Did Jesus get ashed on Ash Wednesday? Um. Nope. Duh…
This day in the Christian calendar has marked the beginning of the season of Lent for way over a thousand years. But, yes, it can be “observed” even if we don’t show the signs of charcoal. But, why bother? It’s pagan, right? It’s not in the Bible, right? It’s just kooky works-righteousness thing, right?
Well, here’s the thing. Let’s think about this. If something is not in the Bible does that mean it’s rendered useless and meaningless from Christian devotional practices? I doubt it. From the beginning God used known culture practices to help his people remember things in a physical/visible way that were connected with the the invisible Reality of him. Have you heard of circumcision? Of (Israelite) cleansing before temple participation? How about Baptism? Well, then you see what I mean.
Do you ever celebrate Christmas or Easter? Then, you’ve enacted what I mean.
Pagan Egypt (used for God’s purposes)
Nationally, Egyptian cultic practices were incorporated with the Israelite’slife of worship of the One True God. The Egyptian priestly practices, in particular, were employed. (Israel was a KINGDOM of priests. Quite an upgrade from slave status, right?)
God wasn’t threatened by the use of Egyptian priestly rites and rituals, the Israelites were familiar with, to help them remember and worship the Living God. On the contrary, God encouraged it. God commanded it. Similar sorts of things can help us today as well.
Still, we mustn’t ever forget–It’s not about the intricacies of the ritual itself, it’s about the condition of one’s heart. We can avoid false religion when we ask ourselves, “Does this practice draw me into relationship with the Living God?” If it does, keep it. If not, scrap it. You might want to read that again. It could be life-changing.
Just for you. A LENTEN SPIRITUAL EXERCISE:
Challenge yourself, by asking God to reveal himself to you, to minister to you, and to awaken you in a new way in the days leading to Easter. What might God want you to look at more closely? What might God wish to make more like him in your life?
This could be very personal, and private, but I encourage you to share what findings you’d like to. It will help all of us journey together through this time of Lent, toward the great joy we celebrate on Resurrection Sunday! (a.k.a. Easter)
Thank you for coming here today! Blessing this holiday season.
-Lisa
Alphonse Mucha's work here reminds me of Redeemed Humanity, the Bride of God's Only Son
Sometimes going to church doesn’t seem worth it. For heaven’s sake, wouldn’t it be better to just have breakfast with some family or friends, and forego irritating people, scheduling problems, overblown or petty dramas de jour, personality conflicts, politics, dodgy doctrinal positioning, and the rest of machine the local church can be? Is the Cracker Barrel growing a bit more more alluring each Sunday morning?
Seems like a no brainer, right?
If this is kind of thing is happening for you, in your local church, maybe church shopping is around the bend? Well, wait just a minute.Here are 5 Mistakes you can make (or have made) regarding your local church.
1. Making theological judgements for what are personal preferences.
2. Mistaking the “local church” for The Bride of Christ.
3. Misunderstanding the idea of “community.”
4. Implementing a consumer approach with the spiritual and transcendent.
5. Overlooking what is happening in the sacraments.
Being from a more independent faith tradition, I grew up with the sense that church, in the local setting, was mainly about worship and fellowship. Well, it is, but not in the small sense I understood it to be. Now a bigger view of Church guides my life, and my relationship with my God and Savior.
Simply put: Church is hardly about “the local church” or about any human individual.
Jesus saved humankind through his Bride the Church. That means our preferences have very little to do with what God is doing, and the workings of Church.
The Church is something universal, invisible AND visible, international, and local. It is bound by culture and history, and yet handily transcends them both. It may exist in a location temporarily, but exists eternally in every location. Yes, it’s bigger, in every way than you think, or have the ability to imagine.
We apprend it in such tiny ways at times…
Perhaps, we get caught up or annoyed by such things a personalities, worship styles, programs, or issues related to our doctrinal formulations, opinion, or personal preference.
We may go “church shopping” and miss the point completely.
How correct to say, “Church is not about me.”
It’s about WE.
