Non-Conformity
August 31st, 2010 § 2 Comments
Last week a book came in the mail. Not all that rare of an occurrence at the Shedden household but this time I didn’t order a book. Kelli, of course, wondered if I had hidden that I’d ordered a book, but that is another subject.
About 3 years ago when I was living in Seattle and attending Church of the Apostles, Kelli and I were lucky enough to meet two fellow pilgrims in Chris and Jolie Guillebeau. Chris had this crazy idea to travel to every country in the world, not just for the fun, but as a lifestyle choice. If I remember right he looked at how much a nice car would cost compared to traveling the world and decided he would live his life unconventionally. For Chris and Jolie this meant living without a car, living below their means, and doing what they loved even if meant not having the life everybody thought they should be seeking. For Chris this meant traveling and for Jolie it took the form of art.
One day Chris called and asked me to lunch to run an idea by me that he was working on. Not being an expert in anything I gladly agreed to meet him and talk. At this lunch Chris showed a ton of work he had been doing on creating content and thoughts for a webpage that he would use as a platform to tell others about his decision to live what he calls “the art of non-conformity.” I had a hard time wrapping my head around his ideas, but Chris had seemed to have done his homework. I offered some vague comments I thought might help him, walked home in the rain, and wondered exactly what Chris had gotten himself into.
Not soon later Chris started his website and I read it eagerly. He slowly started building a following and before I knew it he was actually getting somewhere. Not long after that he quit his side job and took a leap of faith focusing solely on his webpage. Chris was deciding to do what he loved and help other people find out what living unconventionally might mean for them. Chris and Jolie moved to Portland after he quit his job, but I have kept up with his exploits through his blog and twitter.
This brings us back to the book. The book that arrived in the mail was an early release of Chris’s book, published through Penguin. The book, The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World, is coming out in September and contains Chris’s story and more importantly his thoughts to help others to begin to live outside the box. I’d encourage you to check out the tons of great advice Chris gives out on his blog for free and if you feel so inclined grab his book, which is worth it for his story alone.
September Newsletter
August 30th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Many of you asked for the Bonheoffer quote I used in my last sermon and I thought the best way to get that out would be in the church newsletter. The following is from the Cost of Discipleship and I think it is clear presentation of the difference between what we might call “cultural Christianity” and the call to discipleship. As we have gone through the gospel of Luke this year we have preached on several of the harder passages of Jesus and I think Bonheoffer nails how Christ is calling us to a much deeper faith through those passages. If you are interested I would encourage you to read The Cost of Discipleship, but also released this year was a massive, but readable, biography on Bonheoffer by Eric Metaxas. Through reading about him we can come to understand how this distinction between Cheap and Costly Grace was manifest in his life.
Blog Title
August 25th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Normally the first post on a blog explains the title of the blog and it is normally one of the most boring, but revealing posts. When I was using a different wordpress theme this blog had no title because I couldn’t come up with anything smart enough. But some time ago I filled in “Physical Life” as the title and it showed up when I changed blog themes. Now, it is no secret that Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is my favorite book and recently I reread parts of it and came across the passage that inspired my blog title. I would like to think I could write something on why both this book and this passage have become words I often return to in my life, but I don’t think I could write anything as beautiful as the passage itself. However, in the passage itself I think I see that Christianity, Christology, and the sacraments depend on our physicality. Our “physical lives” are not things we can forsake and I hope it is something I learn to love, ponder, and be thankful for. The more I have thought about it, the more I also come to see that prayer is attached to my physical life and how in prayer I come to feel the sacredness and beauty of the physical life I get to live.
"Today was the Lord’s Supper, and I preached on Mark 14:22,"And as they were eating, he took bread, and when he had blessed, he brake it, and gave it to them, and said, Take ye: this is my body." Normally I would not preach on the Words of Institution themselves when the Sacrament is the most beautiful illumination of them there could be. But I have been thinking a great deal about the body these last weeks. Blessed and broken. I used Genesis 32:23-32 as the Old Testament text, Jacob wrestling with the Angel. I wanted to talk about the gift of physical particularity and how blessing and sacrament are mediated through it. I have been thinking lately how I have loved my physical life. In any case, and you may remember this, when almost everyone had left and the elements were still on the table and the candles still burning, your mother brought you up the aisle to me and said, "You ought to give him some of that." You’re too young, of course, but she was completely right. Body of Christ, broken for you. Blood of Christ, shed for you. Your solemn and beautiful child face lifted up to receive these mysteries at my hands. They are the most wonderful mystery, body and blood. It was an experience I might have missed. Now I only fear I will not have time enough to fully enjoy the thought of it."
