Random Thoughts of Miscellaneous Import

Written on 5/27/09
The lovely wife and I are about to share in an experience that thousands have shared before … but it’s taking us into uncharted emotional territory. It’s one thing when your child goes to preschool for the first time … or to middle school … or to high school. None of those developmental milestones changes life and family relationships quite so much as when he graduates from high school. This is the first time the lovely wife and I have traveled these waters … and though we know we will make it through, there is still a smorgasbord of emotion (some good, some not so good) associated with this leg of the journey. It’s all new and weird to us … every last bit of it. The next few weeks (and years) will be anything but boring.

Andrew Guuru from Kenya was with us Sunday morning. His accent made him a bit difficult to understand at times, but he said at least one thing that was tremendously clear to me. I hope you heard it. It was in the form of a Kenyan proverb: “If you want to go very fast, travel alone. If you want to go very far, take someone with you.” He then related that to between FBC Clinton and the village of Karima … and our partnership with God in it all. It is a two-way bridge. We have already provided them with a well, but there are things that money can’t buy that we will receive from them as well.

My final random thought comes from actress and comedienne Susan Isaacs in an interview I heard on Tuesday. She has just written a book called “Angry Conversations with God: a Snarky but Authentic Spiritual Memoir.” Susan has had roles in movies and sit-coms, but wrote this book out of her faith pilgrimage as a believer in Jesus Christ whose life fell apart (she said it was like a country music song without the really nice chord progressions) and how God really became real to her amid the mess. I don’t have the book, but the interview made we want to get it. And people who hear her and read her material begin to do the same. There were several things that she said in the interview that caught my attention, but the most profound was this (and she saved it for last):

The thing that I had to learn about God is that I had to learn to love Him for who He was, not what I could get out of Him. Because I realized that if it was a marriage, then I had married God for His money. … That was the moment I realized, “Wow. I’m a gold-digger.”

The marriage reference is from John Eldridge’s The Sacred Romance which she mentioned earlier in the interview. I’m going to add her book to my Amazon.com wish list. It will have plenty of company on the list, but I also have several books already in my possession that I need (and want) to read.

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.

Forms and Rituals

While I was waiting for my oil change on Tuesday morning, I did some catch up reading in Music Ministry periodicals that I get. In the January/February issue of Worship Leader magazine, Darlene Zschech (of Hillsong Church in Australia) included a quote from Richard Foster’s 1978 spiritual growth classic The Celebration of Discipline. It has been probably 20 years since I read the book, but I do have it in my library. It was way over my head in spiritual depth back then. Reading this quote makes me want to pick up the book again. I’ll add it to my 2-foot high stack of books waiting to be read. Read what Foster said about worship:

Worship is our response to the overtures of love from the heart of the Father. Its central reality is found ‘in Spirit and in Truth.’ It is kindled within us only when the Spirit of God touches our human Spirit. Forms and rituals do not produce worship, nor does the formal disuse of forms and rituals. [emphasis mine] We can use all the right techniques and methods, we can have the best possible liturgy (a form and arrangement of public worship laid down by a church or religion) but we have not worshipped the Lord until Spirit touches Spirit. Singing, praying, praising, all may lead to worship, but worship is more than any of them. Our spirit must be ignited by divine fire.

Foster hit the nail on the head. There are those who mistakenly believe that the only way to encounter God is in the historic liturgical forms of certain churches. I personally love well crafted liturgical worship; and I have had some profound worship experiences that way. On the other hand, some people think that we must of necessity abandon old forms and patterns in order to worship God in spirit and in truth. I have also had some deeply moving worship experiences with very “non-liturgical” worship. It wasn’t the forms and rituals (which are present even in “contemporary” worship) that did it … it was the Spirit of God.

In the same issue of Worship Leader, Reggie Kidd (Professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando) noted that “While introducing the concept of Mere Christianity to his readers, C. S. Lewis acknowledged that the specific forms Christianity takes are myriad, confusing, and seemingly contradictory. Nonetheless, [Lewis] maintained, at the center of the Church’s life ‘each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine.’ And this suggests that at the center of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.”

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.

Eucharist

I love words, and I love taking language apart to figure out what words mean and where they came from. One does not have to be in my presence long to bump into that quirky aspect of my personality. One of the words of our faith and practice that I have grown to love more deeply in recent months is “Eucharist.” It’s a more liturgical term for what we Baptists call “Communion” or “The Lord’s Supper.” Broken down to its Greek roots, charis means gift, and the prefix eu means good; so many scholars describe the Eucharist as God’s good gift to us. In the Gospels, we read how Jesus told His disciples that his body and blood were broken and poured out for the salvation of the world. That has implications for us, the church, as well.

Rob Bell, in Jesus Wants to Save Christians, interprets it this way:

God gives the world life through the breaking of Christ’s body and the pouring out of Christ’s blood. And God continues to give the world life through the body of Christ – who Paul tells his friends at Corinth is them.

They are his body. The body of Christ.

The church is a living Eucharist, allowing her body to be broken and her blood to be poured out for the healing of the world.

• • •

A church is not a center for religious goods and services, where people pay a fee and receive a product in return. A church is not an organization that surveys its demographic to find out what the market is demanding at this particular moment and then adjusts its strategy to meet that consumer niche.

The way of Jesus is the path of descent. It’s about our death. It’s our willingness to join the world in its suffering, it’s our participation in the new humanity, it’s our weakness calling out to others in their weakness.

To turn that into a product blasphemes the Eucharist.

In 2 Corinthians 1 Paul writes: “He comforts us in our troubles so that we can comfort others … So when we are weighed down with troubles, it is for your benefit and salvation. For when God comforts us, it is so that we, in turn, can be an encouragement to you.” (NLT) Archbishop William Temple put it this way: “A church is an organization that exists for the benefit of nonmembers.” So the question is not whether we’re doing each of our very different worship services in such a way as to please the preferences of certain people. The question is “How is worship moving us to be God’s good gift … Eucharist … to those around us?”

That’s enough to think about for now. The peace of Christ to you.