John’s Maundy Thursday

Posted on March 28, 2024 by awtraughber

Tonight I had the opportunity to attend a beautiful Tenebrae service at a local church where a dear friend serves on the worship team.  It was a service full of good music, poignant testimonies, and full readings from the Gospel of Mark.  One of the last songs sung was one I hadn’t heard or sung in a very long time: “Lead Me to Calvary,” also called “Lest I Forget Gethsemane.”  It was a fitting way to mark the evening.   Tomorrow I’ll walk up the street for a Good Friday service and then Sunday I’ll celebrate Easter at my own church.

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I did really appreciate the set of readings from the Gospel of Mark.  It was good hearing the narrative from the Last Supper to the burial of Jesus.  As I sat there and listened, I couldn’t help but think it would also be a great thing to do something similar with the Holy Thursday narrative in John.  Many Maundy Thursday services do that, often picking up John’s inclusion of the washing of the disciples’ feet as an act of great significance.  Quick research reminds us that Maundy comes from the same root as our word for “mandate,” which has to do here with Jesus’ clear command to his disciples:

12 When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, “Do you understand what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. 14 If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. 15 For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. 16 Truly, truly, I say to you, a servantis not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. 17 If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.

A little later in John 13 he gets to the “new commandment”:

31 When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. 32 If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and glorify him at once. 33 Little children, yet a little while I am with you. You will seek me, and just as I said to the Jews, so now I also say to you, ‘Where I am going you cannot come.’ 34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. 35 By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Jesus comes back around to it in John 15, after foretelling Peter’s denial and promising the Spirit and talking about vines and vinedressers and branches:

12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command you. 15 No longer do I call you servants,for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you. 17 These things I command you, so that you will love one another.

Where the synoptic gospels are rich in the various moments of Jesus’ final evening before his death, John’s Gospel takes time to dig in, to embrace the obvious moment while also pointing ahead to what is next and to what is beyond.  Thursday evening in John is a long chunk, of course: 5 full chapters, 7 if you go all the way to the crucifixion.  But there are some great twists and turns in John’s account of Jesus’ final discourse and his closing prayer.

Anyway, it’s just a thought.  Lots of churches do things differently in the days leading up to Easter, and John obviously gets good attention in some (probably many) in various and sundry ways.  Definitely something worth thinking about for the future, though.

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Spring Break Photostream

Posted on March 27, 2024 by awtraughber

I’ve spent the last few days over in Fresno, California visiting friends.  Pictures to the right in the photostream for receipts, right?  The pictures are from a Monday afternoon hike to Pincushion Mountain Peak, which is just outside Fresno.  The day was beautiful, the company top notch, and the view from the top was worth it.  I’m still feeling the burn from the trip up, but we made our way down on a different, more gentle route, which was also nice.

Besides that, I found some great used CDs at the Mad Monk and a Frederick Buchner book and a paperback-and-revised copy of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. I finished Rowan William’s Passions of the Soul and made good headway in O’Donavan’s Disappearance of Ethics (whose cover currently appears on the side there ->).  I hope to finish DOE by Easter Sunday.  And I’ve got one more reflection on Varden’s Shattering of Loneliness to put together.

I’m writing this in the A-gate food court at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International airport.  The final leg of my journey looks like it will leave on time, which puts me into HNL in the early evening.  The trip has gone well, though PHX isn’t really the kind of airport you want to have for a longer layover.  Just not many places to sit and relax.  Granted, that’s not what airports are for, but one can dream.

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Remembrance Part Five

Posted on March 22, 2024 by awtraughber

Varden LonelinessOver the weeks of this Lenten season, I’ve tried to do some reflection on successive chapters of Erik Varden’s The Shattering of Loneliness.  The book begins with the call to “remember that we are dust,” which fits perfectly with Ash Wednesday as the beginning of the season.  From there, Varden moves through a selection of other calls to remember: remember you were a slave in Egypt, remember Lot’s wife, and celebrate the Lord’s supper as a way to remember.  Varden’s fifth “remembrance recollection” starts off the morning of the resurrection, when the angels at Jesus’ empty tomb tell the women to remember:

5 And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?6 He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.” (Luke 24:5-7 ESV)

