Xristos Anesti

Jesus lives, and so shall I.
Death! thy sting is gone forever,
He who deigned for me to die,
Lives, the bands of death to sever.
He shall raise me with the just:
Jesus is my Hope and Trust.


Jesus lives and reigns supreme;
And, His kingdom still remaining;
I shall also be with Him,
Ever living, ever reigning.
God has promised: be it must;
Jesus is my Hope and Trust.


Jesus lives, I know full well,
Naught from Him my heart can sever,
Life nor death nor powers of hell,
Joy nor grief, henceforth forever.
None of all His saints is lost;
Jesus is my Hope and Trust.


Jesus lives, and death is now
But my entrance into glory.
Courage, then, my soul, for thou
Hast a crown of life before thee;
Thou shalt find thy hopes were just;
Jesus Christ, our hope and trust..

Triduum

Alas! and did my Savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For such a worm as I?

Thy body slain, sweet Jesus, Thine—
And bathed in its own blood—
While the firm mark of wrath divine,
His Soul in anguish stood.

Was it for crimes that I had done
He groaned upon the tree?
Amazing pity! grace unknown!
And love beyond degree!

Well might the sun in darkness hide
And shut his glories in,
When Christ, the mighty Maker died,
For man the creature’s sin.

Thus might I hide my blushing face
While His dear cross appears,
Dissolve my heart in thankfulness,
And melt my eyes to tears.

But drops of grief can ne’er repay
The debt of love I owe:
Here, Lord, I give my self away
’Tis all that I can do.

-- Isaac Watts

Dangerous Babies

A cooing newborn baby is much less dangerous looking than a man who bursts from a tomb alive after being dead for three days. We "get" babies. Babies are commonplace, and they speak to us of the best that we can be, full of promise and innocence. Dead men who stand up and walk out of graves alive again most certainly upset the normal order of things. Such men threaten to overturn everything. They are dangerous and we really don't like them. Unlike babies, The Resurrected are scary.

Babies, by contrast, seem tame. The problems is that we want to keep the baby as a baby, ignoring the danger inherent within. The baby in the feeding trough may look like any other baby, but it requires a baby of a different kind to become The Resurrected. If we look deeper, we find that the baby is just the beachhead of the Great Invasion. He is not tame at all. He is a dangerous baby. 

This is why Christmas is so much more popular than Easter. It is easier to tame. In trying to tame it, however, we fail to make real sense of the reality of it.

Ricky Bobby in Talledaga Nights merely channeled the zeitgeist when he said:

"Look, I like the Christmas Jesus best, and I'm sayin' grace. When you say grace, you can say it to Grownup Jesus or Teenage Jesus or Bearded Jesus or whoever you want... I like the baby version the best, you hear me? I win the races and I get the money...Dear Tiny Jesus, in your golden fleece diapers with your tiny, little fat balled up fists..."

As usual, N.T. Wright nails the problem in a recent article from Christianity Today. He explains how the first paragraphs of John's Gospel destroy any chance we might have of removing the sharp edges from the baby Jesus figurine. He urges us to "get real and get johanine" about the Christmas story.

Unless we recognize this strange, dark strand running through the Gospel, we will domesticate John's masterpiece (just as we're always in danger of domesticating Christmas) and think it's only about comfort and joy. In truth, it's also about incomprehension, rejection, darkness, denial, stopped ears, and judgment. Christmas is not about the living God coming to tell us everything's all right. John's Gospel isn't about Jesus speaking the truth and everyone saying "Of course! Why didn't we realize it before?" It is about God shining his clear, bright torch into the darkness of our world, our lives, our hearts, our imaginations—and the darkness not comprehending it. It's about God, God as a little child, speaking words of truth, and nobody knowing what he's talking about.

It is normal for the Dad to hand out cigars at the birth of his child. The family and friends celebrate, but the birth of a baby is hardly news. This baby, however -- this God in an Infant -- this is no ordinary child. Only because of this is the birth worth noting two millenia after the fact.


In God's war on death, the birth of Jesus is only the first move of the ultimate strategy of redemption. It was Operation Incarnation. The birth only sets up the theater of operations for Operation Resurrection, which deals the death stroke to death itself. Revolutionary stuff. Revolutions inevitably involve the breaking of things and the overturning of apple carts. That's what the cooing baby was born to do.

Like I said, dangerous.

But it's a revolution of restoration. His breaking is fixing. His overturning is uprighting. It's no less disruptive, but when you disrupt chaos, what do you get? Peace. When you reverse suffering and sorrow, what are you left with? Joy.

So whenever you look at that baby in the manger, hang on. It may look quiet, but he's a ticking time bomb that will blow everything to heaven.

Advent Meditation 2 - Prepare

There’s a party coming and it’s time to get ready.

