In uncertain times, worship

Yesterday, William Jacobson wrote,

Decades from now, we will look back on this time period as the bad old days. I hope.

Because if these are the good old days, we are in deep trouble.

I don’t disagree with him; as is probably clear from recent posts, I have a deep feeling of foreboding about the current state of our nation and the world. At the same time, though, I am being reminded day by day that that’s only half the picture. When it seems like the world is coming apart, it’s important to remember that’s nothing new—and that as Christians, our hope is not in this world. As Ray Ortlund brilliantly says,

This life we live is not life. This life is a living death. This whole world is ruins brilliantly disguised as elegance. Christ alone is life. Christ has come, bringing his life into the wreckage called us. He has opened up, even in these ruins, the frontier of a new world where grace reigns. He is not on a mission to help us improve our lives here. He is on a mission to create a new universe, where grace reigns in life. He is that massive, that majestic, that decisive, that critical and towering and triumphant.

We don’t “apply this to our lives.” It’s too big for that. But we worship him. And we boast in the hope of living forever with him in his new death-free world of grace.

Yes, we need to care about the troubles of this world, because God is at work in and through them—including in and through us. But as Christians, we don’t begin there. We begin by remembering that we are not first and foremost people of this world, but people of the risen King; and so, properly, we begin with worship. The rest will follow, as God leads and empowers, if we keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, and our focus firmly set on following Christ.

Song of the Week II

I posted Greg Scheer's "A Mark of Grace" earlier because I admire what he accomplished in that song, but it's far from the only new song I learned at the Worship Symposium last week; there were several, of which my favorite is this one, which is still stuck fast in my head from last Thursday morning:

Creation Sings

Creation sings the Father's song;
He calls the sun to wake the dawn
And run the course of day
Till evening falls in crimson rays.
His fingerprints in flakes of snow,
His breath upon this spinning globe,
He charts the eagle's flight;
Commands the newborn baby's cry.

Hallelujah! Let all creation stand and sing,
"Hallelujah!" Fill the earth with songs of worship;
Tell the wonders of creation's King.

Creation gazed upon His face;
The ageless One in time's embrace
Unveiled the Father's plan
Of reconciling God and man.
A second Adam walked the earth,
Whose blameless life would break the curse,
Whose death would set us free
To live with Him eternally.

Chorus

Creation longs for His return,
When Christ shall reign upon the earth;
The bitter wars that rage
Are birth pains of a coming age.
When He renews the land and sky,
All heav'n will sing and earth reply
With one resplendent theme: The glories of our God and King!

Chorus

Words and music: Keith Getty, Kristyn Getty, and Stuart Townend
© 2008 Thankyou Music
Recorded on the album Awaken the Dawn, by Keith and Kristyn Getty

For the blessings of the evening

Every once in a while, I hear a sermon that really shifts me, one through which God speaks to me and works in me in such a way that I know I have been changed. I had that privilege this morning at the Worship Symposium as Laura Truax brought us the word of God; I'm going to listen to this one again once the audio is up, and take some time to reflect on it. For now, I'm just thanking him for a truly blessed day.

Dr. Jeremy Begbie's plenary address was also exceptional (as I expected); he's also giving the plenary address tomorrow, so I'll probably wait to write about that until I've heard both of them and had the chance to consider them together. I think what he had to say may well produce significant change in my sermon this Sunday, though. The three workshops I attended were also all excellent (I probably won't write about all of them, but all three were very helpful); and then I get to spend the evening with my brother-in-law and his family. God has definitely poured out riches on me this day, and for that, I am humbly grateful.

Liturgy as the gospel form of worship

I've been meaning to post on Collin Hansen's interview with Brian Chappell (the president of Covenant Seminary in St. Louis) for several weeks now, ever since Jared posted a chunk of it on his own blog. The interview is in relation to the Rev. Dr. Chappell's latest book, Christ-Centered Worship: Letting the Gospel Shape Our Practice, which I have not yet read but definitely intend on reading, and allows him to make some good points on the subject. For instance, I appreciate his note that there is no such thing as "non-liturgical worship"—every church has a liturgy, only the form of that liturgy varies—and his insistence that what matters is whether the liturgy we use communicates the gospel and directs our attention to Christ.

