Tag: liturgies

Reforming our loves

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 3 – Dancing in the Kingdom– Chapter 15 – Reforming our Souls

Reforming our Loves

[Bible references: Psalm 1; 42; 139:13-14; Proverbs 4:23; Matthew 5:3-12; 12:28; 13:1-22; Mark 4:11; 12:29-31; Luke 8:10, 10:8; 13:18-19; Ephesians 6:10-20; Philippians 1:9-11; 1 Peter 5:8-9]

We are shaped every day, whether we know it or not, by practices – rituals and liturgies that make us who we are. We receive these practices – which are often rote – not only from the church or the Scriptures but from our culture, from the “air around us.”[1]

The Hebrew word for “hear,” “shema,” implies not just hearing, but obedience. Hearing with our mind should be connected to obeying with our body. God has made us with heart, soul, mind, and strength. Descartes had said, “I think therefore I am,” but that, in and of itself, leaves out the totality of who we are. We are not just brains on a stick,[2] we are creatures with embodied souls, creatures made in the image of a loving God, whose love is not just expressed in a sentiment, but by everyday choices expressed in what He does and in what we do. 1 Corinthians 13 makes clear that nothing is worthwhile if there is not love expressed through our actions.

Unfortunately, as we have expressed in a previous chapter, our choices seem to always be shrouded in sinful behavior. Time after time, history has shown us that simply filling our mind with the truth of God is a good start but is not sufficient to prevent us doing wrong things. Although our love will not be perfect until we are completely transformed during our resurrection, that does not leave us with no means to order our loves in our current lives. For the time that we are in, God has provided us with various disciplines which can be used to train our habits and therefore train our loves.

Our hope is not just in the future. Jesus proclaimed two thousand years ago that the kingdom of God has come. Jesus’ work of restoration may not be completed but is already underway. We may sometimes fret that the work of restoration, within us and around us, does not happen quickly, but as we observe God’s character as manifested in the natural and spiritual world around us, God seems to relentlessly accomplish his work through processes of growth. God had specified that all birds of the air, fish of the sea, animals and even humans were, through normal processes, to multiply and fill the earth. God’s own plan of redemption worked through generations from Adam, through Noah, Abraham, Moses, and finally to Christ. Jesus even particularly specified that the kingdom of God is like a seed that over time will grow into a plant or tree.

As creatures made in the image of God, we are given the free will to participate in our own growth. But we should keep in mind that if our goal is to become more like Jesus, then we should expect that growing into the likeness of Christ will take time … will take normal processes of growth. But we also need to keep in mind that God’s work of restoration is not unopposed; there are spiritual forces at work against God and against us.

Ultimately, it is Christ who transforms us. But we can humbly submit ourselves to God and prepare the soil of our lives to receive His grace. Our growth will be impacted by our loves and desires, by our yearnings, hungering and thirsting,[3] by where we choose to feed ourselves, by the habits and liturgies we allow to shape our lives,[4] by the disciplines we submit to,[5] by how we center our lives,[6] by how we have integrated the love we have toward ourselves, our families, our communities, and God. In the meanwhile, we will face resistance from within and from outside ourselves. In the normal course of events, it will be a common experience to have times when God seems absent, but we must know how to stay the course.

Holding to our center, keeping our loves ordered, holding on to our identity in the face of the pressures of the world will take conscious effort and discipline. Of course, our discipleship is not just a matter of paying attention to our inner life but also in the expression of our inner life in our walk with others, inside and outside the church. Hopefully, within the church, we can find healthy mutual support as we share our complementary spiritual gifts with one another.

Spiritual Disciplines are those practices which keep us centered on Christ. There are books with various lists of spiritual disciplines available to help guide us and you will find them with slightly different approaches. For instance, in Richard Foster’s book, Celebration of Discipline,[7] the disciplines are divided into three categories: The inward disciplines (meditation, prayer, fasting, study), the outward disciplines (simplicity, solitude, submission, service) and the corporate disciplines (confession, worship, guidance, celebration).

Another approach to spiritual disciplines is to focus on deliberative lifestyles such as were originally developed for use in monasteries but have application in the everyday lifestyle. One such example is the Rule of St. Benedict.[8] The Rule reminds us that we do not need to go about looking for God, for He is everywhere, including right where you are in your time and your place, in the humdrum everyday tasks of life. Freedom in Christ is achieved through the submission to three vows: obedience, stability and conversatio morum (conversion of life). These vows present us with paradoxes: our need to be in the desert so that we can be more fully present in the marketplace, our need to have prayer alone so that we can be more present in common worship, our need to commit ourselves to stability so that we can be more fully open to change, our need to detach ourselves from things so that we can fully enjoy them. The intent of all these practices is to help us more fully center ourselves in Christ so that we can more fully love our community.

