July 2008

My Sister-in-Law has been inviting Olivia over on Tuesdays so that they can go to the pool. Today I left Elise with them as well and I got some errands taken care of. I never thought I’d enjoy having a day to myself as much as I do, and I never thought I’d feel as guilt-free for enjoying it. Maybe I won’t be a very good homeschooler after all!

I ran to the post office to get my passport updated. It is very frustrating to go through all this work and driving to discover that I could have just done the whole process through the mail since it is just a renewal and not a new application. Even more frustrating is discovering that I could have done it for free if I had done it within the first year after our wedding and name change. Today I wrote a check for $75 to the Department of Security, or something like that. It’s very nerve wracking to send all of that personal information through the mail. I got a delivery confirmation.

Then I stopped by a friend’s house for lunch and to drop off a gift for her new baby. We actually had some time to talk, since her little one was asleep and mine were splashing at the pool with Aunt Sarah.

Then I stopped back home to let the dog out before I went to pick up the girls and our tile for our new bathroom project was on the front porch. I had no idea what it was until I picked it up and brought it in. I just knew that the package was 100 pounds. It said so right on the shipping form. When Olivia found it later in the evening she asked if we could glue them to the wall in the bathroom today. Then she scattered the packing peanuts all over the floor. Nice.

We have been crazy-busy this year. When there is no baby in the house life can really speed up! Sometimes I miss the slow motion lifestyle of a baby, and then I remember how nice it is to get some sleep (some nights anyway).

The girls have been going to the pool a lot, thanks to aunt Sarah. And Rob has started running, too. I injured my IT band, so I’ve been doing about every exercise excluding running. Plus to save money on gas we bought a bike trailer which I have been using to do my short errands with the girls. They love it and so do I.

The garden is really in high gear now and this is Elise’s first experience with pulling something out of the dirt and eating it 5 minutes later. You’d think that fiber would help in potty-training, but alas it does not. Yesterday we ate the last three carrots from the first planting, the second group shouldn’t be mature for about 3 more weeks. We also began munching on the greenbeans, but unfortunately so have the Japanese Beatles.

I also made my first attempt at canning something from my garden. I have a TON, I repeat, TON of Hungarian Hot Peppers so I decided to pickle them to use as pizza toppings and give some away. Well, it didn’t work, The seal was no good. Maybe next time.

Michael Spencer linked to this good read from Michael Horton on the ascension of Christ, and the work left to the church. I nodded along with Horton for his sharp analysis of American Christianity and its revivalist tendency:

So when a conservative Southern Baptist like Rick Warren embraces “new measures” in church growth by advocating a vision of the church as an army of reformers who can end the plagues of disease, war, and poverty as well as promiscuity, abortion, homosexuality, divorce, and alcoholism, he stands in a long line leading from Finney to Strong to Sunday to Graham. “Deeds, not Creeds!” used to be the mantra of the social gospel of mainline churches, but Warren has revived it today as if it were newly minted. After a brief dispensationalist interlude, American evangelicals returned to their more positive and triumphant (postmillennial) message of transforming American culture into “a shining city upon a hill.”

… Ironically, in the land that prizes the legal separation of church and state, the identification of church and sub-culture, each with its political agenda, is nearly total: white suburban evangelicals, the Black church, mainline social gospels, and the more recent “new urbanism” of the emergent movement. Yet in spite of their different agendas, each of these ecclesiastical demographics is largely dependent on the heritage of American revivalism.

But by the end, I wanted him to say something more clearly. He writes on the word “incarnational” here:

… “Incarnational” is becoming a dominant adjective in evangelical circles, often depriving Christ’s person and work of its specificity and uniqueness.[9] Christ’s person and work easily becomes a “model” or “vision” for ecclesial action (imitatio Christi), rather than a completed event to which the church offers its witness.[10] We increasingly hear about “incarnational ministry,” as if Christ’s unique personal history could be repeated or imitated. The church, whether conceived in “high church” or “low church” terms, rushes in to fill the void, as the substitute for its ascended Lord. In its train, the sacramental cosmos returns. As Christ and his work is assimilated to the church and its work, similar conflations emerge between the gospel and culture; between the word of God and the experience of our particular group; and between the church’s commission and the transformation of the kingdoms of this age into the kingdom of Christ.

