Sarah Brooke (daughter at A&M... reminder: Katie is the oldest and don't forget Michael!!) is coming home this Friday... Spring Break... WOOHOO!!!!
So much converges to make Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s poem, “Above All, Trust in the Slow Work of God,” relevant and meaningful to where I am (and where we are) in this season of transformation. (Not only is there our focus on becoming Emotionally Healthy and spiritually mature, but there's Spring and Lenten Scriptures/images [including Jesus' Passover focus in John’s Gospel on vines and branches and our Vinedresser God]…
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown,
something new.
Yet, it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
-- that is to say, grace --
and circumstances
acting on your own good will
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser.
Amen.
Engaging my “Protestant Rosary” (see previous post)… and praying the Lord’s Prayer as I get to the central cross in my lanyard of beads and knots has invited me to see the Prayer itself as a walk through the crucifix…
“Our Father, who art in Heaven,
Hallowed (honored and blessed and regarded as Holy) be your Name (and character)…
[here, my finger traces the head of Christ – recalling Heaven and Christ’s coming from the Father]
“Thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done on Earth (or “in Earth”… something we all are)
[here, my finger makes its way to Christ’s feet – as His feet touched ground and brought the Father’s will to earth, even so, I am asking that God’s will touch ground in and through me]
as in Heaven”…
[my finger makes its way back up to the head and Heaven]
“Give us this day, our daily bread/manna” (or “the bread we need for today”)…
[here, my finger makes its way up to the one hand of Christ… as I ask for Him to “give,” I imagine his hand open to me and gifting]
“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against
us” (or “Forgive us
our [past] sins as we walk as those living
and forgiving under
the Reign of
Your Grace”)…
[here, my finger traces the heart of Christ – the source of His love and mercy and Grace and forgiveness]
“And lead us not into [future] temptation, but deliver us from Evil and the Evil One…”
[here, my finger traces his other hand… as I ask him to “lead” me/us, I imagine taking His hand outstretched hand so that he can guide me/us into my/our future]
“For thine is the Kingdom, Power and Glory forever. Amen.”
[over time, I have found my finger retracing its “walk” through the cross: for thine is the Kingdom (head), the Power (on “earth”), and the Glory (from hand to hand)]
In these ways, the Lord’s prayer is a cross of sorts… or a “cross walk” in which we are about a certain “sign of the cross” as we pray it…
Don’t know if you saw it or not (above), as well: that the Prayer is also a walk through space and time: bridging Heaven (God/Father) to Earth (us humans)… and spanning present, past and future.
Whether any of this “works” for you or not is not nearly my concern as my hope that you are about some regular engagement of this perfect prayer from our Lord… and finding the ways it lives in you… and you live in it..
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
A dream realized: not just getting to meet Ken Medema, but having him engage one of my messages in song.
Ralph Mather (a member of the Crockett congregation I once served) shared the story of how, while he was growing up, he and a group of his friends would tease an old Civil War veteren. Illiterate, but too proud to admit it. Ralph and his friends would occasionally throw a book his way to see what he “thought” about it. Pride had him always coming up with some kind of commentary.
On one occasion they threw a Bible the old man's way. Day's later, they asked him what he thought of it.
"Oh, that old book," the man exclaimed. "It's just like all the rest: in the end, they get married and live happy ever after."
"In the end, they get married and live happy ever after": no better a summary could be given to the book of Revelation and the Sacred Romance which is the Gospel.