Liturgy is simply another term for the order of worship. Every church has a liturgy, although it may vary from being quite simple to very ornate. Understanding the gospel-shape of worship allows us to make Christ-centered choices about how the aspects of each church's liturgy—an opening song, a prayer of confession, or a benediction—are furthering the gospel message in our services. There is no "one right way" to acknowledge the goodness and greatness of God. But knowing that the beginning of the service has this goal allows us to make appropriate liturgical choices about the songs sung, the scriptures read, and/or the prayers offered in the opening phases of a worship service. The same will be true for those aspects of worship that involve confession, assurance, thanksgiving, etc.

The key here is that worship is for God, and thus that everything we do in worship needs to serve that purpose. This isn't just a matter of the content of our worship, either, but also of its form; as Dr. Chappell puts it,

Christ-centered worship is not just talking or singing about Jesus a lot. Christ-centered worship reflects the contours of the gospel. In the individual life of a believer, the gospel progresses through recognition of the greatness and goodness of God, the acknowledgment of our sin and need of grace, assurance of God's forgiveness through Christ, thankful acknowledgment of God's blessing, desire for greater knowledge of him through his Word, grateful obedience in response to his grace, and a life devoted to his purposes with assurance of his blessing.

In the corporate life of the church this same gospel pattern is reflected in worship. Opening moments offer recognition of the greatness and goodness of God that naturally folds into confession, assurance of pardon, thanksgiving, instruction, and a charge to serve God in response to his grace in Christ. This is not a novel idea but, in fact, is the way most churches have organized their worship across the centuries. . . .

Just as the sacraments re-present the fundamental aspects of the gospel in symbol, and the sermon does so in words, so also the worship of the church re-presents the gospel in its pattern.

This means that our worship practices need to be based not on pragmatic considerations and personal preferences, but on the gospel. Dr. Chappell puts it well when he says,

If church leaders try to establish a style of worship based upon their preferences or based upon satisfying congregants' competing preferences, then the church will inevitably be torn apart by the politics of preference. But if the leadership is asking the missional questions of "Who is here?" and "Who should be here?" in determining worship styles and practices, then the mission of the church will enable those leaders to unite around gospel goals that are more defensible and uniting than anyone's personal preference. These gospel goals will never undermine the gospel contours of the worship service, but rather will ask how each gospel aspect can be expressed in ways that best minister to those present and those being reached for Christ's glory.

It's a great interview, with a lot of important insights. Go check it out.

The threat of idolatry in worship

The Devil hates it when we worship God. Any time the body of Christ gathers to worship God, to give him glory and hear the gospel preached, he loses; and so he’ll do anything in his power to prevent it. On an individual basis, he’ll try to prevent it by convincing people not to come, but that doesn’t work on everyone; for all the Devil’s best efforts, a lot of people do still show up on Sunday mornings. So what’s he going to do? Yes, he’s doomed to fail, but he’s going to take as many people as he can down with him, and you should never underestimate his cunning. If he can’t keep us from worship, he’s going to try to neutralize our worship by turning our hearts away from our Lord and getting us to worship something other than Christ.

Tim Keller talked about this at the Gospel Coalition conference last month, that we all have our idols and our temptations to idolatry—our spouses; our kids; our reputations; our jobs; our possessions; anything of real value to us, anything that’s truly meaningful to us and that truly matters in our lives, can become so important to us that it takes God’s right and proper place in our lives. The church can become an idol—usually the local congregation, but I know folks for whom I’d say their denomination has become an idol—and so can our nation and our patriotism. For many churches, of course, style of music is an idol; for some, the building becomes an idol. That was a problem in Colorado, for example. (It probably still is.)