At its best, getting ready for the party is almost as good as the party itself.

Clean the house. Set the table. Cook the food – fancy food, hearty food, plain or spicy. Just make sure there’s lots of it and it’s good. Oh, and remember to pull the best bottles from your cabinets and cellars, with lots of glasses and plenty of ice.

Take a bath, polish yourself up, and put on your goin’-to-the-party clothes. Smile and be happy and open the door.

The house will fill with chatter and laughter. The convivial spirit will rise as bellies fill and wine glasses empty. For a moment the ugliness of the world is held off outside the walls and inside you taste just a bit of heaven. It was finally worth all the work and worry of getting ready, because once the party is on, nothing else matters.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. But…that’s not always the case, is it?

Have you ever prepared for a party and found that the preparation was not fun at all? Have you ever been overtaken by “guest anxiety?” You work for hours, perhaps days, in a red mist of hospitality rage, trying to whip things into shape, and woe to the poor fool who gets in your way or fails to pitch in to help.It's a soul sucking madness that takes over the whole house and turn the rest of the family into zombie slaves in the thrall of the rabid hostess, made mad by her party planning psychosis.

Sound familiar?

This is what happens when the host begins to think that the point of the party is to prove what a great host she is. Instead of offering the party as an act of joyful love for the sake of your friends, the party becomes (in the mind of the host) the impending day of judgment -- and the judges are your guests.

This is such an easy mistake to make because we love to make everything into a religion where we think that doing things just right will save us. We tell ourselves that its all for the guests, when in fact the guests are just an excuse to congratulate ourselves on what good hosts we are. We turn the party into a religion and in the process miss the whole point of the exercise.

Now in the second week of Advent we prepare for the party we call Christmas. It's a pretty big deal, in case you haven't noticed. In this layer of the advent season we remember when Jesus was coming and look forward to when he will come again. His coming changes everything. So we prepare.

Here is the question: What are we preparing for? The judgment? Or the Party?

Be careful how you answer. It’s a trick question really, because if you are preparing for judgment, if you think you are preparing to be good enough for the party, you can just forget it. It is simply impossible for us to perfectly clean the cobwebs out of every corner of our spiritual house. We can scrub and polish and sweep and wipe, but we can never banish the stains and dust of our fallen lives, but we can never really make it good enough for Jesus.The dirt is just too embedded. The walls too rotten. The carpet too shabby.

But that doesn’t mean that there’s no party, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t invite him in. On the contrary – that's exactly why we MUST invite him in. You see, this is the Good News. 

Jesus is the guest who, when he arrives, cleans the house for us – top to bottom. Jesus cleans our kitchen, shines our bathroom, scrubs the toilets, washes the floors and deep cleans the carpets. Jesus arranges the furniture, plumps the pillows, puts away all the scattered clothes, polishes the silver and straightens the pictures on the walls. When Jesus arrives he takes your house, and completely remakes it into the best house it could possibly be and then some – spotless, perfect and completely comfortable. Jesus is the original and better Extreme Makoever Home Edition.

Not only that, Jesus provides all the food. More than you could possibly eat, more kinds than you can possibly imagine and better than you ever thought it could be. Whatever food you might have to offer, even if it’s just meager loaves and dried fishes, he will take what you offer and make it into the most sumptuous meal you never imagined.

With Jesus there is no dieting, no diabetes and certainly no anorexia. With Jesus if its feast time then it is time to feast! And when Jesus is in the house, you can bet no wine bottles will ever go empty.

This is Gospel: Jesus brings his own party wherever he goes and nobody – but NOBODY -- throws a better one.

This too is Gospel: Jesus is both the best guest and the most host, all at the same time.

And this also is Gospel: he has invited you to your own party.

So get ready wontcha?.

 Jesus has both come and is yet coming. We are both waiting (preparing) and enjoying his presence now. So prepare out of joyful overflowing love and in prescient thanksgiving. Forget fear and judgment – he has done away with it. Know that when our own preparations fall short (and they always do), Jesus makes up the difference, completely, joyfully, perfectly. 

Make sure you understand what I am saying. Get ready. Clean yourself up. Make your place beautiful. Do all the things you would do to prepare for the most wonderful guests - but do it all out of love and thanksgiving for the host, and the party He brings. That is Gospel. 

So for Christ’s sake (really, I mean it literally) stop worrying and get ready to party. Jesus is on his way.

Advent Meditation 1

Lately, I find that seasons pass by almost without my knowing.

I am living mostly day to day, week to week, head down, leaning into the wind, making slow headway against the prevailing forces. Now and again I duck behind a tree or a rock and when I look up, time has passed and things look different. I'm always a little surprised. I can't stay in one place, however, so I put my head back down and continue plowing forward. I don't know how long it will take to reach a land that isn't so windy, but I know it's there.

