Enchanted Community

BLOG 1/5/18. ADORATION: A MIND-BOGGLING CONCEPT

It is one thing to sit in the worshipping community and sing:

Beautiful Savior! Lord of the nations!

… Glory and honor, praise, adoration,

Now and for-evermore be Thine!

… but how to wrap one’s head around exactly what adoration is, how to define it, and then precisely how we put that into practice is a real stretch! Archbishop William Temple defined it as an essential component of worship when he wrote that worship is: “the surrender of will to His purpose … and all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable.”

Another theologian, P. T. Forsyth, wrote: “And if there were a higher stage than all it would be Adoration – when we do not think of favors or mercies to us or ours at all, but at the perfection and glory of the Lord. We feel to His Holy Name what the true artist feels towards any unspeakable beauty.  As Wordsworth says:

I gazed and gazed,

And did not wish her mine.”

We become so accustomed to our familiarity with the ‘language of Zion,’ i.e., the ‘churchy talk’ that we do not often stop and take time to reflect as to exactly what it is, or how it is to be incarnated in my/our life/lives. Where do we adore the Triune God, reflect deeply on Who God is, or what is God’s design by which we reflect his glory?

I am helped by Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of John 1:14, “And the Word (Jesus) became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. And we saw the glory with our own eyes …” Take that to the next step: When we embrace Jesus in our lives, receive him by faith, give him our lives as living sacrifices in order to prove his design … that means that we are to become the agents of adoration, of not only reflecting deeply into what a God-focused life looks like, but actually engaging in our ordinary 24/7 lives as those who radiate the divine image to our neighbors in all love and humility and service … in doing the will of the One we adore.

This is all so impossible in merely human terms, but that is why Jesus gave us the Spirit of glory and of God, so that we may live lives that are, actually, not humanly explainable, i.e., those God-focused lives, those lives “when we do not think of favors or mercies to us our ours at all, but at the perfection and glory of the Lord.”

Being formed in adoration is an on-going discipline, but is at the heart of our lives as true worshippers, … and our Sunday gatherings should always be to refresh and equip us in that calling.

BLOG 1/2/18. WHAT IN THE WORLD IS: THE PREACHING OF THE KINGDOM?

So, the New Year is upon us.  That being so, let me inaugurate it by tampering with your thinking a bit. I’ve long been an advocate of the centrality of the theme of: the gospel of the kingdom of God in the New Testament documents. Then, also, I am continually amazed at how little this is understood, and also about the disconnect between its centrality and the actual praxis of the church. Ready for this? What constitutes the preaching/proclaiming of the kingdom of God … and, whose responsibility is it?

First off, this anticipation of God’s invasion of the world with a messianic age, a New Creation, was deeply seated in the psyche of the Hebrew community of the first century, even though it was hardly comprehended. There was the promise given to Abraham about his seed becoming a blessing to all the earth, then there was the promise to David that his throne would be established forever. These promises seemed so dim in the cultural turmoil of Jesus birth, yet it was the angel’s word to Mary that the baby in her womb would sit on the throne of his father David, and of his kingdom there would be no end.

Skip down a few decades and, as Mark records it, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God, and saying that the kingdom of God is at hand. How did he do that? Or, take his entry into public life as recorded in Luke. After his forty-day sojourn in the wilderness, he came to his home town, and was honored by being asked to read the scripture for the day, which was the Messianic prophecy from Isaiah, about the Spirit of God being upon the Messiah to bring good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, etc. … and then announcing to the shocked synagogue folk that the prophecy was now fulfilled in himself.

Or, Matthew begins his description of Jesus going about proclaiming the gospel of the Kingdom. Now then, dear friends, it would seem that such a clear focus on the message and intent of Jesus would be determinative of our understanding of the message. And, as if that were not enough, Matthew ends his account by Jesus teaching that “when this gospel of the kingdom shall have been preached in all the earth, then would the Lord come.”