These are all good things which we rightly love and value. We ought to love our families, we ought to love our churches, we ought to love our nation and thank God every day for blessing us to live here, and certainly we ought to value the work he has given us to do. We ought to love music, which is a wonderful gift from God, and naturally we will prefer some kinds to others. But every last one of these things must—must—come second in our hearts to God; it’s not that we need to love them less, but that we need to love Jesus Christ more than any of them, and our first and foremost desire should be to serve and honor and glorify him by giving him pleasure, with our love for all those other people and things falling in order behind our love for him.  Our worship needs to be directed to God and God alone, and we cannot afford to let anything else creep in.

(Excerpted, edited, from “To the Glory of God”)

Crown and throne

Crown Him the Lord of love, behold His hands and side,
Those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky can fully bear that sight,
But downward bends his burning eye at mysteries so bright.

Worship isn't about our experience, but that doesn't mean our experience is meaningless; and I will tell you that standing to sing that Tuesday night with 3300 brothers and sisters in Christ, all of us singing at the top of our lungs, gave me chills.  I have a sense of what it means that the Lord is enthroned on the praises of his people, because I could feel it, just a little.

All hail, Redeemer, hail! For Thou has died for me;
Thy praise shall never, never fail throughout eternity.

Pastoral subtext

Of all of the workshops I attended at Calvin’s Worship Symposium this past January, my favorite was the one led by Craig Barnes, working out of material from his book The Pastor as Minor Poet:  Texts and Subtexts in the Pastoral Life.  I was glad, a week or so ago, to see the audio go up on the Symposium website; it's from the Friday session, not the Saturday one which I attended, but that’s fine.  (Warning:  there are some glitches in the audio.)

Craig Barnes, “Moving from Text to Subtext”


• download

The Rev. Dr. Barnes defines “subtext” this way:  “not the reality of what is said but the truth of what is meant”—the truth that lies beneath the surface, if you will.  There’s a lot in his talk, so I’m not going to try to post on all of it at once, because he looks at the movement from text to subtext in a few different (though connected) areas.

He starts off with the subtext of the pastor—the truths that lie beneath the surface of the pastoral life.  He uses the example of  the little Apostle Paul flannelgraph figure from his childhood Sunday school—worn from overuse, purple from Kool-Aid spilled on him, taped together after two kids, fighting over him, tore his head off—as a parable of sorts of how hard God can be on those he uses.

What I particularly appreciate about what he has to say here is that he sees meaning in this—which can be hard to do from the inside.  If the subtext of the call to be a pastor is, “You’re going to look purple and taped-together by your retirement party,” there’s a purpose to that:

That’s how you know how to do better ministry.  How could you possibly provide ministry to the subtext of people’s lives unless you knew about brokenness yourself? . . . God breaks apart his people by putting them into ministry, precisely so that they’ll be better pastors—if they respond well, as the invitation always is, if they respond well to that brokenness.

This is a profound truth about ministry, and one which has profound implications for every part of pastoral work and life (including, as he goes on to discuss, preaching).  One of the things I’ve been thinking about of late is how this fits together with Andrew Purves’ pastoral wisdom about the crucifixion of ministry, John Berntsen’s understanding that ministry must therefore necessarily be cross-shaped, and Steven Seamands’ insight that ministry is equally necessarily trinitarian in form; I have the sense that if you put all these concepts together, at the point where they cross, there’s something important about the nature of ministry and human brokenness, but I’m not quite sure what.

It seems clear that we must be broken if we are to minister—broken before God and before his people—and perhaps even that the awareness that we aren’t qualified to do the work is the first qualification we must have; it is, I think, the complete eversion of the kind of attitude Jared Wilson was talking about last week that sees pastoral ministry as a form of worldly achievement.  I think the key here is that ministry isn’t something we do, but rather a way that we live, and that in particular, it isn’t something we do to other people.

Instead, it seems to me that ministry is primarily a matter of identification—identifying with Christ, and particularly in his crucifixion, and with his people.  It requires the recognition that it is Christ who is qualified, it is Christ who is adequate, it is Christ who is capable; we aren’t any of those things, and it isn’t our job to be any of those things.  Our job is to be conduits of a sort, to be open to whatever God wants to do in us by his Holy Spirit, and to be open to our congregations to understand and identify with the subtext of their lives, the part they don’t want other people to see, so that Christ can exercise his ministry through us by the power of his Spirit.  It’s something we have to do to understand—it only makes sense when lived.

