Advent
November 30, 2008
Do you do any special practices in preparation for the celebration of Christ’s birth? I mean do you do any special readings? Do you have any special activities that you consider important by way of commemorating the coming of Messiah? Individually and corporately, how do you do advent? CDP has an Advent and Christmas section beginning on page 228. Check it out. If you access CDP through the link, the special readings are not available online.
Most churches began advent season yesterday. Anglicans celebrate the feast of St Andrew on the first Sunday of advent. Andrew, one of the Apostles, who brings his brother Simon to Jesus (John 1:35-42), and in John 12:20-22 he and Phillip bring the Greeks to Jesus to hear the proclamation of Jesus of the arrival of the kingdom of God, the gospel of repentance in faith.
During advent the church used to prepare for the birth of Christ by reading what the prophets said (the call for the people to return to God) and what John the Baptist proclaimed: repentance. Some parts of the church included the discipline of fasting along the readings of repentance in their preparation. I wonder if this is still true in many churches today. The festivities of the birth were celebrated during the 12 days of Christmas (December 25-January 6). But repentance was the order of the day during advent time. I also wonder if we are not in a hurry to enter the festivities without first considering repentant expectation.
Are repentance and fasting part of your preparation for the celebration of Christmas? They will be mine this year.
Out of Rhythm
November 26, 2008
For the last five days my family and I have been on vacation. We drove to western Nebraska where my wife’s parents have a ranch spending lots of time together as a family. It’s been good. But when I am away from home and out of my normal routine, I find that my goal of entering into a sacred rhythm gets knocked out of whack. Without my favorite chair and easy internet access it’s hard to make it happen.
I miss it. There is no doubt that those 2-3 times of “entering in” to a time of guided prayer have a way of centering my heart and soul. So when I travel or have unusual additions to my calendar I need a back up.
This week I found myself, early in the morning and late at night, praying what words I could remember from CDP. While not as rich as usual, I found that even when relying on my imperfect memory I can still “enter in” to that rhythm of prayer.
One other note, the prayer keeps going, whether I show up or not. When I return to it I don’t have to start from scratch or make up for time missed. The prayer of sacred rhythm is not something one does as much as something one enters into. Neither proud nor self-condemning I feel invited and welcomed, once again, into a regular rhythm with God.
Oh, satisfy us early with Thy mercy,
that we may rejoice and be glad all of our days.
And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us;
and establish Thou the work of our hands.
Martha or Mary?
November 25, 2008
“We live in a world that honors activity rather than quietness, production rather than contemplation, Martha rather than Mary. But Luke reminds us of a different path. Calling us to pause in the midst of the hectic tasks of life and ministry, asking us to detach ourselves from the many demands of job and family, Luke declares that taking the time to sit at the Lord’s feet is ‘the better part.’”
– Inagrace Dietterich, Take Time To Be Holy
“As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
(Luke 10:38-42)
A Lament to Amen
November 23, 2008
“Do I hear an amen?” “Give me an Amen!” shouts the preacher. And I often wondered if this was an admission of insecurity. Once I heard this: “I am preaching better than you’re amening.”
Poor word, you don’t stand a chance! With friends like that, who needs enemies? A few more layers of bad use and meaning and you will be buried for good. Do you cry dear word?
Amen, in other places, you are just one of those functional words we drag kicking and screaming into its proper slot at the end of a prayer. “There, I finished my prayer properly.” Are you happy being used in this way, my word? Do you object? Do you wonder if you will ever come into your own?
Some composers have played on your inherent lyrical abilities. AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaAAmen! You’ve been stretched on musical score sheets for pages on end. By the time the second measure drones on singers have already forgotten what you’re about. Stretched to the point of snapping. Toyed with until you’ve become a discarded rag doll.
Somehow, against all odds, you have survived. Victim of abuse, you have remained strong. Today I want to respect and honor you. I offer you an ode. Be honored my word by being a God-chosen word teaching us to agree that God is faithful. Faithful is your name, faithful you remain. Hats off.
Resolution in honor of Amen: I resolve that every time I encounter you in the written pages of Scripture and in other writings, to honor you by lingering with good thoughts. I resolve every time I see you in Celtic Daily Prayer, and I will see you often, to salute you and welcome you as a reminder from God that I too am called to remain faithful to my call as you have remained faithful to your call in the midst of a trying life. Amen! So help me God.
Fruitful Ministry
November 21, 2008
All Jesus’ words and actions emerge from his intimate relationships with his Father. “Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. 11 Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the works themselves.” (John 14:10-11).
