"Worthy"

Eugene Peterson begins his exploration of Paul's letter to the Ephesians (in Practice Resurrection) with an investigation of the "hinge" upon which the whole letter pivots, Eph. 4:1. He writes:

Everything in Paul's letter [to the Ephesians] is designed to keep God's calling (chapter 1-3) and our walking (chapters 4-6) in equilibrium. We cannot measure ourselves by examining ourselves in terms of ourselves, by evaluating ourselves against a non-relational abstraction such as "human potential." Nor can we abstract God into an impersonal "truth" apart from our hearing and responding apart from our hearing and responding to the words he uses to call us into life, into holiness, into relationship. We can understand neither God nor ourselves in any living, adequate, and mature way that is an impersonal, non-relational way. When God's calling and our walking fit, we are growing up in Christ.

God calls; we walk.

[from page 32 of Practice Resurrection]

Peterson on Resurrection Living

This comes from Peterson's introduction to his book, Practice Resurrection:

The resurrection of Jesus establishes the conditions in which we live and matufre in the Christian life and carry on this conversation: Jesus alive and present. A lively sense of Jesus' resurrection, which took place without any help or comment from us, keeps us from attempting to take charge of our development and growth. Frequent meditation on Jesus' resurrection--the huge mystery of it, the unprecedented energies flowing from it--prevents us from reducing the language of our conversations to what we can define or control. "Practice resurrection," a phrase I got from Wendell Berry, strikes just the right note. We live our lives in the practice of what we do not origniate and cannot anticipate. When we practice resurrection, we continually enter into what is more than we are. When we practice resurrection, we keep company with Jesus, alive and present, who knows where we are going better than we do, which is always "from glory to glory."

On the relationship between discipleship and community

We can talk all we want about missional churches, but they are not missional at all if they are not full of missional people. Missional churches help folks be/become missional people.

That's why I like Dave Harder's blog title, Living Missional, and his subtitle, "engaging in a journey to love God and others." Here's a snip from his post entitled Love and Loss:

I have to say I absolutely love the way God calls us to live. He invites us to take His presence, His Kingdom wherever we go and when we are awakened to that reality things happen... God things happen. I don't know where you are at in your views of church and this Jesus life but God calls us into this way of living that is way more exciting than sitting in a church service listening to some dude talk... the church is real, active, alive, risky, present in every area of life.

The "living" is the life of discipleship. Here's what Eugene Peterson says about that in Practice Resurrection:

Jesus used the birth metaphor for another kind of birth: becoming alive to God. Alive to God-alive. Life vast, complex, damaged, demanding . . . and beautiful. Alive to God's holiness, God's will, God's kingdom, power, and glory. There is more to life after birth than mother's milk, sleeping and waking, walking and talking. There is God.

When I decided to "turn down" the Sunday morning church thing for a while, I knew that I would have to be more intentional than ever about discipleship. I would have to pursue it in new ways. I haven't exactly worked that out yet, but folks like Harder and Peterson are helping me get the focus right.

Bottom line, I'm not totally delighted about being church-less, but neither am I rushing out to find a congregation. Yes, the author of Hebrews did advise "not neglecting to meet together," and the ESV Study Bible footnote for that passage says, "Christian perseverance is a community endeavor." I like that. But I'm not convinced that the "community" has to be in the form of hundreds of folks from far and wide getting together once a week to sit in neat rows in a big auditorium and listen to an expert speak. If you want to do that, fine. Maybe the dude is a great and helpful speaker.

Yes, the talking dudes are okay and can be very helpful. They're on the radio, televison, Internet. They're talking all over the place. I'm thinking they might show up somewhere on my list of "good stuff" associated with Christian discipleship, maybe #27 or #28, I dunno. But more important than all that is "meeting together." And I don't take that to mean "listening together" to the expert Bible guy, not primarily anyway.

Here's anothert quote from Dave Harder (this time from a post called Churchless Christianity:

Instead of being the church, we have fallen into merely doing church, and far too often our doing is disconnected from being.

I stopped into a Panera last week, early morning, and there were some guys in there meeting and talking with their Bible's open (well, actually, one of them had an ipad, but the rest were using the old "turn the page" technology). Anyway, this is Maine, and you don't see that kind of thing too often up here (not guys with Bibles at coffee shops, I mean). In fact, this was the first time I've seen it (other than those times when I myself have been a part of the group). It did my heart good, it did. Discipleship was going on.

Discipleship. Eee gad, but that's a scary word. Eugene Peterson is good at de-mystifying this sort of thing. Here's another example of how he talks about it in his book Practice Resurrection.

The most signifcant growing up that anybody does is to grow as a Christian. All other growing up is preparation for or ancillary to this growing up. Biological and social, mental and emotional growing is all ultimately absorbed into growing up in Christ. Or not. The human task is to become mature, not only in our bodies and emotions and minds within ourselves, but also in our relationship with God and other persons.

Growth. Growth in relationship with God and others. This kind of thing cannot be primarily church-based. It has to be day to day, or it's mere playacting. That's why all the church-talk about "community" is trivialized when it only manifests itself as a Sunday gathering (no matter how effervescent that gathering may be).

