Enough of me. Here is an extended quote from Henri Nouwen discussing the intimate connection between communal and individual prayer:

Much that has been said about prayer thus far might create the false impression that prayer is a private, individualistic and nearly secret affair, so personal and so deeply hidden in our internal life that it can hardly be talked about, even less be shared. The opposite is true. Just because prayer is so personal and arises from the center of our life, it is to be shared with others. Just because prayer is the most precious expression of being human, it needs constant support and protection of the community to grow and flower. Just because prayer is our highest vocation needing careful attention and faithful perseverance, we cannot allow it to be a private affair. Just because prayer asks for a patient waiting in expectation, it should never become the most individualistic expression of the most individualistic emotion, but should always remain embedded in the life of the community of which we are a part.

Prayer as a hopeful and joyful waiting for God is a really unhuman or superhuman task unless we realize that we do not have to wait alone. In the community of faith we can find the climate and the support to sustain and deepen our prayer and we are enabled to constantly look forward beyond our immediate and often narrowing private needs. The community of faith offers the protective boundaries within which we can listen to our deepest longings, not to indulge in morbid introspection, but to find our God to whom they point. In the community of faith we can listen to our feelings of loneliness, to our desires for an embrace or a kiss, to our sexual urges, to our cravings for sympathy, compassion or just a good word; also to our search for insight and to our hope for companionship and friendship. In the community of faith we can listen to all these longings and find the courage, not to avoid them or cover them up, but to confront them in order to discern God’s presence in their midst. There we can affirm each other in our waiting and also in the realization that in the center of our waiting the first intimacy with God is found. There we can be patiently together and let the suffering of each day convert our illusions into the prayer of a contrite people. The community of faith is indeed the climate and source of all prayer.

What does your community do in an effort to be “the climate and source of all prayer”?

How does this translate into your individual life and then back into the community?

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Other posts in this Lent series:

Moving Beyond Immediate (and) Affirmation or Why I Will Be Blogging Through Lent

“Divine Sorrow” and Remembering: Ash Wednesday

Longings, Presence, and Vulnerability: Day 2 of Lent

Being Led by the Gentle Voice of God: A Notebook and 3 Questions: Day 3 of Lent

Lent Around the Blogosphere: 10 Links: Day 4 of Lent

First Sunday of Lent: A Prayer

Psalm 91 and Cliche: Day 5 of Lent

Being Led by the Gentle Voice of God: A Notebook and 3 Questions: Day 3 of Lent

If there is any hope for the Church in the future, it will be hope for a poor Church in which its leaders are willing to be led.

- Henri Nouwen in The Name of Jesus

This morning’s Lenten readings were from Luke 2. It is a passage often recited and heard during Christmas; not a usual story that comes to mind during Lent.

The focus zeroed in on the shepherds watching their flocks and their response to the message given to them by the angels. N.T. Wright describes this episode in way I hadn’t thought about before. In many ways, it corresponds to what I wrote about yesterday regarding longings, presence, and vulnerability.

Shepherds were considered as lowly people in the time of Jesus. Not many people listened to them or respected them. The only ones who trusted them enough to actually follow after them were their sheep. Trustingly, the shepherds’ sheep take their cue from where their leader goes. Traipsing through the arid climate of the Mediterranean, the sheep end up at water and grass only after following the footsteps of their shepherd.

Ironically, the shepherds in Luke 2 are presented with a message where the tables are turned and they are asked to follow. Their destination? A feeding trough where animals eat. The ones who do the leading to sustenance are  now to do the following. The ones who lead are now being called to the vulnerable state of being led.

“So we have to be sheep, now, do we? Why is that?” says Wright of the shepherds. “Back comes the answer, sung to music the like of which you’d never imagined before: ‘The great Shepherd himself has been born! The King is here, and you are his sheep, his people! Come and find him!’”

And off they go to find him as they were told. Instead of giving into the social voices of segregation and second-class citizenship, they followed the gentle voice of God.

Wright asks us, “Pause and pray about the quiet messages you get from time to time; perhaps not angels singing, but a soft whisper that tells you to go somewhere unexpected, to do something you hadn’t planned, to visit someone you were previously thinking about.”

In a world of competing voices, how do you posture yourself to hear God’s voice? What practices help you cultivate an attention to the presence of God?

One of the practices I have incorporated for some time now is the carrying around of my little notebook.

As you can tell from the duct tape, I always have it in my pack pocket regardless of where I am. If it is a trip to the grocery store, all day at work, on family trips, at other peoples’ homes, it doesn’t matter. I have learned God is always present, so I need to be attentive to hearing his voice where ever and when ever. And I’ve found this to be true as I have had to stop and write down thoughts, remembrances, people’s names, and a host of other things in a host of different places. As Nouwen continues,

In short, they [Christians] have to say ‘no’ to the secular world and proclaim in unambiguous terms that the incarnation of God’s Word, through whom all things came into being, has made even the smallest event of human history into Kairos, that is, an opportunity to be led deeper into the heart of Christ. The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained – through prayer, study, and careful analysis – to manifest the divine event of God’s saving work in the midst of the many seemingly random events of their time.

