Reading Scripture (Part 1)
Everyone reads Scripture after a tradition. Sometimes, that tradition is frightfully novel and idiosyncratic, even egotistical. Most of the time, however, when a person reads Scripture, they are reading it after the manner of someone who came before them, who initiated them into that tradition. The person who teaches us to read traditions us in a way of reading. The parents, pastors, teachers, mentors, and friends among whom we have read the Scriptures are all influences that have contributed to our reading tradition.
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The Place of the Scriptures
The ambient Christianity of Southern California tends to be evangelical and non-denominational. In these churches, Bible exposition comprises the entirety of Sunday service, and individual reading forms the main activity of Christian daily life. Reading the Bible is seen as the primary occasion for encountering God, and this encounter with God has a transformative effect. There tends to be, as well, a focus on the power of extemporaneous reading. I have often seen a numinous application of that Augustinian exhortation to “take up and read!” Within these communities, there is often a dichotomy in practice between expositional preaching, which scrupulously follows the literal sense of the Scriptures, and private devotions that attempt to derive God’s will simply by opening and reading in any given place. This Biblicist emphasis can incline one to believe that anything less than this predominant presence and authority of Bible study in a church’s practice presents a dangerous diversion from the solely reliable stream of divine truth.
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God's Breath in Man
Trinity is about to end and I find my prayer practices are limping feebly toward its conclusion, just as they have limped feebly through most of Trinity. When I reflect on the expanse of the last twenty-something weeks I see, in my mind’s eye, a desert landscape. It is a dry, rocky expanse. It reminds me of the Coachella Valley: bordered by low-lying hills, roughly textured by boulders, sand, scrubby sagebrush, sheer sandstone cliffs, and little green-trunked trees that bloom with bright yellow flowers.
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All Souls’ Day
“Now is not the time for this.” I can think of few phrases that so capture the spirit of our age and its perspective as this. We are obsessed with schedule and itinerary and the control we believe they give us. Life must be arranged and it must be optimized. But as we all know, reality does not yield in this way, and few things reveal the objectivity and intractability of reality as death. We do everything we can to defer and distract from our reckoning with death; it’s never quite the right time to consider it, after all. And so we must see it as a severe mercy that we are halted this day and called to remember again.
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Seasons of Our Prayer
Getting back into a rhythm is a difficult thing. When I wrote frequently for our blog last year, the process of sitting down to put thoughts to paper was routine, familiar, and often easy. I developed a liturgy that suited me well and allowed writing to be a prayerful exercise. Yet, after a five-month hiatus for the birth of my daughter, I find myself struggling to make my fingers type. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, but rather that the time away has dulled the familiarity of the liturgy. What was once a discipline of stillness to center my thoughts and prayers well enough to write has become once more a laborious struggle to remember how to be still. It’s much easier to let other things take away my time, and I find myself making excuses that other things are more important than this more cumbersome task at hand. It feels like I’m starting over.
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The Ministry of Reconciliation
The Church fathers taught that the Spirit’s primary ministry is to re-produce Christ within the Christian. This is not to say that there is more than one Christ, but rather Christ means to become fully and truly present in the life of every Christian as He is, while making them that which they are called to be. As this work unfolds, the fellowship of the Church matures in the godlike character of agape, or the love that is uniquely God’s to bestow and enjoy. But before we are united in love as members of one another, before we are made perfect as the living members of the Body of Christ, we will experience the work of personal perfection and the manifestation of Church unity through what the Scriptures call the ministry of reconciliation.
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Pentecost and Pentecostalism
Pentecost is a feast of joy in the Lord’s renewal of His people’s spirits and His whole creation through the giving of the Torah. As the 16th Century Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel notes, “Man’s connection to Torah represents the fruit of the soul God placed within, and its ability to produce spiritual bounty … Without Torah, he remains in that state; but once he receives Torah, he realizes his potential as adama to bring forth bountiful produce.”
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Spiritual Gifts
The Holy Spirit is the Lord and Giver of life, eternally breathed forth by the Father through the Son. Yet that life always has a shape, and the shape of God’s life is relational. Father, Son, and Spirit share an eternal communion with each other, without beginning or end. Out of the abundance of their eternal communion they created the heavens and the earth in the beginning. The Father spoke the Word, His Son, in the Breath of the Spirit and the world was made. Again, out of the abundance of their triune love, they provided salvation to our shipwrecked race. The Father sent His only-begotten Son to redeem the death-afflicted creation by pouring out the Holy Spirit to usher it into the fullness of life again. Our life as Christians is a life shaped by our relationship to the Father in the Son by the Spirit. We are what we are because of the life we have been made to share with them.
