Preparation for Ash Wed & Prayer

Last night at First Baptist Austin, we inaugurated the Christian season of Lent with an Ash Wednesday service. I had the opportunity to open the service with these words and prayer:

As we all know, tonight is not our common Wednesday night Midweek Mooring service, but like Advent, Christmas, Pentecost, Lent, Good Friday, and Easter…today is a note worthy day in the Christian calendar: Ash Wednesday. For myself, having grown up outside of the church, spending much of my time as an atheist, and then becoming a Christian in a very fundamental Baptist church, most of these words: Advent, Lent; much less Ash Wed. were and are still somewhat foreign and mysterious to me.

If you’d ask me five years ago, I would have said “I have no idea what Ash wed is about, but its probably heretical.” My reasoning: it’s a Catholic thing. I mean, didn’t the Reformation save us from all this Catholic ritualism, salvation by works stuff.

If you’d ask me about 3 years ago, I still would have said I don’t really know what Ash Wed is, but I would like to know. For what I had learned, is that of all the good things that came out of the Reformation, many good things were lost too. As the saying goes: the baby was tossed with the bath water.

If you’d ask me today, I’d say something like this. I’ve only experienced Ash Wed once, last year at a Baptist Retreat. In the past, for the most part the only preparation I made for Easter was to buy new clothes. In the last few years I’ve taken to this time called Lent to prepare myself for Resurrection. I mean, shouldn’t’ something as awe-inspiring and somewhat terrifying as Resurrection be prepared for.

And we begin this journey of new life by making room, getting rid of distractions and sins and awakening to our own mortality. I’ve learned a lot in my time with you here at First Baptist, but one of the things I’ve seen time after time is how alive some people become when they are close to death. Ash Wed. marks the first day of this season of drawing near to death, giving us permission to grieve our weakness and sin; and instead of buying more clutter for our lives we are invited to toss some of the mess. So you and I are invited tonight to reflect on what keeps us from living close to our mortality, our fragility of life so that we may live every day fully alive as if it’s our last.

You are invited to identify yourself with Christ who was given the marks of suffering in his body, by receiving the sign of mortality on yours in the form of ashes. So that is Ash wed, not some rote ritual to gain God’s favor, but an invitation to God’s faithfulness by physically identifying yourself with his gift.

Prayer

Faithful, life-giving Creator, there is nothing and no one you have made that you despise.

And though, you call us to life, we close our ears.

You welcome us home, and we desert your hospitality.

You breath on us Spirit, and we prefer the stench of sin.

From your never ending, loving faithfulness, we ask for sorrow for our individual and collective brokenness, isolation, hate, and neglect; to make us new in your mercy; and to bring us to death so we may find life.

We desire and ask these things in the creative energies of your Spirit, the faithful suffering of your Son, and the nurturing guidance of the one God, forever and ever. Amen.

My God, my God why have you forsaken me

Here's a video I created for our Good Friday worship service that centered on the 7 last sayings of Christ from the cross. My text comes from Matthew 27:46. Although it's not necessarily Resurrection appropriate, Happy Easter nevertheless! Maranatha!

Sermon on Psalm 147: Praise. Praise?

I read these words in Psalm 147 and even before I get to the second verse I have to stop and ask, what kind of world did the Psalmist live in?

“Praise the Lord. How good it is to sing praises, how pleasant and fitting!”

Last Tuesday, I drove the church bus to the airport with Ahmed, an Iraqi case manager for the Texas Refugee Services. We met and picked up an Iraqi refugee family: a mother who knew some English and 5 children who spoke only Arabic.
We loaded the bus with their 7 bags before heading to their new home: the Villages of Lamer, a low income housing on North Lamar. These 7 bags represented the little bit of home they could bring with them to this strange and foreign land to puzzle their lives’ together. 7 bags don’t seem like much, but as Ahmed informed me, Iraqi’s tend to bring a lot. I guess a lot of luggage is 7 bags when compared to the one or no bags of African or Myanmar refugees bring.
At the Villages we found their apartments. The small third floor apt where the mother and three youngest children would reside, and the smaller apartment where the older boys would live. Each semi-decorated apartment was disheartening for me to walk into. This wasn’t home.
But it wasn’t the loneliness of these scantily decorated apt’s that broke the family, but rather the distance. As I drove Ahmed back to his offices, he told me that the boys were distraught that they’d have to be so far from their family in the complex…the complete opposite side.
Didn’t the Psalmist know that our world has wars and violence that tears people from their homes and places them in fear, discomfort, and brokenness. Wars that violate innocents and destroy the ability to praise.

