Picture This

Normally, with that heading, you’d expect to find a photo here.  I actually have a few that I think will turn out to be pretty good ones, but they’re still in the camera right now.  Instead today I am thinking of word pictures.  On Sunday nights I’m preaching from the book of Jeremiah.  His ability to paint a mental picture with words is powerful and he does it with poetry.

A couple of weeks ago we read from chapter four.  Jeremiah is describing the spiritual condition of his day. Hear him:

23 I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form and void;
and to the heavens, and they had no light.
24 I looked on the mountains, and behold, they were quaking,
and all the hills moved to and fro.
25 I looked, and behold, there was no man,
and all the birds of the air had fled.
26 I looked, and behold, the fruitful land was a desert,
and all its cities were laid in ruins
before the Lord, before his fierce anger.

Did you catch that?  It’s the anti-creation story.  In the place of the Genesis account where things move from chaos to order now things are moving from order back to chaos.  It’s as if the world is falling apart.  It’s as if creation is being undone.

He does something similar in chapter eight.  Nature behaves according to the ways God has created it to. 

7  Even the stork in the heavens knows her times,
    and the turtledove, swallow, and crane
        keep the time of their coming,
    but my people know not the rules of the Lord.

In other words, the birds of nature know when to fly south and when to fly back north.  But the people of God don’t know how to naturally be the people of God.  We would expect them to practice steadfast love, justice and righteousness, just like their Father.  But they don’t (9:23-24).

These poetic images have a way of cutting to the heart that simple prose does not.  The ability to paint these pictures and tell these stories lie at the heart of our ability to effectively communicate God’s message to us.

This Is Exactly How I Feel

EXACTLY how I feel……..

You may have seen the link to this that Emily left last week in comments, but if you didn’t watch it now.

Unrepentant Sinners Invited To Preach

I like Mark Dever (pictured), pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington DC.  You can find some good church resources at his 9Marks website.

Sam Storms has given an interesting analysis of the position Dever (along with Al Mohler) has taken on the matter of the relationship between baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  I recommend Sam’s post and then ask this question: How could Dever deny a person who was baptized as an infant a seat at the Lord’s Supper because he views that person’s failure to be baptized as a believer by immersion to be "unrepentant sin" (though unintentional), yet invite that same unrepentant sinner to preach in his church?

I’ll let you who have strong feelings about this matter decide whether or not he is right to deny them access to Communion.  I’m more interested in the inconsistency in allowing that same person a place in his pulpit.  If he really believes his infant-baptized friend is in unrepentant sin then isn’t he being derelict in his leadership as Pastor to allow that same person the opportunity to preach in his church?

Of course, at our church we would not deny that person a place at the Lord’s table largely due to the fine argument Sam makes.

I Pledge Allegience…

A few weeks ago I began preaching from Colossians on Sunday mornings.  As part of my studies I’m reading Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire.  In it the authors take a unique view of Colossians as a polemic against the Roman empire (and in turn a polemic against the empires we find ourselves under today as well).

Reading Colossians Remixed has, yet again, prompted my thoughts about the predominant civil religion of our day here in America as well as the pervasive influence empire has on the modern American church.  For instance, many churches surely had patriotic celebrations about a month ago.  Some likely recited the pledge to the American flag.  But isn’t that a rather idolatrous thing to do in a place set apart for the worship of God?  I asked our congregation how it is that we memorize from a very early age that pledge, yet we Baptists couldn’t recite the opening line of the Apostle’s Creed if a gun were put to our heads.  Well…maybe some of the youth could thanks to Rich Mullins and Third Day. 

Isn’t it even odd that we would have an American flag in a place of worship?  If we went to China and found the Chinese flag prominently displayed in a place of worship what would we think?  Would we think that such a church was obviously registered with the state and therefore probably compromised in their commitments?  What if we went into a German church in the 1930s and found a Nazi flag draped over the communion table (it actually wasn’t unusual, by the way)?  Would we have been repulsed?  Didn’t the Nazis have the support of the German church?  Is it somehow different in America simply because we say, "one nation under God?"  And if so can we rightly to decry America as a secular state given over to corruption, immorality and decay?

What do you think?  And, should we remove the American flag from our churches?  Why or why not?

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.