How is that accomplished. Jesus commissioned his followers to, also, be proclaimers of this message. How were they to do that. It is a bit tantalizing to note that Mark tells of Jesus coming on to the scene proclaiming this, but then right away gives the account of several different healings. So, the proclamation was not just in spoken words, but in the works of the kingdom. Matthew, likewise, has Jesus announcing that the long-awaited Messianic moment has come in himself, but when a crowd follows to find out what it is all about, Jesus seats them on the hillside and gives them the guidelines for a radical different way of life and behavior, which good works would cause men to know and glorify God.

Somehow, then, proclaiming the gospel is not just the spoken word, the communicating of the data of the life and teachings of Jesus … but the praxis, the living-out of his teachings in the totality of life. Jesus hob-nobbed with publicans and sinners, initiated a conversation with a village’s shady-lady at the well by asking her to help him with a drink of water. Invited himself into the hospitality of the scandalous tax-collector Zacchaeus. Let me underscore my point here: proclaiming is the task given to every one of us who claims to be a follower of Christ, but it involves our total lifestyle of love and good works. In Paul’s description of the believer’s whole armor, the gospel of peace is on our feet, i.e., it is the doing the lifestyle of God’s peace/kingdom that incite curiosity and inquiry for which we are then to give answer to those who are curious.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven.”  We are to be the practitioners of God’s New Creation which he inaugurated at his coming and which is not dynamically present. May love and good works typify all our lives as this new year unfolds. That’s what preaching is all about.

BLOG 12/28/17. THE DARK SIDE OF THE NATIVITY OBSERVANCE

Perhaps a brief, and more tragic and tearful reminder of one (too often ignored) piece of the Christmas celebration is in order before we move into 2018. It is provoked by the fact that in the church’s liturgical calendar, today is the Observance of The Massacre of the Innocents, (or as euphemistically rendered most of the time simply: Holy Innocents). After local churches and public displays of the nativity of Jesus and adoring parents, shepherds, and others, … one probably will never see any display of hysterically weeping parents holding slaughtered babies after a wicked king ordered them killed, … but such is a significant piece of the Biblical account.

When the astrologers, or wise men, from the East asked the jealous King Herod where they might find the one born king of the Jews, Herod consulted his own advisors and pointed the astrologers to the town of Bethlehem with the requirement that when they found this one born as a competitor king, they would report back to him. And when they didn’t do that, but returned to their homeland after worshiping the infant Jesus, and giving him gifts, … Herod panicked. He, thereupon, order the slaughtering of all male babies under two years of age. And so, great lamentation and weeping was heard in the land (Matthew 2:18).

That’s a very real part of the whole nativity observance that has been conveniently expunged. (Rather, we rush on into the New Year’s Day celebrations, bowl games, and end of the year sales in the stores.)

Ready for this? How is that much different from political policies, and governmental actions that today are enacted for political gain, which deprive the populace of programs of health, education, and the necessary accoutrements for the necessities required for the welfare for our children, as well as financial policies for their working parents … carried out in acts of pure political origin to assure that the dominant party remain dominant? Is that too much of a stretch? Or our nation’s use of foreign aid that seems to marginalize any concern for human rights, or the great host of children who are the unwitting victims, who on this winter of 2018 are refugees living in tents in below zero weather, victims of political programs that have no regard for human rights.

You’re going to say to me that I am a typical political progressive. That’s true. But I also run my own minor political position through my Sermon on the Mount ethical guidelines in order to discern who is concerned for peacemaking, mercy, identification with the poor (poor in spirit), justice, and those who mourn. Those are not Democratic or Republican in origin, but are the principles of the Kingdom of God, of God’s New Creation in Christ. Children and adults who are homeless, poor, refugees, sick, victims of unrighteous policies are a priority for Jesus, … and should be of those who are his followers.

I know, I’ve blogged this to you before. But the observance of the Massacre of the Innocents reminds me that the world, and our nation, are still the scene of political jealousy, and of policies that destroy humankind. “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.” Amen.

