As an attempt to reward you, oh faithful readers, I am trying out a web service that allows you to give suggestions for things I should write about.
So, if you have any pressing ideas of what you would like to see me write about, head on over to my skribit profile and write a post suggestion. I promise I will look at the things you suggest.
I’ve been reflecting on what I wrote yesterday, with “I am not getting anything out of it.” I keep coming to the same conclusion, for as much as we live in a society that says “it’s all about you,” “have it your way,” “you deserve it” or “is it in you?,” there may be no more prophetic statement than “life is not really about you.”
Martin Luther, a monk from the middle ages, and one of the most well known figures of the Protestant Reformation, spoke about the condition humanity is in, calling it incurvitas in se(turned/curved inward on oneself). This condition allows us to think of no one first other than ourselves, because at our very nature, we believe that it is all about us. Luther said this about our condition as humanity:
“Our nature, by the corruption of the first sin, [being] so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realize that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake.”
According to Luther, we use the best gifts God has given us for Him and for others, and use them for ourselves. We look to God as a means to our own pleasure, and everything on some level comes back to what we want. I have noted before, that as a church we have a propensity to embrace a consumer approach to church-to give the (church) consumer what (s)he wants. But this is not the message that the church is to proclaim. Giving the message that says “you can have what you want, now and God will give it to you, and you can have worship in the style of music you like” and so on, is not the message that God proclaims to us.
Instead of saying as a church “we have what you want” we would be much better, and more prophetically served to say “this is not about you, and if you think it is, you have missed the point.”
I am the worst example of this. I want to have the things that I like. I want comfort and a style of music I appreciate. Yet at some point, church has to cease being about what I want and instead begin to focus on Who has called me. Church is not about you. It is not about me. It is about God.
I am going to try to overcome my blog sabbatical and finish up one of my promised posts. Earlier, I wrote about another phrase, which conveys how we promote consumerism as the new Baal worship and confuse it with worshipping God. That post was on the phrase “Let’s have a worship experience.”
The other phrase, which goes towards part of our misunderstanding of worship is “I don’t get anything out of it.” As Eugene Peterson states, “The assumption that supposedly validates the phrase is that worship must be attractive and personally gratifying. But that is simply Baalism redivivus, worship trimmed to the emotional and spiritual needs of the worshipper.”
In much less elegant words, worship that is centered around how you will feel and what you get out of it is not worship of God. That sort of worship is recycled Baalism. This isn’t to say that there is no creedance to something meeting us emotionally and spiritually. As a charismatic I know this is part of the picture, but if that is the focus of my engagement in worship, that worship is not about God but about me.
I wonder if this isnt’ more wired in us than we’d like to admit. We live in a culture that worships the self. Watch advertising- what is the message? You deserve bigger, you deserve better. Have it your way. This is all about you. It feeds into our natural state of elevating ourselves over God and our neighbors. And, we allow it to sneak into our worship services. Is it really that far fetched to say that we are more concerned with entertainment than anything else with our engagement of worship?
On this point, I have found that the more and more I hear about how the first centuries of Christians oriented worship, the more drawn I am to it. The establishment of liturgy, the acts that were done, the rites focused on all served a purpose of telling the story of God coming to us. This was a worship service not centered around me and what I might get out of it, but instead focused on saying “God is at work doing something big, and we have been privileged to be brought in on it.”
When we engage in this sort of attitude of worship, I believe it shifts our focus from “wow! that speaker is good” or “the music today really moved me” or “I really got something out of that!” to more of a sense of awe and otherness. The response of “who is this God that has chosen to do this to save the world?!” or even the biblical response of “it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”
I am as guilty of this as any. For the thing I say afterward is “oh that was good and it helped me make sense of something” or “that will be really helpful” or “I found that interesting.” My natural responses are to be me centered, and I wonder if it might be my job pastorally sometimes to tell myself and those who I relate to pastorally that worship is about more than what we get out of it. And maybe, just maybe if we do worship when we don’t feel like it, or that we will get anything out of it, we might begin to become aware of just how far we still have to go.
Hey everyone, I have been taking a bit of a sabbatical from this blogging thing as life is pretty busy right now. I really do want to get back in the swing of writing, so stay tuned, I will be back eventually.
