Embracing the Mystery

This weekend my wife and I went out to dinner with a couple from our church. The wife noted that our last two worship gatherings felt more like a Friends Meeting than a Baptist worship service. Some in her family were Friends (Quakers) and she had been to several meetings. She noted this because I’ve started talking about the Spiritual Disciplines in worship. When we discussed meditation we actually took time in worship to meditate on scripture, re-write it in our own words, look for application and then pray over it. Twenty minutes of silence occurred while all that happened. In our worship gathering this weekend, we talked about prayer and so we actually took time as a corporate body to pray, and we ended with a big prayer meeting.

So I in this conversation I got to learn from her all about a Friends Meeting. It was quite fascinating and unique. Read more

The Present Tense

A song by Sydney Carter

Your holy hearsay
is not evidence:
give me the good news
in the present tense.

What happened
nineteen hundred years ago
may not have happened:
how am I to know?

The living truth
is what I long to see:
I cannot lean upon
what used to be.

So shut the Bible up
and show me how
the Christ you talk about
is living now.

Spiritual Disciplines - Study

Richard Foster, in his book The Celebration of Discipline, spends an entire chapter looking at the discipline of Study. It is a very needed discipline in our life and in the life of those we minister to. It is important to have a process of study so that we stay in touch with the Scriptures and so that we model biblical study for our congregation. Study is similar to the use of a muscle: if we stop using it, it will get weak. This is indeed a danger in ministry because our schedules get so full with other aspects of ministry that often our study time is limited to simply trying to get a sermon together for Sunday. Quite honestly, this is an area where I struggle.

Yet as ministers, we should be studying much more. We should be doing our own topical and chronological studies. We should be studying people to examine how people relate. We are semioticians and should study the signs of culture. We should be studying to be ahead of our people so that we can lead them in the direction God is leading us and the church in. The struggle occurs, quite honestly, when we are too far out in front of our church. If that is the case, we need to consider how to adapt our study time or consider if God may be preparing us for a move. It is so difficult as pastors to be so far ahead of your church, or as a staff member to be so far ahead of your senior pastor, that you are stifled and can’t implement what you have studied.

For the church member, they need to be disciplined to study so that they as well can stay in touch with God and have a grasp of His teaching. The ignorance of Christians is unsettling; we are so biblically illiterate that we cannot effectively engage in conversations with those who do not have a relationship with Christ. Not studying also leaves them dry relationally with God.

The purpose of this discipline is to move the mind in a certain direction. “The mind will always take on an order conforming to the order upon which it concentrates.” (Foster, 63) As Christians, we undertake the study process in order “to direct the mind repeatedly and regularly toward ceratin modes of thought about God and human relationships.(Foster, 63)” What we study will have a part in determine the kind of habits that are formed, which is why Paul argues us to focus on things that are true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, and gracious.

Study is thus part of the transformational change process; it is not the complete part, but a highly necessary one. It gives us the ammunition to wage war with the enemy. It gives us the lasso whereby we can corral every thought. It gives us the pep talk that reminds us that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, that we are His children and He is our Father.

One of the biggest issues surrounding the discipline of study is time. It’s so difficult, both as a minister and as a church member, to carve out the time to engage in this discipline. One of the ways I have found effective is to take a quarterly personal retreat. I try to quarterly take 3-4 days away from the house and study one book or topic. Often, it results in new insights, a refreshing encounter with God, and rest from the weariness of ministry. With my school load picking up and other things going on, it may be that I take 2 days per month for a time of study and reflections, just to keep centered and balanced. My spiritual formations professor in seminary noted in my journal that when finals time came, my journaling decreased. It is in these times, he reminded me, that our time with God in study, devotion, reflection and journalling was more important.

Meditation

I missed blogging on meditation last tuesday as part of “Blogging the Spiritual Disciplines”. I had some good things going. But here are a few quotes I wanted to pass on to you about meditation:

Meditation, according to Whitney involves, “filling your mind with God and truth. For some, meditation is an attempt to achieve complete mental passivity, but biblical mediation requires constructive mental activity.” ¹ He goes on to define mediation as “deep thinking on the truths and spiritual realities revealed in Scripture for the purposes of understanding, application, and prayer. Meditation goes beyond hearing, reading, studying, and even memorizing as a means of taking in God’s word.”² One of the images that may best describe meditation is the steeping of tea.

Eugene Peterson, in his book “Eat this Book” speaks of meditation as part of the act of reading scripture. He says that it is the “discipline we give to keeping the memory active in the act of reading. Meditation moves from looking at the words of the text to entering the world of the text. As we take this text into ourselves, we find that the text is taking us into itself…Meditation is the aspect of spiritual reading that trains us to read Scripture as a connected, coherent whole, not a collection of inspired bits and pieces…Mediation is the primary way in which we guard against the fragmentation of our Scripture reading into isolated oracles…Meditation is the prayerful employ of imagination in order to become friends with the text. It must not be confused with fancy or fantasy”.³

Peterson goes on to say that “meditation is not intrusion, it is rumination - letting the images and stories of the entire revelation penetrate our understanding. By meditation we make ourselves at home and conversant with everyone in the story, entering the place where Moses and Elijah and Jesus come together. Participation is necessary. Meditation is participation.”⁴

“No text can be understood out of its entire context. The most “entire” context is Jesus. Every biblical text must be read in the living presence of Jesus. Every word of the scriptural text is a window or door leading us out of the tarpaper shacks of self into this great outdoors of God’s revelation in sky and ocean, tree and flower, Isaiah and Mary, and, finally and completely, Jesus. Meditation discerns the connections and listens for the harmonies that come together in Jesus.” ⁵

1 Whitney, 43.

2 Ibid, 44.

3Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, Eerdmans, 2007, pg 99-101.

4Ibid, 101-102.

5Ibid, 102.

Blogging the Spiritual Disciplines

Several bloggers will be, over the next 16 weeks, blogging about the spiritual disciplines.  The list is below.  I was invited to participate in this, and though I never turned in my list of what specific ones I’ll engage in, I am going to try to work through some of these as I have the opportunity. Right now I’m trying to finish another writing project and will be focusing most of my time on it.  But I will get to some of these on Tuesdays.

Introduction
Meditation
Prayer
Fasting
Study
Journaling
Simplicity
Silence
Solitude
Submission
Service
Confession
Worship
Guidance
Celebration
Conclusion