It's not that I rail against wind anymore. I am learning to accept the wind. Wind is. Perhaps I can even harness the wind. Wind is what I have. I can possibly even learn to love the wind. Wind has it's own fierce beauty. In spite of all that, I will still long for the stillness of a sheltered place.

So I looked up the other day to realize that it's the first week of Advent. Once again I am taken by surprise. When I let myself move beyond the surprise, I find myself taken up in the layered beauty of Advent. Advent is like looking through the glass from both sides at the same time. It is a sort of cubist season where I find myself both seeing and being in the sheltered place even though it has not yet arrived.

I can do this because in Advent we remember what it was like for the Jewish nation to look forward with longing and anticipation and hope for the Chosen One who would lift the boot heel of Rome from their national neck. Of course, the Chosen One did come, but he looked nothing like they expected. Surprise!

In this way Advent becomes a time when we mirror that waiting in our own expectant waiting for the coming of The Chosen One. We expect and hope and long for him to return and deliver us from....what?

Pick your poison I guess. We know the world is one messed up hole. Anybody who pays any attention at all knows that for all it's beauty and wonder and power, there is also something quite wrong with the whole operation. Something isn't working the way it's supposed to. Deep down inside we long to see it fixed. It's a human thing, this longing. We naturally seek the sheltered place.

The followers of the buddha might say that if you can eliminate the longing then you eliminate the problem. It certainly doesn't hurt to cultivate a sense of equanimity about what is. I can say from personal experience that it is generally a good thing to do. But I don't think the longing is the cause of the problem. I would rather say that the problem is the cause of the longing. Anesthesia doesn't repair the broken bone. It merely numbs the pain. The bone remains broken.


In Advent, we are reminded that there is someone who came once to deal with that damage in the most unexpected way possible. He set the broken bones of the world with a profound finality that is really breathtaking to contemplate -- beyond politics or power or money or family or education or anything else that we look for to save us. His method is scandalous, crazy, ridiculous and ultimately the only thing that could possibly work. It makes no sense, but it's the only sensible thing.

Then he moved off (inexplicably) telling us to keep an eye out because he's coming back to finish the job. Apparently, the job is done, but not done. The world is fixed but the fix isn't finished. He'll be back to mop up. When? Who knows?

And so we wait, like the Children of Israel. They returned from exile sure that YHWH's favor rested upon them once more, only to experience repeated domination and disappointment over 400 years. Like them we walk against the wind and seek the sheltered place. And Our Shelter is coming. This is more certain than the rising of the morning sun in the eastern sky. He comes.


This then is one layered layer of Advent -- longing and waiting. We know our Shelter is there. And we know that we can stop seeking Our Shelter. We can sit quietly waiting, for Our Shelter has already found us. Our Hope has already arrived and is yet coming. And his coming is always a surprise.

An Incomplete Manuscript

"

"What we must notice at this stage is that, both in the Old Testament and in the New, the present suffering of the world – about which the biblical writers knew every bit as much as we do – never makes them falter in their claim that the created world really is the good creation of a good God. They live with the tension. And they don’t do it by imagining that the present created order is a shabby, second-rate kind of thing, perhaps (as in some kinds of Platonism) made by a shabby, second-rate sort of god. They do it by telling a story of what the one creator God has been doing to rescue his beautiful world and to put it to rights. And the story they tell…indicates that the present world really is a signpost to a larger beauty, a deeper truth. It really is the authentic manuscript of one part of a masterpiece. The question is, What is the whole masterpiece like, and how can we begin to hear the music in the way it was intended?

The point of the story is that the masterpiece already exists – in the mind of the composer. At the moment, neither the instruments nor the players are ready to perform it. But when they are, the manuscript we already have – the present world with all its beauty and puzzlement – will turn out to be truly part of it. The deficiencies in the one part we possess will be made good. The things that don’t make sense at the moment will display a harmony and perfection we hadn’t dreamed of. The points at which today the music seems almost perfect, lacking just one small thing, will be completed. That is the promise held out in the story. Just as, in one of the New Testament’s greatest claims, the kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdom of God, so the beauty of this world will be enfolded in the beauty of God – and not just the beauty of God himself, but the beauty which, because God is the creator par excellence, he will create when the present world is rescued, healed, restored and completed."


N.T. Wright in Simply Christian:Why Christianity Makes Sense. Harper Collins hardcover p 47.

Don't Be Afraid

And the resurrection of Jesus issues the surprising command: don’t be afraid; because the God who made the world is the God who raised Jesus from the dead, and calls you now to follow him. Believing in the resurrection of Jesus isn’t just a matter of believing that certain things are true about the physical body of Jesus that had been crucified. These truths are vital and nonnegotiable, but they point beyond themselves, to the God who was responsible for them. Believing in this God means believing that it is going to be all right; and this belief is, ultimately, incompatible with fear. As John says in his letter, perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4.18). And the resurrection is the revelation of perfect love, God’s perfect love for us, his human creatures. That’s why, though we may at any stage in our lives grasp the truth that God raised Jesus from the dead, it takes us all our life long to let that belief soak through and permeate the rest of our thinking, feeling, and worrying lives.”

