Flash Forward

The title of the sermon this Sunday is Pursuing Wisdom, and the main text is Proverbs 8:1-11. I read an article in the Boston Globe a couple of weeks ago on the attempt to study wisdom. One of the first people to attempt it gave up after some years. It is not a popular topic, in large part, I think, because it is not readily definable. If you can't define something clearly, you can hardly do research on it.

Part of the problem is that wisdom connotes values, virtues, and science doesn't know how to deal with them. Since virtues cannot be arrived at in a scientific manner, they appear to be very dependent on particular cultures and thus relativistic. One of the things that psychology did in the first part of the 20th century was to do away with the concept of character and focus on personality. You see personality is "value-free" whereas character, like wisdom, connotes values and virtues.

Wisdom, however, was very important to the Hebrew's and wisdom is woven throughout the scriptures. In the Bible you will find wisdom literature, like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Some theologians find the key to understanding Jesus is through his being the wisdom of God.

In an age overrun in information and full of knowledge, I would argue that there is a dearth of wisdom. We need to recover the importance of wisdom and as Christians we need to pursue wisdom.

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Thought for the Day

Remember, a closed mouth gathers no foot.
--Steve Post

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Suffering and the Pilgrim Heart

The second to last chapter in Pilgrim Heart has the title, "Suffering: The Fire That Purifies." He writes that "believers never choose suffering. Rather, suffering chooses us" (185). He includes a chapter on suffering in his book on spiritual disciplines not in the sense of welcoming of singing, but in a sense of having the readiness and resources to endure the suffering that will inevitably find us.

He makes the analogy of readiness to face suffering with disaster preparedness, plans and procedures that businesses, schools, universities and other institutions have or should have in place to address threats from either natural or human sources. The ability to endure suffering patiently, trusting God is with us in the midst of it leads to greater faith and maturity.

This does not mean that we do not experience doubts about God and God's will for us in the midst of suffering. Rather, we should not be surprise if we do. It is part of being human and it is part of the struggle of going through periods of suffering. He quotes Thomas Merton at one point:

Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair (190).

Tippens does not minimize the difficulty of suffering and, in fact, believes that time does not heal all wounds. He writes, "I do believe one can learn to carry accrued wounds with grace and resolve. Over time we discover that, yes, "The Lord is near to the broken-hearted, and saves the crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18)" (195).

As one who does not like to suffer, I found this chapter balanced and helpful. He doesn't offer platitudes, doesn't say that it's all God's will, and doesn't suggest that we shouldn't have any doubts.

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Thought for the Day

The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit of doing them.
--Benjamin Jewett

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The Power of Stories

The fifteenth chapter of Pilgrim Heart has to do with stories and their power to communicate to us. A lot has been written over the last 20 to 30 years on the importance of narrative, but Tippens' chapter, nevertheless, offers a succinct and interesting take on stories. One of the quotations of George Steiner which he includes in the chapter I found particularly memorable:

To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial...A comic book is better than nothing so long as there is in it the multiplying life of language...If the child is left empty of texts, in the fullest sense of that term, he will suffer an early death of the heart and of the imagination (180).

Over the last 15 years or so I have come to the understanding of the importance and power of the imagination not only our faith life, but living life well in general. The person that has been the most influential for me in this area is Eugene Peterson. Imagination is essential to story. And it is in story that we learn about who we are and our place in the world. Tippens believes that it is "storytellers in any culture who have the greatest influence on the direction of a culture, not legislators, government leaders, or scholars" (179). I agree.

An important part of discipleship is becoming part of the God's ongoing story, the story recorded in the scriptures and the story that continues today in our world. We need to let the Holy Spirit graft us into this story, so that we live and breathe it as our own. We need to let this story form us, shape us, and move us.

It might be a helpful exercise to ask yourself, what are the stories that our culture tells about us, and what stories are actually shaping our lives?