[If you find these blogs helpful and provocative, encourage you friends to subscribe. And, again, I always value your feedback comments. Now into 2018 “praying always with all prayer and supplication …”]

BLOG 12/26/17. NO ONE EVER WANTS TO BELIEVE THAT …

It was Winston Churchill who said that “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Yet, still, no one wants to believe that his/her national leadership is wicked, alas! In the early 1930s, in one of the most enlightened nations in the world, Germany, there arose a charismatic figure who capitalized on the discontent of so much of the population, and promoted the vision of a whole new and prospering and dominant Germany: The Third Reich. Adolph Hitler was not, by any standard, a particularly gifted person, … except that he knew how to manipulate the masses, and to inflate their pride. In the course of his emergence, he also manipulated the Christian church and insisted that to be a true German Christian, one would be supportive of the Third Reich, and of Adolph Hitler.

Amazingly (horrifyingly?) too many of the masses ‘bit’ and passively went along as things became progressively more destructive. Very few Christian leaders stood up and opposed Hitler, and when they did it was at the risk of their lives. One who was most vocally opposed was the young Christian theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who designated those compliant with Hitler’s regime to be religious Christians vis-a-vie true Christian disciples. That small community of opponents had to operate underground, and voiced their opposition in the illuminating Barmen Declaration.  A French contemporary of Bonhoeffer was Jacques Ellul, who fought with the French underground forces, and later became a giant figure in sociology and theology. He wrote that it was the failure of those professing to be Christians in German to pray that was so distressing. When the wickedness of the leadership in German became inescapable, the church was too compromised, or captive to the dominant order to pray. Ellul attributes so much of Germany’s descent into national wickedness to the church’s failure to pray.

No one ever wants to believe that the leadership of their nation is wicked. Yet, here we are with a national leader who gives lip-service to the Christian faith and yet whose whole life contradicts the ethics of the Kingdom of God and the teachings of Christ. He is arrogant, proud, captive to mammon/wealth, careless with the truth, espousing policies that ignore the helpless poor, the sick, the strangers/refugees, the homeless, and the marginalized, … while living in lavish residences, and promoting those economic policies that favor the rich and powerful. And globally, he promotes what sounds frighteningly like the Third Reich: “America First.” He is untruthful, bullying, personally amoral, and totally without personal integrity, i.e., wicked.

Ah, so what is the alert believer to do? How to respond redemptively (other than voting for persons of peace and order and justice)? Good question. My own reflection takes me back to wondering who was praying for the wicked Saul of Tarsus when he was laying waste the infant church in Palestine and surrounding areas. How did they pray to be delivered from that menace in that brilliant, zealous Jewish prodigy? However, they prayed, one can only surmise that they never could have conceived for them to be delivered by Saul of Tarsus being dramatically and inescapably confronted by the risen and glorified Jesus. Saul was blinded, rendered helpless, made totally contrite, … and then fashioned into the diametrically opposite of what he had been. It wasn’t any minor alteration; it was a radical new life of humility and servitude that recreated his natural gifts to make him the giant proponent of the Christian faith that he was to become.

I don’t pray that our wicked leader will be removed (impeached?). I pray that he will have an encounter with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, humbled, made contrite, have all his arrogance stripped away, deprived of his wealth, and become a witness to the grace of God to the most wicked through a new life of obedience in whatever form God chooses. I pray for the unimaginable “Damascus Road” conversion of this wicked leader. Do you want to join me?

BLOG 12/22/17. THE ENIGMA OF “PEACE ON EARTH”

Hey! On this weekend before the Christmas celebration, it might be worth looking at the enigma of the apparent contradiction that we pass over mindlessly, like “Peace on earth, good will to men,” vis-à-vis “Do not think not that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” The prophet foretold that the messiah to come would be called, among other things, the Prince of peace. So, what gives?

