Coming Up Sunday, August 1

This Sunday, we will enjoy our contemporary worship service, featuring lots of music, spanning from the 8th Century to the 21st Century, from traditional hymns to popular praise music composed in only the last few years. I am excited to experience all of it with you -- it will add an interesting dynamic to worship.

In addition, the day will have personal significance for me. Ten years ago, on the first Sunday in August, I preached my first Sunday morning sermon. A lot has changed in the years since -- as I climbed into the pulpit that day, I never would have imagined becoming a pastor in West Virginia -- or anywhere else, for that matter.

The scripture for Sunday is the same it was ten years ago, John 6, culminating with Jesus words, "I am the bread of life." In some ways, this is one of the most hopeful chapters of John, reminding us of how Christ comes to us in many ways to feed our faith. In other ways, it is a challenging passage, reminding us that all of the answers we think we've found about God may not be the right answers at all. We will explore both of those things on Sunday.

Meet My New Nephew

My nephew was born a week ago, and I have pictures to share. Zachary Titus is a healthy boy, though most of the photos I have of him so far show him asleep -- or at least with his eyes closed. Here's one with his proud Mom Emily where the eyes are open:

And here we have a picture with Dan, proud Daddy, and big brother Sean:

Everyone is home and doing great! Praise God for this new miracle!

Recognizing Each Others Gifts

In Sunday's sermon, I mentioned that I was drawing upon Augustine's theology in my presentation of the Trinity. I was a bit surprised this week to discover that other parts of the sermon also have roots in Augustine's thought, especially the point that we are meant by God to celebrate each other's gifts -- something we often fail to do because of our pride, our competitiveness, and our dishonesty.

While reading a book on Christian history, I read a quotation from Augustine's Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love:

We love God now by faith; then we shall love him through sight. Now we love even our neighbor by faith....But in the future life, every man shall love and praise his neighbor the virtue that may not be hid. (Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity, p. 79, citing Enchiridion..., ed. Henry Paolucci, ch. 21)

In the future life, when our relationships are restored into their proper and intended forms, we will praise and love our neighbors' 'virtues' -- gifts. We will recognize the unique talents and interests with which God blessed each of us, honestly and openly.

In the meantime, as I mentioned Sunday, we should try to overcome our sinfulness and be more honest about our own gifts and those of the people around us, cherishing them as God intended.

Coming Up Sunday, July 25

On Sunday, we conclude our series "What God Wants for You." This week's sermon, "Life," provides both a comprehensive conclusion to the entire series and to specific themes begun in last week's sermon, "Purpose."

Last week, we explored the question of why God created us and what God's hopes were for us in the beginning. The crux of that was that God intended us to enjoy proper relationships with the created world, with each other, and with God. The implication of this, as demonstrated throughout creation and even within the Trinity, is that we each have unique gifts and interests that feed our relationships.

Of course, God's creation did not practice such proper relationships long. Instead, sinfulness crept in, destroying most of God's dreams for us, leaving God's hopes for us to only be partially realized in this world.

The purpose of Christ's incarnation was to counter this sinfulness. Through his life on earth, Jesus demonstrated that we could still enjoy many of God's dreams for our lives in this world, despite the pervasiveness and destructive quality of sin. More than this, though, Jesus the Christ is a sign that God intends to restore human beings to the existence He created us for. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly." We will explore some of the implications of this promise, both for our lives now and our lives to come.

Lincoln in Church

I came across an interesting blog post from a Methodist Church in Illinois, where the pastor is taking three weeks in July to focus on Abraham Lincoln's faith in both worship and study.

Lest you think that your's truly is the only person who spends time talking about Abraham Lincoln in church....

Coming Up Sunday, July 11

We continue our series on "What God Wants for You" with this week's focus on music. There is much written about music in the scriptures, including some prophecies that promise a song in the hearts of the faithful. And of course, there is an entire songbook preserved in the Bible, the Book of Psalms.

Music has always been an integral part of faith. This Sunday, we'll explore why this is during a worship service that will feature both a meditation on music and lots of music itself.

Singing as Theology

A few weeks ago, I mentioned a series of articles in recent issues of The Christian Century in which various theologians discuss "how their minds have changed" over time. This week, I read another such essay, "Deep and Wide," written by prolific author Mark Noll, who after many years of teaching at Wheaton College is now teaching at Notre Dame.

Noll, whose specialty is the study of Christianity in American history (though he's recently begun serious study of global Christianity), is a wonderful historian, capable of writing books for a variety of audiences. His best, in my estimation, is America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Despite this, I do not recommend it to many people because it is the culmination of a lifetime of study that distills an almost indescribable amount of information into a careful theory of the context for American Christianity -- most people would find themselves in over their head because Noll does not take the time (and it would take significant time and probably triple the length of the book) to carefully define for non-experts all of the context he's exploring. Instead I recommend any of his other wonderful books that are written for a general audience, several of which are on my bookshelves.