Thought on worship

I've been trying to work this thought into a fully-developed (and fully-coherent) post for several days now, and for one reason and another just haven't managed it; I still want to do more with it, but for now, I think I'll just put this out there as best I can at the moment.  There is the assumption in most churches, I think—even in many that would deny it consciously, I think it's still there, unexpressed, at the level of subconscious expectation—that the pastor's/worship leader's job is to give people what they want in worship.  All our thinking is organized around that, and much of the language we use in describing our worship supports and contributes to that assumption.  

I think the reason for that is that in the attractional paradigm for church growth, the "worship experience" is the core of the "attractional" part.  It seems to me that whatever the message the preacher is selling, be it self-help or social justice or self-realization or what have you, the worship—by which is usually meant the music part of the service—is the bait on the hook.  It's the free weekend in Vegas to get you to come and listen to the pitch for the time-share (if they're still doing that in the current economy; I've had people try to get me to take one of those trips more than once, but never wanted to):  the worship is the fun time, and then the preacher gives you the pitch.  If the music's good enough and you like what he's selling, you come back; but the emotional experience of the worship is definitely the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.

This has taught us in the American church to see worship in this way, as what we get out of church in exchange for whatever we're asked to put in.  Even in liturgical churches, people evaluate it that way—does the liturgy comfort me, do I like doing the same thing every week, do I not like doing the same thing every week, does the form help me do x, does the routine bore me, and so on.  What we miss is that liturgy is a discipline—and it's a discipline because worship is a discipline.  It's not about what the liturgy does for us, because it's not about what worship does for us:  it's about what the liturgy invites us, leads us, calls us, instructs us to do.

It's the discipline of recognizing that we don't come to worship on our own initiative, but only in response to God's call; of recognizing, as we praise God for his glory and holiness, that in comparison to him, we don't look that great, and that no matter how wonderful we may think we are, we are in fact broken messed-up sinners just like everyone else—and need to humbly confess that fact to him, to each other, together.  It's about the discipline of sitting ourselves down in his presence to receive his Word with open ears, open minds, open hearts—not to use it to get what we want, but to accept it and let him tell us what we need.  It's about disciplining our hearts to receive his sacraments in that spirit, and to respond to Word and sacrament by affirming our faith, standing together to pledge our allegiance as a people to the King and Kingdom of Heaven, than which we owe no greater allegiance.  It's about the discipline of intercessory prayer, which is our confession that we aren't strong enough and great enough to make it all work on our own, and of the offering, which is our confession that we owe God everything, not least gratitude for all that he's given us.  Even receiving the charge and benediction is a discipline:  it's the acceptance of the fact that we are not our own and our lives are not our own, and that what we do and hear and say on Sunday mornings ought to form the lines of everything we do and say and think across the other six and a half days.

As we look at the form and content of our worship services, "Is this what I want?" really ought to be the last question on our minds; what we need to ask is, "What is this asking me to do?  How is this forming me as a disciple of Christ?"  To mangle a line, ask not what your worship service can do for you; ask what you can do for God through your worship service.

Audio from the Symposium

I decided to wait to post my last reflections on the Worship Symposium, and especially on Craig Barnes' workshop, until I could post the audio along with it; the audio still isn't available for everything yet, but I hope it will be soon.  In the meantime, the audio is up for, among other things, the workshop I attended with Dr. Simon Chan, which was truly a remarkable session on the work of the Holy Spirit in the worship of the church; I've added it to the original post, and it's below as well.

