It’s been a crazy, busy week. Most of my writing time has been for lessons, instructions, and sermons. So until tomorrow, here’s a cool “100 Moments in 100 Seconds” in honor of this week’s 100th episode of SHIELD.
On some level, though show has changed a lot, covered a lot of ground in five seasons. But the core cast has been pretty consistent, which has given it some good grounding and stability. Looking forward to The Flash getting the same chance next year.
Yesterday I posted a cover of “Hold Me Jesus,” a Rich Mullins classic. At the same concert, Andrew Osenga also covered one of the songs from Rich’s unfinished album, The Jesus Record. As with some of my favorite music (like “The Truth by Caedmon’s Call), “Hard to Get” is a great use of contrast to capture the truth of Jesus and our loving frustration with things beyond ourselves.
The folks who curate the Ragamuffin Archive have recently released a number of videos from last year’s 20th-year commemoration of the life and death of Rich Mullins. One of my all-time favorite artists, Andrew Osenga, had a few covers posted to the site. Here he is talking about and then singing Rich’s “Hold Me Jesus.”
From a funeral homily for an educator recently posted to First Things on education and “the integrated life”:
Genuine education promotes an integration of life in which the claims of the intellect find a complementary formation of virtue. When these are severed from each other, a couple of things happen. Knowledge is reduced to either sentiment or power, and the aim shifts from forming the good person to producing the well person. Then those entrusted with the hearts and minds of the young squander all their best energy on concerns of health and safety and regulatory compliance. Education deteriorates from the transformational to the transactional and the therapeutic.
But we are unimpressed by this reduction. We want to grasp the whole of reality, mind and will, and invite young and old into that same vision. And this vision is not something we make up; we find it woven in a thousand threads in the vast tapestry of Catholic [and hopefully a more broadly Christian] thought and culture. We learn from it, taking it in deeply, and then we pass it on.
This understanding of wisdom means addressing the whole of the person, and the whole of reality, in an integrated way. Here we are after not just technical training or barren knowledge, but the formation of the personality: mind, will, emotion, spirit, relationships. Anything less is not real education.
But when we try for real education we have in store a breathtaking adventure, not the dry and tedious round of classwork that is so common, but a way of seeing and knowing that opens up the deepest possibilities of existence and gives meaning and focus to all of life. And as the fog clears, we see His face: Christ the Teacher.
Here is the gaudium de veritate of St. Augustine, the joy in the truth. Here is the “stupor” or astonishment of mind that Dante speaks of in the Convivio. And how many here today can personally attest to the transformative power of the Christ-centered invitation to true wisdom, to the integrated life?
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to post some thoughts that hit all around the question of the self and the Christian community. This has been particularly interesting for me during this season of Lent, when much of the “superfluous” is “stripped away” to see the human condition starkly.
I recently mentioned one of the two sermons that I heard this past Sunday, which was the second season of Lent. Before the sermon about wrath, I heard a congregationally-specific sermon about restoration (this in light of things I made some mention of here). I was surprised by how pointed it was (and always positive, which was nice). Using Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians, the speaker encouraged us to “restore gently” those who had gone astray.
I found myself wondering, though, about the full destination of the restoration. I have no doubt that there is something rooted in personal relationship and faith. At the same time, though, I can’t help but feel that we in the contemporary church settle on “restoration” as a matter of program readiness or parish busyness. And while those things definitely overlap with the deeper things of God and Christian community, they are not the true root and core. (Or, as Tozer might say, they are the fruit and not the root).
I found myself thinking of C. S. Lewis’s “Membership,” found in The Weight of Glory. The talk got some great airplay recently in Alan Jacobs’s How to Think (where he wonderfully contrasted it with another Lewis talk in the same collection: “The Inner Ring”). From the first paragraph:
We [Christians] are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest forms of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.
And so whatever else it is, restoration is deeply about membership . . . but a membership that is more significant than monthly dues paid or a card stamped, swiped, or punched. On some level or another, it’s downright mystical (and yet not that mysterious, really).