What gives is that both peace and also the sword are true. That said, you also have to realize that Jesus came to redefine our human existence. He came to inaugurate his eternal kingdom, his new creation, but his kingdom does not fit normal definition. It is a different kind of kingdom. He also came to bring peace, but a peace that is totally redefined. He also came to bring a sword, but it is a sword that exposes darkness and falsehood, discerns the thoughts and intents of the human heart.

He does, indeed come, to bring his own peace on earth, but it is a peace that, first of all, brings us to wholeness, and satisfies the “haunting void” that inhabits the human breast (maybe the meta-consciousness?). But it is also such a recreation and re-definition that is disruptive of all that exists in opposition to such. It exposes falseness and vanity and pride and the arrogance of human principalities and powers, so that soon Christ’s people became the victims of that other sword, i.e., the sword of the kingdoms of this world.

How to define God’s “peace that passes all understanding”? God’s Shalom? It is a peace that comes from knowing that one is reconciled to God by the blood of Christ, and that one is called to be an agent of his new creation, living in a servant role, demonstrating love and good works even to enemies and hostile forces.

It is so tragic that so much of the ostensible Christian community continues to define itself in terms of human kingdoms and institutions, seeking power and influence. Even missionary philosophies so often define our mission as us against them, rather than as those who wear on their feet the shoes of the readiness of the gospel of peace, agents of God’s shalom. God’s people seem, so often, to hold other tribal religions in disdain, or as enemies, … but fail to realize that it is the fervent participants in those other tribal and cultural religions that Jesus came to seek and to save. He does want them to know and love him, but he also want then to know God’s love through us.

Where does one look to seek answers? To be sure, we are always (as the Apostle Peter reminds us) “aliens and exiles” in this human sojourn, but we are aliens and exiles who are agents of God’s peace. One might look again at the prayer of the gentle St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred … let me sow love. Where there is injury … pardon. Where is doubt … faith. Where there is despair … hope. Where there is darkness … light. Where there is sadness … joy. O Divine Master, grant that I many not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood, as to understand, to be loved as to love. …”

The human scene is tragic, with so much violence, heartbreak, hopelessness. On this Christmas celebration, it is a good time to renew our vows of true discipleship as those who wear on our feed the readiness of the gospel of peace, to be agents of God’s peace in what is so often a heartless existence. A different kind of peace. A different kind of sword. And a radically different kind of Kingdom, all inaugurated by Jesus. Such is just a beginning. The enigma is complex. Perhaps I could refer you to Stanley Haeurwas’ classic: The Peaceable Kingdom.

And so, Merry Christmas to my readers.

BLOG 12/19/17. THE BIRTH OF JESUS TOOK PLACE AMIDST THE TRAGIC

There is a famous North American folk artist by the name of Thomas Kincaide, who became quite popular and prosperous painting idyllic rural and domestic scenes notable for their soft light, rich colors, and total absence of any conflicts or negative elements. On this week before Christmas, it is worth reminding ourselves of how prone we are to reduce and interpret the nativity of Jesus to something like a Kincaide painting, what with joy to the world, peace on earth, candlelight services at the church, warm manger scenes where all is devoid of any negative elements.

But it wasn’t like that at all. When “the Word was made flesh” and came into the human scene, it was into a cultural and political context that sounds all too familiar to our own, what with the tyranny of the Roman Empire that required a census and taxation, which caused Joseph and Mary to have to uproot and travel to the city of Bethlehem—no excuses, not even Mary’s advanced pregnancy was to prevent it. Not only was there the occupying Roman army, but there was the insecure, half-breed Jewish king Herod, who when learning from the Eastern astrologers that the promised messiah had been born in Bethlehem, decreed that all boys under two years of age should be slaughtered to prevent any such challenger to his throne.