Theological reflection is reflecting on the painful and joyful realities of every day with the mind of Jesus and thereby raising human consciousness to the knowledge of God’s gentle guidance.

Writing things down helps me remember what I believe God is saying to me. If I don’t, I tend to forget it rather quickly. Writing things down is also helpful in recalling what God said a day, a week, a month, or even a year prior. I always date every book and every day’s page, so I can easily maneuver back and forth between the present and the past for the sake of the future. I don’t write things down just for the sake of writing them down; no, I write things down so I know where I am being led instead of venturing out on my own. It is a book of action, not just memory.

Within this notebook, I have a practice I learned from my friend Ben. I ask three questions in the morning:

Father, what are we going to do together today?

Is there anything I will miss or need to remember that you need to tell me?

Are there any people I need to connect with who aren’t on my schedule?

These questions have given me a posture and a practice of being attentive through listening for and to God. I don’t always write an “answer” to each question and what I write isn’t always perfect. What they do allow for, however, is open space for my longings and presence to be readjusted by Jesus’ voice leading me. It is then my call to follow through with what he is saying. After all, the basis of discipleship revolves around the questions of “What is God saying to me?” and its follow-up, “What am I going to do about it?”.

What practices do you incorporate for listening to the voice of God?

Are there things you are denying yourself in order to create open space to hear God more clearly?

I’d love to hear as we learn together.

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Other posts in this Lent series:

Moving Beyond Immediate (and) Affirmation or Why I Will Be Blogging Through Lent

“Divine Sorrow” and Remembering: Ash Wednesday

Longings, Presence, and Vulnerability: Day 2 of Lent

The Awakening of Hope: Why We Practice a Common Faith by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove – A Review

Ancient.

Tradition.

Monastic.

These are words most of us in our postmodern, post-Christian, post-everything society do not want to entertain. Frankly, we’d all rather focus on, well, that which entertains. Many of us do. And, unfortunately, many churches do as well.

This is why I am thankful for Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. His works remind us of our handed-down-ness. We haven’t made up Christianity and the church. It has been handed down to us as a gift for us to receive. The cultural winds that blow and swirl around us are always tempered by the rootedness of our faith.

The good news is that God has already given us all that we need to enjoy the life we were made for in Jesus Christ. For every new sign of hope, there is ancient wisdom to help us interpret how a new thing can be rooted in God’s old, old story. For every fresh wind, there is a rudder to lead us on toward the beloved community of God’s kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven.

With this wisdom in mind, Wilson-Hartgrove takes us on a journey through his unconventional catechism. Rather than beginning with orthodoxy (beliefs), he aims at orthopraxy (practices) through asking a series of “Why?” questions. His hope is that through this trail of questions and embodied practices, we might reengage with the ancient story and “inspire hope in our time and ask what convictions undergird a way of life that makes such witness possible.” As he states, “This is a book about why. Why do people who follow Jesus do the things we do?”. The result is that the dividing wall between belief and practice will begin to crumble as we see orthodoxy and orthopraxy as one and the same: true belief is true practice.

The chapters flow from essential thought-provoking question to essential thought-provoking question. They are the following:

• Why We Eat Together
• Why We Fast
• Why We Make Promises
• Why it Matters Where We Live
• Why We Live Together
• Why We Would Rather Die Than Kill
• Why We Share Good News

Each of these questions gets examined in real life. This book is not an idealistic utopian vision. Rather, it is a picture of the hope emanating from actual communities living actual life together.

It is messy.

It is difficult.

And yet it is hopeful.

It is hopeful because the accounts given take us beyond merely showing up on a Sunday morning. Notice: none of the questions dealt with have anything to do with our behaviors on Sunday mornings. At least not directly. What Wilson-Hartgrove is doing is bringing our attention to our collective life as the people of God and what it is that the Church has been doing since the time of Jesus. Is there a purpose behind this? What is he trying to point out to us? I’ll leave that to you once you read it.

It is also an “awakening of hope” due the very fact that these practices are actually being practiced by real people. For those of us who have wandered and wondered if there is truly more out there, this book opens up the imagination in a way that says, “You too can do this.” And, further, “You can do this with others. You were made to do this with others.” This is not another example of an individualistic pietism. It is subtitled “Why We Practice a Common Faith” because our faith is a community-creating one in which we share things in common. We are disciples who live under common disciplines.

