processing: Summer 2010 Reading (I)

For The Beauty of the Church

Ed. David Taylor

Since meeting a popular songwriter we hosted in college and being told to check out Steve Turner's Imagine, I've maintained a detached interest in the merger of theology and the arts.  As my theological mind has expanded, so too has my appetite for this intersection.  Duke's (by way of Austin, TX) David Taylor writes and edits this wonderful volume replete with talented and interesting authors and a panoply of perspectives.  Besides Peterson, who can hardly do wrong by me, I was surprised, edified and provoked by John Witvliet Worship piece (I look forward to thinking about original songwriting & worship with some amazing songwriters in our community) and especially Jeremy Begbie's musing on Art and Eschatology.  I highly recommend this to anyone who's ever even considered the role of art in the life of the Church.

Practice Resurrection

Eugene Peterson

The capstone to his prolific Spiritual Theology series, Peterson embarks on a thorough and serious treatment of growing up, being the Church, and living in terms of the resurrection existence Christ inaugurated, as articulated by the letter to the Ephesians.  I really appreciated how constructive this work was.  While providing harsh and prophetic criticism towards the failed and unfaithful ways we North American Christians attempt to build, progress, and grow, the tone and timbre of the whole matches the exciting, creative, and counterintuitive character of the great biblical letter it explicates.

Resident Aliens

Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon

About halfway through this book I really began to resent whoever chose our entrance reading requirements a couple years ago for Duke.  While Dean Well's Power and Passion was somewhat helpful, I can't really think of something else that could provide such a succinct and challenging primer to how things are thought and done at Duke than Prof. Hauerwas' and Bishop Willimon's landmark book.  I might have spoken louder, earlier, and more often in some precepts had I tackled this one prior to the summer before my final two semesters.  Spanning ecclesial ethics, the dangers of no-holds-barred modernism, and introing a Yoderian, post-Constantinian vision, these two master communicators also realize the importance of both eschatology and worship for the life of the Church in the world.  This work begs to be engaged with and achieves the provocation the cover advertises.

The Prodigal God

Tim Keller

I was really excited to dig into this one.  The final parable in the Luke 15 series has always been one of my favorites to read, preach, and re-evaluate.  This fall at Gathering Church, we're looking to focus on Keller's take.  His dealing stuck me as a bit unique, devoting a lot of space to the consideration of the older brother in the story (and going on to portray Jesus as True Elder Brother), going as far as to interpret him as but one of a couple of Lost Sons in the story.  I liked the accessibility and intrigue created by this.  It seems it will be a great entry point for those without a ton of study and small group experience as well as those, who know the story well.  It also made me go back to last summer's read: Volf's Exclusion and Embrace, to re-visit his brilliant exegesis of the characters within this keystone parable.  One main gripe I have is the  over-villianization of the Pharisee character in the story.  While I don't deny the teeth the the story has towards that crowd, the NPP-reader and Mel Gibson critic in me cringes at the careless portrayal of Jews as the epitome of flagrant unfaith.  All this said, I'll return back to Prodigal God (no spoiler alert: prodigal means extravagant, excessive) quite a bit more as a resource.

Deep Church

Jim Belcher
Anyone looking for some sort of positive assessment of the messy tangle encountering evangelical(-ish) church-life to come, should pick this one up.  Belcher offers an accessible and erudite survey of the landscape and painstakingly critiques and offers a way forward (which he, following CS Lewis coins the deep church).  This "third way," for him, is rarely a synthesis of the other two poles, though Belcher possesses all the charity, skill, and machinery to form such syntheses.  Belcher instead looks and, more often than not, finds a true new way.  This way of Orthodoxy and Engagement, truth and warmth, set-apartness and engagement must be the way forward and the type of leaders needed for such a grand endeavor must be committed to ecumenism, creativity, and generosity.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  It accurately mapped and widely conversed un order to generate a gravitational vision around the Triune God in community.  Well done.

praying: "Neighbors in Pain": for Haiti

Neighbors in Pain

God, give us Jobian humility. Help us stand awestruck- silent- before the mystery of your creation. Help us understand the wildness of your creation, wildness at once as terrible as it is beautiful. Help us see you in the terror and the beauty, knowing as we do the agony of our sin in your life. We have seen that agony in your Son's cross. We know his agony continues still so that our unbelief might not damn us. Help us claim to be Christ for one another, defeating the loneliness in which sin cannot help but clothe us. So freed, make us neighbors for one another. In the pain, in our fear of being out of control, may we discover our ability to need help and in that discovery be enabled to help others. We know normality will quickly return and we will again be OK, not needing anyone else. But sear into our memories the moments when we discern we are not our own and, thus, come close to perfection. Amen.

(excerpted from Dr. Hauerwas' Prayers Plainly Spoken. Originally prayed in the destructive aftermath of Hurricane Fran.)

guardian article by Arcade Fire's Regine

Advent Week 1: Hope

“Learning how to wait as a people of nonviolence in a world of war, you’ll know what Advent is. Advent is patience. It’s how God has made us a people of promise in a world of impatience, and Christ has made that possible — for us to live patiently in a world of impatience.”

Come, long-expected Jesus. Excite in me a wonder at the wisdom and power of Your Father and ours. Receive my prayer as part of my service of the Lord who enlists me in God's own work for justice.

Come, long-expected Jesus. Excite in me a hunger for peace: peace in the world, peace in my home, peace in myself.

Come, long-expected Jesus. Excite in me a joy responsive to the Father's joy. I seek His will so I can serve with gladness, singing and love.