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Thought for the Day

Every time a poem is written, every time a short story is written, it is written not by cunning, but by belief.
--Robert Frost

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

Yesterday's sermon was on the Holy Spirit since it was Pentecost Sunday. As I have gotten older, I love preaching on the Holy Spirit. I didn't have much to say earlier in my life, but as I have experienced the power and the presence in my own life and have seen the Spirit's work in the church, I have gone through a kind of transformation.

The three characteristics of the Holy Spirit that I drew from Ezekiel 37:1-14 and Acts 2:1-13 are: 1. It's messy/chaotic like birth is; 2. It comes from a direction and a way that we frequently least expect it to come; and 3. There is an ebb and flow to the working of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it seems more palpably present than other times, and the times that the Spirit's work seems more palpably present occur during big societal/cultural transitions.

I noted that our becoming a discipleship church which I believe is led by the Holy Spirit involves living in more chaos than many people are comfortable with. It, of course, involves change, and change always involves loss. So frequently anxiety and anger accompany change.

As we continue to move forward, we need to be aware of some of the fears that change raises and trust in the Holy Spirit to continue to lead and guide us even in the midst of the angst.

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Thought for the Day

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face...You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.
--Eleanor Roosevelt

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Prayer for Pentecost

Spirit of the living Christ, come upon us in the glory of your risen power; Spirit of the Living Christ, come upon us in all the humility of your wondrous love; Spirit of the Living
Christ, come upon us that new life may course within our vein, new love bind us together in one family, a new vision of the kingdom of God spur us on to serve you with fearless passion.
--Source Unknown

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Tired of Being Tired

I don't know about you, but I am tired a lot. When I slow down to have prayer and devotions, I not infrequently fall asleep. I don't like this state of affairs, and recently realized that my problem is that I simply don't get enough sleep. My problem is where to cut out some of the things that I fell that I need to do so that I can get an extra 1-1 1/2 hours more of sleep a day. It seems like I'm not the Lone Ranger in this. Check out this article on exhaustion and see if it applies to you.

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Meal and Memory

In the fourteenth chapter of Pilgrim Heart Tippens focuses on the importance of meals together in and their relationship to memory. He notes that memory is an essential ingredient to our identity, both individual and corporate.

He writes, "The Bible invites us to remember because memory is the great vehicle of spiritual identity and formation, an important supply for moral reflection, and a source for constructing the future. Without memory there can be no mature and enduring spirituality" (168). This applies to social memory as well. He maintains the one of the marks of our own society is the "erasure of cultural memory," and he quotes Milan Kundera: "The first step in liquidating a people is...to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history" (169).

One of the purposes of the Bible is to help the community of faith transmit its memories from one generation to the next. In fact he refers to the Bible as "a book of memories" (170). The Exodus is a big story that Jews transmit from one generation to the other and it invite them into the story, to metabolize it and make it their own story, for instance. Likewise, the story of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection becomes a disciples story.

Tippens observes how important meals are to transmitting memories. If you grew up in a halfway healthy family, you no doubt have fond memories of mealtimes, or a big family feast. An ancient way of helping people to remember is through a shared meal. The Bible is full of examples of the church fathers and mothers, not to mention Jesus, sharing meals together. Tippens writes, "The fact is that in early Christianity there was a deep and mysterious fusion of food and faith that we only dimly understand in an age which so relentlessly segregates the sacred and the secular...in the Bible food talk is really God talk" (172).

Taste and smell have a kind of immediate access to memory, and therefore, Tippens argues that any faith community that takes itself seriously needs to incorporate meals as an important part of community life. We need to do this both as families and as a church family. It makes me wonder how well we as a church are encouraging families to carve out the time to have meals together and how well we are practicing this as a community of faith. What do you think?

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Thought for the Day

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour.
--G. K. Chesterton

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Thought for the Day

To be forced to choose between science and religion, or between the ways of reason and the ways of faith, is not an adequate human choice. Better it is to take part in a prolonged, intelligent, and respectful conversation across those outmoded ways of drawing lines.
--Michael Novak

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The Power of Music

One of the best chapters in Pilgrim Heart is chapter 12: "Singing: The Way To Heaven's Door." This brief chapter is full of noteworthy quotations about the purpose and power of music in the Christian life.