Varden asserts: The proclamation of life’s victory over death is followed immediately by a summons to remember.  The same happens later to the two disciples who unknowingly meet the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus when He basically retells them the Biblical Story through the interpretive lens of His life and mission.  Varden again:

The first mission of the nascent Church was to engage in a prodigious exercise of remembrance.  We can follow it step by step in the Acts and Epistles.  The Hebrew Bible was re-read from start to finish, scoured for sign’s of Jesus’ gospel.  A newness of perspective ensued as the disciples, still rubbing their eyes, reached certainty that Christ had risen from the dead.  It cast its radiance on ancient things, too.  The Easter proclamation brought about a hermeneutic shift that affected knowledge at every level.  Nothing was the same.  Al things had to be recalled, reconsidered, reinterpreted.

Varden chooses a line from the Gospel of John for the title of this chapter: the Counsellor Will Call Everything to Mind.  Why?  Because “to perform this remembrance is to being to live life in the Spirit.”

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This chapter includes one of my overall favorite moments in what I’ve read of Varden so far.  It comes as a quote and a paraphrase from Irenaeus via the Catholic catechism concerning God’s revelation of Himself to humanity:

St. Irenaeus repeatedly speaks of this divine pedagogy using the image of God and man becoming accustomed to one another: ‘the Word of God dwelt in man and became the Son of man in order to accustom man to perceive God and to accustom God to dwell in man, according to the Father’s pleasure.’

Or more simply put, this is Irenaeus’s “notion of God and man getting used to each other.”

I don’t totally track with God having to “get used to us,” but I understand the overall sentiment.  It’s a great summary of the Biblical Story: of a God who wants to dwell with the creation that rebels against Him continually, and yet He will not relent.  And the Holy Spirit, who will “call everything to mind” is key for us as we live in the fifth act of God’s Story.  Perhaps more than any other chapter in Varden’s book, this chapter moves us into the here and now of our day everyday.

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Remembrance Part Four

Posted on March 18, 2024 by awtraughber

Varden LonelinessIn one of two chapters on the theological virtue of faith in Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis encourages his readers to see the battle of faith as being between “faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.”  He is particularly concerned with helping his readers understand that power of mood and the importance of training “the habit of Faith” to combat mood’s power.

At this point in his argument, Lewis asserts that

if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day.  That is why daily prayers and religious readings and church-going are necessary parts of the Christian life.  We have to be continually reminded of what we believe.

“Do not most people simply drift away?” he asks.

Which is why the fourth chapter of Erik Varden’s The Shattering of Loneliness is such an encouraging challenge.  After encouraging readers to remember that they are dust, that they were once slaves in Egypt, and that they should remember Lot’s wife, Varden brings the readers to one “habit of Faith” that most Christians practice regularly (though often at different intervals): Jesus’ “last supper” command to “do this in memory of me.”

In the chapter, Varden begins by “drawing a picture” of the world Christ entered: a world of man’s violence against another.  He writes:

This is the world we live in.  It is the world God came to save.  The world for which Christ suffered was no made-up world.  He had no illusions about it.  He knew what he would suffer on entering Lamech’s territory.  On the night he was betrayed, he anticipated the events that would out him to death.  He did it by means of symbolic action, within the setting of a meal.  He allowed his friends to partake, somehow, of his impending oblation, though the sense of his gestures and words would become clear only much later.

There is much difference, of course between the Catholic and the low-church Protestant view of what is happening every time we reenact and retell the story of that Maundy Thursday meal, where Jesus breaks bread and pours out wine and challenges his disciples to remember as a way of living into the future.  For many of us, we see “communion” through the lens of Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 11, where Paul retells the events of Jesus’ last supper and then writes:

27 So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. 28 Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup. 29 For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves.

I like Varden’s assertion, in my own low-church Protestant way, that “Christ’s performative presence . . . demands a present response” and that “we must live differently now, not proffer past alibis or future conjectures . . . To be worthy is not to be blameless: the Eucharist is not a prize for good behaviour.  To be worthy is to assent to the realization of Christ’s example in my life- to commit to the newness of it.”  I like Varden’s next assertion a lot:

The Lord does not seek instant perfection.  But he requires coherence in the way we live.

Coherence, I think, is a good word for what we strive for (and often fail to achieve in the day-to-day.  I cannot help but think of what James wrote near the beginning of his epistle”

22 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. 23 Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror 24 and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. 25 But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.

