What Christian Worship Can Learn From Atheists

While recent signs indicate that the tenor of conversation between Christians and atheists may be improving (evolving, even?) in public discourse, there is some irony in the fact that there is such considerable room to improve. Irony because, in the first centuries of the Church, Christians were regularly accused of - and killed for - being atheists, having adopted, said the ancient Greek historian Dio Cassius, "the practices of the Jews." Or as Phil Harkland put it in the article cited above: "the denial of other gods was perhaps the most important source of conflict and the strangest thing about devotees of the Judean God and of Christ."

While it is not uncommon for Christians to consider the distinctiveness of Christian claims relative to Judaism, it is instructive that the early Greeks saw Christians as adopting the practices of the Jews. This outside Greek perspective helpfully recalls the continuity of Israel's vocation - Israel's "set apart-ness" - and God's mission to those beyond Israel.  Dio Cassius is observing exactly the scandal by which the blessing of Israel's Kingdom is, in Christ, opened to Gentiles and that mixed kettle of fish called the Church. For Christians, Jesus is both "a Light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of your people Israel."

To begin with Israel is to begin with one God: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad; Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one (Deut. 6:4). 

Now, belief in one god is, in some sense, a question of movement from one's point of reference. That is, the one god of Israel's Shema could represent an increase, as in, "I did not believe in God before, but now I do." What the early opposition to the Church clearly saw, however, is that confession of "one true god" can just as easily - and far more probably - represent a decrease, as in, "I will not bow down to other gods."(1)  

Examples of the confession of one God as a decrease from the alternative in Scripture are many and too numerous to list. Consider a few representative instances: Israel and the golden calf (and God's response), Israel's request for a king (and God's reluctance), the refusal of the three men to serve the king's gods (and their subsequent deliverance from the fiery furnace), Jesus' crucifixion (and the people's haunting words, "We have no king but the emperor"), and the missionary encounters of the apostles recorded in Acts.

Similarly, the history of the Church's life and witness has consistently understood and engaged formation centered on one God as opposed to many. In his commentary on the Ten Commandments, Martin Luther writes:

Ask and examine your heart diligently, and you will find whether it cleaves to God alone or not. If you have a heart that can expect of Him nothing but what is good, especially in want and distress, and that, moreover, renounces and forsakes everything that is not God, then you will have the only true God. If, in the contrary, it cleaves to anything else, of which it expects more good and help than of God, and does not take refuge in Him, but it adversity flees from Him, then you have an idol, another god.

Thus, Christian formation consists, in part, of not believing; of saying "no" to the pantheon of the gods, where "gods" are understood to be anything from which we expect more good and help than God.

Of course, Christians are not atheists. Emphatically, believing in the one God who delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt and raised Jesus from the dead changes everything. Indeed, to the extent Christians fail to worship the one true God - by expecting more good and help than of God from the countless myriads gods of our day - we live what Stanley Hauerwas calls lives of "practical atheism." 

But if confession of the Christian God requires of those who confess this God the refusal to worship another, perhaps we can acknowledge that atheists and Christians have a shared agenda: the naming and dissuasion of the worship of gods we don't believe exist. For this reason, it is curious that Christians have not valued inter-faith conversations with atheists on the same level as conversations with peoples of other faiths. Christians believe that it is enough to believe, and forget that not worshiping gods is as distinctive of our tradition as is worshiping the Triune God revealed in Jesus.(2) The challenge to an inter-faith conversation with atheists, I suppose, is that Christians and atheists can't agree on the gods we don't believe exist. 

Disagreements notwithstanding, I have hope that generous atheists can teach the Church a thing or two about not believing. I hope, too, that a generous Church can raise questions for atheists - about the gods, with God's help, we are learning not to worship.

JRM+

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(1) Significantly, throughout the Church's history, one of the chief expressions of the Christian's refusal to worship other gods has been the Christian's unwillingness to legitimate the empire's claims of divine status. Thus, the Church understands "Jesus is Lord" to be a theological and political statement.