Horton is on the money when he points out that the church must be careful not to replace Christ. But what I’m longing for him to describe is how the church is in Christ, never replacing Him, but fully and presently partaking in His life death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and even his future return, through the mystery of Word and Sacrament. What Horton needs to point out is that all of the effort the American church throws into transforming culture could never properly be called incarnational action anyway. While Christ was present in the flesh, He could hardly have been called an activist of any sort. Jesus’ exposition of the power of God was something completely different: St. Paul makes clear that the ultimate earthly realization of God’s glory was, paradoxically, Christ’s brutal suffering and death on the cross. The contemporary fad of hybrid-driving evangelical political activism is in a category altogether separate from the bloody sacrifice of the Son of God. In short, it’s not being incarnational that’s the problem, it’s that the church has no idea what that word even means.

Incarnational living is not our life (with the emphasis on our). It is Christ’s life in us (with the emphasis on life and Christ). It is to struggle to find our identities completely in Him–in His Word and in His Sacraments. That is not to be misinterpreted as a way of making Christianity a private existential struggle. This is a public declaration of our present death and resurrection in the Spirit and soon-coming death and resurrection in the flesh. It is, essentially, to end ourselves and be begun in our new-in-Christ selves day after day after day. It’s tone is, by definition, humble. And it happens wherever we are: Our homes, workplaces, neighborhoods. I would use the word local if it hadn’t started showing up on so many t-shirts lately, but maybe I’m too cautious.

Incarnational living is not our project. Our engagement with culture is not informed by a vision or formula, but flows out of our baptism–a baptism that we do not always consent with, but to which we must learn to say “Amen.” St. Paul’s discourse in Romans 8 tells us that this already/not-yet tension is shot through the entire created order. The entire cosmos waits in eager longing for freedom from its bondage to corruption and decau, just as we groan for our relief from struggles with sinful flesh. And that freedom is something no political platform or activist movement can deliver.

Incarnational living is not whatever we’re most comfortable with. The Corinthian church, much like the American, was puffed up in its arrogance. Certain of its importance and focused on its achievement, it wasted time on theological bickering and personality cults (I follow Paul! I follow Apollos!) and turned a blind eye to the Corinthian culture’s grip on its life. And St. Paul’s sharply sarcastic rebuke leaves me stinging every time:

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you! For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.

The way the world looks at things, it’s pretty tough to build a city on a hill out of scum of the earth. Horton puts it well here:

Where we might hope for triumphant calls to “redeem culture,” the New Testament epistles offer comparatively boring yet crucial exhortations to respect and pray for those in authority, to treat employers and employees well, and to be faithful parents and children. We are called “to increase more and more” in godliness through the ordinary means of grace in the church. And in our secular vocations we are called to “aspire to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you, that you may walk properly toward those who are outside and that you may lack nothing” (1 Thes 4:10-12).

Not sure how to close off this rambling post, I think I’ll just post a bit of the hymn “I Bind Unto Myself This Day,” a Lutheran take on St. Patrick’s Breastplate. It doesn’t get much more incarnational than this:

I bind unto myself today
The strong name of the Trinity
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.

I bind this day to me forever,
By power of faith, Christ’s incarnation,
His baptism in the Jordan River,
His cross of death for my salvation,
His bursting from the spiced tomb,
His riding up the heavenly way,
His coming at the day of doom,
I bind unto myself today.

Over the past six months, and especially in the past three weeks, I’ve been relearning what it means to pray. The process started when our family began to try and worship regularly using the Prayer at the Close of the Day service in the Lutheran Service Book prayer card.

The Close of Day service is simple: A benediction, a responsory reading drawn from Psalm 92:1, a scripture reading, the Creed, a common reading of the Song of Simeon, the Lord’s Prayer, prayer for others and ourselves, and finally Luther’s close of day prayer from the Small Catechism. Ordinary as it is, we were doing far less beforehand, and going through an entire prayer service felt like a stretch at first. Now, a few months later, I daily look forward to this family worship time.