Here is a sample of a few:

If singing is not the purpose of religion, it is most certainly one of its principal supports (147).

People are influenced by music because it has the power to transport them into God's presence (147).

Music, more than any other aspect of worship, has the capacity to awaken us to this sense of God's otherness (147).

The force of hymns is often extraordinary because, when we sing, body, emotion, and intellect are mysteriously connected. Great Christian hymns are effective because they implant the truths of the faith in our hearts, not just in our heads. They rehearse the stories of Scripture. In word and sound we experience Gethsemane, the cross, and the resurrection (150).

It is worth noting that the first piece of written English (of which we have a record) is a hymn (150).

...what we sing and feel in our hearts remains with us far longer than what we receive through passive listening (151).

Concerning the various styles of music used for worship, Tippens advises humility and flexibility. stating that "all sorts of music can minister to us in all sorts of ways," he notes that what music means resides in the individual, not in the sound. He also reminds us that over 2000 years thousands of hymns and songs have been written and the repertoire of what we know is small. He writes,
If we turn to the Bible for guidance, we find that it never prescribes musical styles or particular hymns. Styles change, and no single era has an exclusive claim on musical excellence. Every age has its forgettable tunes and inadequate lyrics as well as its masterpieces, but even the mediocre ones may be vehicles of faith for some (152-153).
He packs some other important ideas in the chapter as well, and concludes that discipleship would greatly diminish without music.

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Flash Forward

The theme for this Sunday, Pentecost Sunday, is, of course, the Holy Spirit. The texts for the service are Ezekiel 37:1-14 and Acts 2:1-13, and the sermon title is, "Waking Up." I love the imagery of Ezekiel 37, the valley of dry bones. I feel like many churches in the West are a valley of dry bones, and we need the blowing and empowerment of the Holy Spirit to bring life and power and health into the church.

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Thought for the Day

God is beautiful. He is the most beautiful of beings...He is beautiful through Himself and in Himself, beautiful absolutely.
--Jacques Maritain

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Thought for the Day

The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness.
--William Blake

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Philip Rieff and Culture

The other day I read a review Philip Rieff's book, Charisma, by R. R. Reno, Professor of Theology at Creighton University (Rieff died last year). Rieff was a sociologist of prodigious intellect and both his books Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and the Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) are still relevant and in print today.

According to Reno, Rieff believed that "the central defining purpose of culture is to regulate the always troublesome relation between the No-imposing voice of commandment and the Yes-seeking desires of the individual." Rieff thought that the way that traditional cultures negotiated this tricky interaction between commandment and desires was by creating an environment where people internalized cultural norms. These traditional cultural norms were religious at their core, and in Reno's words, "stamp our inner lives with their creeds and, in so doing, deliver the human animal from its slavery to instinct."

Ever one for a pithy phrase, Rieff wrote, "Without an authority deeply installed, there is no foundation for individuality." In other words, for all of our desire to flaunt authority and "be our own person," Rieff argues that without a deeply held authority that ultimately comes from outside our sovereign self, we live thin lives in a kind of soulless world. Reno comments on Rieff's understanding,

A cultureless culture such as our own encourages us to save for retirement, and we are hectored to quit smoking and always use condoms. Demand and limitations are inevitable parts of social existence. Prudence survives the death of God...our refusal to teach the commandments of God to our children and ourselves leads us to destroy what we promise to cherish and nurture--personality.

"An authority deeply installed..." It's a phrase worth pondering. I wonder how well the church is doing this?

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Thought for the Day

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate. The real labour is to remember, to attend. In fact, to come awake. Still more, to remain awake.
--C. S. Lewis, Prayers: Letters to Malcolm

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Knowlegeable or Wise?