In the sacraments, the community of God (Trinity) intertwines with the community of man (humanity). We receive divine grace. God is with us. God is with his Bride, the Church. Locally the church celebrates what the collection of Christians, past, present, and future is enacting, together.
Each Sunday, worldwide, Christ’s Bride gathers, and meets together. The church is with “him”, as it has done from the beginning.
Even as the earth spins, the variances in time zones cause prayer without ceasing, and the fellowship and communion of the saints occur, globally.
And with Christ, Father, and Spirit, we celebrate the reality of koinwnia (koinonia) with the Divine. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “the Eucharist is the sacrament of the unity of the Church, which results from the fact that many are one in Christ.”[7] (Eucharist means thanksgiving.) Koinwnia is what Christ exercised divinely with humanity, by grace, through his work in his ministry, on the cross, and in his resurrection. It is how we commune with each other, and worship God in Spirit and Truth.
Through a local church body, we live out, and enact the Gospel and participate the actual in-breaking of the Kingdom of God here on earth. The local church is people, and people are flawed. What God has done, is doing, and will continue to do, is not.
This whole concept is all summed up nicely in the Apostles Creed, in which followers of Christ unite in spirit and truth. Many of us may not know the creeds, or declare them together with other Christians. But, this particular creed, well-established in the 300s A.D. (C.E.), and is the/a manifesto (see ref. link) of the Bride. It is a speak-act and agreement of followers of the divine Father, Son, and Spirit, for a way of living and being; and understanding the world.
To take this creed fully to heart will expand your idea of church, unify you with Christians of the last 2,000+ years, and may even help you forebear with the frailties of local church you attend, here and now.
From the Book of Common Prayer –
I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth:
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
Born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, dead, and buried:
He descended into hell;
The third day he rose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
The holy Catholick Church;
The Communion of Saints;
The Forgiveness of sins;
The Resurrection of the body,
And the Life everlasting.
Amen.
Ever wonder how, or if, the Baptists are related to the Methodists? Or the Quakers from the Mennonites?
I’ve been enjoying this site, and I subscribe to their blog, Parchment and Pen. Today they sent an interesting diagram of Christian tradition in tree form (family tree of God?)
Christian tradition diagram (click to get to their site)
Is this a crab-apple tree? Or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Or maybe….
Today’s Featured Writer has something to say about the future of the church. But, he has an altogether different perspective, than our previous guest writer, John O’Keefe, and actually, most people. And this, in a nutshell, is Doug Jackson. But you could ever squeeze him into a nutshell, so never mind. He is a thoughtful and gifted thinker, a searching pilgrim, a devoted Christian, and a baking whiz. And, he’s topped with more than a modest dollop of wisecrackiness.
Please enjoy and interact with Doug’s contribution.
B.A. – English Literature, Grand Canyon College (1982)
The Church with a Future
-Doug Jackson
John O’Keefe is a futurist. I find that intimidating as heck. Personally, I’m a traditionalist. I can quantify the difference. Tramping through the jungle, a futurist and a traditionalist happen on some tiger tracks. “You track him,” suggests the traditionalist, “and find out where he’s going. I’ll backtrack and find out where he’s been.”
There isn’t even a cool name for the preferred direction for my arrow of time. “Futurist” conjures up images of, well, guys with shaven heads and soul patches. “Traditoinalist” calls up images of guys with bald heads (which is SO not the same thing) and no soul at all. This part I can at least work on. I think from now on instead of “traditionalist,” I’ll call myself a “past-er.”
So what can a past-er say to the church’s future? If there is, in the words of T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, “time for a hundred visions and revisions” of the people of God in community, how much time do we have (and should we allow) for a rear-vision? Not too much, I don’t guess. Accordingly, I want to state a thesis and offer three theories. My thesis is that, whatever the church OF the future looks like, the church WITH a future will be the one with a past.
To speak of the church OF the future is simply to make a chronological observation. It means “the church that isn’t here yet.” It doesn’t tell us much about what this church will do or how long it will last. By the church WITH a future I mean the local community with staying power. And this church, I believe, has a future precisely because it has a past. Which leaves my three notions of what such a church looks like.