Simon Chan, “A Theological Understanding of the Liturgy as the Work of the Spirit”


• download

A thought on worship and atheism

I haven’t put up any posts on atheism in a while, so it’s been some time since I’ve gotten into a wrangle with an atheist (for some reason, though, that always does seem to happen when I post on atheism; there always seems to be an atheist blogger or two who finds it and drops in to complain); there have been a couple things I’ve intended to post on, but neither was available online when I went looking for them. The last go-round that way was on my post on “The atheism of presumption and the case for God,” which was last July; that one was primarily with a chap going by the handle FVThinker (who also seems to be, inter alia, someone else who’s bought the phony media narrative about Sarah Palin). I noticed recently, in going back to that thread for something else, that he’d made a comment which I failed to register at the time, and that I had made reference to a follow-up post which, in the business of last summer, I never finished; I need to put up a post soon to address those lapses on my part.

This, however, is not that post. Rather, I want to comment on another approach he took, one which I didn’t address at all in that comment thread: specifically, in that conversation, FVThinker tried to frame his argument against Christianity by comparing God to the ancient Greek and Norse gods. That comparison doesn’t really hold water (as I tried to point out to another interlocutor in an earlier comment thread), because Christianity operates in a fundamentally different way, on a profoundly different basis, than the old pagan religions.

In the ancient world, people believed in religion about the way they believed in magic: you do the ritual the god requires, and you get the results you want. Worship was essentially a form of manipulation; its purpose, as the Old Testament scholar John Oswalt puts it, was “to appease the gods and satisfy any claims they may have on us so that we may use the power of the gods to achieve our own goals.” That’s not the worship God wants. The rituals he had commanded were essentially symbolic; what mattered was the spirit in which they were performed. What he wanted was for his people to give him their lives and hearts so that he could have a true friendship with them.

The problem is, they were taking their cues from the nations around them, and they thought all they needed to do was to do the ritual correctly, and they were fine—and that didn’t working, because it wasn’t the point at all, and so they complained that God was wearing them out with all his pointless demands. To that, God says, “No, I’m not burdening you, you’re burdening me, because you aren’t really doing this for me at all! You’re doing this for yourself. All you’re giving me is your sins and offenses—and I’m sick to death of them.”

And Israel didn’t get it, because they’d bought into the idea that worship is just a way to manipulate God—you do the thing, you pull the lever, and you get the treat. They’d bought the idea that our worship is all about us, and what we want, and what we can get out of it. They didn’t understand that worship begins with submission—with laying aside our pride, and our independence, and our own desires, and our own ideas of what we need and what we deserve. They didn’t get it—and they’re not alone; too often, we don’t either. This is a universal human problem, because it’s a universal human tendency; it’s just another reflection of the desire to be in control of our own lives that drove our first ancestors into sin to begin with. This is the primal human error, that declares in the smuggest tones Frank Sinatra could possibly manage, “I did it my way.”

This is the reason, I think, that so many atheists really don’t understand Christianity; there are exceptions, of course, but most of the atheists I know or have had dialogues with have an essentially pagan understanding of religion, and don’t get that Christianity doesn’t fit that (or isn’t supposed to, anyway). I don’t blame them for that, since all too often, the church in this country doesn’t give them any reason to think otherwise—and having people like Joel Osteen out there on the airwaves certainly doesn’t help. This is fundamentally not a problem with atheism, or with the arguments for atheism, but with Christianity and Christians: we can’t expect atheists to be open to believing in God if we only show them a version of God that isn’t worth believing in.

(Partly excerpted from “No Other Redeemer”)

Coming home empty

And [Jesus] said, “There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living. And when he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything.

“But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.”’ And he arose and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’
And they began to celebrate.

“Now his older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.’ But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, ‘Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!’ And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive;
he was lost, and is found.’”

—Luke 15:11-32 (ESV)

Mary Hulst, “Coming Home Empty”


• download

Another of the high points of this year's Worship Symposium for me was Mary Hulst's sermon on this passage.  I actually would have liked her to go further in talking about the grace of the Father and the gracelessness of the older son, but even so, her message was a powerful evocation of God's grace and love, coming straight out of the fact that, as a pastor preaching to a congregation of pastors and other church leaders (which is to say, people who play the "older son" role for a living), she knew us cold.  I encourage you to listen—especially, but not only, if you're another one who does the church thing professionally.