Sadly, though, we lost our claim on this great ending... and its claim on us... "The reason we have such a hard time resisting our other lovers and living from the heart is we think that this is as good as it gets... At a heart level, most of us have our doubts about the next chapter." (John Eldredge)
One night a father saw a light beneath the door of his son's bedroom. Wondering what his son was doing at such a late hour, he went to the door and heard the boy saying, "ifyou only knew what I know. If you only knew what I know." The next day the boy told his father what was happening. The boy was reading a wild west thriller and had gotten toward the middle of the book where the plot was getting thicker and darker and the hero was being outrageously abused and disgraced. The villain, winning at every turn was gloating over his triumph. When the boy couldn't stand it any longer, he turned to the last page to see how the story was going to turn out. There he saw the hero gloriously vindicated and the villain suitably punished. He went back to the middle of the story. But now, instead of agonizing, he was rejoicing in the midst of the dark plot because he knew the outcome in advance: "If you only knew what I know! If you only knew what I know!" (Phil Bamhart, quoted by Rev. Tim Bruester, FUMC, Oh, yes, we’ve got to keep the end before us… We’ve got to find a way to tell our souls and the world around us – over and over again: “If you only knew what I knew!”… to tell our souls over and over again:"I am a child of eternity."…
Sometimes I wake, and lo, I have forgot,
And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!
My soul that was at rest now resteth not,
For I am with myself and not with thee;
Truth seems a blind moon in a glaring morn,
Where nothing is but sick-heart vanity.
Oh, thou who knowest! Save thy child forlorn.
—Geo. MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul
Yes, it is not that easy… And, for such reasons, we’ll need to take a good, long and hard look at what the Ancients of our faith have called the “Means of Grace” – Holy Habits which help us to recollect… and be re-collected by the truths of this Sacred Romance. (Coming this Summer!)
Along this very lines, Peter Kreeft writes: “Our pictures of Heaven simply do not move us; they arc not moving pictures. It is this aesthetic failure rather than intellectual or moral failures in our pictures of Heaven and of God that threatens faith most potently today. Our pictures of Heaven are dull, platitudinous and syrupy; therefore, so is our faith, our hope, and our love of Heaven ... It doesn't matter whether it's a dull lie or a dull truth. Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith, just as indifference, not hate, is the strongest enemy of love. (Peter Kreeft, Everything You Wanted to Know About Heaven)
(To quote him: “something in my heart says, "For how long? " I mean a 100,000 years? A couple 100,000years? I mean I like worship, maybe as much as the next guy. But, forever ever? Heaven is an unending church service? That sounds like Hell to me... Church is fine, but it doesn 't take your breath away. A weekend in 
“Life is what happens where you’re busy making other plans.” Yeah, right! But what about when you’re sick – neither busy nor living!??!?!
Okay, so here, on the other side of some kind of bug, is the plan… It’s a plan that I was actually going to convey during worship through this last week’s teaching handout (see banner, above):
1) conclude “Sacred Romance” (SR) series this last weekend (2/15)with message on “Living on Heaven’s Shores”
2) defer what was originally slated to be the last message in the SR series on how we can and should live as “Resident Aliens” (that is, how we can live as those in this world but not of it)... defer it until this Summer when we talk about “The ‘Means of Grace’ [prayer, Bible study, etc] as the Means of Keeping It All Alive”
3) commence Lenten series on “Emotionally Healthy Church” this coming Sunday the 22nd (while Ken Medema is with us)… with a keynote question of “do you really want to get well?”
Your head spinning, too? Or, is it just the vestiges of this bug?
With the [now additional] adjustment that this last Sunday’s conclusion now needs to become a blog posting (coming soon!), I am pretty well thinking that’s what we’re going to do…
At least, that’s the plan… and I’m sticking to it…
provided I don’t get sick…
and provided there’s not a hurricane…
and provided Jesus doesn’t come bustin’ in any moment… (Maranatha!)
and provided…
Just got back from preaching at a “Homecoming/Revival” service at a congregation I formerly served in
So good to catch up and reminisce.
As a way of speaking where I am in my own ministry… and as a way of speaking about the real paradox the Church faces in this age of “Post-Christendom,” as many are calling it – this age in which the Church and the Gospel are not the nucleus around which our culture revolves; I shared a most compelling image that was first presented to me by Emergent Church guru, Brian McLaren.
The image comes in the wake of torrential rains associated with the landfall of Hurricane Mitch in
Comments McLaren: “Change is happening constantly. But when a lot of change is concentrated in a short amount of time, structures that used to serve become tourist attractions. And, the maps that used to accurately reflect reality don’t reflect reality anymore. And then you have to start adventuring off the map.”