Was the Psalmists world so different from ours where people’s hearts are filled with fear because of the loss of jobs, the deep grief over the loss of a son at the hands of a tragic accident or suicide, or the confusion over the loss of a parent or child due to sickness or cancer?

Praise God. Praise God?

Do we praise God because he’s some sort of narcissist who commands and needs our adoration. Does God demand our praise out of his own superficial vanity?

If the Psalmist is emphasizing praise as an imperative to ignore our world of suffering and pain or to reinforce Gods vanity, then maybe the atheists, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are right, our ancient book leads us to mere delusion.

But we don’t have to guess at the world of the Psalmist. We do know some things. As Ann mentioned a few weeks ago, our current Book of Psalms is actually 5 books placed together. And in this final 5th, where Psalm 147 resides we can infer that the community that would read and sing these words had experienced the harshest of tragedies imaginable for an Israelite.

The Southern Kingdom of Israel, the indestructible Kingdom of God’s Temple presence in Jerusalem has been conquered. The Israelites have been sent out into exile and the Temple destroyed. It’s truly amazing that the Jewish faith still exists to this day.

See the normal procedure in ancient Mesopotamia, was to change gods if you were conquered, because that meant your god was weak or false. What should have happened in this moment of defeat and exile, is that the Israelites should have given up on YHWH who allowed them to be conquered for Marduk or Baal.

OT theologian Walter Brueggemann distinguishes the Psalms in three categories: Psalms of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.

Psalms of orientation praise God for how the world works, and how God blesses humanity, especially his people, how life works.

Psalms of disorientation or Lament Psalms, have God’s people crying out in their suffering and pain, these are about how life doesn’t work.

Finally, Psalms of reorientation are where God makes possibilities new, and recreates the broken world so new life is possible in the midst of exile, destruction, cancer, the loss of jobs, broken relationships, and despair.

The Psalm from our Psalmist tonight is one of reorientation: the possibility of new life.

With exile and destruction on his mind, and possibly with its marks on his body; the Psalmist declares in the foretaste of hope that God builds up Jerusalem, gathers the exiles, heals the brokenhearted, binds the wounded.

Flannery O’Connor puts words to this experience of praising God in the midst of situations of despair, pain, and oppression: when she says, “grace comes sometimes like a kick in the teeth, leaving us broken, wholly unable any longer to deny our need.”

Grace is a reminder that we need God, and dependence on God is faith. So praise in the midst and messiness of life transforms and shapes our faith’s ability to respond and with a new orientation see God and our situation differently.

Praise in song and music has historically empowered oppressed people’s faith, from the inside to the outside: from despair to hope, from captivity to freedom. One thinks of the power of African American spirituals.

Cornell West, in the documentary about modern day human slavery and trafficking, Call and Response, says:
“The music itself coming out of, especially black people in America, but of course its true for voices all around the world, is very much about this freedom; freedom which is spiritual, so when George Clinton said, ‘Free your mind and your ass will follow: the paradox of freedom is you would have, you have to experience the foretaste of freedom before you become part of a freedom movement.”

God wants us to praise him because God wants to free the world. God wants us to be free from sickness, despair, hate, and loneliness.

We need praise to know the appropriate response to suffering and injustice. Praise grounds us in faith in God, so within our situations of pain, neglect, depression, and violence we can have a foretaste of new life, of healing, of resurrection.

We do not praise God in ignorance or naïveté, but we praise God in solidarity and hope that love and justice will prevail, that peace will come, and that every knee will bow in an overwhelming response to God’s overwhelming love for us.

As Henri Nouwen wrote:
“Worship, to me, is constantly to say, “Yes’ to God’s love; to say, ‘Lord, I love you too.’ All of our life should be worship. Every occasion in our time should be an occasion to say, ‘Yes, I love you too.” That signals a change of heart.”

Praising God in the midst of the brokenness of life and sin, equips us with the appropriate response. Praise is the paradoxical tool of love that forms us for action and activism.

Praise is the paradox that allows us to affirm that grace can come to us in the ugliest of situations, so that when we cry out: “My God, My God, Why Have you forsaken me,” we stand in solidarity with our Lord. We are able to pick up our cross and know, as Bono has said:
“God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.”

Let us pray:
Praise God, for God so loved the world that he gave us his only Son.

