We will not fear though the earth should give way, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea. Psalm 46.2
Continue to Pray
Food, Fire and Light for Haiti
My piece on Craig Miller and his relief work in Haiti is now up on HalogenTV.
Advent, the Fourth Week
This weekend, we had 36 hours of snow and snow and snow. The boys have some nice sled runs carved down the hill behind our house, and Seth even took to riding his snowboard style (pretty well, I must say).
But now we are here, this morning where the pinkish-orange sky rises above Carter’s Mountain and the fiery sun comes to take back more of the whiteness that covers everything. We are here, in the final week of Advent. And I want to touch on one idea that has been hovering with me for some time.
As we all know and as most of us have grown accustomed to saying often, indeed, greed is a problem. Indeed, rampant, thoughtless consumerism plagues us. Yes, we ought resist the lust for more! more! more!
Still…
The very heart of the Good News is reckless generosity. The gospel is immensely powerful, reality-shattering, because it declares a truth so extravagant that it borders on the absurd: God, Creator and Ruler of all, came to us…to us. And came as a squalling, helpless baby…a baby. This moment Bruno Forte describes as the impossible occasion “when the Whole, the All, offers itself to us in the fragment, when the Infinite makes itself little.” Extravagance unbounded.
When the angel came to Mary, he offered a gift, to her and to the world. A gift beyond our wildest dreams. A gift we could never have arranged for on our own. And God gives this gift still…now. This Christmas, in honor of and in the spirit of the Great Gift, I’ll be giving gifts too. I want to give more of my time, myself, my attention and words and prayers and hugs. But also, I’ll be giving two boys a few gifts that are unnecessary, things that make them laugh and jump up and down and run around the room like someone lit a fire to their tail. And I’ll be giving a gift or two to Miska (though less than I’d like this year), gifts that tell her that she is loved and desired and that if I had a kingdom to give away, it would all be hers.
Because I know a King who does have a Kingdom, and we see what he did…
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And I want to give another gift away here, too. This will be our final drawing, so jump in. Scot McKnight has written a wonderful little introduction to the Church’s practices on prayer, Praying with the Church. Here, McKnight offers an overview of the various traditions on prayer and guides us into our own rhythms for following Jesus via prayer. As last week’s book, I think this will be a helpful resource for the new year.
So, leave a comment and a way to contact you – and you will be in the drawing. Per the usual, the deadline is Tuesday night at midnight. Check back here to see if you’ve won.
Advent, the Third Week
We know that there are three comings of the Lord. The third lies between the other two. It is invisible, while the other two are visible. In the first coming, he was seen on earth, dwelling among men; he himself testifies that they saw him and hated him. In the final coming all flesh will see the salvation of our God, and they will look on him who they pierced. The intermediate coming is a hidden one, in it only the elect see the Lord within their own selves, and they are saved. In his first coming our Lord came in our flesh and our weakness; in this middle coming he comes in spirit and power; in the final coming he will be seen in glory and majesty. {St. Bernard of Clairvaux}
Life and mystery, pain and joy, something opening and something closing – do you sense the action all around us? This Advent, we are waiting, but this is an active waiting. The anticipation builds. Like violin strings stretched t
aut, we crane our neck to see what might be coming. We’ve had enough of the muck, enough of the fear or self-pity or selfishness, enough death. We want life. We want death to go, and we want so much for life to come.
And though Jesus is a thousand things, he is this first of all: Life.
Bernard of Clairvaux reminds us that Jesus has come, and indeed, one day Jesus will come again. But Jesus is appearing (adventing) now. God, in Jesus and by the Spirit, is appearing now, all over the place. God appears in a friendship you thought was dead and done. God appears in the child who says, “Daddy, let’s pray for the poor people.” God appears in the form of new courage and fresh hope. God appears when we say we are sorry. God appears when we laugh. Peer deep in the faces you pass. Open your eyes and drink in the sounds and lights and words and smells swirling around you – Life is breaking in. Jesus is appearing.