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The Lord and Giver of Life
The Orthodox priest Fr. Alexander Schmemann calls the Sacrament of Confirmation “the personal Pentecost of every man,” the effect of which is to consecrate him as a temple of the Holy Spirit to inaugurate his new life as a kind of living liturgy. In the next few posts, I would like to explore what is this new liturgical life we have received through Baptism and Confirmation, and what it means for us, each and all together, to be the living Temple of God.
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The Sacrament of Confirmation
Confirmation is one of the seven sacraments of the ancient faith. Sometimes called ‘chrismation,’ owing to the long-standing practice of using blessed oil (or chrism) as part of the rite, Confirmation bestows a unique grace to the baptized Christian, by which the nascent gifts of the Holy Spirit are stirred up in them and by which the Christian is sealed as belonging to Christ. The stirring up from within and sealing from without bestow strength upon the Christian, so that they may carry out their vocation as a member of the congregation of the faithful.
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The Ark Gets Parked
With this week featuring both the Autumnal Ember Days and the Feast of St. Matthew (September 21st), our recaps of 1 Kings as featured in our Old Testament lessons from Morning Prayer will cover only Chapters 6–9, as our lectionary skips over Chapter 7 entirely. As a reminder, the Ember Days are days of prayer and penance which occur at the four seasons (“Ember Days at the Four Seasons” sounds like the name of a fancy restaurant), where we also pray for development of vocations for clergy. At St. Matthew’s, we’ve also taken to praying for the development of all vocations in the Church, including those of the laity.
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1st Kings, First
We continue our recaps of the Old Testament readings for Morning Prayer with the start of 1 Kings.
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Celebrating the Arts
It is a gift to be able to create. As human beings, we have been given the ability to imitate our Creator by exercising and developing our creativity. God creates from the beginning, bringing out of what is formless and void, giving it design, structure, function, and purpose. We create out of what God has made and entrusted to us, ordering our little worlds after the order, or logos, by which He made the heavens and the earth.
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David’s Dénouement Delayed by Doggerel and Data
The recap of our Old Testament Lessons from Morning Prayer continues with the final chapters of 2 Samuel. But don’t worry, David’s story will continue next week in 1 Kings.
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Absalom: Just Hangin' 'bout
We continue our recap of our Morning Prayer lessons from 2 Samuel. This week features the sad tale of Tamar, the tragic response of Absalom, and the fecklessness of David.
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David: King of Israel, Giant-Slayer, & Peeping Tom
Ah, here it comes, David’s Babyface to Heel turn. This is always a sad week for my wife, because it represents a turning point in David’s story as well as indicating that we are moving headlong towards the end of Trinity Season and rushing towards Advent and the end of the year. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you our recap of 2 Samuel chapters 9-12.
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Warriors, Witches, and Wives
Our look at 1 and 2 Samuel continues this week with the end of one and the start of the other. That’s right, you get two weeks of recaps for the price of one! You may notice that recaps of chapters get shorter and shorter as it goes on. I assure you, dear reader, that this is merely a technique of good storytelling, allowing our narrative to build momentum and urgency, driving us to the end (and is not in any way an indication that I wrote this in a couple of hours).
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Grief and the Christian Life
When I was eighteen, my home life and family of origin underwent a sudden change from which it never really recovered. I still remember the lurch of what I thought was permanent and untouchable suddenly shifting under my feet. Like Lewis, I felt afraid. I felt cut off, even when surrounded by people. I felt deaf to the words they were trying to say to make me feel better, and even when their words got through, part of me still wanted their kind words to just go away. Yet I was terrified of being alone. Starting to sound familiar?
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David practices bigamy and Saul gets caught with his britches down (also, Samuel is dead)
We continue our recap of our reading of 1 Samuel from Morning Prayer this week. In this installment, David is in his wilderness years. As Bela Lugosi says in ‘Ed Wood’, “Home? I have no home. Hunted. Despised. Living like an animal!”
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David Enters, Stage Left
We continue our recap of 1 Samuel, which we’ve been reading during Morning Prayer. This week we are introduced to a hick from the sticks, David, son of Jesse. Slayer of lions, slinger of stones, shredder of lyres, and apparently not a chore to look at.
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