Both Jesus “words” and “works” flow from his abiding relationship with his Father, so our ministry must flow from our communion with Jesus. “In all truth I tell you,” he says, “whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself, and will perform even greater works. … Whatever you ask for in my name I will do” (John 14:12-13). He continues in John 15, ” I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing”
Ministry is the fruit of an abiding relationship with Jesus Christ, not human strength or wisdom. The ability to “remain” is essential. Don’t cut yourself off from the vine today. Linger in His presence. Sense His Spirit surging through you.
Are you aware of how you best experience God’s presence? Listen to your life, it will tell you.
Midday Slowdown
November 19, 2008
One of the many reasons for praying the office, via Celtic Daily Prayer, is to reconnect ourselves with the church universal. This means reaffirming our relationship with all of God’s church past and present. The compilers of CDP deliberately include archaic language (’thee’ and ‘thou’) in the Midday Office and this offers an opportunity for us to remember our part in the “great cloud of witnesses”.
It also reminds us of a different time, one in which prayer and devotion to God were not considered oddities but noble choices for life. Our lives, and the lives of those we minister with and to, are immersed in a kinetic culture. Constant movement, speed and the quest for efficiency are hallmarks of our age. These do not lend themselves easily to a life of contemplative prayer.
The words of the midday office support contemplative prayer in both content and form. The words, deliberately short and archaic, remind me of a rock immovable in a stream. The water of the busy day breaks around this small but ancient fortress of prayer. Anchored to the church and praying with it, both past and present, we find refreshment in God’s rule over the day.
The Midday Office concludes with this prayer of St. Teresa of Avila. A welcome slowdown from the pace of the day.
Let nothing disturb thee,
nothing affright thee;
all things are passing,
God never changeth!
Patient endurance attaineth to all things;
who God possesseth
in nothing is wanting;
alone God sufficeth.
Prayer & The Kingdom
November 18, 2008
“Because of its connection to the coming of the kingdom, prayer brings results. As we pray, we are able to perceive the presence of the kingdom in all areas of life. As we pray, we become the instruments of the Spirit in opening the situations we face to receive the in-breaking of God’s rule in the present. And through prayer, we move history toward that day when the kingdom will arrive in its fullness and God’s work in the world will reach its final goal.”
– Stanley Grenz, Prayer: The Cry For The Kingdom
The Community
November 16, 2008
A couple of Sundays ago I spoke the word to a few people in Hamilton, Kansas. I spoke about the healing of the paralytic by Jesus in Mark 2:1-12. I have probably spoken on this passage 25 times or more. It never gets old for me. Every time I speak this word, it seems as if the one whose experience this was in the first place honors my love of it with deeper understanding. It is said that familiarity breeds contempt. False. Not necessarily. Familiarity with an open heart and mind is never contemptible.
This time around (probably my 26th time) I saw three distinct communities in this text. First there is the community of faith (first identified as “They” and then as “four of them”) which is responsible for bringing the paralytic to Jesus (when Jesus saw their faith–verse 5). Pieces of their imaginations collided into one holy action, they dismantle part of a roof, they struggle together, they have compassion together, they are concerned for the welfare of the paralyzed among them together, and each of them was responsible for a corner of the stretcher. Mission accomplished.
This enacted repentance and expression of confidence in the power of God are two motivators of this community. Following their example the community of faith continued to develop in repentance and trust throughout the ages until our very day. It is the kind of community missional order seeks to be. Community is held together by its rhythm of life, by shared experiences, by intimate self-revelation, by formative activities, by being missional.
Our common commitments of praying together, of being transformed together, of being on mission with God together, like the common commitment of the community of faith in Mark 2: 1-12 is one that is built on compassion for others. Praying with others the same text, the same liturgy, the same prayers, sharing the same intentions of being Christ-like in our God-life, will enable us to create a community of faith. Our hope is that this community of faith will find local expressions of the the common commitment we have made, and multiply ad infinitum.
When I pray the closing blessing in CDP’s morning prayer I imagine the many of us who are heading into the world of work or school or vacation, or wherever. Perhaps some are heading into a storm without knowing it. Perhaps there is a wilderness experience custom-made by the Holy Spirit (in imitation of Christ’s custom wilderness journey). What a gift we can give each other when we say those words:
Blessing
May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you,
wherever He may send you.
May He guide you through the wilderness,
protect you through the storm.
May He bring you home rejoicing
at the wonders He has shown you.
May He bring you home rejoicing
once again into our doors.
Lord, hear us and answer our prayers in your mercy.
By the way, the other two communities are the communities of disbelief (2:6), the ones that began to question in their hearts and the community of celbration, the ones that glorify God for what Jesus did (2:12-13.
Christian Community is….
November 14, 2008
The second discipline in Nouwen’s rubric of moving from solitude to community to ministry is obviously community. I have been profoundly struck by this description of community by William Stringfellow in his book “An ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land’ . The Northumbria Community claims to have drawn inspiration from this quote.