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This week’s Advent gift will be one of my favorite Eugene Peterson titles, his classic A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. This will be a wonderful read for a new beginning in January, a fresh opportunity to see God appearing.
So, if you want to be in the drawing, post a comment and make sure I have a way to contact you – or check back on Wednesday.
Advent, the Second Week
This is the irrational season when love blooms bright and wild. / Had Mary been filled with reason, there’d have been no room for the child. {Madeleine L’Engle}
I believe that if something (anything) is going to happen, I’d best push and pry to make it so. I take comfort in my rightness, in my well-formed opinions, in knowing when to speak or even when to shut my mouth – but always me knowing (correctly, precisely) the when for either. I think what all this truly means is that I love illusions. I love the bewitching notion that I have a firm grip on the steering wheel of my life, my identity, whatever will come of me – if only I manage better, twist harder, figure another puzzle out.
And then there is Advent.
Was there anything:
~Mary could do to have the Son of God formed in her womb?
~the Roman Empire could do to stop this rival King from arriving?
~Israel could to do to hasten the coming of the Redeemer?
Is there anything, really, that I can do to manage all my chaos?
Doesn’t it seem insanity: to take inventory of all that must be done – all that needs to be tended to, fought for, worked out – and just simply wait? Madeleine was certainly right. In every way, this is a most “irrational season.”
No matter how many ways we turn it, we won’t be able to make sense of God appearing as a fragile, helpless baby. The logic of divinity taking shape in humility will not emerge from any formula or theorem I’m familiar with. With John the Baptist, God speaks from the wilderness, the fringes. With a Cross and Resurrection, God speaks the preposterous and the unimaginable. With his arrival in a filthy manger in the womb of a teenage girl, God holds out the improbably, the ludicrous – and asks us to wait. And believe.
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Last week’s Advent gift (a copy of Touching Wonder) went to Dayna Schoonmaker. Hope you are enjoying it, Dayna.
This week, our gift is super yummy. One of our new Charlottesville friends, Lisa Procter, makes the most delectable scones – and she sells her hand crafted mixes at Queen of Puddings. So, leave a comment here by midnight Tuesday night – and we will have another drawing (managed by the security firm of Wyatt and Seth). The winner will receive a scone mix of your choice. ***Please make sure I have a way to contact you – or check back on Wednesday where I will leave a comment naming the winner.
And I must add, these scones would make wonderful Christmas gifts. They taste fabulous – and the boxes they are packaged in are beautiful. You don’t even need to wrap them. We bought a couple for the boy’s teachers as Christmas gifts (I really hope I didn’t just ruin a surprise).
Advent, the First Week
I stood at the front of the church in Little Rock, Arkansas that Saturday morning, September 20th, 1997. I was breathing heavily, sweating a bit. For three and a half years (long years, Miska would say), we dated. Finally, I got my act together, strapped on my courage and asked Miska if she would take a big leap with me. And now it was happening. I had been waiting so long. She had been waiting so long. The pipe organ swelled with Pachelbel’s Canon in D, the two grand wooden entry doors at the back opened, and…
I have a friend who’s had a truly treacherous past few years. His world came unglued, and the life he has now is nothing he would have imagined. Pain of every sort has stretched his body and mind in unthinkable directions. He has cried. He has almost given up. He has cried some more. But in it all, he has prayed. And waited. He has waited so long. In recent months, glimmers of a new day have trickled in through all the broken pieces. He sits poised, wondering – might there be a hint of life again – waiting, and…
As Advent began yesterday, we stepped into God’s dramatic pause, God’s long and… Advent means “appearing,” and in these weeks, we wait for the celebration of God’s appearing – and we remember that the whole of our lives are in fact a waiting for God’s movement, God’s healing, God’s appearing. In this time, we learn that little of true value comes quickly. Ruin may bear down swiftly, like the wind; but redemption is a long, long work. This is not to say that God lumbers along, turtle-like – just ask Pharaoh who was chasing down Israel in the Red Sea or blind Bartimaeus who longed to be healed whether or not God ever moves immediately, with haste.