Sometimes this process isn’t just a gradual thing; it may involve sudden crises. There’s a hidden chapter in the life of St Paul, which is usually ignored by those who see him either as the heroic missionary or the profound theologian, or possibly the misguided misogynist. Acts doesn’t mention this hidden chapter, but in our second lesson we heard Paul himself speak of it. At one stage of his work in what he called Asia, and we call Turkey, he says that he went through a horrendous and traumatic experience which seem to destroy him totally. ‘I was so utterly, unbearably crush’, he writes, ‘that I despaired of life itself; indeed, I felt as though I had received the sentence of death’ (2 Corinthians 1:8-9). And a good part of the second letter to Corinth actually grows out of this experience; the brash, proud Corinthian church had wanted Paul to be a success story, and he had to explain to them that being an apostle, and ultimately being a Christian, was not a matter of being a success story, but of living with human failure–and with the God who raises the dead. That’s what following Jesus is likely to involve.”

(NT Wright, Following Jesus, 68-69)

Steal This Holiday

Not too long ago, I had a brief exchange with a friend of mine who is one of Jehovah's Witnesses. We are good friends, and will occassionally engage in friendly jabs about what you might call our "differing faith perspectives." I enjoy this sort of thing immensely, taking pains to refer to myself as a "false religionist" with such great relish that the irony of my usage is clear. He likes to ask very short and pointed questions that end in a very self-satisfied smacking of the lips as if he has just scored the ultimate point. Even so, none of this is mean spirited and our relationship is undergirded by a deep affection and respect. 

So at the beginning of last winter he asked a question that was something like, "So, are you  preparing to celebrate the pagan holiday in December?"  Not wanting to lay down for such an obvious ploy, I answered, "What pagan holiday is that?" I had him there, because the JW training does not allow such a teachable moment to pass unused. Being born and raised a JW, the conditioning was too strong for him to just keep playing the game. 

So he launches into a short but pointed explanation of the true pagan origins of the holiday commonly known as Christmas. It seems we christians (false religionists, that is) have been duped all along. We just THINK we are celebrating the birth of Jesus, even though it clearly cannot be his actual birthday. And even if it were, the whole idea is wrong because...well...Jesus just isn't Jehovah. You aren't supposed to worship anyone except Jehovah. 

This, by the way, is completely aside from the whole aversion that JW's carry for celebrating birthdays of any kind.  I have always found this to be a custom just full of comic possibilities. Especially around Christmas. After all, if you WERE going to celebrate ANYONE's birthday, would Jesus' be the one you would pick? But...I digress.

My point in return was simply that my friend clearly did not understand the nature of co-opting cultural markers. Christians are not duped at all. The whole Christmas/Saturnalia/Solstice thing was actually quite intentional. You see, what we actually did was hit the pagans over the head, and outright STEAL their holiday. Then we took it and gave it to Jesus whose day it SHOULD have been all along. It's ok because Jesus redeemed the day and it belongs to Him now. That's how the gospel works, with people, and with everything else. Jesus has this way of taking things that are all bent out of shape and straightening them out. 

Of course, their is an ongoing tension where the gods of the current age are making their attempts to recapture the day. That's a subject for another post.

I've been hearing similar objections arising lately regarding Easter. I have long been in the habit of referring to it as Ressurection Day, just so as to avoid confusion with the whole bunny-eggy thing, and the happy-happy-spring thing - both gods of this age. But I have been hearing some people suggesting that the whole thing is just a thin Christiany veneer laid over a solid pagan core. Well...no. If anything it's just the opposite.

Christianity Todays Christian History magazine posted a decent article addressing this issue recently. Worth a read.

Seeds of the 4th Revolution

It’s about time I came out about Robert Farrar Capon.

I am now reading my 6^th book written by the skinny priest. It has given me enough of a taste of him to make some reasonably grounded observations about his thought and style. He first came to my attention when my good buddy Ron Jung sent me a copy of Capon’s book “An Offering of Uncles”. At first the odd title set me off, and the first chapter seemed a little wooly, but I stuck with it, mostly out of some strange fascination. Reading that book seemed rather disconcertingly like taking communion and ducking into the tent to see JoJo the dogfaced boy at the same time. That may seem like an odd simile, but Capon’s writing style has a taste of the roller coaster about it. In one paragraph he will both delving into deep spiritual truth, and send linguistic and metaphoric fireworks into the sky over your head. As with a good meal, the crunchy, the smooth, the savory, the sweet, the cold, the hot, the bitter, the dry and the wet are presented in quick succession (or even on the same plate) so that one course may offset and highlight the qualities of the next. Much of his writing is creamy and heavy and full of the most delicious fat. Other sections are remarkably clear and light. The sudden switch-ups, and the rather transparent devices he employs to make his points might put some off, but I have enjoyed them. He definitely keeps the reader hopping and skipping to keep up, but with such a firmly grounded sense of playfulness that it is hard not to join in the play with a gladhearted smile. This, even as he turns your sense of what you thought you understood on it’s ear.

