All Saints Presbyterian Church

Lent, Ash Wednesday, and All Saints #3

How does the ancient liturgical practice of following the church calendar help us consciously step into the gospel, conforming us to Jesus and the shape and purpose of his life? I raised this question in my last blog, giving a theological answer and promising existential explanations as well.  Here is one: the church calendar helps us sacralize time. 

What does it mean to sacralize time?

Lent, Ash Wednesday, and All Saints #2

To participate well in an Ash Wednesday service one has to understand the season of Lent. To understand Lent one has to see it within the context of the entire Christian year. So the church calendar is where we must begin in order to worship “in spirit and truth” on Ash Wednesday. 

Eugene Peterson writes, “When we submit our lives to what we read in Scripture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our stories but our stories in God’s. God is the larger context in which our stories find themselves.”

Marking The Days That Have Marked Us

“We choose to mark (certain) dates because in some way they have marked us.” - Bobby Gross
 
Everyone has certain dates that are charged with meaning. Consider children and birthdays or wives and wedding anniversaries. Then there’s baseball fans and opening day, accountants and April 15th. September 11, 2001 – we all remember where we were on that day. Days and even entire seasons can become filled with significance. They can become sanctified, meaning set aside, from all other days and times. This is what it means to have a holiday (holy day) or holiday season.  
 
The Church calendar is built upon this common human experience of time.

Talking stones

“I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” (Luke 19:40)

Jesus’ stones crying out always brings to mind Annie Dillard’s essay “Teaching a Stone to Talk”:

“The island where I live is peopled with cranks like myself. In a cedar-shake shack on a cliff is a man in his thirties who lives alone with a stone he is trying to teach to talk.”

Ok. People like this should get help, or at least stay on their small island. But Dillard’s response is more gracious:

“I wish him well. It is a noble work, and beats, from any angle, selling shoes.”

“Reports differ on precisely what he expects or wants the stone to say. I do not think he expects the stone to speak as we do, and describe for us its long life and many, or few, sensations. I think instead that he is trying to teach it to say a single word, such as “cup,” or “uncle.” For this purpose he has not, as some have seriously suggested, carved the stone a little mouth, or furnished it in any way with a pocket of air which it might then expel. Rather – and I think he is wise in this – he plans to initiate his son, who is now an infant living with Larry’s estranged wife, into the work, so that it may continue and bear fruit after his death.”

So, what is more audacious: Jesus’ words and vocation or Larry’s? Is Larry the “crank”, or Jesus, or both? Would it have been better if Jesus had been requisitioned to a small island (like John on Patmos) where he could teach his stones to talk, or even sit and talk with them till his heart was content?

Hitchens & Hitchens

“I set fire to my Bible on the playing fields of my Cambridge boarding school one bright, windy spring afternoon in 196. I was 15 years old. The book did not, as I had hoped, blaze fiercely and swiftly.” 

So begins Peter Hitchen’s article, “How I found peace with God and my atheist brother,” from which I quoted Sunday morning. I am relatively unfamiliar with Peter Hitchens’ views in general, but this article in particular I encourage you to read as a thought-provoking tale of wrestling with the “defense of the faith” in a relational context.  

Why debates are a good idea (and a bad idea, too)

Some debates never end.

Most of the endless ones are pointless, too.  Aggies or Longhorns?  County Line or Rudy’s?  Hymns or praise songs? Momo’s or Cactus Café?  In our heads we care about them, but deep down in our hearts, we don’t. Not really.

But not all endless debates are pointless.

“When we behold the heavens, when we contemplate the celestial bodies, can we fail of conviction? Must we not acknowledge that there is a divinity, a perfect Being, a ruling intelligence, which governs: a God who is everywhere and directs all by his power? Anybody who doubts this may as well deny there is a sun that lights us.” 
Cicero, 1st century BC

“The idea that every organism was meticulously constructed by a great Designer provided a significance and order to nature and an importance to human beings that we crave still. A Designer is a natural, appealing and altogether human explanation of the biological world. But, as Darwin and Wallace showed, there is another way, equally appealing, equally human, and far more compelling: natural selection, which makes the music of life more beautiful as the aeons pass.”   
Carl Sagan, 20th century

The debate about the nature of the universe and life has been going on for as long as there have been human beings and shows no sign of ending soon.  But despite its persistence, it’s not a pointless discussion. There’s a lot riding on whether or not we and our world are creations or lucky accidents.

With this in mind Hill House and the UT Biomedical Engineering Department are sponsoring a debate at 7 pm on April 28th in Gregory Gym on the UT campus. The topic?  Was Darwin Wrong? 

Picturing Easter

Easter Sunrise Service at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  Michael Rougier, 1955.

All week we’ve been working with the idea of how to visually represent Easter.  The explorations led in many different directions before ending with these, various Easter scenes from around the world as captured by LIFE photographers. The images span vastly different denominations and cultures. We hope that, grouped together, they generate reflection on the experience of Easter – and the wide variety of playfulness, solemnity, and community encompassed therein. 

The end of art & the school of life

First Things has an article by Roger Kimball entitled The End of Art. If you’re interested in art and its interaction with religion, you might enjoy Kimball’s essay.  Here’s a taste:

"By the nineteenth century, art had long been free from serving the ideological needs of religion, and yet the spiritual crisis of the age tended to invest art with ever-greater existential burdens—burdens that continue to be felt to this day. In Wallace Stevens’ words, 'After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.'”

I wonder if this “existential burden” is being felt at London’s new church alternative, The School of Life?  This curious “shop” seeks to promote “intelligent instruction on how to live a fulfilled life.” Meals, sermons, books, and a blog…it sounds a little like All Saints. Here’s how they describe their sermons:

The last two points to last Sunday's sermon

In my sermon last Sunday I stressed that the story of the Scriptures--Our Story--is the story of salvation, and because of this we can be confident that God loves us and is working in all things for our good. But I ran out of time before I could address the most important part of the message, the “so what?” part. Here’s what my answer to that question would have been if we hadn’t been running late.

First, remember that anger in the face of trouble is appropriate. Injustice, oppression, hunger, and disease aren’t illusions. They are real problems and should be recognized as such. C.S. Lewis almost let his anger get the better of him talking about this in Mere Christianity:

“Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, “If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realize that this also is God.” The Christian replies, “Don’t talk damned nonsense” for Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colors and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God made out of His head, as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists loudly, on our putting them right again.”

Alexander, we hardly knew ye.

Dare we allow the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn yesterday pass unnoticed? His journey from adored Soviet dissident to reviled critic of the west was such an important milestone of my younger years, its hard to believe that today the vast majority of the students I work with have never heard of him.

Farewell, brother! I’ll see you on the other side.

For those who’ve never seen or heard of it, I include below the conclusion of his famous Harvard commencement address, A World Split Apart, delivered on June 8, 1978:

“I am not examining here the case of a world war disaster and the changes which it would produce in society. As long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we have to lead an everyday life. There is a disaster, however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.    

Mary Grace the Neurotic

“The book struck her directly over her left eye.”

If I had a Top 5 Fiction Sentences list, which I probably should, this would be on it.  Recently I re-read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation,” a story about people in a doctor’s waiting room (based on O’Connor’s frequent doctor visits during her struggle with lupus).*  Ruby Turpin, the story’s narrator and protagonist, sits in the room with her husband Claud, who is suffering from a leg injury.  They are surrounded by what Mrs. Turpin calls white trash, prompting her to reflect on her own status.  She frequently muses out loud how fortunate she is to be a godly woman with “a little of everything and the God-given sense to use it right.”