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.
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.
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.
March 4th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Romano Guardini said the Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; once could not separate Christ from His Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church.
Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 150.
This came up in a conversation with Cabe today and I think it hits on one of the reasons why some of us can never give up the Church. And what we want and try so desperately to see is something that Ephraim Radner points out in hope, “Come and see the Body of our Lord. That’s what Christian ought be saying with respect to their churches. Come and see, but recognize in the body that is our Church the form of Jesus not something else…the Church looks like Jesus.”
Hauerwas as Liberation Theologian?
March 3rd, 2010 § 2 Comments
Recently I had a long conversation with my friend Cabe in which both of us pondered whether Hauerwas’s corpus might be better read as liberation theology for American Christians. I can’t remember who came up with this thought but it gave some shape to my thinking about the critiques Hauerwas receives and what his project holds in our mind shapes the holes and themes we will see throughout his writings. Some who will read Hauerwas’s project as primarily about proposing something counter to identities produced by modern liberalism will find different holes than those who see his project as proposing a Christocentric form-of-life via Wittgenstein.
I had held off on blogging this thought, but today I came across this line in Mangia’s review of Hauerwas’s commentary on Matthew:
As I read the commentary, two things began to dawn on me: first, the extent to which Hauerwas’s whole corpus can be read as a kind of liberation theology for North Americans and Western Europeans, asking the embarrassing question as to how we can be Christians and yet so rich; second, the extent to which wealth and poverty are also themes in Matthew’s gospel.
Here, I agree with Mangia, but instead of using the word rich I would use the word comfortable. I would do this not as an effort to escape a critique of riches but I think Hauerwas seriously wonders how we can as Christians can be so comfortable in what he sees as a deeply disturbing society. Why nobody has yet attempted to read Hauerwas in such a way is beyond me given the large of amount of books we have interacting with his project for someone who is still living.
Luke Timothy Johnson, another scholar I respect, wrote a very powerful rebuke of Hauerwas’s commentary that asked “Hauerwas or Matthew?: Pick one.” While I thought his review pointed to several interesting critiques, I think he misses the question Hauerwas is asking those in biblical studies, theologians, and all readers of Matthew, “Matthew, Hauerwas, or Jesus? Pick one.” Hauerwas has no problem losing Matthew (or himself) in writing a commentary, as long as we find Jesus in his place. Near the beginning of his commentary Hauerwas explicitly makes this point in a discussion of apocalyptic and time:
Apocalyptic is the disruption of time by God’s time so that time might be redeemed. Apocalyptic means that there is another world, another time, than the one in which we live; but it turns out to be the same world in which we live. As Rainer Maria Rilke puts it: "There is another world, the same as this one." We simply must learn to see the world in which we live as the world that the Father created and redeemed through the Son. . . . Matthew’s gospel is, therefore, an ongoing exercise to help us see the world through Christ.
Good & Bad
February 1st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Now that I am a full time pastor I often consider a conversation that came up several times at seminary. When talking about the church at some point we would all begin to rail on how one medium is done (think worship, preaching, small groups) and laugh at how shallow, individualist, or consumerist some of the approaches we take to these things in the church. While it was a fun seminary thing to do, and many times good points were brought up, for those of us heading towards professional ministry it was a constant reminder that were going to have to do something when were employed.
One particular time this conversation came up was in regard to worship music. Everybody made fun of the Passion movement, repressed sexual lyrics about God, cheesy choruses, and we all had a good laugh. But since I just interviewed for a position that day I asked some of the most vocal people, “Ok, I totally agree with your critiques but when I go to work for a church they are going to want to sing something about God, what should it be?” The first response I got was, “Don’t ask me, I just stopped going to church.” Given that wasn’t an option I pushed a little further to get the general response of “we don’t know.”
“We don’t know” is one thing that often summed up the seminary critiques about the church. So when in the process of stumbling through the blogs I read this week I came across this video.
On the one hand I was instantly drawn toward critiquing the overused buzz word called “missional.” And yet when I got over my need to out think everything I realized this video very correctly displays some of my hopes for Lebanon Mennonite. In this area of the country there is a desire to make an invitation into evangelism and to become another wanna-be mega church. Sure the video isn’t all good but it isn’t all bad. And when I finally came around to not seeing it as just bland apology for the word missional, the video reminded me of am extremely simplified presentation of what Halden and Dr. Nate Kerr seem to be calling for from our churches. (They would most likely put the in place of mentioning the church in second scenario something like the church reminding us of the apocalyptic nature of Jesus in it’s place, but then they lost every non-theologian watching).
All of this to say that I am trying to get over my deep seated cynicism.
