Keep Singing!
I know I’ve been MIA, here’s the latest and some of what is brewing in me…
We’re preparing our house and family life for our second kid, due September 28. I’m cultivating the early years of Neighbors Abbey’s work in SW Atlanta and the emerging church planting that is a part of it. Joshua Case and I have been teaming up on some Church as Art emerging worship coaching projects for this fall. I’m still working with the Village Counsel of Emergent Village as we live into our being a Village green. And I’m in the middle of curating worship for Clayfire, writing a chapter for an upcoming festschrift by Ryan Bolger about hyphenated emerging projects, curating music for City Church Eastside, and writing my first full length book for Paraclete Press about the intersection the Aesthetics and God’s Mission. This book (provisionally titled, “Getting Drawn In”) is about the creative nature of God’s mission, and our own awakening to God’s calling as we step into creative and intentional lives. In researching all this I came across an old book of poems called The Singer by Calvin Miller referred or given to me by my friend Ty Saltsgiver in the 90s. In it I found this chapter XII entitled”In hell there is no music—an agonizing night that never ends as songless as a shattered violin”:
“Sing the Hillside Song” they cried.
There were so many of them. He
wasn’t even sure he could be
heard above the din of all their
voices. He walked among them
and looked them over. In his
mind he knew that the Father’s Spirit
wanted each of them to learn
his song.
Someone in the sprawling crowd
stood and handed him a lyre.
“Sing for us please Singer—the
Hillside Song!”
“Yes, yes,” they called, “the Hillside Song”
He looked down at the lyre and
held it close. He turned each
thumb-set till the string knew
how to sound, then he began:
“Blessed are the musical,” he
said, “for their’s shall be
never-ending song.”
“Blessed are those who know the
difference between their loving
and their lusting, for they shall
be pure in heart and understand
the reason.”
“Blessed are those who die for
reasons that are real, for they
themselves are real.”
“Blessed are all those who yet
can sing when all the theater
is empty annd the orchestra is gone.”
“Blessed is the man who stands
before the cruelest king and
only fears his God.”
“Blessed is the mighty king who
sits behind the weakest man and
thinks of all their similarities.”
“Earthmaker is love. He has send
his only Troubadour to close
the Canyon of the Damned.”
Then they broke his song and cried
one with one voice, “Tell us
Singer, have you any hope for us?
can we be saved?”
“You may if you will sing Earth-
makers’s Song!”
“Is there another way to cheat
the Canyon of the Damned?”
“None but the Song!”
The beauty of Miller’s language here, to me, is that there is a song that wants to be played. There is a way out of loneliness and despair, that comes with willfully listening to the song within… And that you can’t short cut that listening pathway with some kind of formula or group membership. We have to keep listening, and singing.
Have a GOOD friday
My friend Josh Case asked me to post again. I just noticed that he was the reason for my last post (I need to post more often, huh). I want you to reflect with me on how Good Friday typically functions to form our faith, and to try a short exercise that might re-form that function:
Good Friday can start to feel like a civil war reenactment once death has lost its sting. So what, then, do a resurrection people have left to discover on Good Friday? How does the holy-day serve liturgically to “shape” us as followers in the Jesus Way? To answer that I want to start by throwing out ways that Good Friday might misshape us, and some guesses as to why.
So, if you grew up in a popular American Christian experience like mine, Good Friday was a time to recall the miracle of the Romans Road, when the cross was laid over the pit of hell (complete with hazard cones warning drivers to beware of impending doom) delivering to safety those individuals who would accept the torture of Christ in a representative capacity for their own cosmic debt.
And if you’ve been on a similar journey as mine since, you’ve perhaps grown a bit cynical about that thoroughfare constructed 19 centuries after the fact out of 5 sentences of a 20 page letter to the Romans as well as its complimentary campaign reducing Jesus’ Good-Friday event to a rescue mission to hack into the Matrix and change God’s rules- a mission that God would have sent Jesus to do for me if, even if I were one and only human on the earth (and yes, I’m proud to say that the “I” here is me, the guy writing this post, and not necessarily you- at least that’s how I remember the shtick going).
And if you were living and breathing 7 years ago you had to have heard of or seen Gibson’s Passion of Christ. If it did its job, you might have gotten even more eeby-geeby about the gore and agony that Holy Week culminating in Good Friday represents. And perhaps you shake your head, like me, at those friends who watch it year after year hoping to shame the sin away by “identifying with the pain” of our savior, or hoping to leverage the cinematic shock-and-awe to drill a deeper well toward even deeper gratitude than the year before. But death-movies like Gibson’s have lost their sting to me.