Throughout the essay, Lewis walks the fine line between self and community, perhaps as two sides of the same coin. Because as much as you might be yourself, you are only truly yourself when you are found in the communion of saints. Lewis asserts:
The very word membership is of Christian origin, but it has been taken over by the world and emptied of all meaning. In any book on logic you may see the expression “members of a class.” It must be most emphatically stated that the items or particulars included in a homogeneous class are almost the reverse of what St. Paul meant by members. By members ([ Greek]) he meant what we should call organs, things essentially different from, and complementary to, one another, things differing not only in structure and function but also in dignity. Thus, in a club, the committee as a whole and the servants as a whole may both properly be regarded as “members”; what we should call the members of the club are merely units. A row of identically dressed and identically trained soldiers set side by side, or a number of citizens listed as voters in a constituency are not members of anything in the Pauline sense. I am afraid that when we describe a man as “a member of the Church” we usually mean nothing Pauline; we mean only that he is a unit— that he is one more specimen of some kind of things as X and Y and Z. How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense), precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself. The mother is not simply a different person from the daughter; she is a different kind of person. The grown-up brother is not simply one unit in the class children; he is a separate estate of the realm. The father and grandfather are almost as different as the cat and the dog. If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure. Its unity is a unity of unlikes, almost of incommensurables.
I have thought of that word, collective, often as I have tried to navigate church life as an adult. The church can be many things to many different people: institution, family, collective, community, body, program, parish. It can be all of these or none of these at a given moment, I suppose. The question for those of us who come together in the name of Jesus is to discern and act upon as full of a picture of the Body of Christ as possible, to be members of one another not just of one other organization.
Next Time: A little more from “Membership”
We are now well into the second full week of the Lenten season. Last week I wrote a bit about the first Sunday of Lent and the two sermons that I heard that day (connecting them with some of my own hopes for the season). According to Robert E. Webber in Ancient-Future Time, the second Sunday of Lent is intended to focus on “the call to deny sin.” This, of course, builds off of the temptation of Jesus from the first week of Lent. After seeing the pioneer and perfecter of faith confront Satan, we, too, are challenged fight back against sin. Webber asserts:
The temptation to sin, to do what we know to be fundamentally wrong, to live a life oriented toward our own self-centeredness, sustains a powerful hold on our lives.
Sin is, all too often, utterly insidious. Which makes taking the time to think and feel through these things so vital for the Christian life.
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One sermon that I heard this past Sunday was the third in series on the “seven deadly sins” (or what fans of Shazam! would call “the seven enemies of man.”). The sermon was rooted in the language of the ancient virtues, which was cool because that’s part of Lewis’s argument in Mere Christianity as well as a key approach taken by many when talking about ethics (in the arena of virtue theory). It’s always good to see connections between the pulpit and the classroom.
It’s a good (but all too rare) thing to find good music that you just have to sit with for a while. That’s the case with this second song from Andrew Peterson’s Resurrection Letters: Prologue ep. Plus it’s a nice nudge as we enter into the second week of the Lenten season.
This week’s DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (besides being the only scripted show for me to watch this week) was a nice, Groundhog’s Day episode that worked well at humanizing one of the “colder” members of the cast. And while the deus ex machina reveal at the end was okay, it was far from necessary. But then the episode’s final scene moving things forward in a completely different direction.
The Flash returns this week, which is good. But it’s also nice to see a character thread from that show speed over to Legends. Here’s the “trailer” for this next week’s episode of Legends, which takes us to yet another moment in time.
Yesterday I posted some reflections on the first Sunday of Lent and how even my own mental picture the Christian season of preparation before Easter might have to change . . . or not.
At the heart of this, as I’ve mentioned in this space before, is the church, the Christian church, calendar. This “calendar” (also called the liturgical calendar) is made up of two major cycles: the Christmas cycle (which includes Advent and Epiphany) and the Easter cycle (which includes Lent and concludes with Pentecost). And while pretty much every Protestant church worth its salt acknowledges “the big two” of Christmas and Easter, many of those same churches have done little to nothing with the remainder of the cycles. From a recent Barna Group survey about the liturgical calendar:
There are reasons for that, of course, many of them (right or wrong) rooted in church history and lived experience. And yet the older I get, the longer I’m around, the more I am drawn to at least some version of the practice. Part of that, I have learned, is a personality thing: something about the need for structure and common language/practice. And while most Baptists are far from “liturgical,” we definitely have our favorite forms of worship.