 (2) Cf. Hauerwas: Americans do not have to believe in God, because they believe that it is a good thing simply to believe: all they need is a general belief in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in the US. The god most Americans say they believe in is not interesting enough to deny, because it is only the god that has given them a country that ensures that they have the right to choose to believe in the god of their choosing, Accordingly, the only kind of atheism that counts in the US is that which calls into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty, and happiness.

Why Christians Don't Need Institutions in Order to Screw Up

In an earlier post we looked at Lesslie Newbigin's contention that denominational institutions are a particular kind of anti-sacrament. An odd thing, maybe, for a Protestant to contend, but the idea that schism is bad is not new, either.  What IS new is Newbigin's subsequent contention that a) institutions AND b) unaffiliated individuals (oftentimes perceived as the opposite or alternative of institutions) ironically share the same doomed trust in the prevailing secular ideology that relegates spirituality to the purely private sphere.  This insight should challenge anti-institutional folks to nuance their surface critiques and look for real and developed alternatives of hope.

Plainly, Newbigin believes he has discovered the flaw that makes institutions worthy of suspicion, and it happens to be the same flaw that those not committed to institutions often make.  Such a revelation is vitally important to explore since the goal is the flourishing of the Church's mission and eliminating an identified challenge is not the same as constructing a positive solution.  

Not surprisingly, Newbigin believes this hope has as its source the Gospel of Christ, and especially here he makes an appeal to reclaiming a "true apocalyptic".  Notice what is happening: the flaw is no longer the mere existence of institutions (a clumsy thing to blame since institutions refer to people working together in any kind of organized way) but is now located in how we relate and respond to the action of the living God - the hope we have in Christ.  Here is Newbigin:

There can be no missionary encounter with our culture without a biblically grounded eschatology, without recovering a true apocalyptic.  The dichotomy that runs through our culture between the private and the public worlds is reflected in the dissolution of the biblical vision of the last things into two separate and unrelated forms of hope.  One is the public hope for a better world in the future, the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century French philosophers, the utopia of the evolutionary social planners, or the classless society of the revolutionary sociologists.  The other is the private hope for personal immortality in a blessed world beyond this one.  This dissolution is tragic.  It destroys the integrity of the human person.  If I pin my hope to a perfect word that is to be prepared for some future generations, I know that I and my contemporaries will never live to see it, and therefore that those now living can be - and if necessary must be - sacrificed in the interests of those as yet unborn; and so the way is open for the ruthless logic of totalitarian planners and social engineers.  If on the other hand I place all my hope in a personal future, I am tempted to wash my hands of responsibility for the public life of the word and to turn inwards towards a purely private spirituality.

That tragic split runs right through our lives and our society, and only the biblical understanding of the last things can heal that dichotomy.  The apocalyptic teaching that forms such an important part of the New Testament has generally in our culture been pushed to the margins of Christian thought.  It has been treasured, of course, by small oppressed groups on the margins of our society, but it has been generally silenced in the mainstream of our established Christianity.  Essentially this says to us: If I ask what in all my active life is the horizon of my expectations, the thing to which I look forward, the answer, it seems to me, cannot be some future utopia in the future and cannot be some personal bliss for myself, it can only be, quite simply, the coming of Jesus to complete his Father's will.  He shall come again.  He is the horizon of my expectations.  Everything from my side, whether prayer or action, private or public, is done to him and for him.  It is simply offered for his use.  In the words of Schweitzer, it is an 'acted prayer for His coming.'  He will make of it what he will.  My vigorous and righteous actions do not build the holy city.  They are too shot through with sin for that.  But they are acted prayers that he will give the holy city.  And that embraces both the public and the private world.  The holy city, as its name indicates, is on the one hand the crown and perfection of all that we call civilization.  Into it the kinds of the nations bring their cultural treasures.  But it is also the place where every tear is wiped from our eyes and we are the beloved children of God who see him face to face.  Only in that vision and hope is the tragic dichotomy of our culture healed.

Are Denominations Anti-Sacraments? (and who do they worship?)