However, even when God demonstrates his agility, it is not because God has a sudden whim. God’s prompt, decisive movement rides freely out of the long, long story he has been writing. Pharaoh caught the brunt force, like a hammer dropping, of a God who had been redeeming his people ever since a disaster in a Garden. Bartimaeus first saw the color of the sky and the color of his skin on the day Jesus touched him by the roadside – but God had loved Bartimaeus from his mother’s womb. And Israel, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, cried out, “Hosanna! Son of David!” For hundreds of years, God’s people had waited for the Rescuer to come, the “Son of David.” Now, the crowd gathered, the prophet Jesus made his way into the city – could it be?
And…
Each Monday, we will gather here for a short reflection on Advent, as our way of entering God’s dramatic pause, God’s and… Do join us. And join in.
___
Also, each Monday, I would like to offer an Advent gift – my way of celebrating this time with you and my way of saying “thank you” for reading. This week, I am eager to give away (and tell you about) my friend John Blase’s book Touching Wonder: Recapturing the Awe of Christmas. Christmas books can represent the very worst of the religious publishing industry. Not this book. John is a true storyteller, and his fresh narrative, lively imagination and literary artistry provide a wonderful Advent companion.
If you leave a comment, your name will be thrown in for the drawing for a free copy. You have until midnight on Tuesday, drawing Wednesday morning. If you don’t win, I have two suggestions: (1) buy John’s book – a good gift idea, by the way, and (2) come back next week to for the next gift.
Augustine and The City of God
Last night, I turned the last page on St. Augustine’s City of God, all 1182 pages. Whew.
Augustine and I go way back – he had me write the forward for one of his books. I was happy to oblige, anything for a church father. So I was eager to read his central defining work (with Confessions running a close second).
The City of
God is beefy. If you plan to go in, you best take provisions and gear, you’re going to be on the trail for a while. I won’t offer a full-scale review, partly because I need some space to process the experience and Augustine’s sense of things – and partly because a proper review of City of God (COG) requires a level of energy I can’t seem to muster.
Essentially, Augustine offered a comprehensive vision of the two competing cities, the City of God and the City of Man. These two cities offer us the two orders of society, or realms of human loyalty. I almost said human reality just there, but I think Augustine would take umbrage with that. For him – and this was one of my favorite themes in COG – there is only one reality. Everything else is a non-reality, unreal. So good and evil are not two somewhat equal forces competing for power in the world. Rather, what is real (God, good, the Kingdom of Light) is, through redemption, overwhelming all that is unreal (Satan, evil, the Kingdom of Darkness).
Emerging from the accusation (amid the rubble of Rome) that Christianity – and its opposition to traditional Roman religion/gods – brought down the Empire, Augustine gave a sweeping vision of God’s purposes for the world and how these purposes set the stage for the outworking of human history. He wrote, not primarily as an academic but as a churchman, one who wanted to spur all who would listen on to their “final good” – that place where, whenever we arrive at it, “each [of us] are made happy.”
Here are a few of my favorite excerpts (which I must admit, feels a bit unjust, like bumper-sticker Augustine)
Moreover, if God, by Whom all things were made, is wisdom, as the divine authority and truth have shown, then the true philosopher is a lover of God.
He is the fount of our blessedness, and He is the goal of all our desires…
For our good…is nothing other than to cling to Him…
[I]n comparison with the Creator’s knowledge, the knowledge of the creature is like a kind of evening light. But when our knowledge is directed to the praise and love of the Creator, it dawns and is made morning; and night never falls while the Creator is not forsaken by the creature’s love…And, indeed, the knowledge which created things have of themselves is, so to speak, shadowy until they see themselves in the light of God’s wisdom and, as it were, in relation to the art by which they were made…they know themselves better in God than in themselves…In Him, therefore, they have, as it were, a daylight knowledge, whereas in themselves, they have a twilight knowledge…
In some cases, therefore, there can exist things which are wholly good; but there can never be things which are wholly evil.