In that sense, the writing style very much reflects his subject matter, which falls along two basic lines. Capon writes to illustrate and illumine the sacramental view of life, and to proclaim and explain the radical and outrageous grace that is central to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

What does this mean, the sacramental view of life? We might better call it living in a sacramental manner. What is a sacrament? Let’s go with the definition given in the Common Book of Prayer. It is a visible outward sign of an inward and invisible grace. To take it a step further, a sacrament is present where an object or action becomes a physical and material manifestation of the presence and work of God. It might be thought of as a symbol that carries the power of the higher reality it represents. The most common sacraments in the Christian religion are baptism (a sacrament of membership in Christ’s Body) and the Eucharist (a sacrament of Christ’s presence and forgiveness).

As I have read more of Capon’s work, however, I have begun to see that God the Father has built sacrament into the warp and weft of his creation. This hinges on the idea that none of this was necessary – the entire created order did not HAVE to exist, but rather is an expression of the delight and playfulness of YHWH. Properly understood then, we see that our use of creation, is ultimately our offering up of our own creation back to God. We have the power to make everything a sacrament – driving a car, enjoying a meal, walking the dog, or making love. God made it to enjoy it, and so that we might enjoy it. When we do enjoy it, we offer it back to him.

No matter that many (most?…all?) of our offerings are defective, often in the extreme. That’s what Grace is for.

The most startling assertion Capon makes about sacramentalism is when he states that the crucifixion of Jesus, and his resurrection is the sacrament of the forgiveness of God that was built into the universe from before the beginning of time. While Capon starts with what might be called Total Depravity, from there he moves in a very different direction than my typical understanding. In my days as a Calvinist dabbler, I saw God’s salvation in Christ as actually accruing only to a few. Capon holds rather than Grace is not the end game, but is rather the starting point. That while everyone starts out dead in sin, everyone also starts out forgiven. Everyone – yes EVERYONE --  is invited to the party. He does not deny the scripture that clearly indicates that some people will apparently be such party poopers that they refuse to join in. In other words, the Bible makes it clear that there is a Hell and it is not a desirable state. Yet, Hell is not the starting point.

I won’t go into his arguments in detail here. I will just say that they seem to me to be based on scripture, and to have at least as much validity as other viewpoints. If you are looking, however, for a classical prepositional exposition with proof texts, you may be disappointed. Capon tends to do his theology with pictures. Not with crayons scrawled in the margins, but with words images and stories. He is, in this, purposely consonant with the methodology of Jesus himself, who taught mainly through stories and images. Capon references the parables often, and in fact, I hope to read his commentaries on the parables of Jesus next.

Well…this probably raised many more questions that it answered. If you want answers, you will likely have to go to Capon’s writing yourself. I don’t feel qualified, nor do I really desire to defend Capon as such. I would love to discuss him, because I am still exploring the meaning of what he is saying. I just don’t care to have to absorb arrows aimed at him just yet.

Suffice it to say, however, that reading his work as dramatically reshaped my spiritual landscape. Early in my writings on this blog, I complained about how Buddhism seemed to have a corner on the practice of contentment, of learning to deal with the vicissitudes of real life. I have had very little experience of knowledge of how to explain or handle suffering and worry and stress through Christian models of thought and practice, beyond being urged to pray more.

I suspect that God heard my complaint, and sent me a book by Robert Farrar Capon to provide me with some guidance and answers. A new and broader view of Grace, and a deeper and more powerful way of seeing God’s work in me through His creation has begun to unfold a new depth in my heart. I can point to 3 other times in my life where I experienced a spiritual revolution. This seems to be the fourth, and Capon has been the catalyst.

You Can't Really Water It Down, now Can You?

It is what it is. You can try to stuff it into politics, or science, or environment, or poetry, or mythology, or economics, or whatever. In the end, it is what it is. Moreover He is what He is. He did not tell Moses, "Tell them I AM sent you!" for nothing.


