by Michiana Covenant | May 19, 2013 | Pastoral Notes, Worship
Carl Trueman opens a recent article on worship with the following line:
“The problem with much Christian worship in the contemporary world, Catholic and Protestant alike, is not that it is too entertaining but that it is not entertaining enough. ”
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/05/tragic-worship
What is missing? Tragedy. “Tragedy as a form of art and of entertainment highlighted death, and death is central to true Christian worship. The most basic liturgical elements of the faith, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, speak of death, of burial, of a covenant made in blood, of a body broken. Even the cry “Jesus is Lord!” assumes an understanding of lordship very different than Caesar’s. Christ’s lordship is established by his sacrifice upon the cross, Caesar’s by power.”
I’ll let you read the article for yourselves — but I will add here his conclusion:
“Bonhoeffer once asked, “Why did it come about that the cinema really is often more interesting, more exciting, more human and gripping than the church?” Why, indeed. Maybe the situation is even worse than I have described; perhaps the churches are even more trivial than the entertainment industry. After all, in popular entertainment one does occasionally find the tragic clearly articulated, as in the movies of a Coppola or a Scorsese.”
by Michiana Covenant | Feb 10, 2013 | Pastor Peter Wallace, Pastoral Notes, Pastoral Practice, Psalmody, Worship
What shapes us? What forms us? What is it that makes us “who we are”? Are we shaped mostly by ideas (our intellectual beliefs) or by our practices and customs?
I grew up Baptist — but I became Reformed because I was convinced by the *ideas.* Did that make me Reformed? Sort of. I was a Reformed Christian *intellectually* — but as my friends noticed at the time, I was still fundamentally a Baptist in my ways of living, as one friend told me as I was grumbling about the problems of individualism in American church culture: “Peter, you’re the biggest individualist I know!”
Looking back, if I had continued to be an *ideas* person, who knows where I’d be today. What was it that formed me as a Reformed pastor?
1) Every Sunday morning and evening for more than two years I sat under the preaching of Lendall Smith at Bethel Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Wheaton, participating in their well-crafted liturgy — and coming to the Lord’s Supper (as I began to grasp intellectually what the Lord’s Supper really was, and trembling as I partook of Christ’s body and blood, as I realized that Paul’s warning really meant something!). And then I spent many Sunday afternoons — and other times — with the Larsons, the Brinks, the DeJongs, and other families — learning and watching their practice of being a Reformed family.
2) Every month for nearly five years (two at Wheaton and three at Westminster) I gathered with other students at the home of Darryl and Ann Hart to talk about what it means to be Reformed. Yes, there was deep theological discussion — but it was embodied in the lived practice of a community.
3) At Westminster I was frequently in the Powlison home (usually on the third floor with David and Sharon Covington). Again, the intellectual found its context in a vibrant fellowship of life together. For two years I lived with Steve and Lynn Igo — and their bouncing boys — participating in their family life and worship (our family worship bears considerable resemblance to theirs!), learning to put into practice the counseling paradigm that we were taught in our relationships with each other.
4) My first year at Notre Dame, I gathered with the Deliyannides and Devlins practically every Sunday in the Allison’s tiny 525 square foot apartment — where we always sang a half dozen Psalms. I had been convinced intellectually for years that we should sing more Psalms — but I had never done it! Ben Allison made sure that it happened. The rituals and practices of those few short months shaped me in ways that my ideas never had.
5) As I was licensed and ordained in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I was enculturated into a particular way of being Reformed — the boundaries and norms of the Midwest Presbytery shaped me both in explicit and implicit ways — some of which were significantly challenged when Glenn Jerrell walked into my life and gave me another way of being an OPC pastor. Two years of sitting under his ministry at Walkerton reshaped me in many ways (some of which I probably do not even realize!).
6) Plainly the content of what I learned and read has been crucial — but also who I learned it from! When you have learned Union with Christ from Dick Gaffin, Judges from Al Groves, Genesis from Doug Green, and when you have heard Sinclair Ferguson pray his lectures every day before he preaches them, you will never be the same again.