Overall, I recommend this book to those seeking an embodied spirituality and faith, both those who have been within the Church for some time and those who haven’t or aren’t. The story out of which these practices flow is found on every page illuminating us of what and who it is that push us into these communal realities. The chapter “Why We Would Rather Die Than Kill” was especially poignant, challenging, and yet encouraging for me as I’ve grown up in the conservative Christian realm where being pro-life is a prerequisite, but a consistent ethic of non-violence is often an afterthought. Filtering his position through the resurrection of Jesus, he wonders if Jesus didn’t inaugurate a new way of life that dethrones violence as the answer. Did not Jesus image “a God who would rather die in love than guarantee justice by the threat of violence”? Tough questions with implications worth wrestling with.

The book didn’t come by itself. It’s partner is a series of videos brilliantly done by The Work of the People. Their work always results in a broadening and deepening of the imagination through both content and visual beauty. It is no different with the people and stories presented in this DVD. You will hear from ordinary people being and doing extraordinary things alongside others in the messiness of regular life. If you are tempted to get the book alone, do not. The DVD and book intertwine and bring out subtle yet profound aspects that each by itself cannot.

Get this book and video. Gather with others and engage with their material. Experiment with the practices. Embody them. I pray you find your community awakening hope.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the author and/or publisher through the Speakeasy blogging book review network. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR,Part 255.

Reinhold Niebuhr on Entertainment Driven Churches…in 1927

There has been ample evidence demonstrating the steady decline of the Western church as we continue to push into a post-Christendom society. Many factors have been qualified and quantified as many individuals, organizations, and churches have sought to revitalize the existing Church by calling into question its current ideas and their resulting practices.

One such critique has been the ever-increasing entertainment quality of the today’s church. Surely, this has emerged from both the individualism and consumerism so rampant in the Western church today. Rather than the church being a community living as a family centered on Jesus in all areas, there are many examples of practices that point to the need for distracting entertainment as the unifying factor. Questions like, “Does the preacher give vibrant messages?”, “Is the music contemporary?”, “Is there a chance I’ll win a new car if I show up on Easter?” point to the reality of needing to consume things which will keep my attention above all else, particularly the Spirit.

Here is an extended quote from Reinhold Niebuhr that caught my attention as I was skimming through his book Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Keep in mind this was written in 1927.

I wonder why it is that so many of the churches which go in for vaudeville programs and the hip-hip-hooray type of religious services should belong to the Methodist and Baptist denominations. The vulgarities of the stunt preacher are hardly compatible with either the robust spiritual vitality or the puritan traditions of the more evangelistic churches. Perhaps the phenomenon of which I speak is due merely to the size of the two denominations. They may have more showmen simply because they are big enough to have more leaders of all varieties. Certainly no church surpasses the Methodist in the number of men who posses real social passion and imagination. Nor are the old emotionally warm and naively orthodox preachers wanting in either church.

Nevertheless there is a growing tendency toward stunt services in both denominations. Perhaps it represents the strategy of denominational and congregational organisms which are too much alive to accept the fate of innocuous desuetude, which has befallen some other churches. Finding the masses, which they once attracted by genuine religious emotion, less inclined to seek satisfaction in religion, they maintain themselves by offering such goods in entertainment and social life as the people seem to desire.

When the naive enthusiasms of those generations, among whom religion is an emotional experience and not a social tradition, begin to cool, the churches which serve the new generations must either express religious feeling through devotion to moral and aesthetic values or they must substitute a baser emotionalism for the most religious feeling. Perhaps the prevalence of cheap theatricality among the churches of our great democracy is a sign of the fact that the masses in America have lost the capacity for unreflective and exuberant religious feeling before they could acquire the kind of religion which is closely integrated with the values of culture and art.

There is something pathetic about the effort of the churches to capture these spiritually vacuous multitudes by resort to any device which may intrigue their vagrant fancies. But it may not represent a total loss. The entertainment they offer may be vulgar, but it is not vicious, and without them the people might find satisfaction in something even cheaper.

Imitate Jesus? Only in His Cross: An Excerpt from John Howard Yoder

Before drawing any affirmative conclusions let us first note the absence of the concept of imitation as a general pastoral or moral guideline. There is in the New Testament no Franciscan glorification of barefoot itinerancy. Even when Paul argues the case for celibacy, it does not occur to him to appeal to the example of Jesus. Even when Paul explains his own predilection for self-support there is no appeal to Jesus’ years as a village artisan. Even when the apostle argues strongly the case for his teaching authority, there is no appeal to the rabbinic ministry of Jesus. Jesus’ trade as a carpenter, his association with fishermen, and his choice of illustrations from the life of the sower and the shepherd have throughout Christian history given momentum to the romantic glorification of the handcrafts and the rural life; but there is none of this in the New Testament. It testifies throughout to the life and mission of a church going intentionally into the cities in full knowledge of the conflicts which awaited believers there. That the concept of imitation is not applied by the New Testament at some those points where Franciscan and romantic devotion has tried most piously to apply it, is all the more powerfully a demonstration of how fundamental the thought of participation in the suffering of Christ is when the New Testament church sees it as guiding and explaining her attitude to the powers of the world. Only at one point, only on one subject – but then consistently, universally – is Jesus our example: in his cross. 