"So, let me add that Christianity is, and always has been, and always will be, not just essentially a religion of hope, but in itself, the most stupendous hope the world has ever known. Only incarnate god would have dared to hold out to us all, mere men and women of every sort and condition, sweet Mongols and pundits and professors and beauty queens, the sick and the well, the stupid and the clever, those who stumble equally with those who lend an arm, whoever and whatever we may be, a hope of being involved in a destiny set in eternity and encompassing the universe. Imagine telling caterpillars that they are destined to become butterflies . . . Carrying the image further, I imagine a TV panel of caterpillars discussing the implications of the prophecy that they were destined to become butterflies, with one of them, the genus Popilio Soperino, insisting that what the prophecy really signifies is that all caterpillars should join the Labour Party"
(Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media, pp. 44-45).

Snagged this from Blog and Mablog. I don't have much time lately to actually write anything of my own, so I am reduced to stealing quotes from other people who steal quotes.

Worship: Call and Response

Worship is a conversation. It is a formalized, ritualized conversation, but it is nonetheless a conversation. There is that about worship that involves a give and take, a reciprocation. It is a progression of call and response between the God Almighty and His people.

I say “Marco!” You say……
I say “Thank You.” You say…..
I say “Peace be with you.” You say….

This sort of call out and reply is woven into the very fabric of every liturgy in numberous ways. Look at the bones of a liturgy. Any liturgy that is God-centered, and properly structured around the character and work of God as displayed in scripture will have 4 basic parts.

Gathering and Adoration
Confession and Absolution
Thanksgiving and Giving
Receiving the Word and/or the Sacraments.

There are many variants as to how each of these sections is accomplished, and the terminology used, but at it’s most basic these are the parts of a liturgy. And each of them is includes elements of God calling and His people responding. In fact, each element is a call, to which the next element is a response. They are layered.

It works like this:

God’s Work: We gather together
Our response: We offer our voices in song or our thoughts in meditation and prayer as the service begins.

God’s Work: We hear (or take part in) the proclamation of aspects of His character (power, majesty, holiness, lovingkindness, mercy, etc.) or his work (creation, freeing Israel from Egypt, sending his prophets, miracles, resurrection, etc.)
Our response: We offer our voices in song, or we pray to acknowledge the truth, and/or we stand to acknowledge His primacy.

God’s Work: God reminds us of His character and work through the scripture.
Our Response: To confess our own character and work, which are sinful.
God’s Work: He proclaims us forgiven.
Our response: We offer our voices in song, we acclaim His mercy, we give thanks in many ways including offering our gifts back to Him.

God’s Work: He speaks to us through his Word
Our Response: We pray, we meditate, we listen, we go out to live in obedience to his commands and in communion with His Spirit.

If we are worshipping with purpose and intent, we are listening to God speaking, and watching His acting, and we are responding with speech and actions of our own.

All of this flows from God’s revealed message to us, the Holy Bible. The Bible is our record of God’s call to us. In it he reveals to us his character and his deeds. The job of the Worship Leader is to point you to God’s call, to draw your attention to it and make it easy to hear by declaring God Work and His Character in many different ways. Because Jesus is God made manifest to us, the very image of the Father, we center our worship around Jesus, but through God’s Holy Word. If we, as leaders have done our job properly, the whole service will be infused with the scripture, and therefore, with the Holy Spirit, and God will work in us according to his will thereby.

Now here is one of the deepest layers of this whole call and response structure. Sunday is one day. It is the day set aside for God’s call to meet with Him. The rest of the week is our response to what God does to us and for us when we gather to meet with Him. Sunday worship is just Response Practice for the rest of the week
We are training ourselves to hear God’s call and respond throughout the week

And our gathering to worship is part of that weekly cycle of call and response. If you went to church today, it was because God called you. Your attendance was no accident, and it was no mere acting out a habitual behavior. Whether you realize it or not, you were specifically called to worship. Your response was to rise, dress, eat and go. Even such mundane things as rising from bed, dressing and eating are are acts of worship. They are made holy by God’s call and by our response.

This is also why our actions in worship include such mundane and material things things such as eating bread and drinking wine. Our faith reflects the Great Miracle of the incarnation at every level. YHWH is the God of all of life, there is nothing that does not belong to him, and everything that He created is good. All has been bent by the fall, but when He emptied Himself to take on the flesh of a man and live as one of us, He changed the rules, and raised His creation to a higher level of holiness. We eat bread and drink wine, in part because God is telling us that He meets us in such things. It is not all wooo wooo spirit this and ooo oooh spirit that. He made us to be the place where spirit and matter meet in an ineffable mystical union. He perfected that union by partaking in it, and He invites us, even commands us, to partake in it with Him.

So we come together to hear his call, and when we leave, what we do for the next 6 days is our response. Our rising up and our lying down, our eating and drinking, our labor and our play, it is all an offering to Him. It is all of it our worshipful response to His loving call. Be aware that every act on any day is an extension of our worship on Sunday.

