Our Reformed Heritage and Lent

posted on February 18, 2012 by Musings

As Presbyterians, we are relative new-comers to celebrating the liturgical seasons of the church year, including the season of Lent. Musings this month will be looking at Lent, its history and purpose, and at Lenten spiritual disciplines in particular.

To get us started, we are considering an article Yes and No: Lent and the Reformed Faith Today by John D. Witvliet from the website of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship.  It is a brief history of Lent in the reformed churches. Excerpts are below.  At the end of the article, Witvliet asks the following questions, which are good food for thought.

1. What kind of worship service do you associate with Lent? Is it any different than worship at any other time of year?
2. What do you think about using spiritual disciplines during Lent, such as fasting or other means of giving something up?
3. How does self-denial and self-giving love tie into preparation for baptism or remembrance of your baptism?
4. Is it a good idea to “adopt Lent as an identifiable season of preparation for Easter”? Why or why not?
5. How can we put Jesus at the center of how we mark time?

Excerpts from Yes and No: Lent and the Reformed Faith Today

Our Recent Practice

For the past three generations, Christian Reformed congregations have typically been warm to sermon series on Jesus’ suffering and death, rather cool to too much emphasis on spiritual disciplines including fasting and prayer, and downright cold to other traditions that grew up around Lent: Mardi Gras parties, fish on Fridays, and setting aside the word “Alleluia” during Lenten worship (until Easter morning). This is why, for example, the 1987 Psalter Hymnal’s section on Lent focuses almost exclusively on Jesus’ suffering and death.

Fourth-Century Innovation – A link between baptism and Lent emerged

…..But that created a challenge: How was the church supposed to ensure that people who wanted to be baptized were serious about Jesus? And what did the church need to do to shape these new Christian lives? ……

So the church developed a 40-day course of preparation for baptism—a time of Bible study, catechism study (that’s right—catechism study 1,200 years before John Calvin), and spiritual disciplines including prayer and fasting. This was a super-charged “40-day spiritual adventure” or “40 days of purpose” (both are modern riffs on an ancient idea). The idea was that during those 40 days believers should be either preparing for their own baptism or encouraging someone who was preparing for baptism…….

In other words, Lent was developed in what we now call a “missional context.” It was a pastoral innovation for a time much like our own, where vast numbers of people do not grow up in the church. Lent was the church’s way of saying yes to the free offer of salvation and no to cheap grace—baptism without discipleship.

16th-Century Reform

By the time John Calvin came along, the memory of Lent as a season for shaping new Christians had long faded. Adult baptisms were rare. Just about everyone was baptized as an infant. The Lenten disciplines were still practiced, but they were often imposed by the church in a distorted way as a means of currying favor with God.

So Calvin said yes to the practice he felt his people needed—teaching built around the catechism. But he said no to the season of Lent as too hopelessly superstitious to be of help to his people.

What’s Best Today?

In places where Lent is associated almost exclusively with legalism or superstition, Reformed Christians would be wise to follow Calvin’s lead and say no to Lent. Instead, perhaps pastors should lead congregations through reflections on the theme of “freedom in Christ.”

In other contexts there may be great wisdom in adopting Lent as an identifiable season of preparation for Easter. All of us need to sanctify our calendars and make clear that nothing in the winter and springtime of the year—not Valentine’s Day, not spring break, not March Madness, not even the hockey playoffs—is as important to our identity as Jesus’ death and resurrection………

May God’s Spirit equip us with all “love and spiritual knowledge to discern what is best” (Phil. 1:10).

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Thee and Thou Hath Spoketh

posted on January 22, 2012 by Musings

In an address to the British Academy, The Archbishop of Canterbury discusses the cultural influence of the language in the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible.  We can appreciate the phrases like “fought the good fight”, “your brother’s keeper” and “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”.  But he also lifts up that because the language in the KJV is so distinctive in the modern era, it has been subject of parody.  The Archbishop’s Commentary is below.  It is excerpted from What Should the Word of God Sound Like?

Rather than belaboring the point, we will let Monty Python make the point for us in this clip from The Meaning of Life: Growth and Learning.