Dynamic and erratic, spontaneous and radical, audacious and immature, committed if not altogether coherent. Ecumenically open and often experimental, visible here and there, now and then but unsettled institutionally. Almost monastic in nature but most of all enacting a fearful hope for society.’
How does this description for Christian community strike you? How does it measure up with your experience with Christian community/church life? What do you like about his description? Is there anything that bothers you about it?
Dance of Prayer
November 12, 2008
“One is not really dancing if your still counting the steps.” These are the words that C.S. Lewis shared with his fictional friend Malcolm in the pithy little book, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. Lewis is discussing the changes in the liturgy of the Anglican church and how they negatively impacted his experience of worship. According to Lewis, the best worship experience, finest liturgy, is the one that allows the worshiper to participate with as little self-consciousness as possible. The continual changes in liturgy forced him and others to think most about what was next in the service, the external form of worship, rather than centering their minds upon God, the object of their worship.
Prayer is similar. The best prayer is that which we enter into with little or no self-consciousness. Prayers from the heart, from the top of the head, unvarnished and primitive are best. However, there are times when these basic forms of prayer are beyond us. We simply don’t have the words, the energy, or the ability to form the words that need to be said. At times like this we need to re-enter prayers that were originally prayed by someone else. The perfect prayer life includes a healthy dose of our own extemporaneous expressions of prayer coupled with the words of others. These are prayers upon which we ride piggyback.
Entering into a Sacred Rhythm through praying the hours of Celtic Daily Prayer is one way that we can pray the words of others, making them our own. The repetitive nature of the CDP doesn’t make prayer less meaningful but more so as we pray the already familiar words. Praying the words of others, such as the Psalms, the Lord’s Prayer and the Jesus Prayer is valuable because when we do we pray with those who have gone before. As Scot McKnight puts it, we are praying “with the Church”. Around the world, three to four times a day, hundreds if not thousands join in praying the hours from CDP. Our voices join in concert with them through a fellowship of worship.
“Therefore since we also have such a large cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily ensnares us, and run with endurance the race that lies before us…” - Heb 12:1 HCSB
Do You Hear What God Says?
November 9, 2008
Listening to the voice of God joins our 3 common commitments at missional order into one way of doing life with God and with others. I am in the middle of reading Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read The Bible (Scot McKnight) and got to thinking about his 3 levels of listening to the voice of God.
Level one is attention grabbing speaking and attention paying listening. We hear the message and we bring our spiritual faculties to attend to it. We hear the voice of God and the voice arrests us.
Level two, Scot calls absorbing the voice. This is the level where the heart takes what it hears and drives it deep, deep, deep into the self. Make no mistake about it, listening by heart is not about self-feeding, or self absorption. It is rather absorbing the voice in a life transforming way but for the sake of others. It’s like Solomon prayed: God, give me a hearing heart. It’s like the famous Behold, I stand at the door and knock and if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, we will have intimate absorption.
The third level of listening is to practice or act on what we hear. It’s like Jesus said if anyone, any community, hears my message and acts on it, he will be a wise builder (Matt 7:24).
Listening to the voice of God helps us personally but the goal of listening cannot stop there. Christian spirituality is not about personally gorging ourselves on spiritual practices or disciplines. Our common commitments at missional order of prayer, formation, and serving God and others demand all three levels of listening. Our order is no self-feeding trough. We are an order that is Other-focused, i.e. loving God and loving others as expressed in missio dei. Our common commitments are the vehicles to get us at constantly experiencing loving God and others.
The multi-level listening to the voice of God is a good way of understanding the goals we have set for ourselves in missional order. It’s a good way of integrating our three common commitments. Sacred Rhythm is our attention getter. Continuous formation (level two listening) occurs as we give ourselves to the Holy Spirit through our praying, reading, serving one another, and our world.
CDP is our common way of listening to the Voice of God or to pay regular, daily, and frequent attention to our lives with God. Once our attention is grabbed we are open to formative and transformative listening. The readings, prayers, and Scriptures CDP provides are not artificially consumed. They are full listening courses ready for absorption. We savor them and properly absorb them into our lives so we can practice what we hear. Let the sacredness of the four times of prayer in the day become brief labs of listening to the Voice that speaks. If we let them, if we take time to be with God through them, we will be transformed, and get to act out our transformation. We will then carry paralyzed friends and dig roofs. We will tally the amount of money we don’t need at the end of the month and give it to the poor, or feed the hungry. We would take time out of our busy schedules to visit widows, minister in jails, and spiritually guide a friend. Our hands, our minds, our wallets, if we listen well, will be extensions of his love and our way of loving God and others.