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I recently came across an organization called the Center for Baptist Renewal, a group “of conservative, evangelical Baptists committed to a retrieval of the Great Tradition of the historic church for the renewal of Baptist faith and practice.” The organization recently posted an article about the benefit of the liturgical calendar for Christian community and practice. It’s a nice summary of the issue. I particularly like this excerpt from the second point, that “everyone has an organizing principle”:
In fact, everyone organizes their worship, and usually in large calendric chunks. Even those who are adamantly opposed to the calendar but also insist (rightly, in my view) on expositional preaching through books of the Bible take time to organize their preaching schedule. Every pastor I’ve ever had, and many of the ones I know personally (but not as a congregant), take annual or semi-annual retreats to pray about and solidify their preaching schedule each year. Sometimes this is simply organizing how one will continue to preach through the same book as the year before; other times it includes deciding which new book or books to preach through in a given season. The point is that everyone has an organizing principle for how they preach, even expositional, book-by-book preachers and teachers. The calendar is not antithetical to this, but is merely one way of providing an organizing schema. The calendar is not used because it is commanded in Scripture; it is used because it helps the church throughout space and time organize its exposition of God’s Word to his people.
So if I seemed a little crotchety in my reflection yesterday, it’s because I’m aiming for something in my own life and practice, trying to put some things in place that can help me as I press on (and particularly as I try to push back on the individualism that seems to have infected so many Christian churches and organizations).
I’ll return to this topic a few times over the next few weeks, I hope. It’s a journey that I’m definitely hoping to learn from.
(image from the Barna Group)
Turns out the first casualty of Lent 2018 was Jesus.
Let me explain.
I heard two high quality sermons on the first Sunday on Lent. On Sunday morning, I heard a great sermon rooted in the prophet’s vision in Isaiah 6. Well-rendered, thoughtful, and an eye on sin and forgiveness (“for I am a man of unclean lips and live among a people of unclean lips”). That night I heard a sermon on the deadly sin of envy (after an Ash Wednesday sermon on pride). Great stuff about a topic rarely spoken about (the Gospel reading, which involved laborers working differing amounts of time for the same wage was worth any price of admission). But it wasn’t quite about Jesus.
Bear with me.
According to Robert E. Webber in Ancient-Future Time, the season of Lent is “a time to travel the road with Jesus toward his death.” This plays out over the five Sunday’s before Palm Sunday with different emphasis (much like each week of Advent focuses on a particular disposition or connection to preparing for the first and second comings of Jesus). “The first Sunday after Ash Wednesday asks us to mark our spirituality by the temptation of Christ,” Webber asserts. Building off of the images of the first and second Adam, Webber continues:
The church fathers saw the temptation as a turning point in the process of reversing the human situation. For here, the fathers tell us, is the exact counterpart to Adam. Adam yielded to the temptation. Christ overcame the temptation . . .
The serpent in the Garden of Eden and the tempter in the wilderness represent the enticement to sin that lies in the very structure of the world itself . . .
Lent is a time to intentionally confront all the ways the first Adam continues to control our lives, to carry these ways to the cross, to let them be crucified with Jesus, and to bury them in the tomb never to rise again.
In light of this, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the approaches to the two sermons I heard on the first Sunday of Lent. The challenge of the two cycles of the Christian calendar, though, is to learn to live in the rhythms of the stories of Jesus. Travel as far back in the Old Testament and as far ahead in the New as we may, we must always come back to the life and love of Jesus. One Sunday, much like one Lenten season, does not make or break anything. But as I’ll explain in tomorrow’s post, there’s something about the Christian calendar that really appeals to me (and to my great hope for a life long in Christian belief and practice.
That or maybe even my own expectations about the Christian life and the Christian calendar have to die a kind of death, too.
(image from goodreads.com)
Space Enough, and Time 