Praise God, for God so love the world that he gave.

Praise God, for God so loved the world

Praise God, for God.

Praise God.

Amen.

The Emerging Commodification of the Church

I do have my hang ups with how much time, energy, resources, thought, and planning goes into a single day of the week, Sunday. I've been brooding over this fact for some time now, but haven't come to any real conclusions about how I feel. In the "emerging missional church (EMC)" conversation, attractional vs. missional battle lines have been drawn and Sunday morning has become a topic often battered by a dualistic perspective that paints a strawman for the burning.

David Fitch, who has constantly been a helpful voice in this EMC conversation, recently wrote a good post on this issue referencing to Zizek's "decaffeinated belief:"

Zizek argues that when we say “I enjoy my religion” this implies that I don’t take it TOO seriously. For we really don’t want to take it too seriously (this is what the fundamentalists do according to Zizek). We keep it at a distance so to appear to be a Christian with all of it comforts and accoutrements yet not requiring any great disruption to a comfortable way of life. This distance, between the subject and the Symbolic Order, is what allows the subject’s Christianity (or religion) to be subsumed by the existing order.

The existing order that controls Western culture is the power of the spectacle produced by consumer culture. We commodify everything including our faith. Sunday becomes about receiving religious goods. Pastors are recognizing this growing trend and

…agree that a growing number of worshipers are talking or sitting through the congregational singing writing notes during the special music, showing up 10-15 minutes late, not worried about interrupting anything or anyone. One pastor shared that a congregant stopped attending worship opting to stay home and worship with a church on television. When asked about this, the congregant responded, “Why does it matter where I watch the service?” Another pastor commented that people treat everything in the service as if it were a movie preview and it is not until the feature presentation (the sermon) that people really start paying attention. Or in other churches with a more contemporary style of worship a pastor stated, “Once the ‘concert’ is over, they just settle in waiting for a sermon.”

Most church plants are in the business of Christian reconfiguration, they steal Christians from churches in the area instead of leading people to faith (and this is NOT an overstatement). My growing concern for the "emerging church" is that it preys on the sensabilities of its consumer culture, thus utilizing culture uncritically or being used by culture.

The power of consumer culture and the commodification of everything is that religious seekers can take objects, beliefs, and pieces of traditions and lift them out of their context to be used in whatever way they like. They can have their cake and eat it too, because they simply cut off the baggage from where those traditions arose.

In some respects, I believe this weakens the ability of emerging churches to form people for Kingdom work, because the main tool for combatting commodification is immersion in a religious community who emphasizes its deep religious tradition (baggage and all) for the formation of disciples. I know this is a generalization, but emerging churches are heavily influences by the culture of consumerism because they tend to be planted by those on the cutting edge of consumer culture.

Of course, I've excluded from this conversation "seeker churches," who attract people to church Sunday mornings by having a great rock show and a funny preacher (because I'm sympathetic to EMC). Sunday morning should be about formation:

I think this is a mistake. For the missional church communities require a regular practice for the shaping and forming of a people into the Life with God, the Mission of God. Missional people do not grow on trees. If then we would see people formed into the Missio Dei we must order our worship so as to be encountered by the living God. We must learn how to preach not as information but as proclamation and invite people into the Mission. The real presence at the Table must be the center of our gathering, our lives and our community. If we would see people formed into the Missio Dei, our gatherings must take on liturgical shape, a way of inviting people into the prayers, confessions and affirmations of the alive relationship we have with the living God of Mission. We must learn how to listen, interpret Scripture for what God is doing among us and in the world, hear God and then respond to God. This should be the character of our Sunday morning gatherings.

This kind of gathering should be both easier and harder to plan than any kind of programming approach we have hitherto been used to. It should be simpler and less focused on excellence of performance. It should not cost near as much in time, resourses and planning. It should be able to be done in a living room with three to thirty people or in a larger sanctuary with 200. Yet this kind of gathering takes more discernment of the Spirit, theological wisdom, historical sensitivity than we have been used to in the protestant church of our evangelical past (we haven’t paid attention to theology of worship in evangelical church). This way can lead us out of the wilderness of decaffeinated worship.

Deep traditions like lectio divina, intentional community, monastic practices, authenticity, and vulnerability are all very important, but so are the communities, traditions, and histories they have grown up in. Much of the EMC conversation is reactionary and deconstructive (which is fine, I understand), but there is something unhealthy about simply cutting ties with communities of faith that tend to have baggage because they've been around for 50, 100, or 150 years. Of course, this critique works in the inverse. Communities with baggage need to be listening to churches who are concerned about doing and being church differently.