There is a danger in any order to be about self-improvement and doing it for our own sake in our common commitments. It is also dangerous for our spirituality if we adopt a posture of non-listening. Another danger is to get stuck at the first level and listen informationally rather than formationally. Our order is not the point. The point is to live a life of loving God and loving others as ourselves. We see our common commitments as a way to get at that goal. We will stop at nothing in order to get to do our goal.
Do you see any danger (s) in missional order becoming self-focused versus God and others focused? How have you moved from a spirituality of self-improvement into one of serving and loving God and others?
From Solitude to Community
November 7, 2008
“Why is it so important that solitude come before community? If we do not know we are the beloved sons and daughters of God, we’re going to expect someone in the community to make us feel that way. They cannot. ” — Henri Nouwen
As followers of Christ we are called to love one another. We all know this. The problem is if we don’t “know and rely on the love God has for us” (1 John 4:16), we end up using people instead of loving them. Gaining our identity in God gives us the freedom to lose ourselves in love and service to others. Notice the order, “Beloved, let us love one another” (1 John 4: 7). First, be loved. Second, love one another. Solitude precedes community.
“But you have to pray. You have to listen to the voice who calls you the beloved, because otherwise you will run around begging for affirmation, for praise, for success. And then you’re not free.” — Nouwen
Have you taken time to simply be loved today? Are you free to love others?
A Sacred Rhythm of Continual Conversion
November 4, 2008
Growing up in an evangelical church I routinely felt pulled toward the altar whenever guest speakers would visit. Pressuring their audience to make decisions for Christ their words made me grip the edge of my pew. I was consistently afraid that I would go down to the front of the church and accept Christ for the first time, again.
This experience had both negative and positive aspects to it. Negatively it created a creeping sense of doubt within me. I wondered if my salvation could be secure if I continued to feel the need to go forward? More positively it proved to be a reminder of the grave importance of taking Christ, and my soul, seriously. It was a reminder that my salvation was indeed “closer than when I first believed”.
That initial experience of conversion remains important and there is no point in diminishing it. Yet conversion must also be understood as that continuous process of transformation. Adopting a sacred rhythm assists us in this process of continual conversion.
We believe and trust in God the Father Almighty.
We believe and trust in Jesus Christ His Son.
We believe and trust in the Holy Spirit.
We believe and trust in the Three in One. – from CDP, Midday Office
A declaration of faith is conversion in miniature. Our natural inclination is to drift like unmoored boats down the shore loosed of commitment and security. Continuous conversion allows us, on a daily basis, to reassert our faith, to declare our it all over again. This declaration rights our boats, bringing them into harbor.
Each office in the Celtic Daily Prayer includes a declaration of faith. These declarations are:
1) Acts of repentance; we acknowledge that God is God, we are not and by restating that fact through a declaration of faith, both to God and to ourselves, we repent of our daily drift into idolatry;
2) Means of confession; when we acknowledge Christ as Lord we are implicitly accepting our own position of imperfection, brokenness, and sin;
3) Commitments to growth; the declarations of faith in the CDP are miniature creeds. Both our minds and hearts are trained by their truth. The basic truth expressed in them make room for the growth of the whole person before God.
To whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life,
and we have believed and have come to know
that You are the Holy One of God. – from CDP, Morning Office
What if, rather than being re-converted every few years, we instead entered into a life of conversion through our regular and continual declaration of faith in Christ. Not motivated by external pressures but empowered through our participation in a sacred rhythm we return to proclaiming Christ as both the Lord of our lives and the God of the universe.
Help
November 3, 2008
One of the best definitions of prayer and one I use often is “help.” Ole Hallesby in his book Prayer, says that “prayer and helplessness are inseparable.”
In morning prayer liturgy in CDP there is a moment that is allotted for the Declaration of faith:
“To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God. Praise to You, Lord Jesus Christ, King of endless glory.”
These are touching words to me and I enjoy saying them and hearing them roll off my tongue in the morning. This prayerful declaration of faith humbles me by awakening me to the reality of my self-insufficiency and need of God and of Christ. Through this prayer I come to declare morning by morning my brokenness and my neediness just like the saints have done before me (Luke 18:13; Psalm 40:17). Where do I go? how do I live? what shall I do with my life? What meaning do I bring into my existence? These are the questions that lurk in the background of “To whom shall we go?”
Missional Order expresses our common commitments of prayer, Holy Spirit transformation, and participation of the mission of God. These commitments begin with the acknowledgment of our insufficiency to live up to them. By formulating the question on our lips “to whom shall we go” we are admitting the impossibility of doing the Christian life as we perceive it in our own strength. To whom then shall we go? To the Able One who is Lord, Holy, King full of glory. In our question we bring him brokenness and neediness and in answer he offers us his full power.
Let these two be inseparable in my life today: prayer and helplessness. If I must be bold, let me bold from a posture of helplessness.
What do you think of Hallesby’s idea of marrying prayer and helplessness?
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