Count me among those interested in what a banjo-less Mumford & Sons sounds like. The band just released their first single from the new album, Wilder Mind. You can check out that new song, “Believe,” below. It builds well, though the lyrics might seem a bit slight. Still, it’s a nice and resonant plea. The album drops in May.
Author N. D. Wilson recently gave an interview for DRTV’s “Above the Paygrade” show. It’s a good thirty minutes and is time well spent for those who like to think faith, the world, and books. I especially like what he has to say about “stories as catechism,” which is a great rendering of what a number of other authors have asserted over the years. His writing is definitely different, which I think is good. It’s a little more dense than other things written for kids and teenagers, I think. And he definitely writes what he preaches. Take some time to check out the interview. Don’t let the intro music scare you off!
A song appropriate for the end of the week.
From the Gospel of John (English Standard Version from biblegateway.com):
After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.
Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.” But he answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him,“See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”
A lot going on in this passage, this Wednesday’s Gospel reading for Lent. The strange practice at the pool of Bethesda, the compassion of Jesus, the ambiguous actions of the healed man, the religious leaders starting their opposition to Jesus, the Son’s articulation of His connection with the Father. I also found the evening prayers for Wednesday night quite fitting to the topic of the week.
O God, you so loved the world that you gave your only-begotten Son to reconcile earth with heaven: Grant that we, loving you above all things, may love our friends in you, and our enemies for your sake . . .
and
O God, you manifest in your servants the signs of your presence: Send forth upon us the spirit of love, that in companionship with one another your abounding grace may increase among . . .
Amen and amen.
The system, then, is broken. Love is removed from the heart of the communal life. Malfunction, something worse than normal wear and tear, sets in, things rubbing the wrong way, making things worse in the long run. So what to do with disordered love and malfunction not repented of? Well, there’s only one thing really. Since the body of Christ in the here and now is flesh and blood, and because we too often refuse to follow the Spirit’s lead to repentance, we are forced to use flesh and blood to keep things running. We must use one another to make up for what is lacking, as band-aids, as spare parts, as a kind of compensation. And because there is still something in us that hopes for unity and maturity and love, we buy into what seems like the necessary scenario. We allow ourselves to be used and eventually start using others ourselves. We’ll call this level of the breakdown instrumentalisation, a term used by Samuel Kimbrell in Friendship as Sacred Knowing, which I hope to say more about next week.
When I shared this model with some co-workers, this was the level that got the most push-back, mostly based on the notion that the body of Christ was made so that we could make up for what others lack. I understand that and even agree with it to an extent. When some things stop working, our bodies learn to adjust. We learn to make-do with one kidney or missing teeth. Our spines learn to adjust when our wallets in our back pockets get too big. But you want health for your body when it is possible. That’s what Paul seemed to be going for in Ephesians. Sure, you might need a hand and arm to help your balance when your two feet aren’t enough, but you don’t turn your arm into a perpetual third leg.
We have gotten too good at, too used to, using one another. As Kimbrell states, it is a way of impersonal (not interpersonal) communication and community that doesn’t reflect the nature and love of God much at all. And because we’re too afraid of what might happen if the machine, the community, stopped working, that we keep things going and grow in bitterness and resentment and then turn it into some odd form of spiritual (de)formation.
We have gotten too good at not listening to our bodies, the hints and nudges that tell us that something is not right. It’s true for the human body as well as for the relationships that form the body of Christ. We would do well and be wise to learn to listen again. If we don’t, we’ll turn the body into a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. And we all know how that ended.
From Alan Jacobs’ The Narnian, a biography of C. S. Lewis:
I have already noted that [Lewis’s] education and his experience had combined to stifle his imaginative side; he seems to have been determined, at this stage of his life, to extinguish it altogether– as though (again) he would be Loki’s accomplice in the slaying of Balder. And he fully knew that Balder was moribund at best. Writing to Leo Baker in September 1920, he said “I am more worried by what goes on inside me: my imagination seems to have died: where there used to be pictures that were bright, at least to me, there is now nothing but trivialities and worries of the outer life– I go round and round on the same subjects which are always those I least want to think about.” And yet it does not seem to occur to him that his imagination may have been suffering as a result of choices that he himself was making.
And so “where two or three are gathered” and their loves are out of order, there begins the breakdown of the body of believers. This disordered love leads to a real problem that could have catastrophic results. Let’s call this malfunction.
Malfunction in a community or relationship is not necessarily the only cause of a problem, though. There is also basic wear and tear. The simple fact is that things used often wear down. Things get torn down bit by bit by use. That’s actually to be expected. Wear and tear are signs that things are happening. And the response one should have to wear and tear is prayer for renewal. Wear and tear is an opportunity for rest and recreation.
