As we come to the celebration of Pentecost, we end the festival cycle of the Church Year (Christmas and Easter being the other two great feasts) and move into Ordinary Time (not common place but ordinal or of the calendar). It is interesting to me how even professing Christians will spend a lot of time and money on Christmas decorations, music, activities and church programs. They will do a moderate at Easter and almost nothing for Pentecost. Yet, it is because of Pentecost that we have the Church, that mystic Body of Christ all baptized people who are seeking to be disciples of Christ are a part of.

Why the ho-hum approach to Pentecost? Is it because there are no commercial decorations associated with it? No radio station I know of, even ones that call themselves Christian, have been playing Pentecost music for the last month. If you stopped the average person on the street, would they even know what Pentecost is, let alone that it is being celebrated in the Western Church tomorrow? Would you even know it was Pentecost if walked into many faith communities tomorrow? Why is this?

My personal sense is that as we got further away from the Reformation and more groups splintered into even more groups, rejecting anything that smacked of “Roman Catholicism,” we lost the New Testament church’s structure of cycles to remember salvation history, especially that involving Christ’s birth, death, Resurrection, Ascension, and sending of the Holy Spirit. It became more about each community being led by a preacher through their sense of what needed to be preached on that week. We lost the connected sense to the larger Body of Christ that spans all time and history, in every culture and nation. That is especially reflected in much of today’s music for corporate worship which uses “I” language instead of “We” language.

Does this really make a difference? I mean, one is not saved if one follows the Church Year cycle. True but a sense of being part of something larger, timeless and cross-cultural is lost. It is the same loss we feel in society today with the break-down not only of extended family inter-connectedness but also with the breakdown of the nuclear family. Now, any group of people can name themselves “family” and society says, “Amen.”

The point of this article is not social commentary on familial configurations. It is a sense that while society is fragmenting into smaller and smaller units, so is the Church. Our faith communities don’t follow the same calendar such that we can talk with friends who are members of other faith communities about the same themes we are each experiencing in our corporate worship services. Some of my most powerful worship experiences have been overseas where I didn’t know the language but I knew the historic form of the liturgy that this group was also using. I could participate in English while they worshiped in their language. The sense of unity was palpable.

I would like to suggest that one of the ways to strengthen the witness of the Church of Jesus Christ in today’s society is to all unite around the Church Year calendar and its accompanying lectionary as well as the use of the historic liturgical form of Gathering, Word, Meal and Sending. That form can be filled in with a variety of music and words. By using these two frameworks, we would be more visibly united as the Body of Christ to the watching world. We would feel part of a larger, transcultural Body of believers around the world. There might even be less “us vs. them” within the Christian confession.

That kind of unity might trigger a fresh outpouring of the wind and fire of God’s Holy Spirit, igniting God’s people into new ways of caring for the poor and the earth. Come, Holy Spirit, come.

 

http://conversationsjournal.com/2013/05/truth-and-stability/

The theme this month on the blog is Eugene Peterson. This link takes you to a piece I wrote about him.

During the month of May, The High Calling blog site, http://www.thehighcalling.org/, will be giving away four copies of “The Life of the Body: Physical Well-Being and Spiritual Formation.” I’m not sure how they will be organizing that but it will be worth following them at least this month to find out!

Also, Lane and I will be at the Renovare retreat at The Cove October 29-November 1, 2013.  Check out the details at https://www.renovare.org/what-we-do/conferences-and-retreats/life-with-god-retreat. We would love to see you there!

http://conversationsjournal.com/2013/04/being-a-witness/

Douglas C. Eltzroth has given me permission to share the lyrics to one of his songs that has become an incarnational stream prayer for me:

May I be Your Witness

May I be a demonstration,

May I be an incarnation

Of what you want to say.

May it be relayed through the style of my life

To everyone I see

When they are watching me.

May I be your witness.

God is not asking me to be someone I am not. God is asking me to be who I was created to be, fully and in Christ. I am to use my gifts and talents as they are packaged uniquely in me to love God and to serve others. I am to be Christ in all the circumstances of my life with the help of the Holy Spirit.

Richard Foster defines the Incarnational Stream/Tradition as “A life that makes present and visible the realm of the invisible Spirit” (“Streams of Living Water” p. 272).  Having just written “The Life of the Body: Physical Well-Being and Spiritual Formation” with Lane M. Arnold (IVPress 2012), I have been spending a lot of time thinking about this stream: what does it mean for me today that Jesus came as a human being in a body? What does it mean to be a member of the larger Body of Christ? Why is it important that we stay connected to Christ and his Body through his body and blood given to us in the Eucharist? In addition to the water used at Baptism and the elements of Holy Communion, how does creation and the other material elements of our lives, including our own flesh, carry the message of God?

Deeper Conversation

Pondering what it means to functionally be the hands, feet, voice and aroma of Christ is a challenge. What does it really mean to “incarnate” Christ, that is, to take Christ with us wherever we go and to whomever we encounter? Among other things, it means our words and actions reflect to others what we really believe about God and God’s work in the world. People react to God-in-us, positively or negatively, through the way we work and play.

I don’t know about you but that thought stops me in my tracks. Am I a lovely fragrance of Christ or a stench of judment and hostility? Do I carry peace, love and joy with me wherever I go or does insensitivity and callousness infuse me? It is certainly an item to take to God in prayer with a spiritual mentor.

I often find myself praying the prayer above as I go about my day. It reminds me to be fully me but to be totally dependent on Christ to redeem and shape my personality into a useful tool in his hands.

 

 

Why do so many Protestants dislike the Church? Many are fiercely attached to their pastors and faith community but when one talks about the Church, that Body of Christ that the Holy Spirit fills and empowers, many Protestants rush to their own corners. When asked who determines if a small group Bible study is going “off the rails” in their interpretation of Scripture, many Protestants don’t know how to answer. It makes them uneasy. The idea that there might be a bigger “group” to answer to smacks too much of Catholicism. Better to be slightly heretical than Roman Catholic! And besides, if God has told a person something, than that revelation stands on near equal footing with the Gospels. I am considered arrogant and judgmental if I suggest that maybe there is an interpretation that the Church has held as “orthodox” for centuries that is at odds with your personal divine revelation.

This is a shame as it leads to lots of people fighting over what a Bible passage really means. It also explains 38,000 Protestant denominations and counting. It also means that functionally, there is little to no true accountability in most people’s lives. If someone is questioning my relationship to God and what God has told me, then I will no longer have fellowship with them. I will find a new group or start my own, if necessary.

The discipline of submission, that mis-understood gift from God that gives us freedom from always having to have our own way, would go a long way here to bring Jesus prayer in John 17 for unity among his followers to fruition. If we realized that, as Protestants, we have our own “popes,” those celebrity pastors whose words we all hang on, we might then begin the process of recognizing that the gift of the Holy Spirit is the Church, of which our individual faith communities may or may not be a part of. The Church of Jesus Christ is that institution against which the gates of hell will not prevail. Our individual faith communities will come and go but the Church will not.

How do we know that we are a part of that Church? First of all, one needs to study Church history and decide what and where that Church is. Then, one can evaluate whether the faith community one is currently a part of stands fully or partly in that stream or is out of it completely. This needs to be done with others, not in isolation. The gifts of the Holy Spirit listed in 1 Corinthians 12 is given to a gathered body of believers and not just individuals.

As Christ-followers, we are pieces of a much larger puzzle that goes throughout all time and history. By ourselves, we have no reference. In the larger framework known as the Church, our small piece fits in perfectly into a grander picture called the Kingdom of God.

 

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