Spurgeon

This moved me deeply this morning. It seemed especially appropriate as I wrestle with the idea of sacrament and what it means for God to use the tangible to convey His healing presence.

Have your heart right with Christ,

and He will visit you often,

And so turn

weekdays into Sundays,

meals into sacraments,

homes in to temples

and earth into heaven.

~Charles Spurgeon

Hilarious...

On the 8th day, God created photoshop...

via

Paths

How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading someone else's life? - Thomas Merton

So...what is worship?

     As a worship leader for the past 12 years, I’ve had numerous opportunities to talk with people about the broad and sometimes ambiguous subject of worship. Within those conversations, I’ve frequently encountered a common misconception about corporate worship within the Christian church: that worship somehow only involves the action of singing songs. If this were true, there would be many that would be left as outsiders, unable to fully participate because of tonal deficiencies or lack of musical skill. Singing comes as a challenge to many, so it’s easy to see how this perception of the nature of worship would make the entire issue rather frustrating. The dance of worship is, in fact, much richer and broader in scope than solely musical expression. It involves the totality of our being and requires action on our part but not just with our mouths or vocal chords.
     Worship is unique in that its direction is three-fold. It involves examining and revisiting the past with a spirit of gratitude for all God has done for us. It requires an awareness of God’s activity and his grace and mercy toward us in the present, and it compels us to expectantly fix our attention on the future hope we have in his promise to restore and recreate all things.
      As ministers and leaders it is our intent to highlight the worshiping nature of every action and element that comprises our corporate gatherings so that God receives glory in all that we do and our attention and affections are continually directed toward him. We recognize the presence of Christ among us as we greet each other in the name of the Lord. We identify the work of the Spirit when we give public testimony about His grace, provision, and mercy. We commemorate his death and its ushering in of a New Covenant when we take Communion. We praise Him for His glorious and mysterious redemptive work through history as we read and preach the Holy Scriptures. We celebrate the new life He has given and the community of believers that we’re born into when we witness a baptism. All these actions and hundreds more make up the worship of God by His Church. Our “liturgy”, this dance of worship, is something that cannot be contained or condensed into merely the songs that we sing before the sermon. Our lives, our hearts, our bodies, and our spirits are all living, pulsating components of the worship of our God.

Good Friday Prayer

We veil our faces before your glory,
O Holy and Immortal one,
and bow before the cross of your wounded Christ.
with angels and archangels,
we praise you, our Mercy,
and we bless you, our Compassion,
for in our brokenness
you have not abandoned us.
Hear us as we pray through Jesus, our high priest:
heal all division,
reconcile the estranged,
console the suffering,
and raise up to new life
all that is bound by death. Amen.

Recounting: Part 1

“When was the moment that you first fell in love with me?” She asks, waiting patiently for my response.

The question comes repeatedly, sometimes on dates and dinners, but most often on anniversaries. I know this may sound insensitive, but for a while I couldn’t understand why my wife had such a terrible memory. “Haven’t I told her this story a hundred times?” I would think to myself.

I soon realized that it was not gaps in her memory that I needed to fill in for her. She wasn’t asking because she didn’t already know. She wasn’t having memory lapses about this particular area of our journey or some type of chronic amnesia that seemed to only crop up on special days. She wanted to hear the story of our love’s genesis again. My wife wanted us, in the present moment, to bring the past forward to re-present this eternally significant moment of our story.

When we recount our story, we relive the feelings that surfaced in those cherished moments. Essentially, we bring a portion of the past to the present, and it subsequently causes us to look forward to the future of our love. Our story needs to be continually told.

The beauty of the Eucharist, or Communion, is that it does just this. This act stands as one of the most significant actions of Christian worship. It’s an action that not only crosses geographical limitations to unite us with believers across the globe, but suspends the limits of time to connect us to Christians from every generation who have partaken in this simple, glorious act.

The centrality of the Eucharist in Christian worship has been lost in much of Western Christianity. Many contemporary churches see it as more of a nuisance that clumsily hacks into their struggle for “relevance.” (When you’re entire service is geared towards those outside of the community of faith, it becomes an awkward addition to any church gathering.) But since they consider it an “ordinance,” they appease their spiritual consciences by taking part in it quarterly or yearly. Much of the significance placed on it by the early church and the majority has been abandoned, and the vast weight of the rest of historical Christianity has been lost.

When we partake of the bread and the wine, it is effectively a recounting of the story of the gospel. At its most basic level, it is a joyous retelling of the story of God’s salvation of humanity. It is an action that is inextricably linked to the ancient past in its echoes of the Jewish Passover, but even this connection does little to fully explain the heavy depth of the union of spirit and flesh that the meal declares.

Unintentional Hiatus

Most sabbatical's are planned or announced beforehand. Not so here.
Hope to get back into the swing of things soon.