You might be a sacramental Nazarene if...

So, this might be fun...you know the drill. Finish the statement, Jeff Foxworthy-style.

Here's a few to get us started:

...you've thought about it enough to actually coin a term like "Nazcopalian."

...you've received stares, glares, reprimands and/or hate-mail for publicly crossing yourself before receiving the Lord's Supper.

...you think having candles in worship is more than worth cleaning up the wax drips afterward, thank you very much. (Pass the iron and the brown paper bags!)

...at your home at least one of the following can be found: a prayer book, a rosary, an icon, a baptized infant, any book by Alexander Schmemann, [insert your own 'dead giveaway' here].

...you've ever quoted John Wesley's "it is the duty of every Christian to receive the Lord's Supper as often as he [sic] can" to advocate increased celebration of said sacrament.

...you like/miss our hymnal, despite its lack of good eucharistic hymnody (which assumes, of course, that you've noticed this lack).

...you shudder at the thought of those little pre-packaged communion "kits" we use at General Assembly.

Okay, I could probably go on an on, but I'd better give others a chance. Your turn. Have fun (without being too cynical...)! :-)

Our Web Presence

So, this is totally FYI, but kind of interesting…the following are google/yahoo search terms that have led folks to this blog, and how far down the list we were on the search results:

"wesleyan communion liturgy" (1st hit)
"how often to take communion" (9th hit)
"high church methodist" (4th hit)
"why is communion only taken once a month" (27th hit)
"nazarene intinction" (6th hit)
"nazarene clericals" (1st hit)
"wesley’s eucharistic service" (10th hit)
"wesley infant baptism parris" (4th hit on Yahoo/12th hit on Google)

...and obviously:
"nazarenes for liturgical renewal" (1st hit)
"sacramental nazarenes" (1st hit)

I think it’s also kinda cool that we’re linked here...NYI is on to us!

I really should pay more attention to these things, I guess…

[update: just as an experiment, I did google'd "nazarene eucharist" and we were the 3rd and 4th hits...not so with "nazarene communion" - I guess terminology does matter!]

Lectionary Anyone?

I have recently been involved in a Nazarene Church who are quite earnest about using the Common Lectionary for Sunday worship. This practice is increasing forming/shaping/ordering my life in particular and the life of our local congregation in general.

Simple question, but probably not a simple answer: Any Nazarenes using the lectionary out there? If so, any particular reasons why (aside from the obvious)? If not, any particular reasons why?

Peace be with you,
Joseph

Vestments, Clerical Collars, etc...your thoughts?

Amy posed this question in the comments of a previous post:

...what about the clergy collar? Are there any Nazarenes (especially women) who wear these? I find this to be both good and bad, and has anyone investigated the idea?

I was afraid her comment would be missed, and hence a good discussion forestalled. I would suggest extending the discussion to vestments, e.g. robes, stoles, etc. (I assume a Nazarene has yet to don a mitre...but who knows), as well as the use of liturgical (seasonal) colors in your worship spaces.

I also suggest sometime renting Federico Fellini's Roma and growing wide-eyed in shock and awe at his outrageous staging of a clerical fashion show...one of the more memorable scenes in european cinema, if you ask me.

David Foster Wallace on Worship

Several years ago, as I was adjusting to graduate school and life in Scotland, my buddy Brad Johnson first spoke the name David Foster Wallace to me. Unfortunately, with all the reading and research demands of my masters and then doctoral program, I never made time for Girl With Curious Hair or Infinite Jest - I confess I still haven't (in my defense, it's difficult to make time for the 1,100 pages of the latter novel). So I was actually surprised at my own sadness to learn of his recent suicide at age 46. Suicide is always a sad thing, of course, and as one who has in angst-ier, despairing moments considered ending my own life, I might be a smidge more empathetic toward the victims - because that is what they really are - of suicide, at least more so than your average evangelical Christian.

When news of Wallace's death reached me, I felt immediately compelled - like many, I suspect - to figure out just what, just how much, the world had lost. I watched his Charlie Rose Show interview on youtube, and observed this nervous, bespectacled guy who seems almost frustrated at his own mind's tendency to flit from philosophy to cinema to literature, allusion piled upon reference like an infinite version of the Kevin Bacon game, and I felt an immediate admiration toward him, and even perhaps a kinship, though limited by the fact that I do not possess a fraction of his brilliance as a thinker or as a writer. Wallace, at least in this interview, wears that whole "curse of genius" thing on his sleeve, not is a way that makes you think, "Man, what a jerk...doesn't even realize how gifted he is," but in a kind of postmodernist, self-reflexive way that really makes you feel almost sorry for him. Like, "Man, this guy is keenly aware of how alienated he is by his intellectual gift."

I moved on to some of his shorter prose essays, and marvelled at his style, his gift with language, and the prescience of his thinking. I liked him more when I discovered his fanaticism for film, especially the work of David Lynch. I felt a kind of sickening envy at the fact that, despite every potential and opportunity to become a great scholar in probably any number of fields, he ditched his in progress Harvard PhD and committed himself to writing novels, essays and journalistic pieces. I sometimes wonder how many aspiring academics feel a similar pull but finish their PhDs and enter an academic career out of sheer cowardice. (I sometimes wonder if I might be one of them.)

