Slap It, Son

Left Behind

Today is supposed to be Spiritual Discipline Tuesday and I’m supposed to be writing about Solitude.  However, my mother-in-law is in the hospital and my wife is with her there while I remain at home to make sure the kids get to school, don’t blow up the house and brush their teeth.  My tank is empty right now, so I leave you with this and ask you to pray for my mother-in-law and her family.

This is…you’ve just got to watch this…….

[HT: Tom Cottar]

I Woke Up This Morning…

One of the things I share in common with our Youth Minister is a love for The Blues.  But his name is Doug and mine is Paul.  Not exactly Blues names.  And neither of us has shot a man in Memphis.  At least I haven’t.  Yet.  But once I do I’ll be changing my name to Blind Lemon Littleton, takin’ that southbound train and sellin’ my soul at the crossroads in exchange for fame and fortune.

Think you might have what it takes to be a Blues man? BluesGuide has a list of qualifications.  Go see how you stack up.  Here are a few:

Blues are simple. After you have the first line right, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes. Sort of.
            I got a good woman—with the meanest face in town.
            I got a good woman—with the meanest face in town.
            She got teeth like Margaret Thatcher and she weighs 500 pounds.

The Blues are not about limitless choice. You stuck in a ditch, you stuck in a ditch; ain’t no way out.

Adults sing the Blues. Teenagers can’t sing the Blues. They ain’t fixin’ to die yet. In the Blues, "adulthood" means old enough to get the electric chair when you shoot that man in Memphis.

Good places to have the Blues: the highway, a jailhouse, an empty bed, the bottom of a whiskey glass. Bad places to have the Blues: ashrams, gallery openings, weekends in the Hamptons, golf courses, Tiffany’s, and Ivy League institutions.

For more, check out the BluesGuide.

Immersive Worship

David Fitch summarizes immersive worship this way:

"Immersive worship goes beyond the doctrinal orthodoxy of traditional evangelical worship or the emotional experience of contemporary charismatic worship.  It makes both of these possible.  Immersive worship forms us into an alive body from which we can know and experience enlivened truth.  It displays the God of history with art, symbol, and beauty, not just propositions.  It rehearses the drama of God in Christ liturgically and invites us into this drama to participate in it, not just express ourselves cathartically.  Immersive worship is not new, it is merely forgotten among evangelicals.  Immersive worship does not compromise truth nor give away experience; it reclaims the place of the church as the center for all truth and faithful experience….

"Once our evangelical churches no longer give away the production of experience to Hollywood, Disney, Starbucks, Las Vegas, Broadway, and the professional sports venues, our churches become the center for experience that is thick with the meaning of God’s kingdom.  From here, all other experience separated from God is exposed for what it is: a cheap veneer that cannot sustain life."

Fitch gives a number of suggestions for how our worship can become this "alive body" as opposed to a lecture hall or a pep rally.  I want to focus in on one of these suggestions that on a broad level can have, I believe, a real formative influence in the life of the modern evangelical church: the church calendar.

Growing up evangelical (or if you are one who prefers not to call Southern Baptist evangelicals, then Southern Baptist) liturgy or the church calendar brought to mind two things: Roman Catholicism and dead traditionalism.  Fitch advocates re-enlivening liturgy through modern reinterpretation of the language and music of worship.  But things like Advent and Lent especially evoked images of men in pointy hats and Gregorian chants.

Yet life is a rhythm and time has spiritual/theological significance.  In the evangelical church, however, we have given our time over to the prevailing culture.  The arguments sound odd to me when we decry pagan influences on certain holidays like Halloween and the Easter (whether it is in regards to the Easter Bunny or the worship of the goddess Ishtar), and yet much of our church calendar is filled with cultural celebrations such as Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day and Labor Day in addition to Christmas and Easter.  Thus, in America, the rhythm of the church is the rhythm of the country.

However, in Scripture the rhythm of God’s people was the rhythm of God’s activity among them.  Jewish life was centered around great events of God’s activity among them from the Sabbath to Passover, Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement), The Feast of Booths and a host of lesser celebrations.

At the risk of being offensive to some let me use the recently celebrated Mother’s Day as an example.  The idea of having a Mother’s Day in the United States began with Ann Jarvis who initially had the idea as a way to encourage women to work for cleaner sanitation conditions around the time of the Civil War.  The idea didn’t gain much ground until 1908 when Jarvis’ daughter Anna went on a crusade for a day to honor mothers.  Soon the custom would spread to 45 states and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared a national Mother’s Day.  Even in her own day Mother’s Day had become so commercialized that in the end Anna Jarvis was completely opposed to the day.  Mother’s Day in America is the most popular day of the year to eat out at a restaurant and is the busiest day for long distance telephone calls.

I like Mother’s Day.  I took my wife to lunch and called my mother.  But I was also asked by several people if I was going to do anything special for Mother’s Day in our church.  We passed out roses and then I preached from a continuing series in the Gospel of Matthew and said little else about mothers.  In our evening service one of the men in the church prayed and thanked God for "this Mother’s Day that you have given us."  But the truth of the matter is that it wasn’t God who gave us Mother’s Day.  It was Anna Jarvis and Woodrow Wilson who did that.  But our American cultural calendar is so firmly entrenched in the life of our churches that often we cannot distinguish between the two.  Even in the church we reckon time according to our nationalistic interests rather than the movement and activity of God among us.

The church calendar - by which I mean especially the season beginning with Advent and progressing through Christmastime, Epiphany, Lent, Palm Sunday, Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost - refocuses the rhythm of our lives together according to the great things God has done rather than the great things Uncle Sam has done.  But for the most part the evangelical church has reduced its religious celebrations to two days of the year: Christmas and Easter.  The church calendar, on the other hand, is organized around these great events for a full six months of the year - the remainder being considered "ordinary time" which can be used for a variety of emphases if one so desires.  And once again, then, worship immerses us into the ways of God as we live through the seasons and rhythms of life.