The blindness of self-worship

Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.” Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have
no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.

—John 9:39-41 (ESV)

There are a lot of folks who have trouble with these verses.  For some, it’s a matter of not understanding Jesus’ rabbinic way of talking; I actually had an elder use this as an example of her contention that “there are lots of contradictions in the Bible.”  Others, more seriously, wonder why Jesus says here, “For judgment I came into the world,” when he told Nicodemus in John 3, “The Son of Man did not come into the world to condemn the world, but to seek and save those who are lost.”  The answer is that this isn’t a statement of what Jesus wanted to happen, but simply what he knew would happen; there are those who, in the face of God’s offer of salvation, do not want it.  They would prefer to hold fast to their idols, to gods of their own invention, which they can control.  They refuse to believe they need Jesus—they think they can see just fine without him, thanks—and in their refusal, their true blindness is revealed and confirmed.  It isn’t that Jesus judges them, but that in response to his coming, they judge themselves.

Now, Jesus is drawing this language from Isaiah, who repeatedly associates blindness and deafness with the worship of idols instead of the one true God—idols being blind and deaf lumps of inert material, those who worship them become as blind and deaf as the false gods before whom they bow; and the interesting thing about this when it comes to the Pharisees is that they weren’t blind in the same way as the people Isaiah was talking about—or at least, they would have said they weren’t.  They knew the prophet’s complaint about the people of his time; they knew the dangers of idolatry, of worshiping the gods of the nations, and they were devoutly opposed to that. Their whole effort, their whole reason for existence, was focused on worshiping God faithfully and keeping his law as well as they possibly could.  They no doubt saw themselves as the exact opposite of the blind and deaf Israel against which the prophet spoke.  And yet Jesus makes the same charge against them:  they are willfully blind.

The biggest reason for this is that they were no longer truly worshiping God, for they had made an idol of their own religion; their focus had shifted from worshiping God and giving him glory to worshiping their own purity and glorifying themselves.  They were worshiping their own worship, and their true god was their idea of their own wonderfulness.  While they would no doubt have balked at 7 Simple Steps to Your Best Life Now, the spirit of their religion was really very similar to that sort of American self-help/therapeutic religion, just as it's very similar to the idolatry of style, taste and preference practiced in so many of our congregations that underlies American Christianity’s “worship wars.”  Our worship is supposed to be our gift to God and the window through which we look at him; they had stopped looking through the window and started looking at it, shifting their focus from the Giver to the gift.  Too often, if we’re honest, I think we’d have to admit that we do the same.

The careless grace of God

Again he began to teach beside the sea. And a very large crowd gathered about him, so that he got into a boat and sat in it on the sea, and the whole crowd was beside the sea on the land. And he was teaching them many things in parables, and in his teaching he said to them: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold
and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

And when he was alone, those around him with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God,
but for those outside everything is in parables, so that

they may indeed see but not perceive,
and may indeed hear but not understand,
lest they should turn and be forgiven.

And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. But those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.”

—Mark 4:1-20 (ESV)

Craig Barnes, “Careless Grace”


• download

Craig Barnes is one of my favorite preachers, and I was glad to see that he would be preaching and teaching at this year's Worship Symposium; I’ve already referenced the workshop of his which I attended, and I’ll be commenting on that at greater length soon (I’d meant to do so already), because he had some very important things to say.  I didn’t attend his seminar, but I was there for the opening service on Thursday morning, structured around the Parable of the Sower, at which he preached.  This is a great and deep parable, but it seems to attract bad sermons; thankfully (if unsurprisingly), the Rev. Dr. Barnes’ message wasn’t one of them.  Indeed, it’s a marvelous meditation on God’s extravagant grace, and on our proper response:  listen, wait, and see.  It's well worth your time.

Yet at present

We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. For if the message spoken by angels was binding, and every violation and disobedience received its just punishment, how shall we escape if we ignore such a great salvation? This salvation, which was first announced by the Lord, was confirmed to us by those who heard him. God also testified to it by signs, wonders and various miracles,
and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will.