So instead of blogging through biblical, theological or historical evidence that could either make you feel more self-confident, or could lead you to throw up your hands dismissing my argument as unfounded, I want to ask you to do a little exercise. It is a directed meditation that will require 10 minutes of your dedicated attention. Whether you’re reading this on your Driod or iPhone or laptop, or even if your secretary prints out RSS feeds from Josh’s blog and lays it on your desk next to your morning coffee, I need you to stop for a sec and get a blank sheet of paper.
SPOILER- don’t read ahead, trust your cells to the process and give yourself 10 minutes (9½ now) to go through this exercise. This means you too, my old friend who is scanning this because you’ve just got a minute. Go ahead and get the paper… I’ll wait:
- Okay, now take your piece of paper and fold it in half twice to make four equal quadrants. No need to draw any lines, the two creases should suffice.
- Turn it horizontally and write in the bottom right quadrant the names of people and organizations that fit the following categories:
- People you are against
- People who have hurt members of your family and those you love
- People who hurt you when you were young
- Groups that insult you or your friends or your religious practice
- Countries that mean harm to yours
- Political parties that sabotage what you see as right and just
- Pundits and media moguls who profit from demonizing you and people you value
- Companies, technologies, superstars, industries, ideologies, and leaders with power who misuse their power to devour others.
- That neighbor that you just can’t stand
- Now on the bottom left write the names of people and groups that you self identify with:
- Your family members
- Those who enjoy living, shopping, eating, and working in the same places as you
- Those who you help to get elected
- Non profits and special interest groups you donate time or money to
- Those who you’d take into your house when they need help.
- Those who have given you favors, breaks, and gifted you with opportunities to progress in life.
- Those who subscribe to and/or share your religious group’s gathering habits, styles, ideas, and language.
- Now draw a horizontal line along the horizontal crease above the two groups.
The gospels give us a window into three years spent by Jesus re-imagining a place over that horizon in which the divisions below the horizon no longer exist. He saw a kingdom where those who were cursed would be blessed. He saw a world where the oppressed would carry the oppressor’s pack an extra mile. A future where it would be possible to love your enemies, or even that forgiving others’ their trespasses would be a part of ushering in such a forgiving future. He saw a faith that would reunite the religious and irreligious. Jesus’ mission to “proclaim freedom to the prisoner, and good news to the poor” would affect the prison guards and the wealthy as well.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Jesus did not say every behavior, group, or ethical decision was “relative” or that grace abounded such that injustice or self-sabotage would be free from consequences. Jesus said he’d bring a sword between parent and child. He knew that his cruciform presence, his servant leadership would exacerbate divisions. That either side would have to fall like a seed into the ground and die to be born anew with eyes for that other horizon.
He challenged those entrusted with power to measure out consequences for injustice and self-sabotage. And this challenge would wear out those authorities (imperial and religious, as well as the public power of social media who would cry “crucify him”) until they resorted to the last resort–violent death.
5. Now, draw a cross below the horizon, between the two sides somewhere along the vertical crease (of course I have ideas for what you could draw above the horizon, but this is a Good Friday blog not an Easter Sunday one).
Here’s my beef with the Romans Road, it trains our imagination to think of ourselves first. And when that is our primary metaphor it can pervert the power of Good Friday into a therapeutic form of asceticism. Instead of imaging this Good Friday, that it’s all about a back room deal to get you and those in your group on the bridge over troubled waters, image that the divisions of your everyday life are made physical, demonstrated in the crudest most humiliating of forms. The cross and the torture devises of empire belong below the horizon line of the promised future. What changes the crucifixion’s cruel macabre character is Jesus’ vision for what lay beyond it’s horizon. Empire and death are made a laughing stock on the resurrection side of that horizon. Join Christ on the road to Calvary by laying down your arms, your defenses, your revenge, your bounded sets, by daring what C.S. Lewis liked to call the “deeper magic” to happen.
No doubt, death is real. We feel it to our bones and it is serious stuff. But Good Friday’s glory does not come from death’s gravity. Good Friday is Good because it is the masterful cosmic foreshadowing of the prevailing community of forgiveness. The vision of the Crucified one, on Friday of Holy week, is good news to everything on this side of the horizon, it is proof that God would not want any single one to be left out of the story. ‘Even if you or I would dream it otherwise.