So celebrate Mother’s Day - just celebrate it for what it is: an American cultural celebration honoring our mothers and their contributions to our lives and our world.  Celebrate Father’s Day and Memorial Day and Independence day and all the rest.  Just don’t allow the culture’s calendar to determine what is important in the church, else our worship become something that immerses us into something other than what God has declared important through his mighty acts in history and the world.  For that, the church calendar can help us.

Giving Worship Away

In chapter four of The Great Giveaway, David Fitch takes on worship in a way that moves to far more substantive issues that the all-too-familiar "worship wars."  The subtitle of the chapter is: Why Worship Takes Practice: Toward a Worship That Forms Truthful Minds and Faithful Experience (Not Merely Reinforces the Ones We Walked In With).  There’s plenty here to challenge (and perhaps offend) the staunchest defender of word-centered worship as well as the biggest proponent of worship as "experience."  He is opposed to neither in principle, but challenges both in their common manifestations and their primary emphases.

Perhaps the biggest problem with word-centered worship, where preaching is the focal point, is that the modern church has taught worshipers to come to the preaching moment as autonomous selves ready to judge the message based on its merits.  Instead, Fitch suggests that worship should not be about autonomous selves determining the value of the word, but rather coming in subjection to the word.  Not to the preacher, mind you, but to the word.  In other words, we do not come to worship either to "get something" out of the sermon or to fill in the blanks in a seven point message on successful parenting, but to be subject to the word itself.  We do not stand over the worship experience, but sit under it.  We do not shape worship, but we allow worship to shape us.  We do not determine the meaning of the text on our own, but we allow the text to speak for itself, within the community of faith. 

But this does not happen by the word alone.  The word is a part of a larger, integrated act.  I like how Robert Webber described worship when he wrote that worship should tell the story from creation to new creation.  It isn’t a set of disjointed songs that have no thematic direction, or even a set of themed songs simply telling one autonomous piece of the story.  It is exalting the Creator, confessing our sin and fallenness, remembering the sacrifice God paid to bring reconciliation and looking ahead in hope for our final redemption.  It is telling, re-telling and celebrating that story as we now live out of that story in our own time, confessing our participation in often being God’s antagonist and in repentance setting out to advance his story in our own day.

Similarly, but with a different emphasis, worship is not about getting our emotions involved, or what I might describe as getting ourselves whipped up into a spiritual frenzy.  Fitch is very clear that he is not suggesting we worship without the involvement of our emotions.  But our typical approach to what he calls "charismatic worship" (not meaning charismatic in a Pentecostal sense, but in an emotional one) is, for instance, to sing a lot of songs focused on the autonomous self.  And once again it becomes a matter not of our being shaped by God, but of our shaping the worship moment.  Again, I might describe it as getting in the "worship mood."  I’ve heard it referred to recently as "feeling the presence of the Lord" or for that matter "not feeling anything in worship."  It is a view of worship where our emotions set the agenda.  Instead, worship should shape our emotions and form them into obedience to God.  The first-class worship band with the professional leader and the light show are all used as the means to "create" a worship experience.  Instead it should be worship which creates and re-creates our emotions as a response to the presence of God.

These forms of worship, then, should be replaced by what he describes as "Immersive worship."  It is worship where the self is removed from the center and is re-centered on God.  How do we accomplish that?  One way, according to Fitch, is through liturgy.

"This is because liturgy by definition is immersive.  In liturgy, the individual does not approach the Word as object to analyze it and accept or reject it based upon the limits of one’s individual rational subjective mind.  He or she submits to the Word, participates in it, and out of that relation understands it and is determined by it.  In liturgy, the songs sung or the words spoken are given in response to God as he has first been presented in all his narrative scriptural depth, artistic symbol, and eucharistic presence.  Songs are not sung as self-expression of whatever one is feeling that day."

More on this idea of immersive worship tomorrow.

The Love Of God

This is just one of the greatest songs of the last decade.  There are very few that surpass it lyrically…maybe ever.

MERCY ME lyrics

I Was A U2 Fan When Most Of You Punks Were In Grade School

I know that Bono and U2 are the ultimate in emergent cool these days, but I remember when October was new.  In fact, I still have a number of those from "way back when" on vinyl.  The last U2 CD I bought was Achtung Baby (1991) [man, do I need to catch up!].

I wish I was taking the class being taught by Ryan Bolger and Barry Taylor on The Spiritual Journey of U2.  Instead I guess I’ll just have to keep up with the progress via Ryan’s blog.

What Hath Alice Cooper To Do With Jesus?

WorldNetDaily has an interesting article about rocker Alice Cooper’s claim to faith.  I have to admit that I didn’t know this about him.  Here’s a quote:

"I’m
the first one to rock as loud as I can, but when it comes to what I
believe, I’m the first one to defend it too," he said. "It has also
gotten me in trouble with the staunch Christians who believe that in
order to be a Christian you have to be on your knees 24 hours a day in
a closet somewhere. Hey, maybe some people can live like that, but I
don’t think that’s the way God expected us to live. When Christ came
back, He hung out with the whores, the drunks and miscreants because
they were people that needed Him. Christ never spent His time with the
Pharisees."

(HT: Milton Stanley)

Giving Up The Beatles

I don’t know if Jehovah’s Witnesses celebrate Lent.  Given their aversion to Christmas and the like I rather doubt it.  But it is good to see Michael Jackson giving up his stake in some of the Beatles’s music he purchased the rights to years ago.  I mean, really, Michael Jackson is to the Beatles as Liberace is to ZZ Top.

Technorati tags:  Music, Beatles, Michael Jackson