The soul, then, draws life from God when it lives well…
For the good make use of this world in order to enjoy God; but the evil, by contrast, wish to make use of God in order to enjoy this world. By striving after more, man is diminished.
[T]he holier a man is, and the fuller of holy desire, so much more abundant is his weeping when he prays.
And a few of the questions I ponder as I walk away from Augustine for a bit (the same age-old debates here, nothing insightful or new):
To what extent was Augustine influenced by versions of Platonism, even as he critiqued Platonism on many fronts? Was his division between soul and body still overdone?
What exactly is the nature of happiness redemption offers in this world (not the world to come)?
In what ways (other than procreation) is orgasmic sexuality good, rightly pleasurable to the senses? To me, Augustine seems to say that any physical enjoyment of sexual acts are inherently results of our inferior fallen state. Could Augustine give more space to the good of sensual pleasure or even to the higher ideal of sex as sacrament?
Why does Augustine seem to go to such great lengths to absolve central Biblical characters from their wrongdoing (humanity even)? And could he achieve the “more spiritual” reading he desires (in some cases) without running quite so roughshod over the Scriptural narrative actually sitting before us?
And finally (cliche though it is): Augustine, what was your deal with women???
Questioning the Sermon
As pastors, if you won’t let God use you to make a new world, through faithful words, then all you can do is service the old one. And that’s no fun. {Walter Brueggemann}
Taking my cue from the Good Bishop Annie, I think it would be a shame indeed to offer trivial sermons about trivial things. The Bible tells a most outrageous story. If it’s true, as I happen to believe it is, then our reality has been redefined; we need new eyes to see our life (and the entire cosmos) in new ways; and – perhaps best of all – hope has truly come, in Jesus.
This means that whenever I go to my work of wading into Scripture’s deep waters, my task is to immerse myself in the Story, to let it up close so that the text’s questions become my questions, so that the characters’ fears and worries and awe find their way into my bones. My aim for the Sunday sermon is not to dumb the text down to a few bullet-points and a poem but rather to open a door where our community can encounter the possibility of a world-made-new.
As I begin to get words on paper for Sunday’s homily, then, I need to wrestle with whether or not my words have any life to them, whether they are faithful to the Story, whether the words have any chance of helping people grapple with God-alive. Here are a few of the sorts of questions I ask to help me discern if I’m meandering in something like the right direction:
Are these
words soaked in the Biblical narrative?
Will these words kindle holy imagination?
Will these words give space for sacred discontent, all the while pointing toward redemption and joy?
Do these words tend to our true questions, the deep questions?
Do these words yield to the gospel’s tensions and mysteries?
Will these words ask us to obey, rather than to merely listen?
Do these words live in the here and now, in the world as it actually is?
Do these words find their life and breath from the Living Word, Jesus – and from the Spirit?
Will these words announce – with grace and with boldness – Jesus as Lord over all?
There are more questions – and better ones, I’m sure – but these are a start.
On Preaching
Write as if you were dying. At the same time assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients…What would you be writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? {annie dillard}
Words matter to me, very much. Ideas matter. Images matter. This trio of convictions probably explains a bit of why my vocation dances around two acts that have much to do with words, ideas and images: writing and preaching. I usually chat about writing here. Lately, I’ve been thinking about preaching.
I don’t think of myse
lf as “a preacher,” at least not in the Huck Finn South sort of way. But I do gladly embrace the old and honorable pastoral practice of immersing myself in the Biblical text in hopes of glimpsing God – and then offering what I see (or what I think I see) to my community of faith. I believe – bet all my marbles on it, in fact – that God’s story is the narrative that is trustworthy and that gives meaning and dignity to my story, yours too.