The Forest And The Trees

I want to make a brief clarification to the comments in the last post.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I think grammatical studies/word studies, Greek and Hebrew, commentaries and the like are of no value.  I use all of those things.  On Wednesday nights we are studying 1 John and I have a commentary by John Stott and my Greek New Testament handy, along with other commentaries and study aids.  For Matthew on Sunday mornings I read N.T. Wright’s Matthew For Everyone, Craig Blomberg’s Matthew commentary in the NAC,  Alfred Plummer’s commentary on Matthew and have also found a lot of help from Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy - particularly in the Sermon on the Mount, Lloyd-Jones’ sermons on the Sermon on the Mount, along with Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew and Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus, New Testament And The People of God and Jesus And The Victory of God.

But if we’re not careful we will miss the forest for the trees.  We can get so bogged down in the minutia that we lost the "big picture."  Not far from where I live is Kenneth Hagin’s Rhema Bible College.  The name of that school and church are based upon a distinction Hagin makes between the Greek words rhema and logos.  Both are translated "word" in English.  There is a nuance of difference in the meanings of those words.  But the difference is not large enough to build an entire ministry upon.  God is at work in the world doing something far more extensive and profound than what you will find in the nuances of those two words.

Much evangelical preaching can tend toward those fine, minute distinctions.  We might make the entire structure of our sermons contingent upon these sort of distinctions.  And all the while we might also miss the greater point that is intended.

And as Fitch notes, our understanding needs to be tethered to something other than our own individual choices.  In The Great Giveaway he argues for a communal reading/understanding of the Scriptures.  None of us really has the right or privilege to determine the meaning of the text "on our own."  That’s the stuff that heretics are made of.  Even in our staunchly independent Baptist tradition, people are not free to run out and deny the Trinity or the Deity and humanity of Jesus.  And what we appeal to is the well-accepted understanding of those ideas that have been handed down to us by the greater community of faith in the church.  We’ll even appeal to the great Ecumenical Councils.  And rightly so.

But the plethora of commentaries and study aids has not helped us along to a greater consensus, but has, in fact, resulted in a greater number of interpretive options.  I’m well aware that there are implications to all of that, and I continue to think those implications through.  So hold off a little while on declaring me a closet Catholic, if you will.  In the mean time, maybe you can think through those implications with me.  Let me know how it’s going.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

A little over a month ago I tired to make the case for a more narrative-based preaching over against expository preaching. In The Great Giveaway David Fitch writes about preaching and the "myth" of expository preaching.

Historical-critical methods of exegesis have yet to yield a consensus interpretation for any texts in the Scriptures.  This is evidenced in the fact that one hundred years of historical-critical exegetical studies have produced thousands of commentaries written on various books of the Bible.  Each of these commentaries reports on the historical divergences in interpreting the grammatical minutia within each given text.  Most of these scholarly commentaries offer at least two to four options for understanding the grammar and textual data for each verse of Scripture.  So instead of producing a consensus interpretation for the bible, exegesis and historical-critical studies have disseminated multiple interpretations of each biblical text.

And in that case even "expository preaching," and maybe especially expository preaching, can be every bit as agenda-driven as topical preaching.  In the end, the preacher himself is left to determine which of the three or four interpretations of the grammar of a passage is correct - which leaves the ultimate agenda to the preacher himself.

And trust me, I’ve heard quite a bit of this kind of agenda-driven preaching.  A couple of months ago I listened to a message Russ Moore preached at Ninth and O Baptist Church in Louisville on baptism.  His text was Romans 6, but many of his points were made irrespective of the text.  Perhaps the worst example was a message I heard a while back on expository preaching which was itself a topical message almost completely separated from the text the preacher read.

In addition to all of that, the preaching we find in the New Testament - Jesus’ preaching, Peter’s preaching, Paul’s preaching - was not what is heralded today as expository preaching.  If we are going to exclusively advocate a form of preaching that would eliminate all of the great sermons of the Bible then we are advocating the wrong kind of preaching.  Those sermons were certainly not non-Biblical, but they were not verse-by-verse, sentence-by-sentence expositions of Old Testament passages, even when Old Testament passages are cited, as in Peter’s sermon in Acts 2.  More often than not they were re-telling  Israel’s story in light of what God had now done through Jesus.  Rather than being caught up in the minutia, they continued to tell the one great story.  It was narrative in nearly every, if not every case.

Last Saturday I met an old Pentecostal preacher at the Sapulpa High School musical.  I ran into him after the show and he asked me if I was ready to preach the next day.  I told him that I hoped that I was, and he said, "The thing I really like about you Baptists is that you preach Jesus.  You’re always talking about Jesus.  Who he was.  Where he came from.  What he did."