First, I believe that the church with a future cares less about the draft of its craft than the depth of its ocean. In his eightieth sonnet, Shakespeare admits to his chick that other poets can praise her better. So why should he keep scribbling? Then the bard continues:
But since your worth, wide as the ocean is,
The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,
My saucy bark inferior far to his
On your broad main doth willfully appear.
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride.
In other words, what matters is that her merit can bear the burden of grand praises and meager ones. I come from a generation of ministers who learned that good meant big so bigger meant better. I think the church with a future looks back on the mighty acts of God in history and realizes that the Queen Mary of the megachurch and the rowboat dinghy of the corner congregation all float on the vast sea of God’s greatness, and that plumbing this depth, not scaling our own impressive rigging, is what counts.
Second, I believe that the church with a future cares more about reading its story than writing its narrative. “Narrative” seems to be a big word in church these days. As far as I can tell, it has a lot to do with composing our own future in a compelling way that attaches single acts of worship or service to a greater purpose. I’m all for that, but I think it is important to remember that, at best, we’re writing one chapter in a very long book whose plot is already clearly laid out. This even works at the local church level. Eugene Peterson warns us in The Contemplative Pastor that, “the cure of souls takes time to read the minutes of the previous meeting, a meeting more likely than not at which I was not present.”
We find those minutes recorded in church history and church hymnals, two documents which have fallen from favor in my own denomination, where we seem to believe that the church poll-vaulted from Pentecost over several regrettable centuries until she landed safely in our own generation. That’s why we jettisoned a songbook that came to us polished by millennia of theological mulling on the part of the worldwide body of Christ and opted instead for toe-tappers and hand-clappers that can give us no idea of who we are.
I’m not knocking contemporary music, nor do I believe the Spirit quit inspiring songwriters somewhere around the time Fanny Crosby died. But because more recent music has not had the advantage of the filtering years, I would like to apply C. S. Lewis’ dictum about books to the business of congregational singing: “After (singing) a new (song), never allow yourself another new one till you have (sung) an old one in between. If that is too much, you should at least (sing) one old one to every three new ones.” (I should admit here that Lewis disliked ALL hymns because he thought the poetry was bad. He’s probably right, but to me it seems that their theology is rather good.)
Finally, I believe that the church with a future cares more about present faithfulness than future viability. Because the church of the future will be a mess. Do what we will (and I hope we will), she will remain a morass of carnality and littleness and arguments over service times and carpet samples for the new fellowship hall. And she will be the Body of Christ, the one institution Jesus ever promised to care about, and one which he said would sit on an unshakable foundation.
So the church with a future doesn’t spend too much time reading the chicken guts of the changing culture and dealing a Tarot deck of trends. She doesn’t cross with sliver the grasping palms of earringed “consultants” ensconced in dark tents of occult insider info.
Lewis’ Screwtape rightly warns his protégé Wormwood that the proper focus of human endeavor is the junction of Right Now and Forever which leads us to ask what we need to do in the former in order to serve the latter. But “the future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity.”
The beauty of futurists like John is that they won’t let us rest in Merlin’s tower forever gazing at some ecclesiastical zodiac; they keep demanding that we do something about this stuff. They refuse to let us fall into Screwtape’s trap of forgetting that the future is not (Screwtape again) “a promised land which favoured heroes attain,” but rather “something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
In short, I should simply say that the Church is the church with a future. For two thousand years we have hijacked her with our high-handedness, betrayed, bureaucratized, bushwhacked and bamboozled her, tarted her up, sold her out, locked her in and dragged her down. We have made her impertinent, irrelevant, irreverent and irritating. We have used her to camouflage our carnality and let the slimming stripes of the martyrs’ scars hide the midriff bulge of our overfed carnality. “And for all this,” the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us (if I may take a large liberty), Christ’s church
. . . is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
10
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over Christ’s bent
(Bride) broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