On a good day
August 19th, 2010 § 2 Comments
I hope occasionally when asked for a report of your day in the ministry you will be able to say, “I think I wrote one good sentence in the sermon for Sunday.” The sermon is at the heart of our ability to speak as well as sustain speaking Christian. The sermon is not your reflections on how to negotiate life. The sermon rather is our fundamental speech act as Christians through which we learn the grammar of the faith. As my colleague Richard Lischer puts it in his book, The End of Words, “the preacher’s job . . . is to do nothing less than shape the language of the sermon to a living reality among the people of God—to make it conform to Jesus. The sermon, in fact, is Jesus trying to speak once again in his own community.”
If you haven’t had time yet to read through Hauerwas’ great commencement address he gave at Eastern Mennonite I encourage you do so now. The reason this line stuck out to me is that when I read the address for a second time I had just spend about 4 hours fiddling with a sermon looking for something to crack into proclamation. I had done all my research, had practically written the whole thing, but couldn’t really find anything that I really wanted to say in the sermon. Sermon writing for me often functions like a puzzle with one really odd piece. It’s not hard to find all the pieces, look up sources, even really write it, but I will spend hours thinking about the one sentence that I really want to bring to the congregation on Sunday and for some reason it took longer than usual to find it this past week. So reading this reading right after I finished I felt like I could say to Kelli when she asked what I did all that time at the kitchen table was that, “I think I wrote one good sentence in the sermon for Sunday.”
Hipster Christianity
August 13th, 2010 § 3 Comments
Today Kelli and I had fun figuring out which of the portraits of Hipster Christianity we are and we couldn’t decide between the two posted below. Brett McCracken has been working for what seems like a couple of years on his book Hipster Christianity and this month it has gotten a giant ramp-up with the release of the book. The characterizations are funny, but I often wonder what purpose they serve. I know he thinks he is breaking down what is “cool” versus “real” (according to his Wall Street Journal article) but I have a hard time seeing this kind of project as productive towards that because it bleeds cool. Read his blog, the webpage for the book, and even the marketing format they have chosen and you can see this book is meant to be another tack-on for the person who can now say “yeah that church is cool, but it isn’t real.” I haven’t read the book and to be honest, I am not sure I will (I’ll stick with the original hipster Karl Barth) but I would be more interested in hearing him talk about how someone might hear the Word of God proclaimed and respond in our churches today than see caricatures, nice webpage’s, and the call for something “real”. It’s all fun and games to come with these portraits, but I think if he really wants to tackle where the church is today he will find, like many of us have, that it won’t involve a book contract, a highly trafficked webpage, and manufactured images, but will rather involve the long silent unnoticed laboring of seeking to proclaim and live the gospel in the world. When he gets around to that I’ll buy that book.
Coming Back
August 10th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I told myself that after my vacations and the church mission trip I would begin to blog again. My life seems to have been sorely lacking writing/blogging energy and I fear that might mean I am running low on creative energy as well. I might be in a period where I am learning more than saying more, but I figure it would help to try and discipline myself to write more both here and on the Barth blog. Discipline has never been a word I liked very much in my life, but I am aware that it also helps make up the word disciple. So for the first time in my life I am trying to embrace some discipline. It started about 8 months ago with the Barth project of 5 pages a day (which I have kept up on, just not blogged about), and then moved to running every other day in February as well as eating a healthier diet, and now I think it might mean doing something for my creative life as well as spiritual life. On the spiritual side, I am adding in some new disciplines but creatively I would like to start by trying to write on the blog at least twice a week for this year. For a couple of months two years ago I managed to blog almost every day so that seems manageable, but it also means you the reader (if there are still any) will have to put up with attempting to regain my writing legs. So here’s to disciplines and for putting up with half-baked often incoherent ramblings and #1 out of 104 entries.
June Newsletter
May 26th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Not sure why I am not writing as much lately but hopefully I will get back on track at some point. Anyways here is my June Newsletter about a youth ministry conference I attended in Seattle.
John Updike ‘Seven Stanzas at Easter’
April 3rd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body.