The best response to disordered loves is repentance (see the messages of the Old Testament prophets and Jesus’ message to the church in Ephesus found in Revelation). Repentance in organizations and systems can be hard to come by because of they are often more “progressive” in nature: mistakes are just part of a “learning curve.” But the call to repentance remains. If we cannot be called back to the better and right way of relating and growing together, we will find ourselves in a system that no longer works. The soda machine no longer takes your money. The snack machine no longer lets you choose the option you most want. The copying machine doesn’t staple correctly. The speaker system has a reverb in it. And no matter how many times you put in the flat dollar, the correct change, the right instructions, the thing you most want to happen can’t or won’t. Then frustration begets frustration. Negativity spreads. Expectations sour. Going back to Paul, here there is no unity, no fulness, no being held together. Here there is nit-picking and childishness and a dozen things daily to keep us from doing what needs to be done in order to be what we were made for. And unless the malfunction is not met with repentance, something worse is on the way. We’ll get to the third and final level of the breakdown tomorrow.
And so the apostle Paul assumed that “building up the body” had something to do with growing up together, Christian and Christian, growing up into Jesus, the body’s head, and that sometimes each part isn’t “working properly.” Why does that happen? Why does a body not work well, work rightly? There are probably as many reasons for that as there are days in a year, but I’d like to focus on one that has to do with something Augustine said well. Something about ordering love.
Early on in his book On Christian Teaching, Augustine writes concerning “rightly ordered love” and asserts that proper way of relating to others means loving God for His own sake and then loving others and self for God’s own sake (for we and they are His creations). Consider [italics mine]:
The person who lives a just and holy life is one who is a sound judge of these things. He is also a person who has ordered his love, so that he does not love what it is wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more), or love two things equally if one of them should be loved either less or more than the other, or love things either more or less if they should be loved equally. No sinner, qua sinner, should be loved; every human being, qua human being, should be loved on God’s account; and God should be loved for himself. And if God is to be loved more than any human being, each person should love God more than he loves himself. Likewise, another human being should be loved more than our own bodies, because all these things are to be loved on account of God whereas another person can enjoy God together with us in a way in which the body cannot . . .
Of all those who are capable of enjoying God together with us, we love some whom we are helping, and some who are helping us; some whose help we need and some whose needs we are meeting; some to whom we give no benefit and some by whom we do not expect any benefit to be given to us. But it should be our desire that they all love God together with us, and all the help that we give to or receive from them must be related to this end.
We see the original picture of this in the Old Testament command to love God with all of our heart, soul, and might and then also to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Jesus also casts a sense of order and priority into our presuppositions when he tells those following him to seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness first above other things. The Gospel and letters of John are replete with commands and nudges about loving one another in response to the love of God.
When we (and I mean ‘I’ here, too) love rightly, God for his own sake and others for God’s sake, we (I) will strive to bring others in on it. That probably makes the most sense in the context of the local church, but I think it’s true of all Christian relationships at their best. When we (I) don’t love rightly, things get out of order and start to break down. Or, as Paul might put it: being the body of Christ means making intentional effort “to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”
Disordered loves results in a body where each part isn’t working properly, and I’ll call that malfunction. More on that tomorrow.
A few years ago I (somewhat grudgingly) took the StrengthsFinder test for work. Of the five strength themes, connectedness, empathy, and relator surprised me the least. Input was a nice way to label what had become my renewed appetite for reading and learning. It was the top theme, though, that struck me funny: strategic. According to the debrief, those with this theme “create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.” If this is a true strength of mine, it has only manifested itself in adulthood, primarily in my time as a teacher.
These last few years have led me to be something of a systems-thinker (small-town variety). No real formal training in it. More of a feel-it-as-I-go thing. Of particular interest to me as a Christian, though, has been the way Christians relate and do (or don’t do) things in community. This has been especially true as I find myself in different positions of “leadership.” A few weeks ago, while digesting things from Augustine and the Gospel of John and a couple of other sources that I will cite over the next few days, I finally put together a theory about what often frustrates me most about the trend I see in relationships, cultures, and organizations. I characterize it as a kind of unnecessary and damaging breakdown. So four of this week’s posts will deal with the issue organizational dysfunction from a place of faith.
A few days after I shared my thoughts with some of my co-workers, I back-doored myself into a pertinent passage from Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus that has new significance for me. I was reading the passage because it is the source of “speak the truth in love,” which is something that I don’t do well at all. Here’s the text, Ephesians 4:11-16 [ESV], which I’ll use as a “through-line” in my thoughts this week:
11 And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, 13 until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, 14 so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. 15 Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, 16 from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
Tomorrow’s title: Out of Order. Some of it, probably most of it, you will have heard before and better. But it’s definitely something I’ve been working through that I’d like to share.
We’re just over a month away from the new Death Cab for Cutie album, Kintsugi. Once again Ben Gibbard and company do a great job of taking sobering lyrics with interesting musical compositions. Here’s the video for the first single, “Black Sun.”
You can check out the official lyric video to “No Room in Frame,” another song from the album, here. The link also includes some backstory for the album.
Space Enough, and Time 