“The worship God is seeking relies completely on His initiative, knowing that the only true expression of worship is through the abandonment of all our agendas for His, as we trust in His sovereign power and unlimited grace. It is from this heart posture that true liturgy flows, that music and arts find their highest calling and that the light of a worshipping community shines as a beacon of hope to a suffering and searching world.”—David RuisMy thanks to Jared for posting this quote from one of my favorite worship leaders (and also for the excellent post in which the quote is contained). This is why any worship service, whether “traditional” or “contemporary” (two labels which usually bear little or no resemblance to descriptions of reality), should begin with a call to worship: we gather to worship because God summons us. The initiative is his, not ours. Failure to remember that fact and take it seriously is, I’m convinced, the root of most of our squabbles over “worship style.” We fall into the trap of thinking that worship is all about music and how we do things and other matters of style and preference, and forget that all those things, while not incidental, are secondary. Worship, at its core, is an orientation: specifically, toward God, flat on our faces. The rest should develop accordingly, as Ruis says.This is, I think, the most important thing to remember for those of us whom God has called to lead his people in worship; what we are about is to lead people in precisely this. It’s the reason I believe in liturgy, whatever specific content we may put in it (such as whether the songs were written three centuries ago or three weeks ago), because the ancient form of the Christian service was designed to serve this purpose; but at the same time, if we begin to value the form for its own sake, we make an idol of it and thus defeat that purpose. What matters is that we teach people to trust God’s “sovereign power and unlimited grace” enough that they will be willing to abandon their agendas for his—that we teach them to come to worship out of that attitude, as an expression of that trust—and that we lead them in that by living and worshiping that way ourselves. Put simply, the most important qualification for a worship leader isn’t skill or talent or charisma: it’s a heart and life oriented in this way to the worship of God.
Category Archives: Quotes
Brief meditation on gratitude and discipleship
“See, I believe that if you were chosen—that if you were elected—I believe that if God has anything for you it’s not just to make you happy. God did not choose you and call you out of this world just to make you high. And God didn’t choose you and God didn’t call you out of this world just so that you could be pious. Because there are enough pious people
and there are enough happy people in the world. What God called you for
and what God called you to is to make a difference in the world.”—Rich MullinsHappiness is a good thing, and piety is a good thing. (Piety has a bad name with some folks, but that’s only because they’ve come across distorted versions of it rather than the real thing.) The limitation to each of them, though, is that they’re inner-directed. That’s not bad, it’s not a flaw, it’s just a simple fact: every person and every thing is limited, and this is their limitation (or one of them, anyway). Happiness is about me and my life and my circumstances, and piety is about me and my life and my relationship with God. Both are good and perfectly appropriate things; they just aren’t enough in and of themselves. God doesn’t call us to be primarily inner-directed (not that you’d know it from a lot of American spirituality); he calls us to be directed outward, in love, and grace, and gratitude. Indeed, the primary response God asks of us for our salvation is gratitude for what he has done for us and given us; out of that gratitude, then, he asks us to share what we have been given, and to love as we are loved. He calls us to make a difference in this world not out of a grim sense of duty, but out of a deep sense of joy, in simple thankfulness for the opportunity.
Martin Luther King Jr.: yad vashem
Forty years ago this evening, at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, America lost one of her great-souled sons when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down by an assassin. The memorial at the hotel appositely cites Genesis, from the story of Joseph:
They said one to another, “Behold, here cometh the Dreamer. Let us slay him and we shall see what will become of his dreams.”—Genesis 37:19-20 (KJV)
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Rev. Dr. King’s death is that so much of his dream died with him. Too much of the church, too many of his brothers and sisters in Christ, have set aside his call, which is the call of Christ, that we are to be one in our Lord across all our divisions, racial no less than any other—and for what? For business as usual, and the easiest, most expedient ways to grow congregations. There’s no denying, the “homogeneous unit principle” serves the cause of numerical church growth; what it doesn’t serve is the cause of the gospel, the work of the kingdom of God on this earth. On this point, more people should listen to Markus Barth:
When no tensions are confronted and overcome, because insiders or outsiders of a certain class or group meet happily among themselves, then the one new thing, peace, and the one new man created by Christ, are missing; then no faith, no church, no Christ, is found or confessed. For if the attribute “Christian” can be given sense from Eph. 2, then it means reconciled and reconciling, triumphant over walls and removing the debris, showing solidarity with the “enemy” and promoting not one’s own peace of mind but “our peace.” . . . When this peace is deprived of its social, national, or economic dimensions, when it is distorted or emasculated so much that only “peace of mind” enjoyed by saintly individuals is left—then Jesus Christ is being flatly denied. To propose, in the name of Christianity, neutrality or unconcern on questions of international, racial, or economic peace—this amounts to using Christ’s name in vain.