I am currently on the home-stretch of Paul Weston's Lesslie Newbigin Reader. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

The more I read, the less patience I have for any missional/emerging conversation that is not in knowledgeable and active conversation with Newbigin's writings. Newbigin consistently asks the difficult questions upon which the missional church rightly insists, but he steadfastly avoids Pelagian solutions that would turn missionary efforts into technical attempts to "get it right." Better said, Newbigin perceives the theological resources available to the whole system, rather than zero in on a particular perceived "issue", read in isolation of the whole. And "the whole" for Newbigin is always the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

A great example of this Christ-centered perspective at work comes in his consideration of denominational institutions. Rather than pit institutions in the bad camp and all other forms on the good, his analysis lands him at the heart of the challenge: a gospel-based rationale for freedom of thought that is capable of stepping outside of the inherited basis for that freedom in Western thought, which comes via the Enlightenment. So doing, he saves us the embarrassment that occurs when well-meaning Christians change everything only to realize that they have really changed nothing, because we have not been able to accurately see ourselves, much less sufficiently see ourselves.

Here are some highlights from his observations:

"...the denomination is simply the institutional form of privatized religion. It is a voluntary association of individuals. It is to put it simply - the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual surrender to the ideology of our culture."

"They cannot confront our culture as Jesus confronted Pontius Pilate with the witness to the truth, since they do not claim to be more than associations of individuals who hold the same opinion."

"I believe that it is possible to act effectively in each local situation in such a way that the Christians together in each place begin even now to be recognizable as the Church for that place."

"If we are to escape from the ideology of the Enlightenment without falling into the errors of Corpus Christianum, we must recover a doctrine of freedom of thought and conscience that is founded not on the ideology of the Enlightenment but on the gospel."

On What Grounds Do We Preach One Flock?

Sermon excerpts from Easter 4, April 29, 2012

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

Today is the 4th Sunday of Easter - we’re going on a full month of Easter now, good practice in becoming an Easter people - and the 4th Sunday of Easter sometimes goes by the nickname “Good Shepherd Sunday.”  We call it Good Shepherd Sunday on account of the prayer assigned to this day and the readings, especially Psalm 23 - “the Lord is my shepherd” - and our lesson from John’s gospel - “I am the good shepherd,” Jesus says.

On a personal level, I love these readings.  But if I am honest, I don’t at all know what to do with these readings.  In particular, I don’t know what to do with a gospel that tells us that there will be one flock and one shepherd because, this morning, I am preaching to two services at one church.  Two services for somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-five combined worshipers.  If statistics prove true, fewer than half of us this morning will be among the seventy-five worshipers who show up next week, which means that our church is really made up of at least three congregations: the two that are here this morning and the one that will be here next week, plus the half of us who will join them.  One flock, one shepherd, three separate assemblies.  Moreover, I am preaching the news that there will be one flock and one shepherd in a town with no fewer than twenty-one churches.

Tell me: can you think of any other business, non-profit, or other public entity that the good citizens of Portland, Texas, have decided we need twenty-one of?  I mean, can we get somebody as excited about bringing in some really good restaurants as our town is excited about founding new churches?

Even this number, though, gets dwarfed when one does a quick search for churches in the Corpus Christi area via the online yellow pages; such a search yields results for some four-hundred churches.

Please note that I am not saying that any of this a good thing or a bad thing; it’s simply the thing.  And the thing makes me wonder on what grounds I stand before you and preach one flock and one shepherd.

Importantly, I do not think that these things necessarily mean that we Christians have missed the point of the Gospel.  I cannot say for sure that we have missed the point of the Gospel because I know that each and every one of you, and me, and all of us together have very dear friends in every one of those twenty-one churches - and even at our other service (that’s a joke).  Friends whom we love, friends with whom you have worked and laughed and served closely.

Still, it is a strange thing that on the morning we gather to worship the God who has made it possible for us to be friends of God and one another, we worship without many of our dear, neighborhood friends, a good number of whom are worshiping in separate buildings just down the road, even as I speak.