One of David Foster Wallace's most moving pieces of writing is a 2005 commencement address he delivered at Ohio's Kenyon College, which interestingly enough neighbors our own Mount Vernon Nazarene University (who, given the occasional profanity, would have never invited him to speak for such an occasion). The piece as a whole deserves the 15 or 20 minutes it might take you to read it, and then many more hours of contemplating it...such that I almost feel badly excerpting it. Wallace's self-awareness about the "commencement speech genre" is humorous. His passing comments about suicide are devastatingly sad in light of his own demise. His description of contemporary "adult life" is utterly dismal and yet his call to the graduates his filled with hope and the promise of a life of meaning and fulfilment even in the face of mind-numbing tedium. In a word (or two): read it.

But his reflections that immediately prompted me to compose this post were specifically on the subject of worship, which is of course the preoccupation of this weblog. His insights, though perhaps familiar to many of us who occasionally enter and dialogue in this ephemeral thinkspace, are expressed with the beauty of a wordsmith and the lucidity of a scholar, and yet, good postmodernist that he is, maintain the skeptical distance of one who stands outside all that might commonly be described as "worship." (In fact, I'm suspicious about whether N.T. Wright hasn't actually plagiarized Wallace in one passage of Surprised By Hope.) I'll leave you with his voice, now silenced, as any closing comment from me would be, by comparison, a paltry offering indeed.

"...if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom...The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death."

The Church of the Nazarene and "Liturgical Renewal"

Pastor Steven has asked a good question that has sparked a bit of conversation below. I'm not trying to short-circuit the conversation there, just to allow others who may have missed that conversation to join in.

His question is as follows: "Where do you see the CotN going in the future regarding liturgical renewal and the sacramental life?"

Many of you have added significant insights to our current status as a church body, and where you hope we might begin to move in our future together. Let me just briefly add my own two cents here (sorry to be late to the conversation, but I just got back from an interesting conference in Rome).

I don't know that I can speak authoritatively on either where the church as a whole currently is, or where it is going -- for a host of reasons, including that the numerical "majority" of Nazarenes resides outside the US -- but I can speak from within my own context, and I think we can all add where we hope the church might "go" in the future.

Here in Kansas City -- the supposed "center" of the CoN -- I see a couple of things happening. My own church, Trinity Church of the Nazarene, currently celebrates Eucharist every week, and is ordered somewhat loosely around aspects of a Book of Common Prayer liturgy (there are many aspects that are "free" and don't correspond exactly to an Anglican or episcopal liturgy). I don't see many other churches that practice similarly, however. The church my wife and I first attended, First Church of the Nazarene, seems to have dissolved its "Word and Table" service (though that church has been hurting, and is going through transition currently); other churches still distrust a weekly Eucharist as "mechanical." I think that on the whole, there is very little interest in "liturgical renewal" here save for from "the youth" (which would basically include the 30 or 35's and under)...and Trinity is made up of a great portion of NTS students. This is perhaps why "Jacob's Well," a non-denom church here in town that is organized and attended by a host of young folks, is such a popular place right now.

Two things.

(1) I think we have to be clear that our forms of worship must be allowed to be diverse, polyphonous, and thus allowed to vary from place to place (and especially from "culture" to culture)...this is extremely significant for a church like the CoN whose largest contingent is "international," and not essentially tied to the nationalistic American understandings of "church" -- no matter how much we attempt to pigeon-hole things to the contrary (an example of which would be a recent email sent out by a GS, to remain anonymous, to pastors essentially calling for the endorsement of McCain -- yes, liturgy influences our politics, just as politics influences our liturgy). And the necessity for diversity in worship is a very catholic element, actually, expressed quite clearly throughout various Christian traditions, and especially in so-called "orthodox" ones.

(2) There are certain elements of our gathered worship, our work, our liturgy, that are "essentials." Baptism, Eucharist, proclamation of the Word traditionally make up these essentials, themselves "instituted" by the living Word of God, Jesus of Nazareth the Christ. Nevertheless, we need a clear understanding of just why it is these are "essential." A strong divorce between theology and doxology must be seen to be the culprit of a "deficient" liturgy -- one which assumes it can bypass or supplement these "essentials."

I think that what really is lacking in our church today is a theological understanding that the church is itself sacramental (to use Edward Schillebeeckx's language, Christ is the sacrament of encounter with God, while the church is the sacrament of encounter with the risen Christ). The sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist are "essential" not simply because Christ "instituted" them -- because he "said so"; they are essential because it is through these means that we encounter the living God in our midst, that we are caught up in the event of the Spirit's gathering of the broken, dispersed body into a real, living unity under its head, Jesus Christ, the living Word of God.