In his Christian Century essay, Noll offers some reflections on how his appreciation of the richness and diversity of Christianity has developed over the years, even as he has become more aware of the depth of similarities in the Christian faith across time and culture. I was particularly struck by his reflections on the significance of hymns in his faith and his self-awareness of that faith:

A further broadening effect of the great hymns took me longer to comprehend. With the help especially of Andrew Wall's account of how the once-incarnate Christ has been, as it were, incarnated afresh wherever Christianity enters a new culture. I came to see something else. While the dogmas of these hymns were universal, the music that played such a powerful part in quickening the dogma was particular. Isaac Watt's "When I survey the wondrous cross" remained fairly inert words on the page without the tune "Rockingham," by Edward Miller, or "Hamburg," by Lowell Mason. I might find singing this hymn with a rock-and-roll melody or accompanied by a five-toned Thai xylophone an intellectual curiosity, but it would not be heartfelt worship.

Over time the obvious became clear: the hymns did their great work for me as they were sung with music originating from only about 200 years of Western musical history (1650-1850). With music not from the West and with later or earlier Western music, the affect simply was not the same. Extension was the next step: if I was experiencing the universal gospel through a particular cultural expression, it followed that the same gospel could be as powerfully communicated through other cultural expressions, even if those expressions were alien or foreign to me. The experience of those who could be moved by a rock-and-roll rendition of "When I survey the wondrous cross," or by a five-toned Thai version of a similar hymn, was, in principle, just as authentic as when I sang these words set to "Rockingham." Understood in this way, the hymns were making me at the same time both a cultural relativist and a stronger Christian dogmatist. (June 1, 2010, p. 33)

Many people of faith use music to define what churches they like or don't like. Noll acknowledges that he responds better to certain musical styles than others, but he does not fall into the usual trap of seeking to impose his preferences on others. Instead -- and this is a growth in self-awareness that many of us never achieve -- he considers how God uses this music to reach out to him and then imagines how God might use other forms of music to reach out to different people. In this dual appreciation of music, Noll glimpses depth and wideness.

Like a good Calvinist, Noll then incorporates this insight into his understanding of the grace inherent in the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Certainly, it is another form of the "one body, many members" metaphor found in Scripture and central to most Protestant theological understandings of Communion. But I wanted him to linger on this insight about the role of music in faith -- or maybe I just wanted him to explain more how this understanding crept into his awareness.

Most people are aware that they like certain church songs better than others. Some might admit that certain styles of music or specific instruments influence these preferences, but most would probably speak about how a certain song "feels like worship" or "makes me feel the presence of God." Then, however, churchgoers have to learn an important lesson -- everyone has such preferred songs and not everyone's preferences overlap, even in a single congregation. I have a colleague who once threatened to preach a sermon entitled "Why We Can't Sing 'In the Garden' Every Sunday," to try to address just this issue. As members of a faith community, we gradually learn how to incorporate music over time that includes "favorite songs" or "favorite styles" of everyone in the room, though this is never without grumbling and frustration.

Noll's comments go far beyond this local compromise to imagine -- even admitting his own lack of understanding how this works in various cultures -- that the same God can be in all of these songs, regardless of styles, instruments, tempos, or anything else. In this, he not only reaches out to people he loves that he sees and interacts with regularly: he sees a church far beyond his own imagining, beyond his culture and class, beyond his specific time in history, beyond his language. It's an audacious vision of the gospel, and one that we rarely encounter as Christians because we are so myopic -- so culturally conditioned, so focused on ourselves and our close friends. Might we, in our own ways, gain awareness of such a God whose grace is so ubiquitous even as it seems so overwhelming in our own lives.

Coming Up Sunday, July 4

On Sunday, we'll continue our series "What God Wants for You." Given that Sunday is July 4th, we will focus on the divine wish of freedom. As Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians, "For freedom Christ has set us free."

The nature of this freedom, though, is a bit different from the freedom that we celebrate on Independence Day. On July 4th, we usually celebrate political freedom, with patriotic parades, family picnics, and fireworks. The freedoms we celebrate (if we even think of them) are encapsulated in the great "Song of Freedom" by Irving Berlin:

God's wish for us to be free is not limited to political freedom. God wants us to be free from the burdens of our past, including some of the worst consequences of our sinfulness. Without such freedom, we would be weighed down so much with our spiritual baggage that we would be virtually unable to do anything productive. But even this is only the tip of the iceberg of God's hope for us.

We were created, as explained in Genesis, to enjoy creation as virtual equals of God. Like any loving parent, God wanted Adam to be a free-thinking and free-acting adult in this newly created world. Imagine what you as a parent want for your children -- God wants that for us and more. God wants us to make our own decisions, preferably wise decisions, like every mother and father wishes for their kids as they mature. But God doesn't dictate, giving us the freedom to make mistakes and the space to eventually learn -- hopefully -- how to live faithfully and well.

** As long as I've posted one clip from "Holiday Inn," I should post Fred Astaire's brilliant solo dance routine for Independence Day from the movie. It doesn't relate to Sunday's sermon, but it is fun to watch!