Maybe we’re not expository preachers after all.  And if we’re not, that may be a very good thing, because we may find that the expository emperor has no clothes.

A Low Blow To The Preacher’s Ego

There’s no event more significant to a preacher’s ego than the preaching moment.  We are judged by the quality of our preaching and we judge ourselves by how well we think we did/do.  When I was working for AT&T Wireless and looking to get into pastoral ministry I met with a prominent pastor in our state to get a little pastoral advice.  Above all else he told me to pay special attention to my preaching.  "People will forgive you for not being there to hold grandma’s hand at the end, but they won’t forgive consistently poor preaching."

There have been ongoing blog discussions about what constitutes proper preaching.  But if there’s one thing that I believe should characterize all preaching, whether it is expository, topical, narrative, interactional, whatever, is that preaching should be lovingly prophetic.

I can’t remember who said it (seems like it was either Luther or John Wesley - but hey, I’m too lazy to check it out at the moment so take it for the hearsay that it is), but one of the great preacher/theologians of the past was reputed to say that he took inventory of how his preaching was being received and noted that he was universally liked as a preacher.  He took that to mean that he wasn’t being obedient in his preaching because there should be at least some who were offended.  In his book Unlearning Church Michael Slaughter writes that his job is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.

There’s a fine line in there.  Some preachers think they are being prophetic when, in fact, they are only angry, mean and rude.  Some preachers think they are being loving when, in fact, they are only spouting the pablum of the day to tickle people’s ears.  Being lovingly prophetic means that we genuinely desire the very best for our listeners, but that helping them get there often requires that we challenge their false assumptions and beliefs, tear down their golden calves and point out where self-interest is getting in the way of the Divine interest.

If you’re a preacher and you think you can stomach some healthy self-criticism then check out the series on preaching AJ Swoboda’s got going on over at Blah Guy.  They’re short and to-the-point.  Kinda like a left jab.

Realities of Preaching
Preaching.2
Preaching.3
Preaching.4

Preaching.5

Tell Me A Story

Every night as I’m putting them to bed my two youngest say, "Tell me a story, Daddy!"

I confess that I’ve had to sharpen my storytelling skills.  I’ve told them some children’s stories, some Bible stories and some made-up stories.  Most of these stories have come from my memory bank.  Some of them they have already heard.  But when I tell them one they’ve heard before they don’t stop me.  Their eyes get big and a smile crosses their faces and they help me tell it - often interrupting with, "And THEN….!"

I don’t always like telling them stories.  Sometimes I’m worn out from a long day and I just want to go veg out.  And usually I’ve just battled them to get their teeth brushed, pj’s on and in bed.  That can be tougher than a twelve-hour work day.  But they are both persistent and persuasive.  And I always give in.  But I was thinking….I’m pretty sure I know a way to kill story time - not that I’m going to, nor that I want to.  Truth be told I kind-of enjoy it myself.  Here’s how: rather than tell them stories I’ll start sharing principles with them.  We’ll discuss theology.  "Always be honest,"  I’ll say.  "God consists of Father, Son and Holy Spirit."  "Docetism teaches that Jesus only appeared to be human, but that in reality his Divinity overshadowed his humanity."  "The very free and conversational style in which the second illustration Jesus uses in Matthew 24:45-51 is given, an illustration of the necessity of watchfulness, is remarkable."

Give ‘em three straight nights of that and story time will be a thing of the past.  That’s a better guarantee than George Zimmer can give you.

Something else that’s interesting is that, though they’re only three and five they remember the stories.  Maybe not every detail, but they remember them enough that they can help me tell them if it’s one they’ve heard before.  Stories communicate in a powerful way.  Stories shape our views about the world, ourselves, others and God. 

The story of the American Dream communicates something profound to people in our culture.  It tells us that you can be the poorest of the poor, but with hard work and determination you can be anything you want to be.  It says that the world may be set against you in some ways, but that no hurdle is to great to overcome.  It implies that worldly success is within every person’s grasp and is something everyone should desire.  We pass the values of that story on to our children in numerous ways - one of the most significant in the oft-repeated phrase, "I want you [my kids] to have it better than I had it."  We actually tell the story of the American Dream in a hundred different ways and in a thousand different places - at home, at the mall (yeah, especially at the mall), even in most of our churches with our million-dollar facilities, $300 suits/dresses and Madison Avenue-esque presentations.