The implications for the Church are obvious to me: living in an era of unprecedented change, the “geography” of our culture has changed. If the church is to remain an effective agent of God in bridging humans and God (as well as the members of the human community), we are going to have to acknowledge the shifts; to accept that some features of the old “map” are no longer relevant; to admit that the bridge may need to be moved or changed; and to affirm that more than we are attached to any specific bridge (no matter how effective it’s been in the past), we are committed to bridge-building that is relevant to current conditions! In other words, we’ll need to find ways to make the timeless Gospel relevant to a new day and age—without compromising the essential qualities and principles of that Gospel! To fail to do so is to set ourselves up as objects of curiosity for future generations much like the cathedrals of
Effective bridges, you see, are not only true and faithful in concept but are also seated at the “right” places —touching ground at precise points of existing need and dislocation.
Ultimately, as I shared with my friends in
Frankly, I am very discontent to sit around and hope that they’ll finally see things our way and come to us. Frankly, I believe (and I believe Jesus and Paul and the Saints believe) that, so long as you don’t compromise the Gospel and its timeless principles and laws of life, there is nothing we should not change in style and method to reach those outside for Christ!
Like
I have no doubt that the greatest roadblock to believing in the God affirmed by Christians: how a loving, all-present, and all-powerful Deity could tolerate pain and suffering. It’s an issue, if not the issue at the heart of this week’s focus on “A Maverick of a God.”A small group study on EPIC (a sister work by John Eldredge, the author of The Sacred Romance) provoked one teen to produce the following video about “The Entrance of Evil” in that Story in which we find ourselves. It’s worth a watch for the ways it captures and conveys the interplay of foci from the previous two posts: there’s an adversary in our Story… and there are ways in which this adversary, like other elements of our “meta-narrative” finds its way into our lesser stories and the Arts.
(Note, as well, what I said earlier about the White Witch [from Disney’s first Narnia film], a main focus of the second half of this video: namely, the fact that she’s not ugly or repulsive in appearance and that she offers something so tasty as Turkish Delight. It speaks of the real ways that Evil can deceive and seduce. It’s very much in touch with Paul, writing in 2 Cor. 11:17: that “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.”)
“…we need to hold the creeds in one hand
and our favorite forms of art in the other.”
--John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance
It’s a basis for this sermon series being so filled with and complimented by film clips and my recommending movies for various age groups:
What we are talking about here goes far beyond entertainment, though. It was, in fact, the basis for the conversion of C.S. Lewis to Christianity. While Lewis’ art form of choice was mythology, it was nonetheless his conversations with J.R.R. Tolkien about his favorite Myths that led to his embracing Christ and Christianity.
In a letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves, Lewis recounts a watershed conversation between he and Tolkien and Hugo Dyson on the famed “Addison’s Walk” on the grounds of
"I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ--in Christianity... what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn't mind it at all: again if I met the idea the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself ... I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god . . . similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho' I could not say in cold prose "what it meant". Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened...."
-- C.S.Lewis to Arthur Greeves, 18 October 1931, in
They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis
to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963), p, 427.
For Lewis, like Tolkien, then, the Gospel was a “True Myth” – God’s historic fulfillment of all the truths embedded in the lesser stories, myths, and even movies composed by men.
Of course, the words “myth” and “Gospel” in the same sentence can be offensive and treatening to some – as, indeed, they would have been for me a few years ago. “Myth” connoted, in these earlier years, fantasy and fantastical stories disconnected from reality. To associate the Gospel with “myth” would have sent me reeling… and had me disconnecting from such a teacher/preacher. “Why, them’s fightin’ words, Preacher!,” I can hear someone out there saying.
But, here me out… or maybe hear Lewis out – as I think he might say it best:
[t]he heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. … God is more than god, not less: Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about "parallels" and "pagan Christs": they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic?
--C.S. Lewis, "Myth Became Fact," in God in the Dock
“He has set eternity in our hearts” (Ecclesiates 3:11)
“The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands…
Their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.”