Though I didn’t realize it at first, adopting a prayer service was a complete turn around from the meager way we spent our time before. Our prayers basically consisted of a few words before bedtime with our daughters, occasionally including the Lord’s Prayer, or a confession of the Creed. On a given night, we might have used some of the same elements the Close of Day service includes, but the structure was always spontaneous.

The prayer service, on the other hand, is always the same. Once tedious, I now find this a great comfort. Regardless of my mood, the leftover stress from a long day at work, or the unpredictable tempers of my children, the structure remains the same. This creates a rhythm that steadies us. Especially as we continue to pray many of the words time and time again, associations with the syllables and phrases build in and between us, so that we come to know the service as we know one another.

Some of you may wonder if praying in this way is doomed to become empty ritual. I’m certain that we’re capable of sucking all the life out of this good gift if we approach it mindlessly. But night after night, I’m refreshed because the form of the service is declarative. Evening worship not our activity, but God’s event. Nightly, I hear myself say “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” and I and my family echo back “Amen.” In our little house in Akron, we have again heard God put His name upon us, and in that one “Amen,” we have answered back “Yes, yes. It is so.”

Understanding family worship as an event–God’s event, not our own–blows my mind. Where prayer for me used to consist of running down a well-worn list of requests out of some sense of responsibility, I now find myself coming to hear again what God has to say. We open up His Word, and what it has to say is good. And when we bow our heads to voice our petitions, we pray in Christ. In the mystery of our baptism, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ is our mediator, petitioning the Father for us. The drama in worship goes far beyond our own words on our lips; but in Christ, God’s words are upon our tongues! As we ask in the first words of the service:

It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
to sing praise to your name, O Most High;

To herald Your love in the morning,
Your truth at the close of the day.

What is it that’s good about this? Not that we all happened to read some scripture together, but that we hear God’s great love again, our ears are filled with his truth. The heralds are not giving this simple evening prayer service its oomph, the action of God is! And this is obvious when we speak together Simeon’s beautiful response to laying eyes on God-in-the-flesh, Christ:

Lord, now You let Your servant go in peace;
Your word has been fulfilled.
My own eyes have seen the salvation
which You have prepared in the sight of every people:
A light to reveal You to the nations
and the glory of Your people Israel.

Of course you’d want to say the Gloria Patri after that!

Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

God’s event don’t work like human events. They don’t go hand-in-hand with some kind of emotional rush. In fact, it’s common that we say the final “Thanks be to God,” without feeling a thing. And the Word of God that we hear doesn’t sound like we think it should–a booming thunderclap from the heavens, or even a still, small voice in the bossom. Instead, the Word of God sounds like our own weak and humble words, occasionally faltering and stammering over the Lord’s Prayer, a Psalm, or the words of Simeon I quoted above. It sounds like my daughter’s tiny voice announcing to those of us gathered in the bedroom “…for Thine is the Kingdom! and the Power! and the GLORY!” This may not be what we expect, but yet we say “Amen,”–this is most certainly true.

For the first time in my life, I find myself genuinely loving prayer. I pack my little prayer card in my laptop bag and take it to work, then sneak out and sit and my car and say the noon prayer service aloud to myself. We’ve even begun going through the morning prayer service together before or after breakfast. This excitement may not last forever, but it is a good gift, and I thank God for it.

This story in this morning’s USA Today is heart-wrenching. We must pray for soldiers. Lord, have mercy.

We haven’t seen it yet, but Dreher’s review of Wall-E makes me think we ought to soon.

Sasse:

Whenever the Lord’s Supper has been permitted to decay, the boundary lines between church and world have universally disappeared and the church has been absorbed into the world.

Amen.

We had the best group of kids for Higher Things. Going into any event as the chaperone has its helping of worry. Will the kids be involved, will they listen, will they have fun? Will there be an emergency? I was feeling all those things on the ride out there, but our group proved very responsible and very fun. Here they are singing Dave Matthews Band songs in the van.

Rob and I were continually asked if we were students, and often no one believed that we were leaders until we told them that we had two kids at home. I guess that is flattering.