It’s easy to blame the white church for this, of course, but it’s not only the white church that’s guilty of leaving the Rev. Dr. King’s vision behind; as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, one of his good friends and coworkers, writes, those who claimed the role of leadership of the black community did the same, and did so intentionally. Where the Rev. Dr. King preached the gospel of Jesus Christ for all people, many of those who would claim his mantle “were in no mood for reconciliation, and are not to this day.” The year after his death would see the beginning of black liberation theology with the publication of James Cone‘s book Black Theology and Black Power, which argued that
In the New Testament, Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted of society, and against oppressors. . . . Either God is for black people in their fight for liberation and against the white oppressors, or he is not.
The following year, Dr. Cone took his seat at Union Theological Seminary in New York and published his second book, A Black Theology of Liberation. In that book, he wrote,
The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience, or God is a God of racism. . . . The blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition God’s own condition. This is the essence of the Biblical revelation.
That’s how we got from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.; and it’s why so many folks who looked at Barack Obama and thought they were getting the incarnation of the Rev. Dr. King’s dream are now wondering if they were sold a bill of goods. The good thing in all this, though, is that Sen. Obama is right—words do matter—and that however the name of Martin Luther King may be used or misused, and however his work and legacy may be invoked or distorted to whatever purpose, his words remain, and they ring with power. Whatever else he was, the Rev. Dr. King was a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he spoke the word of God to America—and when God sends out his word through one of his followers, that word will not return to him empty-handed, but it will accomplish the purpose for which he sent it. As such, it is not too great a thing to say, as Fr. Neuhaus does, that the Rev. Dr. King’s words will continue to echo until their purpose is fulfilled.
As long as the American experiment continues, people will listen and be inspired by his “I Have a Dream,” and will read and be instructed by his Letter from Birmingham Jail, and will once again believe that, black and white together, “We shall overcome.”
Amen. In the house of God and within its walls, he has a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off. May Jesus Christ be praised.
Responsibility
“For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us
and the light goes out.”—James BaldwinIn this world as we know it, that’s about it. God is fixed, and so as Christians we have hope of something better coming; but for now, we must live in this world as it is, without trying to pretend it’s anything different. Our call is simply to reflect God’s light in this shadowed world as brightly and clearly as possible.
A children’s Bible for grownups, too
“No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty—except, of course, books of information.
The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of
are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.”—C.S. LewisGiven that, one would hope that children’s Bibles would be books worth reading at the age of fifty; one would hope they would be a joy to read to our children. Unfortunately, however (at least from my experience), that isn’t often the case. It’s too bad, because our older two really enjoy the one we kept; it isn’t great, but it’s good enough. Still, you always want something better for your kids—and now, I think we may have found it. Ben Patterson, who was something of a mentor of mine during his time as Dean of the Chapel at Hope College, and whose judgment I trust implicitly, has a thoroughly positive review up on the Christianity Today website of The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name; Sara and I got halfway through it and decided we want a copy. It’s not just the review itself, either, because there’s a link to The Jesus Storybook Bible‘s version of Genesis 3, which I think validates Ben’s glowing comments. Of all the things for which he praises this book, I think the most important is that it “manages to show again and again the presence of Christ in all the Old Testament Scriptures, and the presence of the Old Testament Scriptures in the life of Christ.” That’s something too many adults don’t see—perhaps, in part, because they never learned it from their children’s Bibles.
Missing the point on McCain?
So Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, responded to criticism of the paper’s recent piece on John McCain by . . . apologizing? Explaining that they have actual evidence for their contentions, and giving good reasons why they didn’t print it? Retracting the story? No; he responded by blaming the readers.
Frankly, I was a little surprised by how few readers saw what was, to us, the larger point of the story. . . . [that] this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances, also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation.