If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the
amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
eleven apostles;
it was as his flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of
enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a thing painted in the faded credulity
of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier mache,
not stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will
eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the
dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not make it less monstrous,
for in our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour,
we are embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
April Church Newsletter
March 23rd, 2010 § 2 Comments
It’s hard to believe it is April already! It means that I have been at Lebanon Mennonite for five months, that summer is just around the corner, and one of my favorite days of the year is upon us: Baseball Opening Day. As many of you know, I suffer the dreaded curse of not just loving a sport that plays 162 games a year, but am hopelessly tied to the Chicago Cubs who have not won a championship since 1908 (but I think this year is the year). As one of my favorite theologians, Stanley Hauerwas, writes about moving back to the Midwest:
I accepted my destiny and again became a Cubs fan. This commitment came at the same time I was convinced by John Howard Yoder that I had to become a pacifist. I like to think that being a Cubs fan and a pacifist are closely-linked—namely, both communities teach you that life is not about winning.
As Opening Day draws near I will most likely take time to watch one of my favorite movies, Field of Dreams. Now if you live outside of the world of baseball you might not know that for many people baseball has a kind of poetic nature to it that crosses over from just being a game to being a pastime. Field of Dreams is just one of many movies that exemplifies this kind of mystical picture of baseball.
But none the less, baseball season draws near and that means I get sucked into this thing I would not desecrate. For instance, during the off season stories have been reported that a Toyota sign is being considered to be put up at the hallowed Wrigley Field (where the Cubs play). Now plenty of baseball stadiums have signs and advertisements all over them, but since 1914 Wrigley Field has always been one of the few places that has not been touched by the marketing craze. The ivy in the outfield kept ads from being put there and for the most part the park remains clean of the visual distractions most modern facilities have. Yet as we all know about some of our favorite places, they can’t stay pure forever. Many of us know of a beautiful park that was torn up for a strip mall, a childhood playground paved into a highway, or a remote spot that now has become a tourist destination. And so at some point what was sacred for us becomes exploited and Eden fades as only a faint memory of what once was.
So, why am I talking about baseball in the church newsletter? Part of the explanation for doing so comes from a scene in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. At a luncheon, Gatsby introduces Nick Carraway, the book’s narrator, to a man named Meyer Wolfsheim. After lunch, Gatsby explains to Nick, "He is the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919." Nick is staggered. "It never occurred to me," he reflects, "that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people…" The feelings that many of us share around baseball, running, fishing, quilting, cooking, or woodwork are comparable to a notion of faith. When we participate in these activities or go to these special places we sense a sacred quality that God has connected to these parts of life, a sense of the good that we feel here that shows up rarely, but it is something that needs to be protected and not merely played with. What we see even faintly is a picture of the goodness of God and a peace that aches for Eden.
Recently I read an article in a Christianity Today publication that explored this exact turn in baseball. The article follows the story of the Brooklyn Dodgers leaving for Los Angeles and the turmoil it caused. The article closes with this though:
All fans know that three words, whether spoken by villains or saints, kill the spirit of whatever sport of which they’re said: It’s a business. Baseball is not a business, any more than is marriage, or teaching first grade, or playing four-square. If we want to raise boys and girls who will come, like the aging Satchel Paige, to preach "the sanctity of the double steal and the blessedness of the bunt," we will find ways to preserve and protect this treasure. And chances are, if our children learn to feel the sanctity of the double steal, they’ll come to know other realms of sanctity, too—and perhaps gain the courage to construct ways of guarding them.
I understand that many of you don’t feel the way I do about baseball, but shortly after Opening Day we will celebrate Easter, the resurrection of Jesus. And the question that spurred these reflections is what sacredness do we want to celebrate on that day? Do we want to model for the younger generations among us that our Church is a place among places, that Easter day is just another day, that the communion we take is merely a remembrance of something we know only on the inside? Or, do we want to speak in wonder, poems, and whispers about a secret that is sacred that we are both dying to share and wanting to protect from being trampled upon by the forces that would seek to commodify it, sell it, or turn it to from sacred to profane? So, as excited as I am for Opening Day the day, what I greatly anticipate the most is the day when we celebrate, pray, and tell the stories of the One who defeats the powers that enslave our world and frees us to worship without fear because of Resurrection. Easter is always better than Opening Day.