A couple of weeks ago I read an article in the Boston Globe about studying wisdom. Wisdom is not a word that you find frequently in psychology or sociology. A few brave souls have tried to operationalize the definition of wisdom and try to study it. The problem seems to be that no one has a good way of doing this.

Wisdom is not intelligence, is not knowledge, is not information. Values are involved in wisdom and in our modern world who can agree on values. It seems that everyone has their own values and who is to say that yours are better than mine? You can see the difficulty a researched might have in nailing down a definition that other can agree with.

It so happened that I recently read a chapter in Pilgrim Heart by Darryl Tippens on wisdom, a chapter I found quite insightful. Referring to the work of Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg who edited the book Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, he notes that intelligence without linked to moral virtues can lead to disastrous behavior. He writes,

Sternberg observes that while IQ scores are rising about nine points per generation, people are not necessarily becoming wiser. Intelligence simply cannot be equated with wisdom, which entails qualities like compassion, honesty, and reciprocity, and the"golden rule" (charity towards all) (139).

Tippens also argues that one of the chief virtues necessary for wisdom is humility, a quality in our own culture that is not held up as a particularly important one. I keep reading article about the increase of narcissism in our own society, not a promising trend if you are interested in the increase of wisdom.

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Thought for the Day

All men are frail, but thou shouldst reckon none as frail as thyself.
--Thomas a Kempis

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Prayer for the Day

O my sweet Saviour Christ, which in thine undeserved love towards mankind so kindly wouldst suffer the painful death of the cross, suffer me not to be cold nor lukewarm in love again towards thee.
--Sir Thomas More

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Thought for the Day

Did God...not invent man so that He might hear him tell tales?
--George Steiner

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Ministering to the Poor and Powerless

On Sunday Patty MacDonald will share about some of World Visions work supplying clean water to villages in Africa. The church has contribute $17,000 to drill a well in Zambia.

I share this because I am excited about World Vision's commitment to Jesus by incarnating his love throughout the world especially through ministering to the poorest of the poor. Beth and I have been sponsoring children for over 30 years now, and I don't cease to be impressed with World Vision's ministry over the years that we have been involved with them. I have also had the privilege of visiting two of our sponsored children, one in South India and the other in Lesotho, and I have been impressed with the World Vision staff in both of these countries.

Richard Stearns is the current president of World Vision, USA and I think he is doing an outstanding job as a steward of the monies and gifts that have been entrusted to World Vision. He has led World Vision to join forces with the lead singer of U2, Bono, in the One Campaign, a campaign aimed at wiping out the extreme poverty in the world. To get a sense of Richard Stearn's heart, go to Guy Kawasake's blog, scroll down to the May 14, 2007 blog and read the interview with Richard Stearns.

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Thought for the Day

Life is a mosaic work of the Lord's, which he keeps filling in bit by bit.
--Isak Dinesen

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Fast Forward

Patty MacDonald from World Vision will share with us on Sunday about the well that they are drilling in Zambia with money donated from our church. She will make a presentation that includes powerpoint and pictures as we look both at the needs in Africa and what is already being done by World Vision. I hope that you can worship with us at either the 9:30 a.m. or 11:00 a.m. service and learn more about the possibilities that lie before us in terms of world mission.

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Thought for the Day

Justice is truth in action.
--Benjamin Disraeli

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The Renovation of "Holy"

In the sixth chapter of The Jesus Way, Eugene Peterson discusses the whole notion of what holy and holiness mean. I learned a lot from this chapter and am trying to figure out how to use what I have learned.