BD
Interesting post by Tony Jones today on why it matters that Jesus really rose from the dead. In the article, Tony talks about how making some of the social stances that he makes generally pigeon holes him into a theological camp that denies a literal, historic resurrection. It’s stances like this that make me think that the charicature of all emergent folks as devolving into the new liberalism isn’t quite true. Anyways, check out the link if it sounds like something that might be an interesting read to you.
I know I have a few promised posts that I haven’t gotten to yet, for instance the follow up to “Let’s Have a Worship Experience,” “I’m not Getting Anything Out of It,” another post on why Christus Victor is compelling to me, and one I have bouncing around in my head but haven’t said anything about. But before I can write those, I just had a new survey brought to my attention that has some numbers that rub me the wrong way. According to a Pew survey, the more often people attend religious services(in this case primarily Christian), the more likely they are to see torture as a justifiable means.
By way of being fair, the survey gave five options: decline, torture never appropriate, rarely appropriate, sometimes appropriate, usually appropriate. For the sake of simplification let’s split that down the middle and compare the statistics of thosw who said often and some times with those who said rarely or never.
I find it sad to think that in America, those most involved with church services are 9% more likely to support torture. What does it say about our understanding of the value and sanctity of human life? If we are to make a stand for being pro-life, it must be pro-all-life, which for me means also being anti-torture.
One thing that is interesting to me, is to listen to how people talk about the New Testament church.
It was organic, there was no paid leadership, there was no bank account, there was no buildings, etc.
Often times I start to wonder if we are reading different Bibles. There are church leaders getting paid, Paul references them. For instance, 1 Corinthians 9. Paul states that among others, Peter is being paid, or at least provided for to continue to be faithful in the ministry he is doing.
Surely, someone will argue that these men were Apostles, and that in a sense they were itinerant preachers and not permanently located in one place. This would be partly true, but at least in the case of Paul, much of his itineration included long stays in different cities along the way.
At the local level, there are leaders being appointed as either elders or deacons, with a little mixture in between. None of this represents the romanticised New Testament church that I hear talked about.
As for buildings, there are cases where it was common to use the synagogue if possible, and if not someone’s property. But even in that property, much was modeled on the synagogue model of spiritual gathering.
Simply put, I don’t find the totally organic, spur of the moment existence that so many others talk about when they begin to romanticize the New Testament church.
I just read a blog by a musician, saying how it was weird for her to like sports as well as music.
I apparently didn’t know how much artsy types are stereotypically against team sports.
What’s funny is that I would not, in a thousand years consider myself a jock, in fact I was picked on quite a bit for being terrible at sports. But somehow, it would seem weird for me to not have team sports, since it seems that playing team sports can teach a lot of life skills and what not.
Every once in a while I like to download mp3’s off the This American Life podcast. The last one I listened to was titled “This I used to Believe.”
The second story of the episode was about a former Catholic, now agnostic, woman who was having phone conversations with a Christian football coach because of an article she read about him.
What followed was a listen in on this Christian man giving the sales pitch for the faith. I should probably note right now, I am very glad that he was willing to share his faith. It takes an incredible amount of trust to even enter into a conversation, speaking of faith to those who don’t believe. This is not to say that there weren’t things I found discouraging about his talk.
The coach spent most of his time talking about atheism and evolution, seeing those as the primary things standing in the way of this woman and faith. What was sad, was that he was answering questions she wasn’t asking. She never brought up evolution as contrary to Christianity, or talked about being an atheist. Her whole problem was she couldn’t see how God would allow her friend, who was a good person to die of cancer. After two conversations, the coach finally answered her question by talking about the world being a broken, fallen place. This statement is true, but once again, did not answer her question.
I bring this up, not to be critical of this man for sharing his faith and being involved in evangelism. As a pastor, it thrills me that he is engaged in evangelism. I think that it does however present an excellent opportunity to comment about evangelism.
My worry is that many times, we dehumanize the process of evangelism, we stop looking at people as people with feelings and hurts and fears that build into their belief or unbelief, and instead we look at them as an argument to be won. So instead of really hearing what the road blocks are for them, we start to answer questions that they aren’t asking. We talk about evolution or atheism as primary opponents of the faith(a topic for another post from me). We answer what we think they are asking, but we never actually stop to hear what they are really saying.
Some reflection points:
whether to laugh or cry at this…
[ht:internetmonk]