My main concern though, is that churches critically engage culture so that contextualization is healthy (meaning the gospel doesn't get subsumed or overpowered by the culture). Our culture is a product of late capitalism, consumerism, and commodification; so we need traditions and narratives that will equip us to live counterculturally. We need Sunday mornings baggage and all to be unenjoyable, uncomfortable, and formative.


If you've made it this far, you might also be interested in Fitch's conversation over the epistemology of missiology and ecclesiology.

G.K. Chesterton Hymn

O God of earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die;
The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us,
But take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honour and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord.

Tie in a living tether
The prince and priest and thrall,
Bind all our lives together,
Smite us and save us all;
In ire and exultation
Aflame with faith, and free,
Lift up a living nation,
A single sword to thee.

- Gilbert Keith Chesterton via

World Communion Sunday

This morning, churches across the world celebrated communion as part of World Communion Sunday. I love this symbol and idea that Christians gather not around dogma and doctrine, likeness and homogeneity, but the broken body and blood of our servant and Lord.

I had the opportunity this morning to share with my faith community, a new way of envisioning the elements and ritual of the Lord's Supper. While in India this summer, we practiced communion using a very Hindu/Indian form: the coconut. The use of the coconut by Hindu Christ followers comes from a Hindu practice of sacrifice, where a person takes a coconut to a Brahman at a temple where it is broken for that persons sins. Also, not only is bread and wine a foreign element, but pretty scarce.

So this morning, I took a coconut and broke it open during worship. The imagery brought a fresh and engaging perspective to a very important ritual within the church. The rough outer skin representing not only the human form that Christ took on in his descension from heaven, but also the sin and brokenness of the world that he took on when nailed to the cross. Then I took a hammer and with some loud cracks to the coconut, the milk poured out into a bowl, representing the shed blood.

This is such a powerful image and a great way to re-envision communion.

With that I leave you with a clip from Arandhna, contextual sitar musicians we met at the ReThinking Forum before heading to India.

Worship as Solidarity

I've been mulling over worship the last few weeks, ever since Brian McLaren visited Truett to talk about the challenge of radio orthodoxy. In the hour discussion, Brian shared some lyrics from this song.

Then a week later I read in Jonathan Wright's The Mission of God that mission creates praise and vice versa. And tonight I read Sally Morgenthaler's article over at Allelon. She sums up her experience with worship evangelism, which she can be rightly called the initiator or innovator of this movement. In grief, she admits the church has become narcissistic and misuses worship as the chief means of getting people inside the walls of the church building. As she described the perception of a nonbeliever experiencing this worship evangelism, I was struck by this quote,

No sad songs. No angry songs. Songs about desperation, but none about despair. Worship for the perfect. The already arrived. The good-looking, inoffensive, and nice. No wonder the unchurched aren't interested.

The church has become insulated from reality by its own worship. In Romans 12, Paul urges Christians to worship. He does not say that we should gather on one single day and allow nonbelievers to gather to us. He does not say that we should spend all our time, effort, and money on a single event for adore and praise God. He does not say that we should seek relevant songs or tunes. No, instead Paul says that worship by being transformed, living our lives as a sacrifice. A sacrifice! Now, if you allow me to pull this out of the "spiritual" talk of daily quiet times or prayer times into reality; I think Paul is saying that we must go into the world, into our communities, into our neighborhoods and seek solidarity. For most of us, that means opening ourselves to the grief and suffering of those who don't have their lives together. That means giving up our self-referential, self-sustaining, narcissistic, consumeristic lifestyles in order that others may be experience wholeness.

Most nonbelievers will find Sunday morning worship at most churches irrelevant and probably annoying. Who can fit into this picture of continual happiness and praise? Is there any room for the suffering? Is there any room for the pain of the world? Is there any room for the grief and tears shed over those who don't yet know God?

So, what do we do with Sunday morning worship? Do away with it altogether? No, connect it with reality. We realize that worship is a time for Christians to be transformed for God's mission, not a time for happiness or comfort. This should be a time of discomfort sometimes, lamenting the pain in the world as well as the weakness of the church to meet it. Then, and only then will true praise for God flow, since it is here that we meet God. In our weakness, seeking to find him in his strenght among our neighbors, communities, and nonchurched.