The word holy has a lot of baggage with it. It's actually not a word that I am likely to use, especially in a nonchurch setting. But even in church I don't use the word much. I think one of the reasons for its disuse is the past misuse of the word. When I think of holy, I must confess that words like moralistic, joyless, and legalistic jump to mind. Peterson puts it this way:

Holy is never a pious abstraction...It is something lived. It is the life of God breathed into and invigorating our lives...but in our culture it is the fate of holiness to be banalized. Holiness is reduced to blandness, the specialty of sectarian groups who reduce life to behaviors and cliches that can be certified as safe: goodness in a straightjacket, truth drained of mystery, beauty emasculated into ceramic knickknacks. Whenever I run up against this, I remember Ellen Glasgow's wonderful line in her autobiography. Of her father, a Presbyterian elder full of rectitude and rigid with duty, she wrote, "He was entirely unselfish, and in his long life never committed a pleasure" (127-128).

But after reading this chapter, I have a renewed understanding of the meaning. It has a rich meaning that helps us to keep focused on the fact that God is not our "gofer" or our genie-in-the-bottle, but the One who is Other and yet loves us eternally. Again, Peterson captures this well:

Holiness does not make God smaller so that he can be used in convenient and manageable projects; it makes us larger so that God can give out life through us, extravagantly, spontaneously. The holy is an interior fire, a passion for living in and for God, a capacity for exuberance in the presence of God. There are springs deep within and around us from which we can drink and sing God (128).

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Thought for the Day

All beauty in the world is either a memory of Paradise or a prophecy of the transfigured world.
--Nicholas Berdyaev, The Divine and the Human

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Think Outside the Walls

Taco Bell's current advertisements have the catchy phrase, "Think outside the bun." I think our church can modify this phrase to "Think outside the walls! (of the church building)

The more that I read, pray, and ponder the church and its mission, the more convinced I am that the church needs to focus on what is going on outside the building and bring to bear Jesus' love and commitment to people outside of the sanctuary.

Today's thought for the day by Alan Hirsch powerfully captures this idea of thinking outside the walls: "the church's true and authentic organizing principle is mission. When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible" (The Forgotten Ways, 82).

I am constantly wondering how we can live outside the walls, how we can incarnate Christ in Medfield and the surrounding towns, in the nation, and in the world. I wonder how we can make this happen, and not just offer this idea lip service. I wonder what it would look like.

The membership or Christendom model church has focused primarily on what happens inside the walls of the church building and attracting people inside. It takes intention, it takes effort to reverse this thinking and focus on what is going on outside and how as Jesus body we might incarnate his love in the surrounding neighborhoods. Rather than think of mission as one of the many things that we do, what if we began to think of it as our organizing principle and the main thing we do? What if what we do inside the building is always seen in the light of what it will help us to do outside the walls rather than what we do outside the walls supports what we do inside the walls? I suggest that we adopt the motto, "Think outside the walls!"

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Thought for the Day

The pilgrim heart is a confessional heart, a heart that faces the truth, accepts the truth, and tells the truth--especially about oneself.
--Darryl Tippens, Pilgrim Heart

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So What Else is New?

The Ideas section of the Boston Globe yesterday featured a review on Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It seems that fundamentalist atheists can't keep themselves from publishing book after book about the evils of religion.

The reviewer was none other than Daniel Dennett, a professor at Tufts University and author of another book ridiculing and reviling the religions and those who worship. He writes concerning the book, Hitchens'

has the credentials, as both a combative journalist and a surprisingly erudite literary scholar, and he wants to break the diplomacy barrier and expose the preposterous presumptions and ignoble machinations that stain the history of all religions, bringing discredit that tends to get magnified over the years by a persistent pattern of coverup, veils of illusion, and denial of one design or another. These efforts at obfuscation are quite transparent under Hitchens' merciless scrutiny...

It appears that many of the themes in this book overlap with some of the other recent books by Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, and Wilson.

One of these "conversation stopper" questions in Hitchens' that lays bare the deceit and illusion in Christianity is, "If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?" It is a simplistic question seeking a simplistic answer. If you are a thoroughgoing materialist and rule out the prospect of spiritual reality by definition, I suppose this question might bear some weight. If you have done your homework and studied the religions in more detail, and in relation to Christianity what theologians have thought over the centuries concerning questions like this, it wouldn't be mentioned as a very significant obstacle to faith.

