Lenten Laments

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me for ever?

How long will you hide your face from me? 

How long must I bear pain in my soul,

and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

If you don’t know it already, take a look at Psalm 13. Out of 150 psalms (prayers) in the Hebrew section of our Bible, roughly one third of them are laments like this one.

LAMENT: a passionate expression of grief or sorrow;
a song, poem, or prayer expressing such emotions.

Heartfelt lament takes a little getting used to, in part because an intense prayer like Psalm 13 asks us to risk offending God with our deep complaints about the injustice and brokenness often present in this life. In the words of Eugene Peterson, “Untutored, we tend to think that prayer is what good people do when they are doing their best.” But it turns out that lament is no offense to the God we meet in Jesus, at least not if we are to trust our teacher’s example. At the lowest point in his ministry, amid the shame of a catastrophic cross-ending, it was the language of Psalm 13 on which our Lord leaned to name the cursed abandonment of (our) death (Mark 15:34). To put the matter crudely: If Jesus can lament, why not his people, too?

Of course, no one is suggesting more gripes for the sake of gripes. Lord knows there is enough of that already. (No, really. The Lord knows. Woe to us when we confuse our boredom and entitlement for real harm.) But the Lenten season is as good a time as any to practice the grace of lament. Start with Psalm 13. Practice those words for yourself or your family if you find that your way to the Father seems blocked by pain, injustice, or the lingering decay of body and spirit. Or -- and this is where lament becomes a ministry -- practice Psalm 13 or something like it on behalf of those in the world who need it most: the battered, the abused, the lost, the tortured, the persecuted, the forgotten ... to name but a few.

In this way, learning to lament is learning to pray for the world through the prayers of our dying Jesus. It is to dabble in the mystery of crying out to a Trinity who, after the cross, is already more acquainted with the world’s sorrows than we are. It is to work on exchanging the personal benefits of middle-class religion for the sacred burdens of Christian discipleship.

We Used to Matter

I believe we have entered a shake-down season for mainline congregations like ours. As one wise pastor I know likes to say, “I’m a Presbyterian. We used to matter.” It is a way of saying that our best institutional days are now well behind us. In the past, we enjoyed prominent spots on the corners of our towns and among the communities that inhabited them. We still hold land on many corners, but much has changed. I believe our waning influence should prompt some honest examination, not with the goal of reclaiming lost ground but with the hope of liberation for greater faithfulness to God and greater integrity with the pattern of the gospel. Sometimes it is a gift to no longer be the coolest hangout.

As such, I believe the era of the low commitment, big tent, catch-all congregation is over. Communities of justice, mercy, and humility (Micah 6:8) cannot be sustained by keeping the expectations as low as feasible in order to attract and keep as many as possible. Numbers may expand for a time under this sensitive regime, but numbers usually contract again when the time comes for harder work, greater commitment, and renewed faithfulness to the call of Jesus. Going forward, congregations will want to come to peace with kingdom proportions: joy over 10 serious saints for every 100 curious onlookers. God loves onlookers. Indeed, God loves the whole world. God’s love for anyone or everyone is not the burning question. That matter was long ago settled. Jesus blessed the crowds, but he called a handful of disciples to follow him in the way of discipleship.

Speaking of discipleship, of forming students for Jesus, it will matter more and more in the future. I agree with Mike Breen, who notes, "If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples." We have in the past given much attention to the formal, public, large-group dynamics in our congregations: music, liturgy, preaching ... the furniture in our parlors, the length of our services. But it is now clearer than ever that these ecclesiastical externals do not themselves fashion new servants for God’s work. The crisis in our public worship space offers us the opportunity to pay attention to the “back of the house,” where Christian relationships are formed in less formal, smaller spaces. It is in these communal relationships that faithful thinking, praying, and serving are most likely brought to bloom. The governing question for the next 25 years will no longer be how we get people like us to come to our building on Sunday mornings and help us keep doing what we have always done, but rather, Will we risk making room in our common life for the fertile space in which new disciples bloom and flourish? Will I be threatened or blessed by my fellow Christian’s growth?

