Video clip:  Lent and Dying to Yourself

This video clip is from a subscription to The Work of the People, which is a community of artists who create visual media for the church to re-orient God’s people around Jesus’ good news and mission to make all things new.

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).

In the spirit of Ordinary Time, we are providing links to some collective blogs, individual blogs, on-line magazines, and other resources that challenge, inspire, make us think and sustain us.  We will post some more links in a few days and we have other blogs listed on Our Blogs We Follow panel on the left hand side of the page.  Check those out as well.  And please share the places that you have come across that provide food for your journey.

• Gathering Voices from The Thoughtful Christian

A place you come to learn more about spirituality, ministry, popular culture, engaging news stories, and find out how these everyday stories can become a part of your religious life.

• Unbound: An Interactive Journal of Christian Social Justice

An online jour­nal and com­mu­nity that exam­ines, expresses, and pro­vokes social jus­tice as inspired by the prophetic gospel of Jesus Christ. As both a jour­nal and a forum for con­ver­sa­tion, action and com­mu­nity build­ing, Unbound is at once the inher­i­tor of the print jour­nal Church & Soci­ety (98 years run­ning) and the inno­va­tor of an inter­ac­tive approach to sup­port­ing social min­istry.

• Patheos Religion Portal

Patheos.com is the premier online destination to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality and to explore and experience the world’s beliefs.  Patheos brings together faith communities, academics, and the broader public into a single environment, and is the place where many people turn on a regular basis for insight, inspiration, and stimulating discussion.

Progressive Christian and Evangelical are two great portals full of diverse blogs on where our Christian faith and life intersect.

There are a rich diversity of voices in other portals featuring blogs from the Atheist, Buddhist, Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, and Pagan communities.

• PC(USA) Eco-Journey

A blog of the Environmental Ministries Office of the PC(USA). It includes a wide array of environmental topics: upcoming environmental events, links to interesting articles and studies, information on environmental advocacy, eco-theology topics, and success stories from churches that are going “green.”

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.

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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!

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.

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.

Mark 10: 35-45 and excerpt from The Drum Major Instinct

Excerpt from The Drum Major Instinct

Text of Sermon

There is nothing wrong with marching in this sense. The Bible tells us that the mighty men of Joshua merely walked about the walled city of Jericho and the barriers to freedom came tumbling down. I like that old Negro spiritual, “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” In its simple, yet colorful, depiction of that great moment in biblical history, it tells us that:

The battle is in our hands. And we can answer with creative nonviolence the call to higher ground to which the new directions of our struggle summons us. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. But we must keep going.

These words I have given you just as they were given us by the unknown, long-dead, dark-skinned originator. Some now long-gone black bard bequeathed to posterity these words in ungrammatical form, yet with emphatic pertinence for all of us today.

———-

I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” Somebody’s asking, “How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?” Somebody’s asking, “When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?”

Somebody’s asking, “When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?”

I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because “truth crushed to earth will rise again.” How long? Not long, (Yes, sir) because “no lie can live forever.”

© The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tweet]]> http://fpcshreveportblogs.org/our-god-is-marching-on/feed/ 0 http://fpcshreveportblogs.org/how-long/ http://fpcshreveportblogs.org/how-long/#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:44:37 +0000 Musings http://fpcshreveportblogs.org/?p=2777 March 1965 witnessed one of the emotional and political peaks of the civil rights movement.  Months of voter registration efforts, marches and protests in Selma, Alabama, had culminated in the shooting death of a marcher by an Alabama state trooper in February 1965.

In response, leaders of the voter registration efforts decided to stage a march from Selma to Montgomery to confront George Wallace with the death of the marcher and his complicity in that act.  Three efforts to make the march from Selma to Montgomery took place in March 1965.  The first on March 7 is remembered as Bloody Sunday when marchers were gassed and beaten as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The second effort on March 9 was turned back by state troopers and a court injunction.  On March 11, a Unitarian minister who had come to Selma in support of the marchers died as a result of a beating he had received in Selma.

On March 16, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to present legislation that would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Finally, on March 21 after the injunction had been lifted, the marchers to Montgomery crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the first day of their journey to Montgomery.  They arrived four days later where on March 25, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave what has become known as the “How Long?” speech on the steps of the state capitol.  Below are some excerpts from that speech.  We will post some additional excerpts tomorrow, the day we celebrate his birth.  A complete copy of the text can be found here “Our God is Marching On!”

Last Sunday, more than eight thousand of us started on a mighty walk from Selma, Alabama. We have walked through desolate valleys and across the trying hills. We have walked on meandering highways and rested our bodies on rocky byways. Some of our faces are burned from the outpourings of the sweltering sun. Some have literally slept in the mud. We have been drenched by the rains.

Our bodies are tired and our feet are somewhat sore. But today as I stand before you and think back over that great march, I can say, as Sister Pollard said-a seventy-year-old Negro woman who lived in this community during the bus boycott-and one day, she was asked while walking if she didn’t want to ride. And when she answered, “No,” the person said, “Well, aren’t you tired?” And with her ungrammatical profundity, she said, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” And in a real sense this afternoon, we can say that our feet are tired, but our souls are rested.

……………

Today I want to tell the city of Selma, today I want to say to the state of Alabama, today I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around.

We are on the move now.

Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. We are on the move now. The burning of our churches will not deter us. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. We are on the move now.

The beating and killing of our clergymen and young people will not divert us. We are on the move now. The wanton release of their known murderers would not discourage us. We are on the move now.

Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us.

We are moving to the land of freedom.

Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream.

© The Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Below is an excerpt from the letter.

Is the PC(USA) undergoing a season of change? For certain. We are feeling the birthpangs of a new church as it is being reformed by the Holy Spirit. But those changes are much broader than the divisive debates of recent years. The desire to discern what missional actually means “on the ground,” to re-invigorate congregations losing momentum and to make a real life-giving difference in our communities is happening across the whole denomination. We are convinced that that reformation is strengthened by reinvesting ourselves and all of our congregations – and weakened by the departure of any.

We understand that it’s difficult not knowing exactly where we’re going to end up. But the road we are on, in seeking to proclaim God’s Word to a 21st century culture, is not only exciting but transformative.