The fundamentalist atheists must really be frightened by all of the religious activity they see.

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Thought for the Day

If you love truth, be a lover of silence.
--Isaac of Nineveh

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Prayer for the Day

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.
--John Greenleaf Whittier

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Thought for the Day

Work is not always required of man. There is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
--George MacDonald

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Emptying

In the third chapter of Darryl Tippen's book, The Pilgrim Heart, he lays the groundwork for the spiritual disciplines that he will explore in the remainder of the book. The key is "emptying."

He refers to Henri Nouwen's phrase, "downward mobility," as the way of pilgrims. A passage that I found particularly powerful was

The spirit of "emptying' lies at the very heart of Christianity. Thus, unwillingness to empty one's cupboard, whether literal or spiritual, is a serious impediment to the pilgrim heart finding its way to God. For one thing, God has much to offer us, but if we are already full--of ourselves or the things of this world--then we have no room to receive. Satiation, the state of being overly full or satisfied to excess, is as dangerous to the spiritual life as obesity is to the body (40).

As he builds his case he refers to the kenotic passage found in Philippians 2:5-11; Jesus' self-emptying for the world. Kenosis is the biblical Greek word for "emptying." As he notes, at the core this word means "relinquishment of authority, power, or prerogative" (41).

He also offers an important caveat for understanding kenosis, and that is how easily it can be misunderstood and misapplied. Self-emptying has been used as a way of exploiting the powerless and weak, but telling them that they need to empty themselves for the purposes of serving the powerful. It has also been used to teach people that they should be happy doormats, a major distortion of self-emptying. Tippens writes, "Jesus teaches us how kenosis is to work. He is meek and lowly, the humble servant to the weak, the needy, and the outcast. He also confronted evil bravely. He taught us to be wise as serpents as well as harmless as doves" (50).

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Thought for the Day

To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of the poem, oral or written, is a kind of living burial.
--George Steiner

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Abraham and the Jesus Way

In chapter two of The Jesus Way, Peterson focuses on Abraham and God's test of his faith by asking him to sacrifice Isaac. He has some thought provoking ideas, I think, in the chapter, ideas that I have been thinking about.

Concerning sacrifice, Peterson writes

Sacrifice exposes spiritual fantasy as a masquerade of faith. Sacrifice scraps any illusion, no matter how pious, that is spun by the devil. Sacrifice plucks out the avaricious eye. Sacrifice lops off the grasping hand. Sacrifice is a readiness to interrupt whatever we are doing...A sacrificial life is the means, and the only means, by which a life of faith matures. (49-50).

I must confess that I wish things didn't work this way, but I know that they do. I can so easily lull myself into complacency and thinking things are going smoothly and all is well with me. I agree with Peterson when he says, "we cannot be trusted to test ourselves. We are too full of self-interest and self-deceit. We are too devious in devising ways of cooking the books to document the evidence that serves our illusions....Religion and spirituality is a bottomless pit breeding illusion, deceit, and oppression" (53). And so, according to Peterson, God tests us.

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Thought for the Day

Be attentive about your time. Man will not be able to excuse himself at the last judgment, saying to God, "You overwhelmed me with the future when I was only capable of living in the present."
--The Cloud of Unknowing

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Faith on Campus

An Op-Ed piece from the New York Times, "Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus," a week ago, May 2, 2007, comments on the interest college students have with religion. Peter Gomes, the Harvard University Chaplain writes, "There is probably more active religious life now than there has been in 100 years."

Some college officials attribute it to the influence of the religious right in politics, to a renewed interest in religion as a result of 9/11, and a large influx of evangelical students and international students who practice their faith. Even Berkeley has seen a large rise in religious students.

I would also suggest this phenomenon is a function of our inherent need to worship, the subject of last Sunday's sermon. I find it particularly ironic in light of Freud's belief that with the scientific revolution and the increase of knowledge religions would atrophy as knowledge increased. The very place where one would expect Freud's thesis to be most evident, is in the university.

