Non-Conformity
August 31st, 2010 § 3 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 § 4 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.