Given this, I believe we are called to no longer treat one other or our neighbors as consumers. Even in 2013, with everything we know about the allergies of the current generation to the spit and polish of marketing, we are still arguing in our churches about form instead of substance. Many of us church folk are still haunted by a consumerist compulsion: If we sing the right music, call the right preacher, offer the right programs, give away the right freebies, sing high or sing low ... the young people will come. Packaging the right product still works along the Boardman strip, or for those who troll Amazon.com, but spin and sales are not the tools of a living Christian community. I believe our Lord makes possible a genuinely human encounter, where persons are welcomed as human beings and are summoned to become students of Jesus and children of the Father, not to be treated as potential consumers of religious goods and services. We cannot treat our neighbors as prospective pew warmers and church bill payers, and then expect them to be anything more than the entitled, chronically disappointed, critical consumers that our culture tends to produce. In our common life, going forward, we have the opportunity to share in what seems less and less available in the wider society: the holy experience of not getting everything we want, when we want it, the way we want it. Instead, we get each other: mere Christians. And together we come to know a living God who promises to change our thirst for creature comforts into an appetite for faith, hope, and love. Besides, with regard to taste, I find that when a person is growing in the Lord they are grateful to be able to sing to God whatever music they can get their hands on. Among a collection of consumers, taste is tyrannical. In a communion of saints, substance matters more than form.

Let us agree, then, that gone are the days when music, messages, and a menagerie of programs would easily draw people into our common space. These days, people seem stuffed full of music, crammed with information, and overloaded with activities; stuffed, yet feeling depleted. If we want persons to dwell among us, now more than ever we have to be a church worth joining. Names, locations, styles, personalities: These carry precious little weight anymore. Our life together must be (can be!) marked by some quality of fellowship not otherwise available at Chipotle, on Facebook, or in the bleachers at Sunday afternoon soccer games. Not that these places are fake; rather, let our fellowship be at least as real. This will invariably mean relaxing on style and technique (always interested in controlling our experience) and being open to relationships and worship (always risking knowing and being known). I believe this manner of community cannot be hired out, or manufactured from up front, or mediated through technology, but is only known when the Holy Spirit is welcomed in times of joy and sorrow, when the way of Jesus is sought on Sundays as well as Thursdays, and when a generous Father is worshipped with substance more than form. A congregation moving along this spectrum will find itself less self-conscious about its worship. Inside its walls there will be plenty of air for others to breathe.

Undergirding this, I believe that the day of the passive church board has passed. There was a time when churches could call a pastor and, if they got lucky, she or he would rally the troops, speak well to all ages, and bring in the numbers (and money). But we live in an age that is worn out on singular personalities. I believe that healthy congregations know that they already have a Messiah, and are aware that they don’t need another. Our time in Christendom calls less for boards of management and acquiescence and more for councils of prayerful discernment. If your church is led by an executive and a board of directors, over time you get a non-profit religious corporation. If you are led by believers who are taught by the Word and open to the Lord’s leading, over time you get a community of disciples wanting to worship and engage. This is why I am usually more blessed to hear of a prayerful and conscientious “no” to ordained leadership than I am to know of a hasty and uncommitted “yes.” It is a sign of spiritual growth that it is taking longer to summon newer classes of officers. Knowing what we need from those who serve and lead us, we’ll likely need to get more comfortable with the pain of many “no’s” that help lead us to those who are called to the terrible burden and wonderful demotion of ordination.

I suspect, too, that the day of church staffs is likely passing for many congregations. We Presbyterians have often prided ourselves on good hires, and so there has been a tendency in our churches to see the goal of our shared ministry as the hiring of someone to do ministry. Make a good hire, and our collective work is done; sit back and watch the show unfold. The problem is this: We cannot hire our way out of our calling to raise our children to know and follow the Lord, to worship the triune God with gladness, to love our neighbor, to bless our enemies. If 75% or more of spiritual formation takes place in our homes on the other six days of the week, then church staff are, at best, a means of equipping the body to raise our children in a covenant embrace and to hold each other accountable to the call of discipleship. I predict in my lifetime the demise of full-time clergy and staff in many of the mainline congregations that survive the next 25 years. Much of this has to do with money. But more subtly, as the Christian pilgrimage no longer fits as cohesively into the mainstream American middle class experience, I believe our congregations are being called upon to embrace nothing less than a thoroughly amateur faith--a practiced communion, a growing discipleship. As long as a few of us keep up our giving and the money holds out, we can get some help with that learning from teachers and staff. But when it does run out for our kinds of churches, it just may be that we’ll be in a fresh position to experience the reality of the first-century church in Acts: amazed by every provision, empowered by the Spirit, and dependent upon the triune God in every respect. Although I will surely miss my pension, I look forward to that era and its kingdom fruit.