One of the most significant things you will have noticed in this anniversary year of the Authorized (King James) Bible (KJB) is that it has not come across simply as a possession of religious believers, which is why in a sense it is treated as belonging to everybody. It has been treated as something which isn’t the preserve of the Church. It’s been discussed — and to a very surprisingly large extent affirmed — as part of a wider cultural legacy. And one of the themes which we’re bound to be thinking about directly and indirectly in the context of this afternoon’s discussion is of course the curious way in which religious language (and religious symbolism in general) escape from their homes. They are, you might say, very disobedient pets. They jump over fences and get into places where you don’t expect them to get, and they produce occasionally very surprising progeny as a result.

————-

The odd thing is that our culture has in some way retained a sense of what a sacred text looks or sounds like even when the Church has been uncertain about it. That’s to say that a vague recollection of the King James Bible is heard – heard more than read perhaps – as striking a particular register in British discourse. People know roughly what you’re doing when you parody the King James Bible even if they’ve never opened it, and neither has the parodist!

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What Should the Word of God Sound Like?

posted on January 21, 2012 by Musings

In November of 2011, The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spoke at a British Academy event examining the historical origins of the King James Bible and its literary and cultural influences over the last 400 years.  In his keynote address, Dr Williams explored the dilemma the Church faces in choosing traditional or modern speech in Bible reading and liturgy.

Below are excerpts from the address. The text of the address can be found at What Should the Word of God Sound Like? An audio version can be found at Archbishop’s Keynote Address.

What does sacred English sound like? What does the word of God sound like? And that means acknowledging the awkward fact that modern English largely lacks certain kinds of voice in its repertoire. In earlier centuries English was capable of working with different registers without too much self-consciousness. But we’ve largely lost that unselfconscious capacity to slip between registers, voices or keys in the way we talk publicly, never mind privately. And we’ve largely lost what has been called the ‘language of excess’ in religious utterance, the language of ‘redundancy’.

………

And the hard question for the translator of Scripture these days, is how to find an idiom that still does justice to the strange and the disturbing, both culturally strange and the transcendentally strange. What does the word of God sound like in a context where language itself is so often stripped-down and narrowed? Can we point to, evoke or even articulate the word of God in that environment where our linguistic options are so shrunken? And the answer to that does mean attention to both elements of strangeness that I have mentioned: the cultural and the transcendental. The culturally strange, because of course the Bible is not a book or a collection of books that was written yesterday. And its ‘not-being-written-yesterday-ness’ is an abidingly significant thing about it. It is from another era (several other eras) it is something that speaks to us from a place of human difference. And for those who believe it speaks from a place of more than human difference, there is that second strangeness – the transcendental strangeness to be dealt with and thought through. Translations of the Bible which ignore both of those kinds of strangeness are not actually going to do their work. That’s why translation of the Bible is difficult.

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What Makes For a Good Bible Translation?

posted on January 19, 2012 by Musings

In Westminster Abbey on November 16, 2011, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams preached at a Thanksgiving Service for the 400th anniversary of the 1611 Authorized (King James) translation of the Bible. Following are some excerpts from his sermon.  The full sermon can be read here: KJV Anniversary Sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

What is a good translation? Not one that just allows me to say, when I pick it up, ‘Now I understand’. Of course, if I’m faced with a text in a strange language, I need to be able simply to read it; but a good translation will be an invitation to read again, and to probe, and reflect, and imagine with the text. Rather than letting me say, ‘Now I understand’, it prompts the response, ‘Now the work begins.’

…..

We have all suffered from a mindset in the last couple of centuries that has assumed there is an end to translating and understanding and thus that there is something wrong with any version of a text that fails to settle disputes and to provide an account of the truth that no-one could disagree with. But what the 1611 translators grasped was that hearing the Word of God was a lifelong calling that had to be undertaken in the company of other readers and was never something that left us where we started.

….