Discipleship happens in community, but community has to be more, much more, than Sunday morning. Try this metaphor: Sunday morning is the flower of community, but the roots are in deeply real and authentic personal relationships among believers.

Here's my deal. I'm going to pursue the latter (the roots) and hope for the former (the flower) and not the other way around. After all, it was Paul who said, "if the root is holy, so are the branches" (Rom 11:16). And maybe the flower too.

But what happens when we live God's way?

This is Eugene Peterson's take on Galatians 5:16-26.

My counsel is this: Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit. Then you won't feed the compulsions of selfishness. For there is a root of sinful self-interest in us that is at odds with a free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with selfishness. These two ways of life are antithetical, so that you cannot live at times one way and at times another way according to how you feel on any given day. Why don't you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?

It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on.

This isn't the first time I have warned you, you know. If you use your freedom this way, you will not inherit God's kingdom.

But what happens when we live God's way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard—things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely.

Legalism is helpless in bringing this about; it only gets in the way. Among those who belong to Christ, everything connected with getting our own way and mindlessly responding to what everyone else calls necessities is killed off for good—crucified.

Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original.

Eugene Peterson Interview

Eugene Peterson is as near as it gets to "hero" in my book. But this 30 minute interview is the first time I've ever heard him speak. And of course, it's profound.


(HT)

Going on about Bob

I have a new job!

I'm working as a general get 'er done guy at a cartographic library/museum. That means maps, son, and don't you forget it.

Actually, this institution is a division of the university library where I have worked for the past 7 years or so, so I'm still swimming in the same pool, ya might say.

Which has little to do with what I was going to say. I was going to say, I really like Ray Ortlund's blog, Christ is Deeper Still. That's a good title, don't you think? By way of personal application:

Christ is deeper still than my new job.

There you go! And all the stuff going on at that job, and the pressures and "circumstances" associated with it. In fact, speaking of circumstances, Ray recently quoted Francis Schaeffer concerning them:

The central problem of our age is not liberalism or modernism, nor the old Roman Catholicism or the new Roman Catholicism, nor the threat of communism, nor even the threat of rationalism and the monolithic consensus which surrounds us [nor, I would add today, postmodernism or materialistic consumerism or visceral sensualism or whatever]. All these are dangerous but not the primary threat. The real problem is this: the church of the Lord Jesus Christ, individually or corporately, tending to do the Lord’s work in the power of the flesh rather than of the Spirit. The central problem is always in the midst of the people of God, not in the circumstances surrounding them.

Wonderful startling truth, that. Again, by way of application: whatever is going on around you at your job (conflict with your boss, boring work, low pay, etc.), the real problem, Schaeffer would say, is in you trying to deal with these things and navigate these circumstances "in the power of the flesh."

Hmmm. I plead guilty. Guilty as it gets.

Along the same lines, Ray recently excerpted a 1987 interview with one of my spiritual heroes, Eugene Peterson, in which Peterson said this:

...my job is not to solve people's problems or make them happy, but to help them to see the grace that is operating in their lives. It's hard to do, because our whole culture is going the other direction, saying that if you're smart enough and get the right kind of help, you can solve all your problems. . . . The work of spirituality is to recognize where we are -- the particular circumstances of our lives -- to recognize grace and say, "Do you suppose God wants to be with me in a way that does not involve changing my spouse or getting rid of my spouse or my kids, but in changing me, and doing something in my life that maybe I could never experience without this pain and this suffering?"

Ah, circumstances again. Have you noticed that we use that word as a euphemism for things we'd rather not be going through. I mean, a heavy debt load is a "circumstance," but a holiday in Hawaii certainly is not. Which leads me to this thought: we're so emotionally preoccupied with wishing things were not the way they are. Have you ever noticed that? As an alternative, we might want to try being preoccupied with what God would like to do in and through us right there in the midst of the circumstances.

Well, that's all. Now go over to Christ is Deeper Still and just read. Good stuff over there.

"The polluted stream of religious professionalism..."

My praise for Eugene Peterson's Bible translation is, well, muted at best, but my praise for his books on the other hand knows very few bounds. I've been reading his Living the Resurrection, which harbors under its generally winsome tone a distinct and rather urgent critique of the church in America today.

The best I can do, as usual, is simply offer a quote. Peterson begins by citing Chesterton:

A hundred years ago, G. K. Chesterton protested against the way the specialists and experts were taking over common and essential human activities. He wrote that it wasn't so long ago that men sang around a table in chorus. Now one sings alone before a microphone for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If this kind of thing goes on, Chesterton predicted, "Only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest."

This kind of thing has accelerated in our society and it continues to infect Christian consciousness, where it is most crippling to the human condition. But we are not without Chestertonian voices calling our attention to the spiritual devastation that takes place when Christians lapse into religious consumerism and abdicate their dignity and glory as followers of Jesus. There are strong and articulate men and women--some of them reading these words right now--who are urging and guiding us to go against the polluted stream of religious professionalism that has unleashed this rampant, relentless onslaught of religious commercialism, which commodifies the spiritual life and treats the church as a free market for promoting and selling programs, techniques, and devices to the greater glory of God. I hardly think God is pleased.

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.