We used to matter a great deal. Perhaps in being relieved of that burden, we will find afresh that plain old calling of the gospel. As for me, I am learning to live by the closing paragraph of the Confession of 1967:

With an urgency born of this hope the church applies itself to present tasks and strives for a better world. It does not identify limited progress with the kingdom of God on earth, nor does it despair in the face of disappointment and defeat. In steadfast hope the church looks beyond all partial achievement to the final triumph of God.

May it be so for all of us. 

Day Counting

Listening as a citizen, I was glad on Monday to be able to watch the inauguration of our President to a second term. Dem or Rep, loathe him or love him, it really is remarkable in the history of the planet’s peoples: the unobstructed transfer or reinstallation of executive power. What a sea of faces on that Mall lawn, including at least four New Wilmington Presbyterians (of which I am aware).

Listening as a Christian, however, I was struck by a line in Mr. Obama’s speech:

America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands ...

Limitless? Granted, it sounds like what a youthful president would say to raise spirits in a melancholy season. But the sentiment reveals much about how we the people want to view ourselves: unending possibilities, money, time, votes, budget lines, debt ceilings, natural resources, public welfare ... you name it. Reacting to a previous generation’s tight hand on the wheel, now we’ve oversteered into a lust for freedom. But it is freedom immaturely defined: liberation from any and all constraint. How did we get to the point where reminding ourselves of our human limitations sounds ... unpatriotic?

It is a lie, our limitlessness. For me. For you. For the country. For Mr. Obama. Indeed, his now-famous last glance, that parting look back over the Mall to see the ocean of citizens: His face said it all. “This is the only time I will see this. I need to take one last gaze.”

There are limits. And contrary to the mythos of unlimited possibilities, there can be beauty in a boundary. I think of the psalmist’s sober prayer: “Lord, teach us to count our days, that we may gain a wise heart.” In the witness of Psalm 90, wisdom begins, not in the hubris of a boundless future, but in the recognition that (to borrow a phrase) our days our quite numbered. Perhaps true freedom begins with the recognition of our finitude, our limited time. Braced by the promises of a boundless God, we find the grace and courage to make the most of each precious day. Woe to the person, woe to the nation, that imagines it is the one special exception to life’s earthbound limits. For now, at least, only one among us has shed that limitation. We live and die in his risen name.

My best guess is that I myself have about 10,000 days left, more or less. That’s assuming God remains generous and that the Lipitor works. How about you?

Confident of This

Happy new year. I trust that the January 1 holiday was a good one for you and yours, and that the pristine calendar on your refrigerator door or the fresh swipe of a screen in your smartphone appointments finds you anticipating a new season, bright with possibility.

Instead of adding to your list of resolutions, if you have them, I offer you for the new year this much-beloved, oft-quoted promise from the epistle of Philippians:

I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. (1:6)

Or, in the words of the winsome paraphrase of scripture that is The Message:

There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears.
And that is my prayer for you, fellow believer, that 2013 will be a year of renewed confidence in the promise-making and promise-keeping of the God three in one. By the presence of the emboldening Holy Spirit, by the promises conveyed in scripture, by the encouragement of the great cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1-2), and through that way of praying whereby your spirit is made more open, more receptive, more supple to God’s word and way ... By these good graces, may there be in 2013 “not the slightest doubt in your mind that the God who started great work in you will keep at it” until the end of all that God has undertaken in the world.

Noble as its appears, it just may be that the burden of resolution-making reveals in us a propensity to take on more responsibility for abundant life than we are even intended to carry. Besides, four times out of five, hasty resolutions are a setup for disappointment in ourselves. But we are bound up in a promise-laden gospel, in which the burden of abundance in this life lies at the feet of one who was once raised from our death, whose existence in the now is a token of the Father’s pledge to complete what was commenced. Those who walk in his way, those filled up with his Spirit, they need not resolve to do anything more than be confident in the promise-keeping God of Easter morning.