It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. But there is a place where someone has testified:
"What is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
you crowned him with glory and honor
and put everything under his feet."

In putting everything under him, God left nothing that is not subject to him. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to him. But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family.
So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers. He says,
"I will declare your name to my brothers;
in the presence of the congregation I will sing your praises."

—Hebrews 2:1-12 (NIV)

In checking to see if Calvin had started posting audio and video from this year's Symposium yet (they haven't), I was reminded that there were a few from last year's that I'd really wanted to post, and that I had forgotten to do so.  Of those, the one I most wanted to post was Scott Hoezee's sermon from the opening worship service, on which I commented briefly last January; a brief comment just doesn't do the sermon justice.  It's been rattling around in my mind ever since, and when I listened to it again this evening, I knew I still wanted to post it.  I can't embed it, but the link to the audio is above; it's a powerful statement of hope in Jesus Christ in the midst of the brokenness of our world.  I encourage you to listen.

The work of the people is the work of the Holy Spirit

Simon Chan, “A Theological Understanding of the Liturgy as the Work of the Spirit”


• download

The most interesting part of my second day at the Worship Symposium at Calvin was Simon Chan's workshop on the liturgy as the work of the Holy Spirit.  Dr. Chan is a Pentecostal who teaches at Trinity Theological College, an ecumenical Christian seminary in Singapore; from the title and the interview he gave Christianity Today last year, I knew him to be rather more liturgically-minded than most Pentecostals, but I didn't expect him to ground his argument in the work of Eastern Orthodox theologians like John Zizioulas and Nikos Nissiotis—which is exactly what he did.  It was a fascinating argument and discussion about the way in which the Holy Spirit works on and in the church, and effectively takes on the shape of the church—the church, we might say, becomes the body of Christ by embodying the Holy Spirit.

I'll be a while processing what Dr. Chan had to say, I suspect; but I greatly appreciate his emphasis on the fact that the Spirit of God is always present with and at work in the church, and that it's the Spirit's ongoing work that constitutes the church.  That really drives home the point that we are entirely dependent on grace.

Thought on worship and idolatry

Human beings have an instinctive tendency to idolatry.  That might seem a strange thing to say in the West, where we don’t have big statues standing around for people to bow down to, but it’s true.  For one thing, we were made to worship, and have a bent that way; if we don’t consciously worship God (or some other god), we will usually find ourselves coming unconsciously to worship something else.

This might sound like a strange thing to say, but take a look around. Take a look, not at people’s formal religious affiliations, but at where they put their money, their time, and their trust, and what do you see? You see entertainment; you see possessions; you see, perhaps, investments; with some people, you see their ambitions, whether social, political, or economic; you see relationships, certainly; and you see a lot of people who put most if not all of their money, time, and trust, quite frankly, in themselves. Now, some of these are purely good things—for example, if I didn’t spend money and time on my wife and kids, I’d get a lot of questions, not least from them—and none of them are evil; but the pattern is another matter. As Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there is your heart,” and it’s even truer that where your trust is, there is your heart; we might say, going further, that where your trust and treasure are together, there is your true worship, and the true focus of your attention.

Worship isn’t just about going and participating in a formal service somewhere, although that’s what we associate with the word; worship is about giving honor, and according someone (or something) a place of particular importance in our lives.  The word “worship,” in its older English form, was “worthship”; it meant to ascribe worth to something, to see that thing as having worth, as being important, and to treat it accordingly. Now, the word “worship” has come to have a more specific meaning, a formally religious one, but that old meaning is still at the core of it—it means to treat something or someone as of greatest worth, and to behave accordingly.

This is perfectly natural; indeed, we might say it’s necessary, or even inevitable.  The problem is, in our pride, we resist according that place to God, because doing so means giving up control—or, at least, the illusion of control—and so we have the tendency to turn instead to things, or to the self, to find security and peace and meaning in life instead of turning to God.  That way, by giving pride of place to nothing greater than the self, we remain free from being told what to do (as long as circumstances permit, anyway).  The problem is, in so doing, we put our trust and our hope in things which simply cannot bear the weight, and so—sooner or later—they fail us.