But all of this runs into another way of being and knowing and doing — one that is well-articulated by Matthew Vos’s article on the Super Bowl.
http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/3864/prizes-and-consumables-the-super-bowl-as-a-theology-of-women/
[Thanks to Mark Hanson for the link — and to be fair, I should note that I watched most of the Super Bowl.]
Vos points out that the customs and practices encouraged by the Super Bowl embody a fundamentally idolatrous way of being human (an Ezekiel 16 sort of culture — for those who weren’t at MCPC a couple years ago, Ezekiel 16 could be summarized as, ‘Cinderella becomes a porn star’).
So much of the church today is trying to make Christianity more palatable to our culture by trying to put the content of Christianity into the forms and customs of our culture (see Vos’s comments on this). I once spoke to a young man from Muncie, Indiana, who said he was looking for a church down there. I asked him, “What are you looking for in a church?” He answered, “I just want to be entertained.”
I was dumbfounded at his honesty (so I didn’t quite know what to say!), but it got me thinking. There are two things that I do not want to do:
1) I do not want simply to entertain him (it would only cheapen the good news of what Jesus has done);
2) I do not want to bore him (that would also cheapen the good news of what Jesus has done!).
Rather, I want him to see that there is something so much more grand and glorious that God has done in Jesus! And that’s where the customs and practices of our life together are so essential. If what we do on Sunday morning is disconnected from what we do the rest of the week, then yes, it will feel jarring (and so if that young man would ever come to MCPC, I don’t doubt that he will find it strange — but by the Spirit of God he should see a strange and beautiful power revealed there!). But if what we do on Sunday morning begins to shape what we do the rest of the week, then we will begin to find the practices of our culture to be strange and jarring.
The ideas are relevant to all this — but disembodied ideas are a mere fantasy!
by Michiana Covenant | Feb 26, 2012 | Pastoral Notes, Worship
I often say, “Your biggest problem is that you don’t love God”? We had a good discussion about this in the Men’s Discipleship Study on Tuesday morning. I usually emphasize how we love the creature rather than the Creator — and some people have wondered, “what about selfishness? Isn’t our problem that we love ourselves?”
In one sense, I would agree that loving the creature is self-serving — namely, we think that we will get what we want — but in that sense you could also argue that loving God is self-serving, since we will certainly get the best thing by loving and serving him!
My overall point is that we were created to worship — and very few people actually worship themselves. You could look at this in terms of prophet, priest and king.
As prophets we are meaning makers. We were created to interpret and explain God’s world and word. But instead we listen to other voices and explain ourselves and our world in terms of other gods and their words [lies]. And so we wind up speaking lies to others as we speak on behalf of our gods. As prophets we trust the idol, and assign meaning or value to the idol. We think that it is capable of helping us achieve our goals. An athlete may believe that an Olympic gold medal will give him fame, importance, etc., and so he trusts in the gold medal–he sets his heart upon it.
As kings we use authority and power. We were created to use God’s authority to serve others. But instead we wield the authority of other powers to dominate and control others. Ironically, we end up enslaved to the very powers we sought to control and manipulate. And so we obey the idol’s demands. The worshipper is under the authority of the “god” he serves; he rules for the sake of the god. The athlete obeys the idol of the gold medal by strict training, and forsakes all other “gods” so that he might obtain the desired blessing. Power is exercised as trust becomes active.
As priests we mediate blessings. We were created to receive God’s blessing and give it to others. But instead we seek blessing and happiness from created things. Of course, the opposite of a blessing is a curse — and so we wind up under the curse of our gods, and mediate those curses to others. We receive the idol’s blessing or curse. The athlete wins the race, and receives the gold medal, with the supposed blessings and peace which he sought. But such blessings are illusory. It does not satisfy. If he fails, and loses the race, he receives the idol’s curse–he has no peace because he has failed his god.