So, when the Church of the Nazarene offers as a possible supplement to the sacrament of Baptism the "rite of dedication," or completely bypasses Baptism altogether through the means of "conversion," what is lost is not a "proper form," so much as the embodiment of theology as doxology (the only mode in which theology is truly Christian theology); and when the Church of the Nazarene offers the celebration of the Eucharist only once a month, or once a quarter, or in some places only once a year (yes these do still exist!!), what is lost is not truly an "episcopal" understanding of church as it is the failure to live into what really makes the church the church (as something that is always nourished from beyond itself). When we relinquish these modes of worship, we attempt to lock up the church as a possession to be attained (and one which we often assume we have already come into possession of), rather than a gift to be received and given away (since we are ourselves made gifts for the life of the world in the unifying work of Baptism and Eucharist, which happen as events around the proclamation of the Word of God, and by the power of the Holy Spirit). I would think that most Nazarenes would find this latter conclusion to be ironic, or something to be refuted. Well, let us refute it with our practices then; not with a unified "form," but in a living embodiment of God's Word which dispossesses us of all claims to being "right," and gives us away as bread and wine -- body and blood -- water and spirit -- towel and basin -- for the nourishment of the life of the world, which the Holy Spirit is making new.

Nazarene Roundtable: website evangelism

In case it interests any readers of this blog, I posted a few thoughts on website evangelism, which also turned into brief excursus on the respective "sinner's prayers" of two evangelical denominations (one being our own), over at Nazarene Roundtable, one of our Cohorts. Check it out.

I nearly opted to post it here, being about prayer and such, which is of course not unrelated to worship, liturgy and the sacramental life, but it seemed a bit too sprawling and unformed for this blog's particular focus. Still, I'd enjoy some of your thoughts on these matters.

"Liturgy and the Arts" by Albert Rouet

I've just started reading this exceptional little book, which was recommended to me by theologian Philip Sheldrake (author of Spaces for the Sacred) at a conference about 2 years ago. It's one of those that might have slipped under the radar for many folks who might otherwise be very interested in it's content. I'd better not attempt anything like a review since I'm still reading it - although I really appreciate what I've read so far - but I thought I'd share a few highlights to whet some appetites...and perhaps provoke some dialogue.

This first quote is from translator Paul Philibert's introduction, and is (I assume) more summative of the work as a whole; the remaining quotes are Rouet himself:

"So another principle of Rouet's theology is that the arts are not for ornamentation, but for evocation. Their role is not to fabricate an alternative world alongside ordinary life, with all its burdens and ugliness, even though the beautiful can be a relief from the heaviness of daily tedium. Rather, the arts have as their role the disclosure of holiness within the ordinary...The function of the arts in the Christian life and in liturgy is to map out the location of God's presence and to detonate the sacramental potential of the world." (p. ix - emphasis added)

"Liturgy is the transformation of a people. It addresses itself to people within their culture and their circumstances. It is something for today." (p. 10)

"Movement toward conversion is the real object of liturgy. This is how it makes a people to become "a people," creates them as the people of God. The real question is not if this liturgy pleases you, nor even if you find it beautiful. The real question is whether the liturgical rites move people forward to walk with God and to move toward God." (p. 19)

This next quote reminds me of something Dr. Tim Green said in his recent Hicks' Holiness Series, delivered at Mount Vernon Nazarene University (very worthwhile - available as a podcast here). To sum up the first of the three sermons/lectures, Tim said that the beginning of holiness - which is the story of what God is and has always been doing in the lives of God's people - is to receive life as sheer gift.

"Worshipping people are beggars. Because they know their poverty, their liturgy becomes the praise of that One who gives them everything. Liturgy succeeds when those who celebrate realize that they have been pushed beyond themselves..." (p. 20)

No promises, but perhaps a full-fledged review will follow. (Although considering I have two different journals waiting on reviews from me - Clive Marsh's Theology Goes to the Movies and John Caputo's What Would Jesus Deconstruct? - don't hold your breath!)

Tradition!

"The only alternative to tradition is bad tradition."

~Jaroslav Pelikan, 2003

"The Need for Creeds" (Radio interview), Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett
[American Public Media]

What to do?

It came to my attention yesterday that our local United Methodist minister has an interesting predicament he is dealing with in the life of his church. He has been asked to serve communion to a dying parishioner, but there is a catch, and he is wondering what to do. Here is the scenario:

Mrs. Jones (not real name) is dying of cancer. She is in the hospital just surviving. Her cancer happens to be in the Trachea and has spread throughout her internal organs. As a result, she cannot swallow anything, liquid or solid. Therefore, she is being nourished through a tube that goes directly into her stomach. I am not sure, at this point, if anything slightly solid can go through the tube. I am guessing only liquid can be fed into this tube. She is close to death, and she has asked her Pastor for one last participation in the Lord's Supper. She cannot swallow, and only liquid can be placed in her feeding tube. What is the Pastor to do?

Brannon and I spoke a little while about this yesterday, but I would like to get input from all of you. If you were this pastor, and we all could very well be there one day, what do you do?

Peace to All,
Joseph