I’ve mentioned hearing as well as reading. It’s easy to forget that when the 1611 Bible was first published it was not yet a volume that everyone could be expected to own. Like its Reformed predecessors, Tyndale’s Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible—and unlike its Catholic parallel, the Rheims/Douai version—it was meant to be read aloud. And that means that it was meant to be part of an event, a shared experience. Gathered as a Christian community, the parish would listen, in the context of praise, reflection and instruction, to Scripture being read: it provided the picture of a whole renewed universe within which all the other activities made sense.

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Epiphany

posted on January 6, 2012 by Musings

From : Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

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Redeeming Darkness

posted on December 20, 2011 by Musings

Ask any expectant mother if she wants her baby to come early and she will say no, she does not. As badly as her back hurts, as long as it has been since she has seen her toes, she is willing to wait because the baby is not ready yet.….

The church waits like this during Advent—mulishly refusing to sing the songs pouring from loudspeakers at every shopping mall, stubbornly counting the days, puritanically declining to open any presents—because the baby is not ready yet, which means that we are not ready either. We have some time in the dark left to go.

There is one word for darkness in the Bible that stands out from the rest. It shows up in the book of Exodus, at the foot of Mount Sinai, right after God has delivered Torah to the people: “Then the people stood at a distance, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was” (20:21).

This is araphel, my concordance says, the thick darkness that indicates God’s presence as surely as the brightness of God’s glory—something God later clarifies through the prophet Isaiah, in case anyone missed it earlier. “I am the Lord, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things” (Isa. 45:6–7).

Here is a helpful reminder to all who fear the dark. Darkness does not come from a different place than light; it is not presided over by a different God. The long nights of Advent and the early mornings of Easter both point us toward the God for whom darkness and light are alike. Both are fertile seasons for those who walk by faith and not by sight.

Even in the dark, the seed sprouts and grows—we know not how—while God goes on giving birth to the truly human in Christ and in us.

Excerpted from an Advent reflection, Redeeming Darkness, by Barbara Brown Taylor that appeared in The Christian Century.

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Thanksgiving

posted on November 24, 2011 by Musings

Our Thanksgiving post is a meditation on the gospel lectionary text for Thanksgiving day, prepared by Catherine Dodson Goodrich for a meeting this week of the session of Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta where she serves as a resident pastor. Catherine was ordained to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in an ordination service in our sanctuary last month.

Luke 17:11-19

¹¹On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee. ¹²As he entered a village, ten lepers approached him. Keeping their distance, ¹³they called out, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” ¹⁴When he saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean. ¹⁵Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. ¹⁶He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. ¹⁷Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? ¹⁸Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” ¹⁹Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”

What are you thankful for?  If you made a list, what would make the top 5?  My list changes from week to week, depending on what is happening in my life, but right now it includes….read more at Luke 17 Sermon

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Listening to Our Ecumenical Partners

posted on November 1, 2011 by Musings

The passage of Amendment 10-A has prompted mixed reactions among our international church partners, much as it has within the membership of the PC(USA) itself.  On one hand, the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico voted to end its longstanding mission partnership with the PC(USA) in response to the adoption of the amendment, and other international partners have expressed similar concerns.   On the other hand, the PC(USA) has received letters of support from mission partners in Australia, Britain, and Colombia.  On September 23, the Stated Clerk of the PC(USA) Rev. Gradye Parsons received the following letter from Anglican Archbishop Emeritus and Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu:

Dear Brother in Christ,

I am writing you with the request that you share these thoughts with my brothers and sisters in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.):

It is incumbent upon all of God’s children to speak out against injustice.  It is sometimes equally important to speak in solidarity when justice has been done.   For that reason I am writing to affirm my belief that in making room in your constitution for gay and lesbian Christians to be ordained as church leaders, you have accomplished an act of justice.

I realize that among your ecumenical partners, some voices are claiming that you have done the wrong thing, and I know that you rightly value your relationship with Christians in other parts of the world.  Sadly, it is not always popular to do justice, but it is always right.  People will say that the ones you are now willing to ordain are sinners.  I have come to believe, through the reality shared with me by my scientist and medical friends, and confirmed to me by many who are gay, that being gay is not a choice.  Like skin color or left-handedness, sexual orientation is just another feature of our diversity as a human family.  How wonderful that God has made us with so much diversity, yet all in God’s image!   Salvation means being called out of our narrow bonds into a broad place of welcome to all.