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Thought for the Day

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
--Czelaw Milosz

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The Way as Metaphor

Eugene Peterson wants followers of Jesus to live the Christian life with integrity and with passion. Before I knew about him and read my first Peterson book, I didn't really know what the jacket cover meant when it said that he was professor of Spiritual Theology. After ten years of reading his books, I have a much better sense of what that means, and I think his latest book, The Jesus Way, captures this passion.

There is a way in which the metaphor of Jesus as "the Way" captures this desire he has to communicate the depth and breadth of Jesus and following him. In the first chapter of the book, he argues that you cannot adequately define or inform the life of following Jesus. Metaphor is the only linguistic mode that can carry the freight. He writes,

A metaphor is a word that carries us across the abyss separating the invisible from the visible. The contradiction involved in what the word denotes and what it connotes sets up a tension in our minds, and we are stimulated to an act of imagination in which we become participants in what is being spoken. Metaphor is our lexical witness to transcendence--to the more, the beyond, the within--to all that cannot be accounted for by our microscopes and telescopes, by our algebra and geometry, by pulse rate and blood pressure, by weights and measures...a witness to all the operations of the Trinity (25).

To say that Jesus is The Way is to exceed what we can possibly define or describe. This metaphor draws us imaginatively into it to discover meaning and behaviors and attitudes and dimensions that description could never include. There is always a surplus of meaning in this metaphor, and that is why metaphors are so important and occur so regularly in the Bible.

What does this metaphor mean to you, and how have you incorporated into your own life? How is Jesus the Way for you? How is Jesus not the Way for you?

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Thought for the Day

Don't expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty...
--Flannery O'Connor

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

I focused my sermon yesterday on the notion that we all have an "inner altar" upon which we place someone(s) or something(s) to which we pay homage or worship. I said that we are so constructed that we can run away from God--that is we don't have to believe in a supernatural being if we don't want to, but we can't not worship. Whatever is at the center of our lives, on whatever we place ultimate value, that is what we worship. If God isn't on our inner altar, something will replace God.

I noted that who or what is on our inner altar has important ramifications for our lives because we tend to construct our identities around it. In fact, I noted that I consider the counseling and therapy that I do at one level to be a discovery process for who or what is on the person's inner altar. Once we discover a person's idols, the person can begin to address attitudes and behaviors that keep this idol in its place.

I ended the sermon by asking a simple question that has profound implications: What is on your altar?!

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Thought for the Day

Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise.
--Martin Luther

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Prayer for the Day

Grant me, I beseech thee, almighty and merciful God, fervently to desire, wisely to search out, truly to acknowledge and perfectly to fulfil, all that is well-pleasing to thee. Order thou my worldly condition to the honour and glory of thy name; and of all that thou requirest me to do, grant me the knowledge, the desire, and the ability, that I may so fulfil it as I ought, and as is expedient for the welfare of my soul.
--Thomas Aquinas

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Jamestown

I have been doing some reading and following the celebration for the 400th year of the founding of Jamestown. Time, National Geographic, and Smithsonian all have article this month on the founding of Jamestown, and I imagine that many other journals and magazines will include articles on its founding. Queen Elizabeth II is in Virginia this week helping in the celebrations.

To be honest, while I was well aware of Jamestown and its founding in 1607, I really didn't know much about it. So this morning when I read in Time the articles on John Smith, Pocahontas, and how slavery began and expanded in Virginia fascinating. John Smith has an incredible story and had many close calls during is relatively long life. Just in is relationship with Jamestown he was almost executed three times, one by the Indians and twice by the colonists. He was not an easy person to get along with, but as the byline of the essay says, "He was a bully, a braggart and a rebel with a big chip on his shoulder. They would never have made it without him." What I find especially amazing is that when Jamestown was settled, Smith was only 27.

I would be interested in learning about any articles that you have read about Jamestown that you have found particularly interesting.