Come, long-expected Jesus. Excite in me the joy and love and peace it is right to bring to the manger of my Lord. Raise in me, too, sober reverence for the God who acted there, hearty gratitude for the life begun there, and spirited resolution to serve the Father and Son.

I pray in the name of Jesus Christ, whose advent I hail. Amen.

praying: on All Saints Day

Mary-born Lord, humble us so that we also might say, "Let it be with me according to your word."

We are tempted to will our way to humility because we just do not trust you with your creation.

Someone has to make this world come out right. Thank you for surrounding us with your saints, whose lives remind us what your work looks like.

Your saints are a funny lot- weird and wonderful. They often make us laugh, Sarah-like, and through laughter we discover humility.

God, it is wonderful to be made a part of your entertainment so that the world might be freed from sin. Amen.

(taken from Dr. Hauerwas' Prayers Plainly Spoken: "Your Saints Are A Funny Lot")

praying: Virtues of Fear & Hate

God of Light,

Shine in our darkness

that we may see that this world,

for all its distortion by sin,

is still your world.

Give us the virtue of courage

to fear rightly that which

we should rightly fear.

Give us the virtue of love

that we might rightly hate

that which is hateful.

Give us the virtue of prudence

that we might know

what to fear and hate.

For this task we pray

that we might learn to trust one another,

as we are incapable of being faithful alone.

Amen.

praying: Worthy Agents of Your Peace

On the commencement of summer book study on forgiveness and reconciliation:

“Saving God, free us from hardness of heart, take from us pride and pretension, strip us clean of all that makes us incapable of being witnesses of your gentle love. Make us worthy agents of your peace, so that even as we contend with one another the world must say, “But see how they love one another. Amen.”

(“Worthy Agents of Your Peace”- Stanley Hauerwas taken from Prayers Plainly Spoken)

praying: for memorial day: 'thanksgiving for those who preceded us'

"Our Father, you who have mothered us by giving us good forebears, we thank you for those who have preceded us. Without them, faithful and unfaithful, we would not be. Often we little understand what they must have been like, yet they passed on to us a sense of how wonderful it is to be your people. may we be capable of producing yet new generations born of your hope. Amen."

*Prayer by Stanley Hauerwas, Painting by Jasper Johns.
While I sincerly doubt this prayer would have necessarily been prayed in a memorial day setting, its humility and perspective seem apt.

praying: Humble Us Through The Violence of Your Love

My recent troop through the used bookstore yielded Dr. Hauerwas' prayer collection, "Prayers Plainly Spoken" at the nice price of $7. These candid, provocative prayers are great starters and intensifiers for reflection.

Gracious God, humble us through the violence of your love so we are able to know and confess our sins. We want our sins to be interesting, but God forgive us, they are so ordinary: envy, hatred, meanness, price, self-centeredness, laziness, boredom, lying, lust, stinginess and so on. You have saved us from "and so on" to be a royal people able to witness to the world that the powers that make us such ordinary sinners have been defeated. So capture our attention with the beauty of your life that the ugliness of sin may be seen as just that- ugly. God, how wonderful it is to be captivated by you. Amen.

processing: Stanley Hauerwas & Jean Vanier- Living Gently in a Violent World

I read this book and really liked it, and think it is really important. The idea and message has really gotten legs around my school. Instead of me neglecting my schoolwork to write a review, I'll link to an NPR interview that aired today:

http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/sot0127bc09.mp3/view

processing: the peaceable kingdom- stanley hauerwas

A few thought-provoking excerpts...

Jesus, Israel, and the Imitation of God from page 76

“…For there is no way to learn to “imitate” God by trying to copy in an external manner the actions of Jesus. No one can become virtuous by doing what virtuous people do. We can only be virtuous by doing what virtuous people do in the manner that they do it. Therefore one can only learn how to be virtuous, to be like Jesus, by learning from others how that is done. To be like Jesus requires that I become part of a community that practices virtues, not that I copy his life point by point. There is a deeper reason that I cannot and should not mimic Jesus. We are not called upon to be the initiators of the kingdom, we are not called upon to be God’s anointed. We are called upon to be like Jesus, not to be Jesus…Thus to be like Jesus is to join him in the journey through which we are trained to be a people capable of claiming citizenship in God’s kingdom of nonviolent love-a love that would overcome the powers of this world, not through coercion and force, but through the power of this one man’s death.”

The Church IS a Social Ethic from page 99

“Surely in social ethics we should downplay the distinctively Christian and emphasize that we are all people of good will as we seek to work for a more peaceable and just world for everyone. Yet that is exactly that I am suggesting we should not do. I am in fact challenging the very idea that Christian social ethics is primarily an attempt to make the world more peaceable or just. Put starkly, the first social ethical task of the church is to be the church-the servant community. Such a claim may well sound self-serving until we remember that what makes the church the church is its faithful manifestation of the peaceable kingdom in the world. As such the church does not have a social ethic; the church is a social ethic.”

The Servant Community from page 105

“The virtues of patience and hope are necessary to be a people who must learn to live without control…For ‘living out of control’ is but a way of suggesting that we are an eschatological people who base our lives on the knowledge that God has redeemed his creation through the work of Jesus of Nazareth. We thus live out of control in the sense that we must assume God will use our faithfulness to make his kingdom a reality in the world.”

on Nonviolence from page 123

“For it is my contention that if we are genuinely nonviolent we can no more decide to use violence even if the situation seems to warrant it, that the courageous can decide, under certain conditions, to be cowardly.”