(Partially excerpted from “Can You Do This?”)

A little more music for Christmas

This is a medley of "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" and "We Three Kings of Orient Are" done in a folk-rock style by the Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan.  Great track, imho.  The video is just the words (with, annoyingly, a few errors).

HT:  Ed Morrissey

Carol for Christmas Eve

This is probably my favorite Christmas carol (not counting "Joy to the World," since as I noted earlier, it's not really a Christmas song).  There's no hope of undoing George Whitfield's edits to Charles Wesley's text, since they're embedded even in the common title—but we would still do well to include the verses he cut.

Hark! the Herald Angels Sing

Hark! the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King,
Peace on earth and mercy mild,
God and sinners reconciled!
Joyful all ye nations rise,
Join the triumph of the skies;
With th' angelic host proclaim,
"Christ is born in Bethlehem!"

Hark! the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King.

Christ, by highest heaven adored,
Christ, the everlasting Lord,
Late in time behold him come,
Offspring of the virgin's womb!
Veiled in flesh the Godhead see:
Hail th' incarnate Deity,
Pleased as man with men to dwell,
Jesus, our Immanuel!

Hark! the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King.

Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
Risen with healing in his wings.
Mild, he lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die,
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.

Hark! the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King.

Come, desire of nations, come,
Fix in us thy humble home;
Rise, the woman's conquering seed,
Bruise in us the serpent's head.
Now display thy saving power,
Ruin'd nature now restore;
Now in mystic union join
Thine to ours, and ours to thine.

Hark! the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King.

Adam's likeness, Lord, efface,
Stamp thy image in its place.
Second Adam from above,
Reinstate us in thy love.
Let us thee, though lost, regain,
Thee, the life, the inner man:
O, to all thyself impart,
Form'd in each believing heart.

Hark! the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn King.

Words:  Charles Wesley, alt. George Whitfield, Martin Madan,
and William Hayman Cummings
Music:  Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,
adapted and arranged by William Hayman Cummings
MENDELSSOHN, 7.7.7.7.7.7.7.7.7.7.

Carol of the Week

This great hymn by Isaac Watts is commonly miscast as a Christmas hymn, when Watts didn't write it for Christmas and it really has nothing particularly to do with the birth of Christ; it's actually a better fit for this season of Advent, since what it's really about is Christ's Second Coming.

Joy to the World

Joy to the world! the Lord is come;
Let earth receive her King.
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing.

Joy to the world! the Savior reigns;
Let men their songs employ,
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains,
Repeat the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make his blessings flow
Far as the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of his righteousness,
And wonders of his love.

Words:  Isaac Watts
Music:  Lowell Mason, from a theme by George Frederick Handel
ANTIOCH, 8.6.8.6.6.6.

Taking time for Advent

Tomorrow is the first day of the Christian year, the first Sunday of Advent. For those not familiar with it, Advent is the season of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Christ; it's a very different thing from what the world calls "the Christmas season," though the two run together. As Joseph Bottum put it in First Things,

Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away All Saints, and New Year’s has drunk up Epiphany.

Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.

More Christmas trees. More Christmas lights. More tinsel, more tassels, more glitter, more glee—until the glut of candies and carols, ornaments and trimmings, has left almost nothing for Christmas Day. For much of America, Christmas itself arrives nearly as an afterthought: not the fulfillment, but only the end, of the long Yule season that has burned without stop since the stores began their Christmas sales. . . .

Even for me, the endless roar of untethered Christmas anticipation is close to drowning out the disciplined anticipation of Advent. And when Christmas itself arrives, it has begun to seem a day not all that different from any other. Oh, yes, church and home to a big dinner. Presents for the children. A set of decorations. But nothing special, really.

It is this that Advent, rightly kept, would prevent—the thing, in fact, it is designed to halt.

It's an excellent meditation on the meaning and purpose of the discipline of Advent, and why we need it; I encourage you to read the whole thing.