We will be using this litany on Sunday in place of the Apostles’ Creed. The purpose of saying the Creed is rather like a pledge of allegiance, in my view, and given the sermon material and the Gospel reading for the week, the litany expresses exactly that.

Jesus inaugurates the kingdom of God not by conquering with legions of angel armies, but by suffering and dying and, ultimately, by being raised from the dead – death has lost its hold on him. So also we are to carry our cross, to identify ourselves with Jesus and to seek to understand the world in the terms Jesus understood it. It’s not just about believing “in” Jesus, but about relationally attaching to him, about being like Jesus.

~ Jason

One thing I often hear from people is a concern that my penchant for the “liturgical” is a foray into some kind of “lifeless tradition” or “tradition for tradition’s sake”. They seem unable or unwilling to see how it is that ancient practices and words could have much, if any, bearing on spiritual life in our current situation. Many of them have not necessarily, or at least not consciously, been co-opted by the modern penchant for the novel, the believe that newer is better and novelty brings satisfaction. They just don’t see how some of these traditions, often traditions that are foreign to their own church experience, can have relevance today.

One of the first things I ask someone, when they say something like that to me, is “What about the Bible?” After all, the Bible certainly fits into the “ancient” category, with writings that record communal memories stretching from two to as many as four thousand years ago! I often get a response something like “well, of COURSE the Bible is relevant, it’s God’s word and it’s ALWAYS relevant, in every time and place!”

I agree, of course, though possibly for different reasons than my discussion partners (or at least with different shades of meaning), but then I have to ask the follow-up question: “If the communities who gave us these traditions were guided by the Bible, and these traditions are rightly seen as coming out of these communities’ understanding of the Bible and of the faith they received from those who came before, doesn’t that at least open the door to allowing the traditions they’ve passed on to us as relevant?”

Here’s the thing about traditions, in my mind: there is a reason why they become traditional. There are reasons why these practices and prayers and ways of speaking were passed down from generation to generation, and that is because the communities in which they were born found them to be extremely meaningful expressions of faith and their life together. If they have become “dead tradition”, it is only because we have lost sight of the very things that gave them life. This is not something that only applies to tradition, by the way, it can apply to many things – relationships, organizational memberships, and so on.

In a world that is infatuated with the novel, where tomorrow’s big new deal seems to become yesterday’s news before today has even passed, returning to ancient practices can be a necessary corrective and even a subversive movement. The drive for novelty too-often creates violence, both within the heart of the consumer, in the localities from which natural resources are extracted, and other places. Returning to the practices embedded within our historical memory can lead us to seek a point of groundedness that challenges the never-ending carnival of novelty which really turns out to be the same thing, again and again – the same failure to provide that which it promises, the same slavery to stuff played out in different shops, different web sites, different neighborhoods, different towns.

Novelty for its own sake is its own kind of institution, and, far from being institutionalized and stifling, these classic Christian practices, the liturgy, the service of the Word and Table, praying the Kyrie and Sanctus and Agnus Dei, can in fact be a catalyst for breaking the power of these very structures. Ancient prayers that refuse to separate sacred from secular, Sunday from Monday, religion from politics, remind us that life is a connected whole and that the Spirit seeks to transform us in all areas of our being and doing. These voices from the past challenge us to reconsider who we are and what we do. That is why we say the Trisagion together, and read the Psalms responsively, and say the Canticles. That is why we say the Creed, like a “Pledge of Allegiance” to God, instead of pledging to any flag. The Word and Spirit move the church, and in the church the world is to be re-created.

Let us follow in the footsteps of the one who truly makes all things new (Rev. 21:5), speaking words of truth that have been given to us by those who followed before us.

~ Jason

Old Testament: Jeremiah 15:15-21
Psalm: 26:1-8
Epistle: Romans 12:9-21
Canticle: Philippians 2:1-2, 5-11
Gospel: Matthew 16:21-28

Bulletin for August 31, 2008

Sermon title: Believing about Jesus? Believing in Jesus? Or believing Jesus, and believing what Jesus believed? (Part 2)

Welcome to Ecclesia! Or, more accurately, welcome to the first post on Ecclesia’s blog.

I’m always challenged to come up with a concise statement about who and what we are, so let me just say this: what we are is what happens when a small group of people, dissatisfied with their church experiences but not willing to forsake the church at large, get together to pray and question what it looks like to be the ekklesia, the people of God, the visible sign and agent of the kingdom of God at this particular time, in this particular place.

We believe that Jesus’ command to love God and love your neighbor as yourself is not just an ethical imperative, but that it necessarily entails entering into a whole new way of seeing the world, a vision that can only be entered by regeneration, only by heeding the call of the one who beckons: “Follow me”.

In Exodus, God reveals the divine name to Moses. It has been translated in ways such as “I AM WHO I AM”, or “I WILL BE WHO I WILL BE”. Put them together and you have “I AM WHO I WILL BE”, a thought-provoking statement that is entirely tenable from the Hebrew text. However, theologian James McClendon suggests a different shade of meaning for the divine name. He translates it “You will only come to know me as you follow me.”

Let’s follow him together, the wild and untameable God who led Israel out of Egypt and defeated the world’s biggest empire; the homeless rabbi from Nazareth who went about everywhere healing the sick and doing good, teaching indiscriminate love and forgiveness, even of enemies, and challenging the powers and principalities with his every word and deed; the Spirit that blows through the earth like wind, beckoning us to “come, holy people.”

Come, let us follow.

~ Jason