As you begin to understand the idols in your own heart, you can begin to understand patterns in your life. Often, what we call “personal development” is actually the refining of our skills as idolaters! The athlete will someday learn that his body will not let him pursue the gold medal anymore. So then he turns to relationships, and tries to find meaning and purpose in his wife. He trusts her to provide a warm and caring home which gives him security and happiness (prophet); so he then obeys her demands and his whole life is consumed with attempting to make her happy (king); when he succeeds, he receives her blessings, but when he fails, he receives her curse! (priest) ESPN interviews him a few months after his retirement, and does a special feature on how the great athlete has become such a devoted family man. The sportscaster even makes a comment about how beautiful it is to see him exercising the same devotion to his family that he used to have for his athletics. What they could say is that he has simply refined his idolatry and has merely switched gods. The heart hasn’t changed.
Because honestly, is his wife capable of providing everything he wants from her? Of course not! She will fail him–just like his pursuit of the gold medal couldn’t satisfy, neither will she.
Only faith in Christ can break the death-grip of fear and bondage to idols. But how?
First we need to understand the nature of idolatry better:
Idolatry as Defiance–Gen. 3:5
We were created to imitate God for his glory–instead we imitate God to defy his glory (Rom. 1:21)
Imitation as son became perverted into imitation as rival (“you will be like God…”)
Why do people sin? Some people suggest that sin is a misguided attempt to find satisfaction, happiness, etc. Others suggest that sin is selfishness–putting self at the center, and trying to gratify the self. But if people were really seeking happiness, if people really wanted to find contentment, what would they do? Wouldn’t they turn to the truth?
Prov. 8:35-36–sin is folly. Sin is irrational. Sin is lawlessness. Sin is the love of death.
Only a covenantal perspective can make sense of this. Man is a priest who expects blessings from his covenant partner. He has a purpose for his sin. Hence there is an element of rationality involved. But this priest serves idols rather than the true God. His goal is unattainable, self-defeating, disordered, and inconsistent. Hence the irrationality of sin.
Idolatry is not merely something which arose from fearful people who were attempting to deal with the human dilemma (evolutionary portrayal of religion), idolatry is a deliberate, hateful, rebellious provocation of the Almighty God (Jer. 7:17-18)
The fear of punishment, fear of rejection, and fear of failure do not explain sin–rather, they describe the experience of those who are sinners.
The psychological confusion which so many people experience is not the unavoidable, pitiable lot of the weak and misguided–rather it is an expression of defiance against God. There is not a human being on the face of the planet who is innocent. Rather than respond to their situation with trust and obedience toward God, they prefer to follow their worthless idols–who inevitably lead them in a downward spiral.
And yet, if we are to be sons of God, imitating our Heavenly Father, then we must have compassion on these people–showering them with the peace of Christ, the Word of God, and Power of the Holy Spirit. But compassion may be expressed in numerous ways. These people think that they can have their lusts, and yet not be ruled by them. But the sinner is a slave of sin.
The solution is the gospel — Christ, the prophet who has spoken to us the Word of God and show us the way of salvation, the king who has subdued us to his will and rules and defends us from all our enemies, and the priest who has blessed us with every blessing in the heavenlies through his once-for-all sacrifice which has removed our sin!
A Religion for Everyone?
The following link is an intriguing proposal from an atheist as to how to create a “Religion for Everyone.” He suggests that the death of religion has resulted in the death of community. I especially appreciated his comment that “A church gives us rare permission to lean over and say hello to a stranger without any danger of being thought predatory or insane.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204883304577221603720817864.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
All around us are people who are disconnected and alienated from one another (and from God). When we understand that the human problem is not merely ignorance (the prophetic symptom), nor merely rebellion (the kingly symptom), nor merely sin and misery (the priestly symptom), but that all of these things are the constituent parts of idolatry — loving and worshiping the creature instead of the Creator — then we can also see how the solution is not education (by itself), nor good order in society (by itself), nor simply the forgiveness of sins (by itself), but a return to worshiping the living and true God!
And where the living and true God is worshiped and glorified aright, you will find true knowledge, good order, and the forgiveness of sins, as the prophetic, kingly, and priestly ministry of Christ is exhibited in the life of the church, unto the salvation of the world!