What good work has God begun in your life?

Advent Mashup

Truth is, among Christian folk of various stripes, Advent is a mess.

Some say it is the season for preparing for Christmas day, for celebrating the big Birth. In that way, it looks backwards. Others have taught that it is a big block of time for looking forward to what the Bible calls, in the New Testament’s great Greek, the parousia -- a second appearing (some say coming) of the Lord.

Some have said: No carols, no sentiment, no festive celebrations. “Not until Christmas!” Advent is for penitent preparation, a Christian holding-back against the world’s excessive consumption. Fair point. Still others: “Ring the bells, throw your parties, pull out the old familiar tunes sooner than later! Why should Christmas wait until, well, Christmas?” I suppose.

Backward or forward? Restrained or festive? In the words of that great holiday philosopher, Charlie Brown: “We're obviously separated by denominational differences.” 

From the Latin adventus, the word basically means “coming.” The implied arrival indicates a spacial movement that is intended to fire the Christian imagination. “Come, Lord Jesus,” cries the ancient bidding prayer. Whether one imagines the familiar first coming (the nativity scene) or an inexplicable second (the world yet to come), the point of Advent is this: He comes from a place quite other than our own. “[Let it be here] on earth as it is in heaven,” we pray each week in the Jesus-taught prayer. Implication: What is already true there, where he is, is not yet thoroughly true here. 

That fact remains baldly obvious in Newtown, Connecticut; sometimes more subtle in our town, Pennsylvania. But whether there or here, whether wounds are gaping or closed or somewhere in between, still we Advent believers learn to pray, “Come, Lord Jesus. Make it so in our space what must surely be real in yours.”

For what’s left of Advent: Lay off the sweets and swags and be mindful of a strained, stained world. Or put out the party platter, cue up the Steamroller, and celebrate with all your pals a blessed baby boy. Remember Mary and Joseph and the angels way back when, or ask yourself about tomorrow, “What would I do if I only had one more day?” Backward or forward, doleful or merry ... Either way, until and beyond the 25th of this now ambiguous month, just keep praying,

Lord Jesus ... come.

Guest

Sweep the walk.
Clean up the bathroom. 
Vacuum around the living room.
Finish preparing another casserole.  
Put fresh sheets on the bed in the guest bedroom.

Most of us—But we might note, not all of us!—have worked our way down this sort of mental list before.  Preparing for guests in your home is no small task.  There is always much to do, assuming  you intend to treat your expected visitors as special guests.  Then again, ‘special guests’ is surely a tautology.  Is there another kind of guest other than special?  (Okay … other than your in-laws.)

I suppose one could choose not to prepare for guests at all:  “Come on in, friends.  Sit on our couch all hairy with cat fuzz.  Rest your feet on our crummy rug.  Enjoy some tasty leftovers, from March.  Come, get some rest on the same sheets you used during your last visit.” Of course not!  None of us would think twice about welcoming a friend or family member into that kind of house if we could help it.  We would go out of our way to make sure that all is ready.  Special guests deserve at least that much.

Perhaps it is not so different for the season of Advent.  In his volume Worship Is a Verb, Robert Webber likens Advent to a time when we anticipate a special guest coming to visit our home. Much hard work and preparation spans several weeks.  But the real burden of that work is offset by the hopeful expectancy of spending time with someone special.  Webber:

I am sure that you, like me, have spent weeks preparing for a visit by loved ones, knowing full well that when they come you will be ready to relax and enjoy their presence. This change in mood from preparing to enjoying is not unlike the shift in spiritual mood from Advent to Christmas. Simply put, Christmas is a season of joy, festivity, and fun. It’s a twelve-day festival from December twenty-fifth to January sixth, the day of Epiphany. And our spiritual experience during this time should be similar to that of enjoying a visit from someone special. It is a time of celebration, of singing Christmas carols, of giving and receiving gifts, of enjoying fellowship with friends and loved ones...during this time we are truly alive and free in the presence of our Guest. And the good news of Jesus Christ deserves a shout, a party, a frolic!