You are undoubtedly aware that in some countries the church has been complicit in the legal persecution of lesbians and gays.  Individuals are being arrested and jailed simply because they are different in one respect from the majority.  By making it possible for those in same-gender relationships to be ordained as pastors, preachers, elders, and deacons, you are being a witness to your ecumenical partners that you believe in the wideness of God’s merciful love.

For freedom Christ has set us free.  In Christ we are not bound by old, narrow prejudice, but free to embrace the full humanity of our brothers and sisters in all our glorious differences.  May God bless you as you live into this reality, and may you know that there are many Christians in the world who continue to stand by your side.

God bless you.

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu (Cape Town, South Africa)

To read more, see Responses from Partner Churches

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Who Is My Neighbor? Hope for the Homeless

posted on September 26, 2011 by Musings

When asked to sum up the law, Jesus tells us to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”  But who are our neighbors?  With our church’s decision to reinvest in our neighborhood, who are the people with whom we are called to serve?  Table Talk is a chance to gather in an informal setting to discuss ways of being church.  This fall we are going to have four groups of people “host” conversations that explore who our neighbors are and how the ministry of the church can connect to them.

Our first conversation is Tuesday September 27 at 6 pm in the event space across from Abby Singer’s Bistro in the Robinson Film Center.

Speaking on Tuesday night will be Christa Pazzaglia, Executive Director of Hope for the Homeless.

HOPE for the Homeless is a homeless coalition serving Northwest Louisiana.  Each year, over $3 million comes into our community from HUD specifically to serve the homeless. In order to utilize this money as effectively as possible, over 60 agencies and individuals serving those who experience homelessness meet each month to take a “big picture” look at the solutions to end homelessness.

HOPE leads the effort in area-wide strategic planning and provides area homeless service agencies opportunities to collaborate, network, and locate referral sources. We strive to achieve this through informative monthly Homeless Coalition meetings; by gathering, updating, and distributing information on the services that each agency provides; and by educating the community about homelessness and the agencies that work so hard to address this issue.

To learn more about the faces of homelessness, explore the links below:

100,000 Homes Campaign

Behind the Poverty Numbers: Real Lives, Real Pain

More Service Cuts for the Vulnerable

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DAY 11 – SEPTEMBER 11 REMEMBRANCE

posted on September 11, 2011 by Musings

The PC(USA) has designated a season of prayer in observance of the 10th anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001.  Romans 12:9-21 form the basis of our season of prayer. This passage  sets forth the parameters for Christian life in a time of fear and violence, hatred and persecution. It also offers a compelling model for faithful Christian witness and response in our own day.

Below is a scripture passage, a short reflection, suggestions for action and a closing prayer. We particularly encourage you to consider the ideas for action and to share your thoughts, prayers and acts with us here on Musings.

First Presbyterian Church, Shreveport will mark this tragic event by participating in an ecumenical Service of Peace and Hope at 5:00 p.m. on September 11 in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church of Shreveport. We and five other Highland area churches, including St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, Noel United Methodist, St. John Berchmans, Church for the Highlands, and First Baptist, will be joining their respective choirs and ministers to lead this hour-long service of anthems, hymns, scripture, Taizé, instrumental music, prayers, and a meditation by our pastor Pen Peery.  All are invited to attend this moving time of reflection as we gather together as worshipping congregations.

SCRIPTURE

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. (Romans 12:21)

REFLECTION

How is it possible not to be overcome by evil? How might you or your congregation develop or nurture this capacity?

How is it possible to overcome evil with good? How might you or your congregation develop or nurture this capacity?

Where have you seen examples of people, communities, or organizations, by the grace of God, overcoming evil with good—particularly in response to September 11, 2001?

ACTION

In some small way, try to respond to something evil with an act of goodness, generosity, and genuine love. Let this be a practice that takes root in your life, not only this day, but every day!

PRAYER

God of all goodness, we rejoice that you have already overcome the powers of sin and death through the dying and rising of Christ our Savior. By the grace you have given us in Baptism, help us, day by day, to die more and more to sin and live more and more to your glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

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