Whether we are following an intentional plan or not, our everyday habits and practices do shape our spiritual lives. Even the normal, incidental routines we do, such as brushing our teeth, can shape us in ways we don’t think about. But if we take the time, we have the opportunity of using those same routines to help transform us in the ways we want to. But if we want to give our everyday routines a chance to transform us in the way we want, we will need to practice ways of waiting, hoping, slowing down, and preparing.

“When I brush my teeth I am pushing back, in the smallest of ways, the death and chaos that will inevitably overtake my body. I am dust polishing dust. And yet I am not only dust. When God formed people from the dust, he breathed into us—through our lips and teeth—his very breath. So I will fight against my body’s fallenness. I will care for it as best I can, knowing that my body is sacred and that caring for it (and for the other bodies around me) is a holy act. I’ll hold on to the truth that my body, in all its brokenness, is beloved, and that one day it will be, like the resurrected body of Christ, glorious. Brushing my teeth, therefore, is a nonverbal prayer, an act of worship that claims the hope to come.” [9]

We need to be mindful that changes in our life are never neutral. We need to be intentional about choosing practices and patterns in our life that will transform us to be more in the image of Christ.

“Take heed, consider your temptations, watch diligently; there is a treachery, a deceit in sin that tends to the hardening of your hearts from the fear of God.” [10]

We need to be aware of how much our sin is actively working against us, hardening our hearts, and turning us in ways, even very subtle ways, against Christ. To be diligent in following Christ, we need to be diligent in practicing spiritual disciplines in one form or another.

[1] Warren, Tish Harrison. “Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred practices in everyday life.” InterVarsity Press 2016. eBook

[2] Smith, K.A. James “You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit” Brazos Press 2016. eBook

[3] Smith, K.A. James. “You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit” Brazos Press 2016. eBook

[4] Warren, Tish Harrison. “Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life” InterVarsity Press 2016. eBook

[5] Foster, Richard J. “Celebration of Discipline” Harper & Row Publishers ©1978

[6] De Waal, Esther. Seeking God The Liturgical Press. 2001; Tozer, A.W. “The Pursuit of God” Christian Publications, Inc. 1948

[7] Foster, Richard. Celebration of Discipline. Harper & Row Publishers ©1978

[8] Foster, Richard. Celebration of Discipline. Harper & Row Publishers ©1978

[9] Warren, Tish Harrison. Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life. InterVarsity Press 2016. eBook

[10] Owen, John. Mortification of Sin. In Believers The Necessity, Nature, And Means Of It: With A Resolution Of Sundry Cases Of Conscience Thereunto Belonging.” From The Works of John Owen Johnstone & Hunter Volume 6, 1850-3 www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/owen/Mortification%20of%20Sin%20-%20John%20Owen.pdf

Observe

Read Psalm 1; Matthew 13:1-22. How do you prepare the soil of your heart so that you can spiritually flourish?

Playful and orderly

Dancing in the Kingdom- Table of Contents

Dancing In the Kingdom – Part 1 – Shadows of the Kingdom – Chapter 3 – The image-bearers

Playful and orderly

[Bible references: Deuteronomy 12; Exodus 35:30-38; 2 Kings 17:1-41; Nehemiah 8:1-9:38; Psalm 100; John 4:23-24; Acts 6:1-7; 15:1-35; Romans 12:1-2; 1 Corinthians 14:1-40]

There is much that is wrong in the world. People endure pain and suffering sometimes from natural happenings and sometimes from the actions of others. Evil seems persistent and never-ending. When we are called to serve God in this world, we can become overwhelmed by all the work that is to be done. Playfulness can seem out of place. Particularly, any playfulness that emerges from self-centeredness or obsessiveness.

Actually, that is the point we need to assert. Playfulness can be out of place in a world of sin and evil. But playfulness can also be a reminder that the reality in front of us is not the total reality. Our playfulness arises out of the relationship we have with God, the one who has overcome the evil in the world, who will end the suffering and who will restore us and world to be what he intended from the beginning. Playfulness arises out of the hope and joy we have in knowing that the reality in front of us is not the whole reality.

Our imagination can be helpful in this play. As children, we can pretend there is another world and do something like taking a cardboard box and imagining it to be a spaceship and accepting the rules of living in that spaceship. Family traditions (or even community or national traditions) are a form of play, they do not serve a utilitarian purpose, but stem from the creative ways we wish to remember our unique heritage.

This same imaginative playfulness can be useful in reminding us of the reality that lies behind our current reality. Our traditions of worship are a form of play, albeit a more serious play. Our worship traditions represent ways for us to remember our spiritual heritage or to provide imaginative ways to perform biblical sacraments about which we have sparse details on how to perform them. These traditions and liturgies help us point to that other reality, a new Kingdom that began breaking into this world with the incarnation of Jesus.