Let us then approach him with joy, and solemnity, with boldness and humility, for He is both great and kind and his love knows no end.

That's My King!

In the church calendar, this day is commonly celebrated as Christ the King Sunday. It is the last Sunday of the cycle of the liturgical year, and is the gateway to Advent. It is eschatological, looking forward to the concrete establishment of Christ's rule. Like Advent, it also has a clear element of the here and now, for Christ does indeed rule right now.

I'd like to refer you to a video I discovered a while ago. It is video presentation based on a portion of a sermon by S.M. Lockridge. I'll let the video speak for itself except for this one comment: Amen!

Christ the King

People of God, Stand up!

You are now come together into the presence of the High King of Heaven.
He is the Most High God, the Almighty. Heaven and Earth are full of His glory.
He is the Rider of the Storm, whose eyes are lightning, and whose feet, thunder.
He is mighty in battle. He dwells with His people and guards His own with His right hand.
He is mercy to the humble, salvation to the lost, and hope for the dying.
He is the Hammer of Judgment to lawbreakers, Destroyer of the Proud, scourge of evildoers.
He provides for His people, and gives gifts to all who serve Him and love Him.
He is the wild Lion of Judah, The Alpha and Omega, the Bright and Morning Star.

O, Exalt your King
For this same King is also our deliverer. He came to dwell with us, and rescue us.
He came as a baby, as a tiny newborn infant – wee, weak, and wailing.
He grew into a man, ate meat, drank wine, and cut wood with callused hands.
And as the prophets foretold, he was executed in humiliation and pain.
In his death he took our shame, our weakness, and our darkness into the Great Pit.
And when he burst the gates on his way out, he left them there, to be forgotten forever.

Shout in Triumph.
For although His kingdom seems incomplete now, His victory is assured.
On that day, He shall ride a white horse, in righteousness He will judge and make war.
Out of His mouth will go a sharp sword to shatter His enemies.
His fierceness and wrath shall crush them, like grapes in a winepress.
We shall see His title written boldly upon Him – King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
And He shall establish His dominion over all – and that dominion shall never end.

Prepare yourselves
For He returns to claim us as his own, to bring us to dwell with Him always.
He purchased us with a price, ransomed us from death by His own Godly Blood
His death shall cancel ours, remove its sting, and make it null and void.
His Life brings you together to worship Him. To live in him and love Him.
To Fear Him, to Serve him, to Proclaim his deeds, to obey his commands.
For it is right to do so. He is our King. He is our High King.

Let us Worship our King.

The Bitter and the Sweet

At the ripe old age of 42 I began drinking coffee. I had avoided it for years, since it tasted pretty much like burnt beans to me. While I love sour flavors, I have never been one to appreciate bitter flavors. Grapefruit, gin, many kinds of greens, any number of medicinal concoctions – all of them turned me off with their bitter astringency. So I avoided coffee even through college and the early stages of my career. Nevertheless, a few years ago I reached a point in my life and my business where I simply needed chemical assistance. Too many early mornings after burning the midnight oil. I viewed coffee as a delivery system for caffeine, and I found that with enough sugar and cream, almost anything can be made mostly drinkable. I still take my coffee sweet and light, but less sweet than I used to, and often less light, depending on how heavy I pour. I don’t know if I’ll ever take it black, but since I never thought I would drink coffee at all, I can’t rule it out.

In the past two years I have learned to actually like coffee. I not only seek it out for it’s medicinal qualities, but I’ve come to actually enjoy the flavor. I like it strong, too. Sweet, as I have said, but strong. I am of the opinion that there is no such thing as coffee that is too strong. Only people that are too weak.

Recently, my wife and I have been playing around with chocolate. Not the waxy cheap Hershey’s variety. We’ve been exploring the intense flavors of chocolate with a high percentage of cacao – that’s the pure chocolate stuff. Less milk (or none), less sugar, and more of the stuff that makes chocolate chocolate. In fact, we recently purchased a small bag of cacao nibs, little pieces of the actual chocolate bean. You can’t get more pure or direct than this – perhaps unless you melted it in a spoon, drew it up into a syringe and shot it directly into your veins.

As a food, chocolate is about 3000 years old. It was first cultivated in South America, and it’s properties were noticed and celebrated early on. It was a sacred food, and it’s eating was surrounded by myth and ritual. The Olmecs, Mayans, Aztecs and Incas all drank chocolate, hot, unsweetened, spiced with chilis and poured out to make it frothy. I have also read that warriors and hunters would chew the beans, sometimes living on them for days with no other food. The fat content of the chocolate bean is very high (about 40% I think) and it’s high concentration of alkaloid substances make it an excellent energy endurance food.

The particular alkaloid prevalent in cacao is theobromine (C7H8N4O2, or 3,7-dimethylxanthine, or 3,7-Dihydro-3,7-dimethyl-1H-purine-2,6-dione for you organic chemists in the crowd). The figure on the left is Theobromine. the right is caffeine.