I know better, but - at least on the surface - rather than God making our friendships possible, it sometimes looks like Jesus gets in the way of our friendships.  Like we get along better - Monday through Saturday - when we just don’t go there.  And I wonder: what does it tell us about the nature of our friendships when we discover that Jesus is getting in the way of them?

Many times, as Christians, we find friendship with others as we rally together around shared causes.  Causes like breast cancer, poverty, addiction, justice and wealth - and we are right, I believe, to hear God’s call to action in all of these things.  We tell ourselves that it is enough that we do these things because of Jesus.  We collect our friendships around these causes or lesser ones, like our children’s soccer and gymnastics practice schedules, our common love or hate of take-your-pick Texas universities, golf, biking, ceramics, whatever.  And again, here we are exactly right to imagine friendships in such a way that allow us to partner with people of all types and persuasions...

And yet, I wonder if even a small part of our souls is still bold enough to hope for the possibility of friendships centered on Jesus.

....


Good Shepherd Sunday - and John’s gospel in particular - mean to call us back to the miraculous possibility of just such friendships.

The grounds for our preaching one flock and one shepherd is Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, who calls his sheep by name.  Because he calls them to himself, he also calls them together, and he becomes their center.  The flock is one because the Shepherd is one.  The unity of the Church becomes a mirror of the oneness of God.  This is the vision of St John’s gospel.

I do not think this vision of Christ-centered friendship means that everybody in a given church must or should be soul-mates.  But I do think that all Christians should set as our goal friendships with Christ at the center.  And so I feel the gentle but persuasive nudge to ask myself these questions:

Am I willing to ask my brothers and sisters here: “How is your spiritual life?” as often as I ask, “How are you?”  Am I willing to listen charitably when they answer?  I think of the question Cursillo small groups ask each time they gather: “When in this past week did you feel closest to Christ?”  Do I offer to pray with people as often as I commit to pray for them?  Do our leaders - do I as a leader - take time in the midst of our planning to ask the question out loud, “How does this plan connect to what we know about the God of Jesus Christ?” or “What image from Scripture inspires our understanding in this moment?”   Do I talk to my children - whatever their age - about my own life’s direction and how I understand it in relation to God’s call?  And even with folks I haven’t seen in some time, perhaps this is the question: “What has God revealed to you about who God is since last we sat down and spoke?”

I put these questions out there to hold myself accountable in asking them to you.  I hope they can be questions that rescue daily life from the stale, safe, default settings.  I believe they are questions of the living Kingdom and an Easter people.  I hope they are questions you can use not just at St Christopher’s, but with friends in the other twenty-one churches and even in our other service.

Because Good Shepherd Sunday - and John’s gospel in particular - means to call us back to the miraculous possibility of just such friendships.  Christ-at-the-center friendships.  So there will be one flock, one shepherd.

Amen.

Finding Our Passion in Christ

Last Saturday, St Christopher's Vestry gathered on the Island for our Spring Vestry Day.  Our theme was Finding Our Passion in Christ, and - with God's help - we began to.  I offer a modified outline from our time together here for those in our parish family who wonder what we did on that day - where the leadership of the congregation is focused and moving - and also because I believe the exercises and the questions we engaged can be helpful to all of us as people, and that on some level all of us in the Church share the desire to locate the true selves God has given us in the presence and power of our Lord.  I pray this can be a helpful place of engagement toward that end.

peace to you.
father j+ 

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Daily Devotions for the Morning (BCP)

Introduction

The theme for our Spring Vestry Day is Finding Our Passion in Christ.  When Kirk Mason came down to visit with last year, he knew about our financial concerns, he told us that the diocese stood ready to help, and then he said the first and most important question that would help us and also help the diocese help us was this: Where are your potential pledging units?  No, he didn’t ask that first.  He said, What are you passionate about?  What do you like to do? 

Our theme for today is Finding Our Passion in Christ. 

I don’t believe that passion is something we can delegate or assign to others.  I don’t think it works if a group of leaders gathers together and assigns roles like, “Who is going to be passionate for young people this year?”

Passion is authentic, right?  Passion can be learned, but it comes out of who you are.  Passion is a lot like the oxygen mask that the flight attendant is always talking about: you can’t talk to others about their passion until you have taken the time to name - to know the source of - your own.