Jesus’ command to “do this in memory of me” is not just word spoken; it is also cup poured and bread broken.  It is an almost-living reminder of the hurt and hope of what Christians will celebrate around the world next week.  It is a vital reminder for us as we go through these days.

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Spring Break Scramble

Posted on March 16, 2024 by awtraughber

This last week has gone by in a blur.  That’s to be expected, of course, at the end of a quarter or semester.  The week has been packed with classes and grading and meetings and trying to wrap things up nicely so as to keep my mind off of work for a few days.  I think (hope) that I’ve done a good job preparing for the next two weeks in that way.

But, as you can tell from the lack of posts over this last week, there’s not been a lot of creativity in the day-to-day.  I have been enjoying working my way through O’Donavan’s The Disappearance of Ethics.  And thanks to a random comment from the Franciscan Friars, I’ve finally gotten around to reading Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son.  I finished the story of Joseph in Genesis (and now onto Moses and the Exodus in line with Easter), which has also been encouraging.  So quality input, just not much, if any, output.

I did listen to one interview while grading this past week that I think is worth sharing.  I’ve mentioned Andrew Root before on the site.  He’s quite the prolific writer, so it’s always good to find succinct accounts of his thinking.  Here’s an interview with “Ryan and Brian’s Bible Bistro” that brought out some of the key themes of Root’s work.  Once again, I don’t agree with it all, but there are some things that I think Root is seriously getting right.

I’m hoping to be a little more prolific myself not that the meetings are over and the grades are in.  I’m a little behind on my Shattering of Loneliness reflections.  There are two weeks to go before Easter, which lines up nicely with our break this year.  Hoping that helps me make the most of things, too.

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Remembrance Part Three

Posted on March 9, 2024 by awtraughber

Varden LonelinessPerhaps the most sobering of Erik Varden’s reflections on remembrance in The Shattering of Loneliness comes in the third chapter.  The chapter is centered on Jesus’s command in Luke 17 to “remember Lot’s wife.”  

The command to remember Lot’s wife is set in a long talk from Jesus about “the coming of the kingdom.”  It’s not coming in a way that can be observed.  There will be people pretending to point to it, but they are wrong.  The sign of Noah is given- people aren’t going to realize what’s actually happening in the world around them.  The same with Lot:

28 “It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. 29 But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.

30 “It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. 31 On that day no one who is on the housetop, with possessions inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. 32 Remember Lot’s wife! 33 Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it. (Luke 17 NIV)

Varden uses the language of conversion throughout the book.  By this he does not mean an initial “conversion experience” so much as conversion of life as it is lived over time.  It is, perhaps, a kind of working out of our salvation (reference).  He spends time in the chapter retelling the story of Lot and his wife and brings to bear a few difference approaches to the story: how she turns and looks back even though she has been commanded not to.  And thus she becomes a pillar of salt.  What might that have to do with us today?  How do we engage with the Old Testament story and Jesus’ gloss on this side of both?  How do we keep moving forward instead of pausing and looking back? Varden asserts:

. . . to maintain a forward momentum, we need to be honest enough to discern and unpick our complex motivations; to enquire what arises from our passions, what may stand a chance of being from God; then to enact a prudent, gracious response. 

He goes on to say:

. . .  conversion must be constructed in aspirational, not reactive, terms; as an option for what is good, not against what is thought bad— or dangerous.

So we have and are allowed to use the critical distance of centuries to mindful of how we live in our own time.  Not that we know better or that human nature has changed, but that we have more to draw from.  We have the Spirit.  But as Lent reminds us, we are never far from temptation, whether to look back or to give up or to give in.  Varden challenges his readers to be careful when addressing the temptations and passions that could lead us to turn around when we ought not:

The Desert Fathers, though innocent of Freud, insisted on the interconnectedness of the passions: the most libidinal may voice what is really a spiritual malady, which is why it is futile to combat them in isolation.

I mentioned that this chapter was the most sobering of the book.  Part of that is, of course, the nature of the Genesis story and Jesus’ capturing of it.  The other part is how Varden employs Father Sergius, a story by Leo Tolstoy.  I don’t want to say more about the story because of how embedded the story is into the argument that Varden has been building.  It is his most effective use of a cultural artifact in the book (and it is one among many).  It reminds us, in the end, of this sobering truth:

Apparent success must never seduce us into thinking we are beyond temptation’s reach . . . It is never to late to turn into a pillar of salt.