That meant that Joseph and Mary, within weeks of Jesus’ birth, and being warned by an angel, fled as refugees to Egypt, where they lived in exile until Herod died. Then it was back to their peasant lives in Nazareth, where even the Jewish faithful were not ultimately able to comprehend the messianic claims that Jesus made when he went public in his young adulthood. The whole social-cultural-political-economic setting can only be described as tragic. No Thomas Kincaide interpretation fits that scene.

When the church, later on, began to designate certain days as feast days, by which to remember significant events in the unfolding history of Christ’s mission, it designated December 25^th as Nativity, then the 26^th as the Feast of St. John the Apostle, but then on the 27^th, the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr, followed by the observance of The Massacre of the Holy Innocents.

Interesting! The church gave itself the reminder that one can get hurt, even killed, being a follower of Jesus. Jesus, also, warned people off who sought to follow him for the benefits he could bring to their lives … if they were not willing to suffer violent death, i.e. take up their cross, pay the price.

The late Oswald Chamber, whose devotional book My Utmost for His Highest is a composition of talks he gave at the Bible college in England before the 1^st World War, became a chaplain to the British army in Egypt during that war. He wrote that he liked it there in Egypt with the troops because they were “real men with real problems”. He continued to explain that his memories of the church in his Scottish homeland before the war was that it was “all twilight and unreality, …  very nice people sitting in very nice parlors, drinking very weak tea, and eating very thin cucumber sandwiches.”

No, the nativity of Jesus is not in a setting of twilight and unreality. It is the inauguration of the age to come, of the in-breaking Kingdom of God, God’s new creation. It comes into all of the broken-ness, inhumanity, indifference to human need, political ambition, economic greed, prejudices, racism, moral cowardice, and endless cultural icons.

But, … it is also the advent of God’s message of true hope and joy and God’s infinite love – right in the midst of the tragic, in the context of the humanly impossible. Merry Christmas!

[If you find these blogs provocative, recommend them to your friends. Then don’t forget that I love hearing your comments.]

BLOG 12/8/17. CAN WE CONNECT HUMAN SEXUALITY … AND WORSHIP?

Then there’s the humorous story about the guy who said that there were three things they never discussed in his church: sex, politics, and religion. We can laugh at the ludicrous contradictions in that, . . . but what with all the stuff we are observing these days about inappropriate sexual behavior by so many very public figures, it’s time to take a deep breath and look at human sexuality in the design and purpose for which God created it. Most folk inside the Christian church have some notion that God created humankind, male and female, in his own image and likeness. And yet, so often, we put the figurative fig-leaf over the reality that a hugely prominent part of that human body is the sexual, hormonal, and reproductive package (and genetic code) with which we are all endowed (though, admittedly, sometimes confused and confusing).

Human sexuality is never muted in scriptures. It appears in so many stories, sometimes heartening and heart-warming, and sometimes in its distorted and grotesque forms. Reproduction of the species is a presupposition. The secularists of our own culture are correct when they observe that we are “hard-wired to reproduce our gene-pool into the next generation.” Scripture contains beautiful love stories, along with stories of rape, incest, harlotry, and unbridled lust. The story of Ruth is a beautiful story of caring love. And then there is David, who is obviously “sexually active”. The prophet Hosea is commanded to marry a prostitute to exemplify Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. Israel is likened, in graphic terms, as being like a promiscuous woman who opens her legs to every new invader. Add to all of that, the fact that early on the church renounced the heresy of Docetism, which heresy denied the full humanity of Christ. The church insisted that Jesus was fully human, … and as the scriptures assert, he was “tempted in all points like we are”. One must assume that this includes his sexuality, though most church folk would blush at the thought.

If you remove the spiritualizing filters and read the gospel stories candidly, Jesus was unique. He engaged in conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well, and she was the town “hooker”. She engages Jesus in talk about religious traditions, and it is only an aside remark that indicates that Jesus is quite aware that the man she was currently living with was not her husband. As she is evangelized, and becomes an early evangelist, she rushes back into town to tell of him. There is a hidden bit of humor in that she announced that she had met a man who “told me all that I ever did.” . . . Don’t you just know that such a report sent a chill of fear through some of the town’s menfolk?

