"A multi-thousand year long rope"

Christian blogger Nate Spencer, who resides in Asheville, NC (aka, Crazytown), is also an accomplished musician, and will be going on tour soon, starting in Memphis and then skedaddling south and west. So I suppose he won't be blogging so much in the next month or so, but his most recent post was a doozy. He's talking about "the remembrance feast of communion." Here's a significant snip:

What Jesus is doing in Luke 22:4-20 is taking a multi-thousand year long rope, and tying it around his waist. Then he's taking the other end, tying a stone to it, and hurling that stone forward in time to the end of history, and he's saying to his church "grab ahold." If and when the church holds on to the rope, they are tugged around, shifted, influenced, by his movements. As he goes to the cross, those holding the rope feel the shivers and jerks in the rope as he is beaten relentlessly, dragged up a hill, and nailed to a piece of wood. They feel a series of slightly decreasing tensions and releases as he gasps for his final breaths. If they are holding tightly enough, and solemnly silent enough, they can hear him cry out that he is thirsty.


Have you ever watched someone die? I haven't, but I'm sure I would never be the same. And I'm sure this death, were I watching, would change me like no other. And by practicing the remembrance meal, that is what we do each time: together, we watch the Son of Man die. And each time we die with him. And then, on the third day as the mysterious Church Universal grieves what they have just seen, all of us throughout history will feel a gentle tug on the rope, first imperceptible. Then, unbelievably, we begin being dragged about, with forceful purpose and energy. He's alive, he's strong, and he's shoving the stone out of the way with his bare hands. Incredulous, the church feels the movement and intention of the Risen Glorified Christ as he exits the grave leaving death inside.

"For the love of the Father is the only rest of the soul."

I've begun reading John Owen's Communion with the Triune God, with a plan to discuss it in some manner here at the blog. A number of people will undoubtedly be doing this, since we're all cadging for a free copy. Notice, for example, the hard-working Adrian Warnock.

I'm only 3 chapters into the book, and I must say it makes me shake my head in wonder at times, for the writing is rich and deep. Chapter 3 in particular has stopped me in my tracks. I don't intend to recapitulate the whole of Owen's argument here, but I did want to dwell for a moment on a particular point from chapter 3. On page 111 there is a section headed, "The Requirement of Believers to Complete Communion of the Father in Love." I've reread this section three times now and I can't get over it. Owen makes two points here about true communion with God.

1. Believers must receive the love of the Father.
2. Believers must return love to the Father.

On point 1 above, Owen makes this incredibly simple and yet profound statement:

How then is the love of the Father to be received, so as to hold fellowship with him? I answer: By faith. The receiving is the believing.

Owen explains that the receiving is through Christ; in other words, that Jesus mediates the Father's love to us. And it is by faith that we receive it. To receive is to believe. He writes:

Would believers exercise themselves herein, they would find it a matter of no small spiritual improvement in their walking with God.

But don't let that word "exercise" fool you. Owen is talking about "rest." He writes, "For the love of the Father is the only rest for the soul." Owen is saying that there can be no true communion with God unless the point is settled in our hearts. As Brennan Manning often asks, "Do you know how much the Father loves you?"

Owen says that through Christ we are offered rest for the soul, and we receive that rest by trusting in Christ. He is "the procuring cause." By him the believer has access to the Father and

... into his love; finds out that he is love, as having a design, a purpose of love, a good pleasure toward us from eternity--a delight, a complacency [peace], a goodwill in Christ.... The soul being thus, by faith through Christ, and by him, brought into the bosom of God, into a comfortable persuasion and spiritual perception and sense of his love, there reposes and rests itself. And this is the first thing the saints do, in their communion with the Father[.] (p. 113)

Chew on that for a while, saints.

Communion

Begin here then, perpetual beginner--
into the rank compost of history falls
a seed,
into the hard unpromising soil
of our waking-sleeping-walking around lives,
a dead man,
eased down from its humiliating throne--
caressed, wept for, laid in a rock tomb--
tell me who would have called this wisdom?
Who would have named it love?
Who could have placed his hope just here,
just where the bitterness blinded and burned,
just where the fear pounded down,
shattering hearts.

And yet,
up through the cracked concrete,
up from the caked embittered clay,
what the shattered heart received in tears,
now leaps to life as plain as day.

Booksnip (5)

It's taken me months, but I'm wending my way through Eugene Peterson's Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. I think it's a wonderful and quite unique book. Infused with the passion of a lifetime, it seems to be poured out rather than written.

Although it would be difficult to summarize this book, one thing that can be said without doubt is that it is Christocentric. Here's a "snip" concerning the taking of communion:

The Eucharist is the definitive action practiced in the Christian community that keeps Jesus Christ before us as the Savior of the world and our Savior, and ourselves as sinners in need of being saved.... Without the Eucharist as focal practice, it is very easy to drift off into imagining Jeus as our Great Example whom we will imitate, as our Great Teacher from whom we will learn, or our Great Hero by whom we will be inspired. And without the Eucharist it is very easy to drift into a spirituality that is dominated by ideas abut Jesus instead of receiving life from Jesus. The Eucharist says a plain "no" to all that. The Eucharist puts Jesus in his place: dying on the cross and giving us that sacrificial life. And it puts us in our place: opening our hands and receiving the remission of our sins, which is our salvation.

The Christian community is never going to give up teaching moral behavior, giving instruction and the commandments of Moses and the imperatives of Jesus and the exhortations of Paul, dealing with the idea and truths given in the Scriptures, and training Christians to follow and obey Jesus in the many and varied conditions of history in which we find ourselves. But however important all these things are, they cannot serve as the center. We cultivate our participation in the play of Christ in history by following him to the cross and receiving his life as he gives it to us under the forms of the Eucharist.