And so we remember Lot’s wife.

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“The Rare Chance”

Posted on March 7, 2024 by awtraughber

CathedralSomething I appreciate about the thinking of Seth Godin is that he finds a way to blend the possible and the practical.  And he crafts some great one-liners in the process.  A recent post of his, “On Building a Cathedral,” is a great example of this.

He begins with a simple premise:

If you’re in need of a gathering place, a dry, functional, centrally located facility for your folks to meet, a cathedral is probably way more than you need. It’s far more expensive to build and maintain and not optimal in delivering what’s required.

But what if this building needs to fill other functions as well?

And then he gives a short list of “perhaps…” statements to get you thinking.

He closes by turning things around using one of his most common approaches: talking about the tendency of organizations to “race to the bottom” in order to succeed.  And then he says this:

The thing we’re working on is a rare chance to contribute something far more than the least we could get away with.

Such a great quality: to call you out and to inspire you at the same time.  How great it would be if we all could contribute “more than the least we could get away with.”

(image of Saint Paul’s from businessinsider.com)

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Reading in Lent

Posted on March 5, 2024 by awtraughber

Great DivorceOne of the practices I’m trying to hold to during the Lenten season is the reading of shorter books.  Small thing, I know, but it feels somehow fitting.  The season started as I finished up Zena Hitz’s Philosophers Look at Religious Life, which was far from a tome.  From there, I made my way (back) to The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis.  It’s a book that I have read a few times over the years and think about often.  It’s not the kind of book one read’s flippantly.   Till We Have Faces feels much the same way, though The Great Divorce has more payoff throughout the book.

Funny enough, the preface of The Great Divorce is almost worth the whole price of admission.  He starts with the thought that we can’t have it all, that life will ultimately boil down to some kind of either-or choice that is not a fallacy.  Lewis writes:

You cannot take all luggage with you on all journeys; on one journey even your right hand and your right eye may be among the things you have to leave behind.

A nice nod to the Sermon on the Mount there.  At the end of the same paragraph Lewis writes:

Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.

Which feels like a key Lewisian thought in a nutshell.

There are so many great moments in the story’s 146 pages.  So many honest questions asked and sobering responses given.  I hate to take too many of them out of context, which the narrator’s guide is also concerned about, it seems.  But here’s one of my all-time favorite conversation/quotes from the book (which hopefully doesn’t suffer from a lack of context here):

‘Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.’

‘The saying is almost too hard for us.’

‘Ah, but it’s cruel not to say it.  They that know have grown afraid to speak.  That is why sorrows that used to purify now only fester.’

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Remembrance Part Two.Five

Posted on March 4, 2024 by awtraughber

Last week as I was thinking the second thing to remember from Erik Varden (remember you were once a slave in Egypt), a song from long ago came to mind.  A bit of context from an odd source first, though.

A couple of weeks ago, Russell Moore posted a fun reflection on the contemporary Christian music industry (inspired by a recent book about the topic, which I really should check out).  In the article, Moore traces his agreements and disagreements with the author’s attempt to trace cultural trends through the lens of CCM from the 1970s til today.  As others have pointed out, it is fun seeing what artists Moore mentions, fun seeing what overlap is or isn’t there.  One of the best moments from the piece:

Contemporary Christian music, flawed as any human endeavor is, was a positive force in my life. The music of Amy Grant and Rich Mullins went with me through an adolescent spiritual crisis and are probably part of the reason I came out of it more Christian than I went in. I’m amazed by how much of my incipient theology—convictions I teach to this day—was taught to me by Petra lyrics. I have never, not once in 30 years of ministry, preached Romans 6 without hearing their “Dead Reckoning” song in my mind.

I learned how to read biblical narrative Christologically, how to understand parable and poetry and paradox, from the lyrics of Michael Card. I might be embarrassed to tell you how often, in the middle of dark times, what strengthens me are words like “Where there is faith / There is a voice calling, keep walking / You’re not alone in this world” or “I’ll be a witness in the silences when words are not enough” or “God is in control / We will choose to remember and never be shaken.” None of that may be rock-and-roll, but I will die believing that God gave that to me.