Families have stories, too.  Some family stories say, "Kids in this family never go to college.  They move out when they turn 18 and get a job like the rest of the working world."  Other family stories say, "Kids in this family always go to college and become professionals of one sort or another."  Or, "this has been a family business for three generations and you will be expected to make it four."  Every now and then someone challenges the story.  Scrub girl Cinderella actually makes it to the ball and marries the prince.  Ariel forsakes the sea for the people of the dry land.  The little Hobbit Frodo actually saves the Shire and the rest of Middle Earth.  And these become compelling stories in and of themselves - shaping new realities.

The Christian faith is basically a faith controlled by stories.  The story of perfect Adam in perfect Eden eating some perfectly forbidden fruit.  The story of faithful Noah and his family being saved from destruction and to a new beginning because he followed after God.  The story of a hundred-year-old man and a ninety-year-old woman having a son because of God’s promise.  Of three young Hebrew boys who were rescued from a hot-as-hell furnace because they refused to become idolaters and remained faithful to their God.  Of a baby, and a feeding trough, and five loaves of bread and two fish, and walking on water and a cross and an empty tomb and the world set to rights.  Of a new heaven and a new earth where there is no more sorrow or pain, where righteousness lives and where the radiance of the King outshines the sun.

These are powerful stories.  Jesus knew the power of stories.  He told some of the world’s greatest stories.  He challenged many of the prevailing stories of his day and invited his listeners to enter into a new story about a new day and a new kingdom.

Folks over at Marty Duren’s blog have been having an ongoing discussion about "expository preaching."  In some ways I believe "expository preaching" has become a new idol for some among us.  To preach any other way is to be doing something other than preaching.  It’s just speaking to the wind.  Wasting everyone’s time.  Dishonoring the Scriptures.  I have nothing against expository preaching.  I hardly know how to do anything else.  I may not be a good expository preacher, but I’m a worse non-expository preacher.  But I know this: practically no one can recall for sure a single principle about life or faith that I preached in 2004.  But like my kids, they can’t forget the controlling stories that lie at the heart of our faith.

Last night I had an interesting discussion with a church member about the movie The Matrix.  I love those movies.  If you pay attention you’ll see a lot of "stuff" lying underneath the bullets and blue sky.  This church member watched the movie with his twelve-year-old son and they talked about some of those underlying messages and what they mean.  I believe that is a large part of the preacher’s task - to tell the stories and to get at the underlying message that is there.  This is what the apostle Paul did both in his preaching and in his writing (notice, for example, that in the book of Romans Paul writes about creation [chapters 1 and 8], Adam  [chapter 5], Abraham [chapter 4] and the temple sacrifices [chapter 12]).  Whatever style of preaching we employ, we, as Christians, should be storytellers who point out those great underlying themes, moving the story forward, inviting others to become a part of God’s ongoing story in His world.

Rapture Ready

As you know I occasionally take it upon myself to update my readers on the current status of the Rapture Index.  Bad news.  It’s at 163 which is the highest it’s been since at least 2004 and already equals the high for 2006.  If those danged Democrats hadn’t taken over congress we might very well be sitting at a more comfortable 145 or so.

Of course, I was checking the Rapture Index out because I’m preaching through Matthew 24 right now and since there is no such thing as the rapture I was looking for a little something to make me smile to start the day.  I rather like Ben Witherington’s statement on the rapture (HT: Michael Bird):

Since the rapture is not a Biblical doctrine at all but rather something dreamed up by a teenage girl in about 1820 at a revival in Glasgow Scotland and then preached by Darby and Moody neither of whom were ever Bible experts, perhaps we had better pay attention and see what a proper Christian response should be to this crisis, especially for the sake of being a good witness.

Ummm.  Am I playing my hand too strongly?  I realize that a Southern Baptist hammering those words out on a keyboard for all to see is a bit like going all-in in Texas hold ‘em with a 2-3 off-suit  [What you don’t know is that I’ve seen the flop and I get three more deuces].

At any rate, I take a fairly strong preterist view, particularly of Matthew 24 (Mark 13, Luke 21).  I was somewhat surprised to see that Craig Blomberg does as well, though he sneaks a little millenarianism in the back door.  And just when he was starting to sound like a good amillennialist, too.

I’m wondering, though….how do you see it?  Do you have any exegetical insights you might share with me before Sunday?  I’ll specifically be looking at verses 15-28.  Here’s your chance to set me straight.

Next Page »