If we are not careful, our Advent and Christmas traditions can easily slip into the realm of the purely sentimental: something good to celebrate if one so chooses, but not altogether necessary for the soul. Yet preparing to receive the Savior is hardly a sentimental trip.  By remembering Christ’s advent (coming) in the past, we learn to “remember the future”— to ready ourselves for the good and great day of the Lord.  Webber’s analogy of preparing for a guest reminds us that there is indeed work to be done – soul work, you might call it.  We are learning, year by year, to live in the expectancy of God’s promised future.

Preparing the heart and mind for the advent of Christ is as important a task as preparing for Christmas guests in your home.  Are our hearts ready for the coming of one who resides among us by his Holy Spirit?  Perhaps the five candles of our traditional Advent wreath – the wreath that always adorns our sanctuary in this season – will serve as a kind of spiritual to do list for preparing for Christ.  With each new candle lighting there is new reason to have good hope.  Let us then prepare, expect, worship, and wait with all that we have to give.

May God grant us an Advent season full of hope and peace.

Narnia

So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.  -- Colossians 3

(Congregation, overhearing this brief interpretation of scripture for these two dear friends of mine on their wedding day will make much more sense when you learn that they have been teaching together a class of Jr. High youth on Sunday mornings here in our congregation.  As a couple, they have been leading their little flock of young believers through the famous wardrobe and into the fabled world of The Chronicles of Narnia, that masterpiece of children’s literature by Christian apologist C.S. Lewis.)

And so I want to say to you two, you brave new explorers (Or should I call you Pevensie siblings?) ... Welcome to your new Narnia. That is to say, welcome to the landscape of a staggering new world, a strange and wonderful country known as Christian marriage.

Try to imagine with me that this familiar place, these four walls so well known to both of you — For it is here in the space of word and sacrament that you have worshipped and shared fellowship and served the Lord, here were you are met week to week with the bath, book, and banquet of our generous Jesus — try today to imagine this good place as ... a wardrobe, a divine armoire, a covenantal closet.

Because here, in this time of glad worship, by your outlandish promises to one another, and by your confidence in those outstanding promises God has made to you, here you step into a new world.

It is not the land of Lewis, not the land of Calormen, Telmar, or Narnia.  Rather it is the territories of compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline, and love … all those Christ-shaped arenas laid out on the dependable map that is Colossians 3, your favorite passage.

These are your new domains, these make up the new world you will now inhabit.  Welcome to space for following Jesus through this life, together ... as the Son leads you ever closer to the Father, by way of countless neighbors and communions and even enemies ... all there for you to bless, together.  Dare I say it (and don’t spoil it yet for your class), but Jesus is your Aslan ... the lion of your shared life, that great one who laid down his life for you, whose word is your guide and whose life is your power. 

Now to be clear, and this should be said often among believers, one need not be married to be Christian. There is a long and important and noble place for singleness in the Christian communion and for the ministry of Jesus in the world.

But when Christians marry, that marriage becomes the primary territory in which Christ-shaped faithfulness and ministry are practiced and exercised and brought to perfection. After all, when our Lord calls us to “love our neighbor” — no less than the second great commandment — who else is a closer neighbor than the one beside whom you wake up each morning? In marriage, Christians practice daily that basic ministry to which we baptized folk are called in every other territory of life: faith, hope, and of course that all purpose garment ... love. 

So it is then that your vows send you packing today, through the wardrobe of this wedding, away from your former existence, and out into the land where you will learn to handle the good gifts of God’s in-breaking kingdom: 

Gifts such as forgiveness, when the checking account is overdrawn ... Patience, when the dirty clothes remain piled on the floor ... discipline, to keep you in your vows, when hot dates and hand holding give way to stomach flus and overly-short haircuts ... grace, when you are not the prince or princess you so desire each other to be ... How about mercy, when work in the world has been demanding and there is little left over for love at home ... and especially humility, lest you forget that you are not your spouse’s savior, nor do you need your traveling companion to be one for you.

Why? Because you already have a Savior, both of you, and he has gone on up ahead of you to prepare a good place, a lasting place, and he has left you his Word and Spirit to guide you along.

That news — that you both already belong to him — that is enough to see you through this journey. 

N. and N.,
it has been an honor to walk with you to this day.
Welcome to the threshold of a terrific new world.
Go on now. 

Go on through, 

together.

Godspeed.