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.
where you do not want to go.
March 11th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Before I begin I should say I had a great time at MHGS. I say this because as hard on it as I am I did enjoy myself, learn a lot, and grow with a group of great people.
A couple of weekends ago Rob Bell visited the seminary and had a good interaction with students there. I watched the exchange online and enjoyed seeing Rob interact with people at MHGS. After he attended the school he wrote this on his webpage:
I had the chance to speak at the Mars Hill Graduate School in Seattle. Those folks are so far out ahead. When you start there, you essentially do group therapy for a while, because, as they say, “you can’t take people where you’re not willing to go yourself.” Brilliant. This kind of holistic, flesh and blood, theological education is where it’s at.
Here I think Rob points out very clearly what is billed as the central experience at MHGS, Practicum. For many people at MHGS this type of situation is a well needed breath of fresh air that helps them get perspective on their lives. For many students the Practicum experience is a gateway to professional one on one therapy that continues healing for them but at times can turn into a sort of fetish for the MHGS student.
But I think my biggest problem about what Rob’s quote states is that it signifies an attitude that floats around the school that therapy is the thing that is going to take us to the places where we are not willing to go.
Granted, I am not the typical MHGS student, but practicum never met in that way. Maybe I wasn’t open to it, or it was the wrong time, or I was just too worried about passing. However, practicum served as a good opportunity to try on different modes of listening, and understand issues of transference. But there are those at the school who would echo what Rob is saying here and that therapy is the realm where we will surpass where we will go.
On a biographical note, when I was halfway through MHGS I started volunteering bi-weekly at a ministry for the homeless. It was the place I didn’t want to go but I found myself there none the less. I would sit and talk to people who from week to week couldn’t even remember my name. I soon learned that I had nothing to offer them, but I kept going and through the process people close to me began to notice I was changing as a person. After I graduated I started spending three mornings a week with the folks at this ministry. I would come into the house in the morning put on a pot of coffee, do the dishes, and just sit. Some days I broke up fights, some days I hung out in garden with them, some days I helped them with laundry. I prayed a lot. It was a humbling time, but with little else to offer it was what I did. This was the place of transformation, my holistic, flesh and blood education.
Before I came to MHGS I read a Brian McLaren book (I can’t remember which one) where he laid out that seminary could be a place where people came together and did things like this. I had misinformed myself enough to think this is what Practicum was and failed to ask the right questions before attending. While Practicum and therapy was for many students what Rob says it is I felt lost with the singular option I was expected to fit into.
This is my problem – when I think of flesh and blood, holistic theological education I don’t think of the classroom or the therapy session with other emerging adults, but of the places that Jesus will carry my body that I do want to go. When I hear what Rob describes I just can’t imagine the therapeutic experience aimed at creating a healthy individual who can enter into community changed but something else. I think of places we could not go but for Jesus carrying us there. Sitting in silence (see the bottom of this article by feminist theologian Sarah Coakley), placing our bodies between conflicts, teaching at risk youth coffee skills, joining a black Pentecostal church, going to the godless, working with the homeless, prostitutes, or the mentally disabled. I think the key thing for me is that I am convinced going places where we don’t want to go involves Jesus carrying our bodies there and not just our minds/souls.
I was one of a few students that got votes to address the graduating class and was asked to pray at the ceremony. Being aware that people thought of me as one to address the class I began to ponder what I would have said if I was giving one of the speeches and the only I think I could think of is this section of John that I feels gets to the heart of what I was trying to say during my time at MHGS:
Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go." Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, "Follow me!"
Advice from Hauerwas
March 9th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Never lie. Never Lie.
And you’ll discover that is hard work. And part of what it means not to lie is to preach truthfully and what it means to preach truthfully is to preach in manner that you expect God to show up because the Word has been proclaimed. As soon as you hear a minster say, “As my six year old was saying” you know its going to BS. Because its going to insight on the human condition that anyone could have at the Kiwanis club. What it means to preach truthfully and not to lie is to be willing to say when you don’t know what needs to be said…”But that we do see Jesus. We are not sure we know what needs to be said. If I said more than that I would be lying to you. But we do see Jesus.”
I also of course think it is very important to see Jesus in the body and blood of Christ… That won’t make us more faithful but at least God promised to kill us if we do it unworthily or at least make us sick. And I figure that that’s better than dying of boredom. If we return to Eucharistic celebration in a serious manner who knows what God would do with that. What it means to be a Christian is very simple. It means you worship Jesus. But it forces a extraordinary intellectual and moral challenge and we need to be people confident that God will help us speak and live appropriate to the speech we have been given. What I hope we do in the divinity school is give you confidence that you can use the language of the faith, Jesus is Lord without apology. Because if you do that God will show up and scare the hell out of you.
I know that I said I wouldn’t post aimless quotes here but at the tumblr instead but I broke that rule with this one. I think it’s because this quote seems anything but aimless.