Now, leave aside for a moment whether you believe this defense or not, or indeed whether you believe it qualifies as a defense or not, and just look at what he’s saying. First, Keller says that Sen. McCain “prizes his honor above all things,” which isn’t quite true but is certainly close enough for journalistic work. Then he says that Sen. McCain “appreciates the importance of appearances,” and then that the point of the story is that the senator actually has a pattern of not appreciating the importance of appearances. It would seem, then, that the assertion that Sen. McCain “appreciates the importance of appearances” rests not on the senator’s behavior, but on the preceding statement that he “prizes his honor.”
In other words, if I’m parsing this correctly, Keller’s defense of his paper’s story rests on the assumption that caring about honor means caring about appearances—which is to say, that honor is the same thing as reputation. I’m not surprised to find the NYT thinking this way, but I very much doubt that Sen. McCain makes this mistake; indeed, if he did, he would never have ended up with the public persona he has. You don’t earn the label of a straight-shooting maverick who’ll offend your friends as soon as your enemies if you’re concerned about appearances; that one is earned precisely by caring about the reality of honor so much that you’re willing to let your reputation swing in the wind. As the sci-fi/fantasy author Lois McMaster Bujold has one of her characters say,
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. Guard your honor; let your reputation fall where it may.
I think Sen. McCain knows the truth of that; demonstrably, the New York Times doesn’t. We’d be better off if they did.
The cross at the center
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
—T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets, II.
Testing, testing, 123 . . .
Thanks, Erin. 🙂
Herewith, the rules:
Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.
My wife happened to be walking up to me with a book just as I caught the tag, so the book is Camp’s Unfamiliar Quotations from 2000 B. C. to the Present (which should be a fruitful source for this sort of thing).
(Our topic is “Greed,” btw; the book is arranged thematically.)
“Yuppies’ creed: ‘I want it all and I want it now.'”
“I think the enemy is here before us. . . . I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed. . . . I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land.”
Weird meme. 🙂 So, tags:
Justice and mercy
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just:
that his justice cannot sleep for ever.”
—Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 289
God is our judge; he is a God of justice. It’s a major biblical theme, a heavy biblical truth, and it’s one that a lot of people don’t like; we tend to prefer the warmer biblical language that God is love, that he’s our good shepherd, and so on, and so a lot of times, we quietly shuffle the “judge” language out the back door into the shed. In some ways, this is ironic, because many of those who most dislike thinking about God as judge are quite convinced they want justice, even folks who really should be asking for mercy (as the Calvinator noted in the comments a while back); I guess the lesson here is that people want “justice” defined as them getting whatever it is they happen to think they deserve. We want justice measured by our own standard, and God uses his standard, not ours.
If we’re going to be faithful to Scripture, though, we just can’t go along with that. All through the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, as God declares himself the God of the weak and the powerless, of whom the archetypal examples are the widow, the fatherless, the homeless foreigner, and the stranger; over and over, he condemns the evildoers who “kill the widow and the stranger, [and] murder the orphan.” Again and again, we have the affirmation that God is a God of justice, and that those who exploit the poor and defenseless will be punished. The psalmist may ask, “How long shall the wicked exult?” but he does so in the certainty that the one who disciplines the nations will dig a pit for the wicked in the end. Those who build their mansions on the backs of the needy may prosper for a time, but not forever.
And in the end, though talk of God as a God of justice and judgment rings a harsh note, it’s important for us to remember that the judgment of God comes on those who do evil, on those who reject his ways; and it’s important to remember that it’s rooted in his insistence on making right all that is wrong, and on his concern for the powerless—and that his concern includes us. The highest and greatest expression of this concern came in Christ, in his death and resurrection on our behalf, taking the punishment for our sin and paying the price that we were powerless to pay, winning for us the freedom we were powerless to win.
Which means, I think, that here we see justice and mercy meet; God’s greatest act of mercy was also his greatest act of justice, as here he defeated not just human evildoers but the power behind them, the slavemaster who bound all of us helplessly in sin. In showing us mercy, he was working justice on our behalf.
Morning prayer
I watch this morning
for the light that the darkness has not overcome.
I watch for the fire that was in the beginning
and that burns still in the brilliance of the rising sun.
I watch for the glow of life that gleams in the growing earth
and glistens in sea and sky.
I watch for your light, O God,
in the eyes of every living creature
and in the ever-living flame of my own soul.
If the grace of seeing were mine this day
I would glimpse you in all that lives.
Grant me the grace of seeing this day.
Grant me the grace of seeing.—J. Philip Newell, Celtic Benediction: Morning and Evening Prayer, 2.
As a pastor, that’s a beautiful note on which to begin the service of the Lord’s Day.