John Howard Yoder in The Politics of Jesus

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Prayer for Lent

Here is a beautiful prayer for Lent by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. If you have never read any of his books, you need to. His ideas and practices written about during his imprisoning and eventual death at the hands of the Nazis has inspired and taught many, many people. Regardless of whether you are familiar with his works or not, I hope the Spirit uses this prayer as you pray it. (Thanks Christine Sine for originally posting this at her blog Godspace.)

I Cannot Do This Alone

O God, early in the morning I cry to you.

Help me to pray

And to concentrate my thoughts on you;

I cannot do this alone.

In me there is darkness,

But with you there is light;

I am lonely, but you do not leave me;

I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help;

I am restless, but with you there is peace.

In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;

I do not understand your ways,

But you know the way for me….

Restore me to liberty,

And enable me to live now

That I may answer before you and before men.

Lord whatever this day may bring,

Your name be praised.

Amen

Taking a Posture of a Mother and Father: Paul in 1 Thessalonians 2

Last night I had the privilege of having a hand in dedicating 3 children from our community to God, each other, and in a very real way, the onlooking world. We’d been planning on having this event for awhile now and, thankfully, our lectionary texts for the day proved to be invaluable.

The text I decided to preach on was found in 1 Thessalonians 2:1-12. Here we find Paul describing his life-on-life approach to founding a community of disciples centering their lives on, around, and in Jesus, also known as a church. He comes to them as one looking to proclaim the kingdom of God brought about by the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. He does this, however, not through seminars, classes, street preaching, or questionnaires, but through giving his life over to them. Words alone will not suffice; he must meld his life with theirs and embody or incarnate the message he is attempting to bring to them. This is because it is not simply a hodge podge of words or some mythical story. No, he is presenting to them Jesus.

Here we find the idea of posture through Paul’s metaphor of coming to them as both a mother and father.

As a mother, Paul comes to this community opening himself up in love for the sake of them. Picture a mother nursing her child: it is an image of love and self-giving for the betterment of the child. It is a depriving of herself. It is a posture of weakness, not in a pejorative sense, but in a sense of sacrifice and, ultimately, love. It is a posture of invitation that seeks out the other with open arms.

And Paul continues to push our imaginations by claiming to also have come as a father. He came to them under the pretense that he would labor and work in order to not be a burden upon them. He was “exhorting and encouraging and imploring each one of [them] you” because he saw the need for their growth. As a disciple himself, he had to be taught what living life like and in Jesus was about. He was pushed and shaped and formed and now he was seeking to do the same. Yet again we see the love and tender care that he employs here. He wasn’t a burden, he wasn’t a hypocrite; he took on the posture of challenge and enveloped it with the posture of invitation he embodied/incarnated as a mother.

And, again, where did Paul learn all of this? He learned this from being a disciple (the Greek actually means learner) of Jesus. Jesus knew that his posture towards others would be the means by which he would influence. Like a mother, He called children to himself and used parables involving children to provoke our redemptive images of God and ourselves. Yet he pushed his followers to a fuller and more holistic way of life: a life within his new creation as his kingdom unfolds and they become the humans they were supposed to be.   If you look at the gospels, you can see that it was his embodiment of love (his posture of invitation and challenge) that powerfully formed people; his message typically pushed people away. So, we see it was his actual person/being that “attracted” people to himself, so they could understand his message. In other words, they saw how to live his message long before they could articulate his message.

And I believe this is what Paul is causing us to recall. He didn’t come up with this stuff on his own. No, he learned it and it was for the “kingdom and [God's] glory.” He brings to our attention the earthiness of our faith in that we don’t have to look very far to see how Jesus was and is: simply look to a loving mother and father. He reminds us that our lives, our practicing resurrection, must be lived in a posture that depicts what we believe. We have been called into the kingdom of God, which demands not a mere set of beliefs, but a life that interlocks and intermingles with the lives of everyone around us. In our culture, we have become good at speaking words (demonstrating what we think we know), but not incarnating words (demonstrating what we actually believe). We must be patiently postured in the midst of our family, friends, and neighbors in order to articulate our message.

Perhaps if others haven’t wondered more about our faith it is because we haven’t postured ourselves in love for God’s kingdom and glory.

“This is Discipling” (video)

If you watch one video on here, please watch this one. This resonates with me on many levels. I won’t say much, just this: the content of this video is what is needed.

Thoughts?