Or, again, in the (controversial) account of Jesus dealing with the woman caught in the act of adultery, and her accusers wanting to see how Jesus would carry out the law regarding adultery (stoning), you can almost perceive a twinkle in Jesus’ eye when he responds: “Any of you guy who have never been guilty of some such inappropriate behavior, you can cast the first stone.” And they all slunk away and left the woman to receive Jesus’ word of absolution. Or, take a look at the one-liner in I Thessalonian 4: “This is the will of God for your sanctification, that you abstain from sexual immorality” (fornication). Which indicates that the problem was pretty rampant.

Ah! But take note of the very significant passage in Romans 12. “I appeal to you brothers … to present your bodies (including one’s sexuality) as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship … transformed, renewed, the will of God. God’s design is that the human family become the basic communal building-block of society, in which communication, love, discipline, caring, worship, and nurturing into God’s new creation takes place, and where sexuality is cherished as a gift, and celebrated within the purposeful disciplines of purity and faithfulness. Worship and human sexuality should absolutely be connected. Human love and sexuality should unquestionably be formed as an act of worship. I’d love to hear from you …  Stand by.

BLOG 12/5/17. “HOW LONG, O LORD?”

Some weeks back, I posted on this site a blog on the importance of the Book of Revelation in scripture because it is an overview of human history, and the warfare between “the beast and the Lamb.” What was surprising was that it got one of the largest discernable responses of any blog I have done. That comes back to me today particularly as we look at a nation and a world that seems so inextricably engaged in destructive behavior. It brings me to the poignant picture in Revelation 6:10, where God’s people are being assaulted by warfare, famine, poverty, martyrdom, and seeming hopelessness. The observer sees, under the altar those who had been slain for their witness, crying out: how long before you will judge and avenge our blood?

Then step back with me, and look at the reality that our current existential setting mirrors that cry. In this nation of which I am a part there is political cowardice, wickedness in high places, unjust incarceration of multitudes, discrimination against so many minorities, shootings in churches, … and there seems to be no solution. But then, look at the reality that in this world of ours, God’s people, who are our fellow-citizens in the kingdom of God, are experiencing horrendous terrors—some seen, and most unseen—among Arab Christians in the Middle East, affliction at the hands of ISIS, inhumane affliction of minorities in Myanmar, Afghanistan, and so many other nations. Don’t you know that there are a huge host of our persecuted Christian kinsmen, not to mention that huge host of those of other religions suffering, who are crying out: “How long, O Lord?”

From the perspective of the Book of Revelation, the interpretation gives hope, and gives to us a course of action that is (in merely human terms) totally impossible. It is the insight that it is these prayers of near despair from under altar that determine the course of human history! (Revelation 8:1-5). That sounds crazy to our culture so captive to rationalism and human solutions to problems. What is our response to be to all the darkness and governmental chaos in our own, and so many other nations? Prayer. Humanly, it is laughable. But we are reminded that the seventh piece of God’s whole armor for us in this battle, is “praying always” (Ephesians 6:18). Prayer is the most pragmatic and effective weapon we have.

I also commend some hymns, as good prayers: Take, for-instance:

God is working his purpose out,
as year succeeds to year,
God is working his purpose out,
and the time is drawing near;
nearer and nearer draws the time,
the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God
as the waters cover the sea.

Or:

O God of Truth . . .

Still smite; still burn; till naught is left
But God’s own truth and love;
Then, Lord, as morning dew come down,
Rest on us from above.

Cultural and political chaos is not new, . . . nor are those who distort the message of Jesus in denial of his clear teachings for their own political purposes, but rather that we are God’s new creation committed to peace and order and justice, … and the walking talking incarnations of his love. Stay tuned … [and invite your friends to tune in also. Thanks.]