Theobromine literally translates as food of the gods. It is unclear whether this means food FOR the gods, or food FROM the gods. Either way is good, I suppose. Theobromine is a close analog to caffeine, an alkaloid with which we are much more familiar. Like caffeine, another member of the methylxanthine family, it is a stimulant, but it’s effects are quite different from those caffeine. Caffeine is like injecting nitrous oxide into an internal combustion engine. The effects are immediate, dramatic, and short lived. Theobromine is more like putting an octane booster in the gas tank. The effects are noticeable, but much gentler and longer lasting than caffeine. Theobromine does not affect the central nervous system, but it does dilate the blood vessels, reducing blood pressure. It stimulates the cardiovascular and muscle systems, as well as the kidneys. It produces a mild pleasurable effect on the body, and lasts about 3 times as long as caffeine in the blood. Yet the difference between caffeine and theobromine is a couple of extra hydrogen molecules.

So I am experimenting with eating the chocolate bean. I left for a run this morning with a wad of cacao nibs (broken pieces of cacao beans) tucked into my cheek. I wanted to see if they had any effect on my performance. This is not really a scientific trial – there are way too many variables unaccounted for. Nevertheless, I wanted to see if I noticed anything. I did, but not really what I expected.

I noticed that I seem to be coming to terms with bitterness. To chew on cacao beans is a pretty intensely bitter experience. A few years ago I would have spit them out. This bitterness still makes me wince a bit, but I get through it, and I even manage to note some of the other essences that chocophiliacs rave about – floral and berry flavors, hints of lavender and wine. I like the idea of eating a food that has been around for thousands of years, that has been used by warriors to sustain them over long periods. I’m not sure if they chewed on “nibs” exactly, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have chocolate bars. These are all reasons for doing this, but what’s particularly interesting is that I am doing it at all. I don’t yet find the bitterness pleasant (as some people apparently do) but I find that I can tolerate it.

I suspect this may have parallels elsewhere in my life. There has certainly been a degree of bitterness in my world lately. Fear, anxiety, fatigue, uncertainty, all flavored by traces of anger and blame. That’s just the feelings around the circumstances. It’s not even the circumstances themselves. It all makes for some difficult pills to swallow, and it tastes pretty awful going down. Yet there is nothing else for it. Life is what it is and you eat what you are served when it comes around. Still, is it possible to learn to love the bitterness?

I think maybe it is. I think, in fact, that may be a good part of what spiritual growth is about. I think maybe this is where we find the difference between knowing God, and knowing about Him. I wrote in one of my earlier posts about my puzzlement over the apparent lack of Christian tradition around purposely cultivating a peaceful heart. We all know about the myriad of eastern traditions and techniques – zen meditation, koans, chi gung, yoga, ayurveda and so on. We seldom read about a technical approach to Christian enlightenment. How does one attain to the “Peace of Christ that passeth all understanding” exactly? It’s not that the Christian tradition is void of such things. It’s not hard to find, if one looks, various practices and rules – Desert Fathers in caves, ascetics sitting on poles, vows of silence, the Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans and Jesuits. Various mystics practicing many types of devotion. Yet such practices do not seem to have the same hold on Christian thought as they do on the eastern religions. Perhaps this is because ultimately our peace, our joy, our enlightenment does not depend on technique and it does not depend on us. It is about a Person, and it comes from Him and flows back to Him.

Christ enlightens the darkened heart. Christ brings peace from the turmoil. Christ turns the ugly soiled things of life into pure white linen. Christ makes it new, makes it bright, and enfolds it into Himself and in so doing gives it back to us as it was meant to be. Christ is Joy -- and our Joy, and Peace and Life is in Him and is Him.

There are kinds of knowing. This is a kind of knowing that is beyond the command of information. Jesus says “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” I am thinking that He did not mean that he shows the way, although He does. He means the He is the way Himself. And when we release ourselves to Him and His work, we join ourselves to Him and we come to know Him more.

I am starting, just starting, to glimpse how Christ takes the bitterness of life and turns it. He alone can take that bitterness and redeem it, turning it into all kind of goodness. How is it, on a cosmic, historic scale that He takes Adam’s disobedience and turns it into something even better than if Adam had never sinned? The Apostle Paul wrote, “the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!” How much more did it overflow! How much more!

This kind of turnabout is His specialty. And if He can turn about a whole world gone wrong, what can He do with my life, my bitterness? Indeed, what WILL He not do with it?

So can I learn to love the bitterness? To love to see what life Christ will bring from it? Perhaps by His grace --perhaps I can. I chew the beans, taste them, swallow them, and thank Almighty God for them. They are His gift, bitterness and all.