I’m always a little surprised in reflections on CCM that don’t mention Steven Curtis Chapman, whose music really has spanned decades.  His most recent album, Still, is a quality piece of work that picks up on some of SCC’s long-term themes while also folding in some greater eschatological hope.

All of this to say that SCC’s “Remember Your Chains” came to mind as I was thinking about Varden’s challenge to us to remember what God has saved us from.  This clip of SCC singing the song looks and feels like it’s from another world, which, I suppose, it is.  The song is from his Heaven in the Real World album, which was the first “brand new” SCC album I ever bought, I think.  If the hairstyle and fashion throw you off, just close your eyes and listen to the song and remember.

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Remembrance Part Two

Posted on March 2, 2024 by awtraughber

Varden LonelinessFor me, most Lenten seasons start with the “bang” of Ash Wednesday but quickly fall into a slough of messy hopes and habits.  That’s a cost of being interested in the church calendar as a member of a church that doesn’t do much with the calendar.  But I’m also not a big “give things up” kind of guy. Which brings me to this comment by Erik Valden in the chapter of The Shattering of Loneliness that deals with the “dying daily” pointed at in Ash Wednesday:

A monastery is a specialist environment designed to support perseverance over time.  It is a place where the depths can be faced in Jesus Christ.  It stands by its very existence as an extended hand of friendship to all who have looked into those depths and found them fearful.  Monks and nuns hope, by their lives, by their prayers, to invite fellow seekers to look up, to find their hearts touched by a deep remembrance of God’s original caress.  To remember this is to awaken to hope.  And to find comfort the does not deceive.

And so a comfort and a challenge: the comfort that somewhere Christians are able to live into a way of life that can be difficulty to grasp and seemingly impossible to maintain, and the challenge that it’s possible to do such a thing outside of the rhythms of a monastery.

The church can and should, of course, be a picture of this reality, too.  Something about perseverance was, perhaps, part of the draw and the reason to stay.  From the book’s introduction, Varden writes:

The Church became for me an inspirer of remembrance.  It permitted me to read my banal, sometimes squalid life into a narrative of redemption that not only reaches back to time’s beginning but remembers forward, to eternity.  To stay within that narrative’s crux is to hear, sometimes with terrifying clarity, the desolate cries of mankind; to hear, too, the rasping voice of evil; and that, not vaguely round about, but in one’s heart.  One can only persevere in such hearing by attending, at the same time, to another, discreet but ordering voice that speaks “It is accomplished!”  It manages, by harmonic genius, to fathom the violent cries of “Crucify!’ and the angelic ‘Hosanna!’ in a single chord that rises out of dissonance towards unheard beauty.

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The second “remembrance” that Varden writes about it the Old Testament to “remember you were a slave in Egypt.”  He spends much of the chapter’s early section in Deuteronomy while also reminding us of our own live:

Insofar as I enter the logic and flow of biblical remembrance, I am made aware that I, who today may have attained some degree of freedom, was not always free.  I am asked not to forget how the transition came about, to see my desert journey as a process of redemption. Only by recalling what I was  can I acknowledge what, by grace, I have become.  Forgetfulness threatens to envelop us, however.  The smog of perceived entitlement obscures grateful retrospect.  It happened in Canaan, where Israel, God’s vassal, developed, soon enough, a notion of itself as landowner.  It easily happens in each of our lives.  We claim rights where grace is at work, and so are made ungracious.  We inhale the chief intoxicant of spiritual life: self-righteous ingratitude.  

Varden makes the connection, then with Jesus’ command to remember via the Last Supper, which is a retelling of the Exodus event that gave the Hebrew people their freedom.  He reminds the reader that Paul in his letters would often remind his readers of his own past and of the constant call to the freedom that Christ brings (and that we in our immaturity too often try to thwart).  Before moving into the story of Mary of Egypt, Varden concludes:

Each of us will have his or her own story of deliverance.  We should not make a fetish of it, nor proclaim it indiscriminately, but we are not to forget.  I may claim citizenship of Jerusalem above (cf. Philippians 3:20); but if I forget where I came from, the wastelands I have passed through, I forfeit my right to call it ‘home’.  For to remain in that place of light, I must know I am a guest brought in out of darkness.  I must learn to respond to grace with grace, to take nothing for granted, and so able to receive all as gift.

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