Well, like I said, the kids were awesome. They made friends, took notes, asked questions, sang at the top of their lungs and I was proud to be their leader. They were even better at keeping curfew than Rob and I. All I have to say is that I’m sure that Lutherans plan their conference location around dive bars…

Last week, Devona and I chaperoned our church’s youth group to the Higher Things conference in Scranton, Pennsylvania (I hope to write more about this in a few other posts, too). The conference was such a blessing, and it’s very possible that we got more out of it than even the kids did.

Specifically, though, the conference gave me the chance to recollect some of my most formative experiences growing up heavily involved in a modern evangelical church: Summer camps and conferences were a huge part of my Christian identity when I was young. I have fierce memories of crowding together into a darkened, sweaty gymnasium with hundreds of other teenagers, a stage washed in concert lights, the roar of electric guitars, raised hands, tearful repentance, the ultimate conviction that this was where we belonged.

It’s hard to shake off moments like that, and years of them piled up to convince me that I was called to be a minister–after all, that fire in my heart had to be a calling from God, right? Night after night, with the echo of those drums ringing in my ears, I’d lay awake with my certain future in ministry spreading out in front of me.

When it came time to pick a college, I was sure I needed to attend one of our loose denomination’s Bible colleges (later shot down by my parents). I wanted to join up with a good worship band. Maybe become a missionary. I hardly gave a future in the secular world a thought–I was certain I would be doing something in the church.

But then real life woke me up. As I finished high school and began college, leading worship services, mentoring newer Christians, and guiding Bible studies, I began to have real questions. Struggles with sin. Doubts. It just wasn’t always easy to stay on the mountaintop. I began to loathe the fire in my heart. I was angry about it, ashamed. How could someone called by God feel so conflicted?

it only got worse, and my wife (at that time, my fiance) and I came to a spiritual crisis. We were burnt out. We needed the Gospel, and we needed it desperately. And though it was being preached in some form all around us, we were deaf to it. The message was too mixed. Grace didn’t seem free, and we felt like we were in chains.

By the time we ended up in the small LCMS church we still attend, I’d walled off my heart from any hope of becoming a pastor. I was bitter with my Christian experience, certain that I’d fallen prey to my own emotions at a vulnerable age. I convinced myself that work in the church was something I could never do, someone else’s job, someone else’s problem. The ache to serve, though, never left. And over the last five years I continued to struggle with anger and sorrow at its persistence. Time and again, the desire would well up inside me. And in all that bitterness I had only one answer: “No.” Considering a life in ministry, after the emotional wringing I’d felt I’d been through, was impossible. But why couldn’t I get rid of this burden? Get on with clocking in and out of my nine-to-six job, living in my vocation as father to my kids, husband to my wife, and hard-working employee at my job?

At some point during the conference last week, though, something changed. There were no sweaty gymnasiums, no flood-lighted stages, no roaring electric guitars. No calls for tearful emotional repentance, and no emotional revelations. I laid awake in my bunk in the University of Scranton dorms, listening to the sound of teenagers talking outside–teenagers so much like I must have been years ago–and laying my spiritual past alongside these similar, but so tremendously different experiences at Higher Things. Day after day I heard the preaching of Christ, Christ, and Christ again. I received Christ, again, again, and again. I went to confession and absolution, I laid down my pride and heard that I was forgiven. And somehow, all that anger started to disipate. The six-foot thick concrete walls I’d built between myself and the possibility of a life serving the church started to crumble.

It’s so hard to put into words, but I guess I just started feeling alive again. And when I asked myself why I felt so alive, the obvious answer was because I’d just stopped saying “No. Not that. Anything but that.” Somehow, I found myself open again. Open to possibilities. And no longer afraid that caring about the truth of the Gospel would lead me over a cliff. Not certain of anything, to be sure, but I find myself with a heart that is more tender, rather than bitter. And a temperament that is more patient, not angry.

And the burden is gone. The weight I felt every morning when I woke up, and every night when I came home weary from the office has lifted. And for now, that’s good enough. I don’t know if I’ll ever pursue the ministry, but wondering, thinking, talking, and most of all praying about it does not seem so hard any longer. And if that means I can be a little more at peace, then that’s good enough for me.