What are your passions?  How can we learn to lead, to serve, to glorify God, out of that?

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Video # 1: Juice, featuring Dewitt Jones


Video #1: Juice, Finding Passion

Small Group Questions:

What was your earliest passion?  Do you have passion now?  What are your passions? 

Dewitt Jones shares elsewhere that he has a six-word mission that fixes him to his passion before his feet hit the ground in the morning.  What would you like your six words each morning to be?

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One of the biggest obstacles to passion is fear of not having enough.  Passion can seem like a luxury in the face of an uncertain future.  But holding on to what we have in the face of uncertainty is not just contrary to the Gospel - “whoever holds on to their life will lose it” - on a practical level, when we put passion on the back-burner, we make it difficult for others to join us in our pilgrim walk with Jesus.  Most people can survive on their own; they are energized to join others in the project of thriving.  Passion thrives because its strength does not depend on others - it is a fire that burns from within.  Think of passionate people: Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bono, Bill Gates.  All of them have that burning perseverance in common. 

Even as passionate people, we plan to encounter the fear of not having enough.  How will we respond to that fear?

Ask someone in your group to begin with prayer.  Have another person read the lesson:

Matthew 6:28-33
Jesus said, “And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
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How have you seen the capacity of worry to distract from passion?

Have you ever known someone who was a picture for you of striving “first for the kingdom of God”?

What are the central worries in your life right now?

What do you know about God that speaks to your worries?

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Worry distracts us from passion and also other people.  For example, worry is what makes us think we are too busy to take extra time with someone in need.  Or maybe worry is what makes us think, as people in need, that other people will certainly be too busy for us. 

Part of what it means when Jesus tells his people not to worry is that we have been given all the time in the world to be God’s People to and for one another and the world.

How would practicing the belief that we have time to be passionate and be present to one another change the possibilities we see?

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Exercise: Take 30 seconds to look out toward the water just now and write down everything that you see.  Remember, you only have 30 seconds.

Now, look out the same window, but you have 3 minutes this time.  The instructions are the same: write down everything you see.

How are your vision and your ability to be present connected?

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Chic-Fil-A: Everyone Has a Story (a training video)



It's an obvious but needed reminder: everyone has a story, and everyone is carrying some form of burden.  Give yourself permission to feel your own pain right now.  Assume that it is represented ten times over just in this room.  Take your own hopes, and do the same.  They’re not the same hopes, but everyone has his/her own.  And of course, God experiences pain and hopes, too.

Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche communities, has written, “Almost everyone finds their early days in a community ideal. It all seems perfect. They feel they are surrounded by saints, heroes, or at the least, most exceptional -people who are everything they want to be themselves. And then comes the let-down. The greater their idealization of the community at the start, the greater the disenchantment. If -people manage to get through this second period, they come to a third phase —  that of realism and of true commitment. They no longer see other members of the community as saints or devils, but as -people —  each with a mixture of good and bad, darkness and light, each growing and each with their own hope. The community is neither heaven nor hell, but planted firmly on earth, and they are ready to walk in it, and with it. They accept the community and the other members as they are; they are confident that together they can grow towards something more beautiful.”

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What is your story? 
Describe your last year with God. 
Describe your hope for this next year with God.
(At the retreat, we did this visually, through art - give yourself a medium and at least 20 minutes.)
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Video before break: Why Your Church Doesn’t Feel Like a Family, Mark Driscoll (for fun)


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An Order of Service for Noonday (BCP)
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After lunch video: Celebrating What's Right with the World, Dewitt Jones
Write down 2 questions you would like to ask the group about the video on possibilities and vision.



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Jonathan’s questions: How do you understand the difference in “being best in the world” and “being best for the world”?  What possibilities do you see for your church family in the next year?  The next two years?  The next five years? 
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What do you love about yourself and your church?  How does these gifts begin to bridge the distance between where you are and the possibilities to which you believe God is calling you?
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Daily Devotions for the Early Evening (BCP)