Do you recall that curtain ripping in the Holy of Holies at the strike of 3pm? Paul would later write that the dividing wall between people is also removed (Eph 2.13-16). So, what shall separate us from the fellowship forming love of God in Christ Jesus? Nothing! There is no longer Covenanters or pagans, no longer male and female, no longer enslaved or free citizen… all things are made new. Even that old foe, death, no longer has its stinging capacity to separate us. The empty cross proves that corporeal threat is impotent in the face of God’s love, and the empty tomb proves that sacrificial death is empty too. Jesus was betting on that! Good Friday is the inhaling of the deeper magic. On Good Friday, we are invited to join Christ in letting-go of the demand we hold on others and in letting-come the power to forgive, heal, reconcile and belong within a New Creation.
Have a Good Friday!
Hermeneutics
My friend Josh Case asked me to write what I think about “Hermeneutics” for this age
My operating hermeneutic is to encounter texts through communal practices that break our guessing machines and place us in postures of listening.”- me
Here are the four cats who’ve blown up this idea for me:
- Daniel Pink suggests that we are in a conceptual age where pattern recognition, play, story, and empathy are the new sought after leadership skills. He admonished us to cultivate “high touch” “high concept” aptitudes. I think that churches can be overflowing with these skills if they trade out old “stand and deliver” practices for real life rehearsals, practices, drills, postures, that ask us to interpret with these emerging skills.
- Walter Bruggemann writes in Text Under negotiation:
“Our task is not to construct a full alternative world, but rather to fund-to provide the pieces, materials, and resources out of which a new world (from origin to completion) can be imagined. The place of liturgy and proclamation is “a place where people come to receive new materials, or old materials freshly voiced, which will fund, feed, nurture, nourish, legitimate, and authorize a counter imagination of the world.”
3. And Jonny Baker writes:
“The goal of ritualilization is the creation of a ritualized agent, an actor with a form of ritual mastery, who embodies flexible sets of cultural schemes and can deploy them effectively in multiple situations so as to restructure those situations in practical ways”
These three thoughts make me want, not to write better sermons, but rather, to create ritualizing situations that feed fund and nourish a person’s participation in the new creation… Such a church places textual authority ahead of herself, in the “yet to be determined” space of a promised future. Churches that design themselves for something shorter-sited than that have become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy– clanging cymbals, lost symbols, siloed on hills or under bushels.
Leslie Newbigin wrote,
“The congregation is the hermeneutic of the gospel.”
I think he nailed it. And since first reading that I’ve found this to be true in encouraging and discouraging ways:
- A congregation’s method (its polis) is the “news” it spreads: Have you ever tried to explain Google or Wordpress without referencing internet or open sourcing… These companies organize differently because the world in which they live acts differently. When we believe that gospel is physical and relational, in a “conceptual age,” in its affect and its MO, then we too start to organize differently. Recently a good friend came to a worship gathering of Neighbors Abbey and she was not allowed to be a spectator, not allowed to “church shop.” She was placed in a position of reflecting through prayer and discussion. This moved her in an incredible way. Moved her past what she expected for a church visit. This was the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ penetrating her defenses for the first time in years. A speech, no matter how well prepared, would have never made it past her guard.
- A congregation’s way of being with its neighbors determines the most about its being “good or bad news” to its neighboring host culture. An innercity church in determined that building a large elder-care complex would be best for their ministry to the poor and best for their community. They did not, however, listen for the community’s desires. They came into community meetings demanding to be heard, and demanding quick action. This posture hurt their ability to show/share/be gospel with their neighbors. It’s unfortunate, but they were the hermeneutic of the gospel- few, if any, voiced arguments against “what” this church proclaimed, or how this community views scripture or revelation. Their actions speak loudest at alienating themselves from the good news that is breaking into their neighborhood.
- A congregation that engages its local issues makes room, again, in people’s imaginations for the possibility of a God that has something good in store for the world. Recently at a party a person pointed to a local church leader and said, “he’ll makes you believe there is a God.” Now this leader is not an apologist. As best we could tell, he’s never tried to convince her or others “about” anything. Instead this Jesus follower lives real life with the others in the community. This person is not a “seeker” for the church leader to attract. This person is already receptive and listening for the revelation of God, ears ready for goodnews. It just takes people being that good news around her. The Post-Denominational Willow-Burberry hermeneutic is not a faith statement or a preaching style, it is the the courage to practice in real time, out there.
For a few centuries, at least, hermeneutics questions have allowed people to stand on their shoulders and argue “about” revelation. I say, lets spend a few centuries joining creation as humble incarnation people, open and listening together for God’s revelation.