(Psalms 19:1,4)
And, across the ages, sensitive spirits have sought
to define the stirrings of their hearts
and contain the voice of the Heavens
in story, in song, in art.
But, their's were only dim echoes and shadows.
The Real, I mean THE REAL—
Word and Truth and Very Spirit of God—
Could never be captured or confined or contained.
So, in the midst of frustration—His… and ours—
God spoke the Word into our lives.
But, as always happens when He speaks,
That Word was active and alive
And lived and breathed and walked among us.
So that, seeing the Truth enfleshed and risen,
Our hearts saw the Source of all stirring
And our Souls, the Voice of the Heavens.
And still, my Soul craving the Heaven’s voice,
I go to the movies and the lesser fictions,
heart stirring…
And, I go to the Bible to understand why.
O come, Thou Author and Perfecter,
Fulfillment of every truthful story,
And write my story,
Perfect my part in Your greater play.
And carry me beyond the “title page” of this world!
—A Lost Sheep
The kingdom of darkness was far more real to her than the presence of God…
The woman who called herself “A Lost Sheep’’ finally gained some measure of freedom. She was sitting in church one Sunday four years after she wrote her desperate prayer when she sensed God’s leading to write His response to her. This is what she wrote:
—Love, God
(Neil Anderson, The Bondage Breaker, p. 17, 28)
As we make our way into this series on "The Sacred Romance," my heart is drawn to the words of a favorite mentor, Henri Nouwen from a sermon he gave in 1991. (Time does not permit to tell you more about Nouwen... and all the ways he's spoken to me through the years. Alas, I see another post [or two... or three... ] coming!)
I would like to speak to you about the spiritual life as the life of the beloved. As a member of a community of people with mental disabilities, I have learned a lot from people with disabilities about what it means to be the beloved. Let me start by telling you that many of the people that I live with hear voices that tell them that they are no good, that they are a problem, that they are a burden, that they are a failure. They hear a voice that keeps saying, "If you want to be loved, you had better prove that you are worth loving. You must show it."--from the “Life of the Beloved,”
Henri Nouwen, May 17, 1991
Over the course of the last 10 years, several books have had a tremendous impact on my throughts and feelings about the ideals that surround (at least, for me) discipleship and the Gospel and Church life. (See related blog posting, October 18.) Two of these books will be the bases of what I consider to be among the most important discussions of our life together… and our entering into a new chapter in our personal and corporate lives at Strawbridge.
The first of these books, The Sacred Romance (by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge), will be the basis of a sermon series by the same name (to be presented between January 4 and February 22). While there’s a need to be critical of aspects of its discussion (as I believe there is with any and all books and discussions and teachings), "Sacred Romance" has done more than any other book I have read to assist the Gospel in making that “longest journey” which is the “18 inches from head to heart.” I’ll share this coming Sunday, for example, about how the book was part of a bigger move of the Holy Spirit to convert my relationship with the Gospel and Jesus Christ from a mostly academic/intellectual one to a more holistic (and balanced, I believe) engagement of mind and heart and soul and being. Breathtaking it is (or should be) for us to consider that we – you, I – are His cherished beloved… at the heart of Jesus’ Passion!
The second of these books (which will inform our focus during Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Palm Sunday) is Peter Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Church. (A companion, follow-up, well worth reading, has a more personal, less corporate focus and is entitled Emotionally Healthy Spirituality.) I first heard Scazzero at a Beeson event in
[I’m already anticipating the ways this Lenten series will synergize with a 40-Day prayer vigil focused on the principles of being emotionally healthy disciples and an emotionally healthy congregation – a vigil which will lead us to some kind of “sacred assembly” whereat we’ll all have a chance to leave baggage behind and begin a new and fuller chapter in our lives. Don’t worry: more details coming!]
Enough for now... It’s sufficient, though:
Yes, "heart matters" in discipleship: it matters that our hearts are engaged by the Gospel... and it matters that our hearts are on the way to becoming pure and whole. Yes, the "clarification of our hearts" is very much a focus of the first third of the coming year!
I pray that you are looking forward to it all as much as I am!