For me, then, preaching is not about giving a lecture or merely passing along religious information. Nor is it an attempt to whip people up into some devoted fervor. A sermon is far more personal, more engaged, more treacherous and alive and messy than that.
A sermon, a good one anyways, tends first to God – and to us second. We get a whiff of what God has in mind, what kindness or justice or grace God intends – and then we ask ourselves if we have the courage (the faith, you might say) to believe, to obey, to spurn fear or control and dive into the mercy. I continually return to Karl Barth’s reflection on what happened whenever he stood behind the pulpit: “When I look out at the congregation, I realize they are here with one question: Is it true? Can it be true that there is a God who is loving and wise and powerful? Answer that question.”
Here’s a way to discern if we’ve told God’s story well: does it simply sound too good to be true? does it touch a hope so deep that it causes us to tremble at the possibility? do we wonder if it could possibly be true – and is there a certain sense of fear – of doubt – that it might not be? If we encounter that kind of fear and trembling, chances are we’ve gotten somewhere close to the God of the Bible.
Soon, I’ll post a list of other questions I bring to the text, in hopes that my sermons will not “enrage by [their] triviality.”
The Problem with Organized Religion
This week, Wall Street Journal columnist Gary Hammel reflected on “organized religion’s management problem.”
Attempting to offer friendly critique from an outsider, Hammel provided a number of insightful observations. I found his piece intriguing on multiple fronts. First, I just think Hammel is an interesting writer (his phrase “mugged by change” will get some play with me). Second – being a pastor, I hear a good bit about the problem with “organized religion.” In these conversations, often, I’m nodding my head with a strong, “amen, brother (or sister).” Other times, I have this haunting suspicion that we are asking some of the wrong questions and as a result, landing in some of the wrong brier patches. Perhaps that topic will be
for another day…
Hammel had a few encouraging things to say about the church’s influence:
The fact is, society is made more hospitable by every individual who acts as if “do unto others” really was a rule. And contrary to what you might believe, evidence suggests that, on average, “religious people” really are nicer—in practical feed the hungry, clothe the naked, sorts of ways. (And if you’re one of those generous folks, you’re undoubtedly embarrassed by the minority of believers who are quicker to judge than they are to love).
And a few distressing things to say about the church’s current predicament:
Moreover, it’s usually necessary to decapitate the old leadership team before an organization can embark on a new course. In other words, fundamental change in large organizations happens the same way it happens in poorly governed dictatorships—belatedly, infrequently and convulsively. And that’s pathetic. It shouldn’t take the organizational equivalent of a deathbed experience to spur renewal. We need to change the way we change…Over the centuries, religion has become institutionalized, and in the process encrusted with elaborate hierarchies, top-heavy bureaucracies, highly specialized roles and reflexive routines.
I most resonated with his guiding hypothesis: “The problem with organized religion isn’t that it’s too religious, but that it’s too organized.”
My sense of what Hammel means by this (or at least my own conviction that I’m reading back into his words) is not that we are too purposeful or that there should be no visible, flesh-and-bones reality to our faith – commitment to a community in which we embody our faith with others, for instance. Rather, I think Hammel suggests we are too manufactured, too programmed, too full of all our plans and certainties about who we are to be and what we are to do. Our faces are set like flint toward our destination – and we will exert whatever energy, raise whatever funds, pimp whatever value or political cause — in order to get there. If we have always approached things in a particular way and if this particular way affirms how we view the world (whether or not that’s the way the world actually is), then reality-be-damned, off we go (or here we sit, whatever).
And it’s a sham. It isn’t real – religion-faux.
When we follow that path, we lose our imagination. We sacrifice the simple (and essential) Jesus-way of friendship, curiosity, awakened hearts and courageous living, all on the altar of efficiency, safety, power and image.
And Hammel is right – that’s a problem.