Water Is Thicker Than Blood

In honor of the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, I thought I might point you in the direction of the recent issue of Holiness Today in which there appears an article by Jamie Gates (director of the Center for Justice and Reconciliation at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego) entitled "Remember Your Baptism." Here are a few quotes, but our discussion need not be limited to just these quotes. The entire article can be found here.

"Baptism is wide in the sense that it ties us to a global body of Christians who are called by one Lord, one Spirit, and one faith to be one Body. Baptism became one of the early church practices that initiated new converts into a new way of being a group of people. "Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy" (1 Peter 2:10, NRSV). We have received mercy so we might be holy people, a group whose lives together should be a sign of God's kingdom at hand."

"As members of Christ's Body, we are no longer to hold on too tightly to the ties that used to bind us. We are like a husband and wife who, because they are bound together, should no longer seek their individual interests at the other's expense. Water is thicker than blood. Ties to our brothers and sisters in Christ should become more important than our ties to people of our own extended family, race, ethnicity, or nationality."

"I guess living in the San Diego-Tijuana metropolitan area, a border town between Mexico and the U. S., makes me more aware of how often our citizenship trumps our baptism. It is difficult to see the San Diego-Tijuana region as one parish when a big fence with armed guards cuts off part of our community from the other. It is difficult for us to live in the "year of Jubilee," holding all things in common so that none go without, when we have wealth disparities reinforced by the international border. It is difficult to be one body and one faith with one baptism when immigration laws increasingly hinder our brothers and sisters from south of the border to join us for worship and fellowship north of the border."

Peace,

Eric+

Church on Christmas Day?!

It seems to be a phenomenon that churches, specifically protestant evangelical churches, in America do not have services on Christmas Day. If we are willing to stand up against those who refuse to say 'Merry Christmas' (insert Happy Holidays), then how can we justify not even celebrating together on Christmas Day?

I have been doing some searching online at quite a few church websites in America from the small to the mega and it seems to be a prevailing trend: service on Christmas Eve, no service on Christmas Day. I wonder, do we celebrate people's birthdays on the day before and do nothing on the day? What is the reason for this?

I pray this is not universally true. How many of you Nazarenes out there have a service on Christmas Day? If you don't, what are your reasons for not having one?

Peace,
Joseph

Chewing the Host

...or, Weirdest Discussion Thread. Ever.

Make sure you get to the second page to read this "tasty" (pun intended) comment:

most of the time it goes down fine without a chew but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.... short of choking

I remember as a child an old nun told me that chewing the host was "snapping the bones of Christ"

considering what happens to the host after you swallow it chewing is probably not an issue

And I thought some of our discussions (like Joseph's quandary about serving communion to someone with a feeding tube) got pretty "out there"...!

Advent liturgy « Godspace

I thought you all would like this, it is actually a video clip!

Peace,
Steven

Advent Practices

With the season of Advent almost here, I was wondering what are some of your Advent practices? Do you use an Advent wreath, when do you start singing Christmas carols, when do you decorate the Church and what are some of your favorite Advent hymns? One thing I have done is to use the collect for the First Sunday of Advent from the BCP as a opening prayer each of the four Sundays of Advent.

"Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen"

Peace,

Pastor Steven

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."