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Thought for the Day

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel.
--Shakespeare

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The Pilgrim Heart

I purchased Pilgrim Heart: The Way of Jesus in Everyday Life this week on the basis of Scot McKnight's recommendation that I read on his blog. The author, Darryl Tippens, provost and professor of Early Modern literature at Pepperdine University, invites the reader to take a fresh look at spiritual disciplines so that we might more faithfully follow an embodied Jesus in the world in which we live.

One of the major misunderstandings in Christian spirituality is the "spiritualizing" of everything, and not taking seriously and integrating the created world, including our bodies, into this spirituality. He quotes C. S. Lewis to help make his point:

There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man [or woman] to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unscriptural. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.

I know the spirituality that I exhibited in my 20's and early 30's suffered from just this problem. Perhaps this is why I am finding Tippen's book so interesting and helpful.

The other important point that Tippen's makes in the introduction is that we as Christians must insure that our faith and spirituality is reproducible in the next generation. He writes,

In the quest to convey the right message, we may be abandoning the most basic--and most powerful--"tools" of faith transmission...no matter how well we might have "done church" a generation ago, it matters little if we don not continually recreate the kind of compelling culture that allowed the early church to thrive in persecution and that will ensure the propagation of communities of faith in our time as well (15-16).

I find interesting intersections with Eugene Peterson's book The Jesus Way, and hope they become visible as I blog through each of them.

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Thought for the Day

Where is the wisdsom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
--T. S. Eliot

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Flash Forward

This Sunday's sermon will address the human need to worship. Texts for the sermon are Deuteronomy 5:1-10 and John 4:19-26 and the sermon title is "Altar Ego." I believe that the need to worship is universal even for those who are die-hard atheists. We put something on the altar and if it's not God it will necessarily be something else. It's not possible to live life without some object on the altar of our hearts.

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Thought for the Day

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
--Albert Einstein

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Thought for the Day

Everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.
--Soren Kierkegaard

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The Jesus Way

I want to blog through the new Eugene Peterson book, The Jesus Way, a book that has spoken to me personally. I have been reading through it as part of my devotions and thought that I would share some of the highlights.

"The Purification of Means," a phrase taken from philosopher Jacques Maritain, is the title of an engaging introduction. In the Way of Jesus, means are as important as ends. He notes that our culture encourages us to focus on how to "get ahead," and within the specific field in which getting things done is the goal, it does accomplish this. But in relation to persons, this way of being as terrible costs to it. Peterson writes,

When it comes to persons, these ways of the world are terribly destructive. They are highly effective in getting ahead in a God-indifferent world, but not in the community of Jesus, not in the kingdom of God...In matters of ways and means, the world gives scant attention to what it means to live, to really live, to live eternal life in ordinary time; God is not worshiped, Jesus is not followed, the Spirit is not given a voice (3).

Peterson notes that the way of Jesus (He is referring to John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life") is incarnated in the local church. For many North American Christians, however, has been infected by consumerism which has a detrimental impact on living the Way. Instead of denial the church influenced by consumerism is more interested in acquisition.

North American Christians are conspicuous for going along with whatever the culture decides is charismatic, successful, influential--whatever gets things done, whatever can gather a crowd of followers--hardly noticing that these ways and means are at odds with the clearly marked way that Jesus walked and called us to follow(8).

He includes what I consider an outstanding section on what he calls the laity myth and its attendant consequences. The two-tiered system of clergy and laity, in which the laity are clearly marginalized is a terrible heresy for him. "Within the Christian community there are few words that are more disabling than 'layperson' and 'laity.'" Laity for Peterson is a term of dignity and needs to be renovated and reinterpreted so that we can be the church that we are called to be and live the Jesus Way.

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Thought for the Day

God cannot be explained or interpreted by notions we have acquired by assembling feelings of reverence from sunsets, spiked with a few stories of miracles, and then legitimated with some comments that we pick up from celebrity interviews.
--Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way

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