Christian worship was in fact and from the beginning a festival:  the festival of Christ’s resurrection from the dead … Easter begins with a feast, for Easter is a feast and makes the life of those who celebrate it a festal life … Jesus himself compared the presence of God, which he proclaimed and lived, with the rejoicing over a marriage. His earthly life was a festal life, even if it ended in suffering and death … the early Christians have understood his raising from the dead and the presence of the now-exalted Christ as the beginning of an unending joy and a happiness without end … the risen Christ as ‘the first among those who had fallen asleep’ and as the leader of life; as the leader in the mystic dance and himself as the bride who dances with the others, as the church father Hippolytus put it.  Long before the somber dances of death were painted in medieval times of plague, the figure of the resurrection dance can be seen in the old churches. The modern Shaker song ‘The Lord of the Dance’ brings out very well the dancing Christ:

I am the life that’ll never, never die;
I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.[1]

We hope to participate in the inbreaking of the new Kingdom by living according to its rules. When we pray or worship, we are participating in the rules of that new Kingdom. When we come to others and share with them the hope that we have, we ask them to use their imagination to look beyond the current reality and envision the new Kingdom that is already here and is yet to come. When we accept contentment in all situations, when we trust in God, when we comfort others with the hope we have, we are living according to the rules of the new Kingdom.[2]

It is also true, that In this present life there are endless encounters with grief. Although we acknowledge the pain and suffering of that grief, whether that grief is ours or others, we can encompass that grief with hope. Even amid grief we can choose to cling to God and to the hope He brings us. If we can live under the rules of the new Kingdom, we can have assurance that the current grief will pass and will be replaced by future joy and laughter and that every tear that we have cried and will cry and even now cry will be wiped away.

Our hope of the new Kingdom allows us to endure the current pain and suffering knowing that the hard experiences can be redeemed and to be used for good. God can take the pain and suffering we endure to transform us to be more like Christ, who himself suffered for us, transforming the very evil intended for him into the final victory that shall ultimately also make us victorious. This hopeful living then is also a form of play, accepting the rules of a reality we cannot see and choosing to live according to the rules of a Kingdom that we can only realize in part.

That playfulness also emerges in our creativity, which erupts early on in our lives as our desire as children to play and also in the desire we have as parents to play with our children.[3] There is no doubt about how uniquely creative we are in the way we express ourselves, not only in all the various art forms we use but in the ways we can solve all sorts of problems[4] – even to the creative ways we try to cover up our sins.[5] No other creature can come close to expressing creativity the way we can.

Our ability to create and even detect order is also unmatched.[6] Our ability to detect order is evident in the way we can detect patterns in sight or sound. The sense of order is evident in our ability to recognize faces, our ability to recognize the voices of our mothers or fathers as infants and even before we are born.[7] Our sense of order is seen as we grow in our ability to recognize the patterns of letters and sounds and to recognize and respond to language – even languages.

Our sense of order becomes more evident in our ability to create order out of many abstract concepts such as math, science, philosophy, and many other areas.[8] It is our sense of order that allows us to create businesses, governments, and civic organizations to make society productive. When we bring order to farmland, we increase the productivity of the farm.

The visible order within Creation inspired Christians in the past to study Creation. Order within Scripture helps the Bible to be meaningfully used as meditative literature. In the same way, order during worship also helps us to avoid confusion and to focus on God.

[1] Moltmann, Jürgen. “The Living God and the Fullness of Life” trans. Margaret Kohl Westminster John Knox Press, 2015, p.192; Carter, Sydney. Lyrics “Lord of the Dance” (1963) Genius genius.com/Sydney-carter-lord-of-the-dance-lyrics; Tune “Simple Gifts” Brackett Jr., Joseph. (1848) Praise gathering www.praisegathering.com/media-files/pdf/a08380_lyrics.pdf

[2] Edgar, Brian. “The God Who Plays: A Playful Approach to Theology and Spirituality” Cascade Books 2017 (e-book)

[3] Gowman, Vince. “Playful quotes for the child in your heart” Vince Gowman www.vincegowmon.com/playful-quotes-for-the-child-in-your-heart/

[4] Baumgartner, Jeffrey. “The Basics of Creative Problem Solving – CPS” Innovation Management, innovationmanagement.se/imtool-articles/the-basics-of-creative-problem-solving-cps/

[5] Brister, Tim. “6 Destructive Ways We Minimize Our Own Sin” Bible Study Tools www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/6-destructive-ways-we-minimize-our-own-sin.html

[6] Basulto, Dominic. “Humans Are the World’s Best Pattern-Recognition Machines, But for How Long?” Big Think 24 July 2013 bigthink.com/endless-innovation/humans-are-the-worlds-best-pattern-recognition-machines-but-for-how-long

[7] Pfaff, Leslie Garisto. “6 things you may not know your baby can do” Parents www.parents.com/baby/development/intellectual/6-things-you-may-not-know-your-baby-can-do/

[8] Armstrong, David. “Christianity Absolutely Critical to Origin of Science” Patheos, 18 Oct 2015, www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2015/10/christianity-crucial-to-the-origin-of-science.html

Observe

Read Deuteronomy 12; 1 Corinthians 14. These chapters contain explicit instructions about how and how not to worship.  Since we do not yet experience the fullness of the new Kingdom, how can our imagination help us more actively engage in worship?