As a recovering work-addict, I have been obliged to a keen awareness of the patterns of work and leisure that surround me. Frustratingly, I have often felt like a recovering alcoholic living in a walk-up above pub row, immersed in the ambient noise of what I imagine to be great enjoyment and satisfaction happening just downstairs. All around me are impulses to feed a beast who is just biding the time it needs to grow large enough to feed on me. Like those who’ve struggled with any substance or habit will know, the addiction isn’t about the thing but about something else behind, beneath, beyond it.
The fact that we pray for God to “keep us” in His true religion clearly implies that it is possible for us to drift out of it, into false religion or no religion at all. Most of us have observed this tragic reality in the lives of the people around us, and if we look frankly at our own hearts, we will likely recognize tendencies that could lead to apostasy if left unchecked. If we are to maintain our faithfulness, some sort of safeguard is evidently necessary.
The true meaning of time is rooted in agriculture and the agricultural metaphor. The acts of God commemorated in the Old Covenant were all linked to the cycles of planting and harvesting. Redemption itself is described in terms of agriculture. St. Paul says that “Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20). This refers to the offering of the first sheaf of grain that was the promise of more to come.
Let us summarize three important points from the previous posts. First, the church year is the way the church experiences the true meaning of time that was revealed in the covenant God made with Israel, in the light of the fulfillment of both time and the covenant by Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Messiah of Israel. Second, this experience of time is rooted in the dynamic relationship between fulfillment and expectation, between the current experience of the kingdom "in the Spirit" and the longing for its fulfillment in the coming of Christ. Third, this experience of time requires commitment to disciplines of prayer that are rooted in the church year.
The life of Jesus Christ changed the way the people of God experience time. Jewish weekly time was rooted in six days of work leading to a Sabbath. Holy Week narrates Jesus’ fulfillment of this time. He entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the first day of the week. He finished his work on Friday, the sixth day. This is the primary meaning of the words “It is finished” (John 19:30). The word “finished” is a form of the word “teleo” which is related to “telos.” On the cross, both time and the covenant were brought to their completion.
The experience of time in the church stands in contrast with the experience of time outside of the church, in “the world" (cf. 1 Jn. 2:15-17). Each experience of time brings us into its own narrative or story and forms us accordingly. Many Christians struggle to live out their faith because they live in the wrong time. They "believe" in the sense that they hold in their minds certain things to be true, but they are stuck in the world's experience and narrative about time. Living in the world's time and story cancels the impact of a merely cognitive faith.
In Part I, we started by acknowledging the many ways we attempt to make peace without being born again to the life of God the Trinity, without seeking earnestly to enter peace in the rest of God the Father by being conformed to the likeness of Jesus the peacemaker and the Spirit the peace-giver. In Part II, we approached and considered again the Person of Jesus, He who is the peacemaker, seeking understanding of how He enables and empowers us to know the peace of God again. In this third and final essay, I think it is now possible for us to talk about what it means to be makers of peace like Him in the world.
As we come to terms with how we’ve attempted to create false peace, we begin to yearn for the true thing. Shalom, true peace, is the creation of God, the quality of life known by all things that walk in step with His will. We cannot make peace for ourselves. It is given, and we must receive it by the terms that it is given. We must enter into it and participate in it with a sense of humility and wonder.
Peace is a concept that emerges clearly in the Biblical account of Creation. The poetry of Genesis characterizes the creation of the cosmos as God making a dwelling place for Himself. Each part of the creation story involves a kind of call-and-response as God makes a place and then fills it with life, calling each of these dwellings and dwellers “good.” On the seventh day, when God takes His rest, it is meant to invoke an image that would have been common to those familiar with the architecture of an ancient temple: the god seated in the center of the temple to consecrate it and inaugurate its operation.
The Christian hope of Resurrection is the certainty planted in our hearts by the Holy Spirit that our lives will follow the pattern of Good Friday and Easter. On Good Friday Jesus died. His spirit left his body (John 19:30, Luke 23:46) and went to the place of departed spirits. In the Old Testament, this place is called Sheol. In the New Testament, it is called Hades (translated in the Apostles’ Creed as “hell”). And his body was buried in the tomb. On the third day this process was reversed.
Many Christians live in the wrong story. The wrong story is the narrative that is bounded by time. It begins at birth and ends at death. Prayer in this story is aimed mostly at improving the quality of life between birth and death. Though “heaven” is sometimes invoked in this story, it carries with it a sense of a consolation prize. It is not the thing a person was deeply longing for; rather, it is something that will be talked about now that the person has lost the temporal life that was the real focus.
The streets of Jerusalem were empty. Observing the Sabbath, the people kept to their homes. In the upper room, the Apostles lay hunkered down, scared and despondent. Their Savior was dead, crucified and buried. Were they next? The Romans still prowled about the city on the Sabbath; were they looking for them? Would the Jewish leadership want to kill them as they had Jesus?
Like all real and good things that take practice, prayer doesn’t always come easily. In fact, as we grow in prayer, we can expect to have seasons where it is downright difficult to pray. There are a lot of reasons for this. When the newness of a habit begins to wear off and we settle into a pattern, we begin to experience new challenges to our disciplines of prayer. It is important for us to remember that difficulties in prayer are not necessarily a sign we are doing something wrong. In fact, experiencing difficulty in prayer can be a sign that we are doing exactly what we need to do. Here are some of the common difficulties that face a person who is learning to pray.
Forgiveness is the first shape salvation takes in our lives. Through confession we experience forgiveness from God and are initiated into the ministry of reconciliation. We are then sent out to practice this ministry, first in the Church and then in the world. I say ‘practice’ here to cut against the notion that forgiveness is something at which we are immediately skilled. Forgiveness is a journey, the steps of which sometimes take months or years each. But forgiveness is real and it can bring us freedom from the power of our wounds. For this to happen, though, we have to get real about those hurts we would most like to avoid. Forgiveness begins where we really need to forgive, or it does not begin at all.
In the past, I’ve written that healthy shame will turn toxic unless acted upon and held in health by a power beyond itself. Individuals and communities—including churches—will repeat cycles of toxic shame until someone intervenes. I have seen in pastoral conversations many attempts to ‘manage’ the voice of shame by negating it. We do this either through ignoring it or by trying to persuade ourselves that shame can tell us nothing and is merely a figment of a general atmospheric moralism. But no matter how boldly we shout I am not ashamed! we still are.
This post is about a way to approach contemplative prayer. I freely admit from the outset that I am no master of this art of ultimate trust in God’s love for me. Almost twenty years into my journey as an Anglican and over thirty into my life as a Christian, I am still unlearning the engrained habits of self-sufficiency.
This Lent, I am revisiting Martin Laird's remarkable little book, Into the Silent Land, as an aid to my contemplative prayer practice. For me—and I imagine I speak for many who have gone through St. Matthew's Pastoral Ministry class—Into the Silent Land was my first introduction to the Christian tradition of contemplative prayer.
Be quiet and listen. What do you hear? Do you hear an aircraft overhead? Vehicles in the street outside? The air conditioning? Can you hear the compressor on the refrigerator? The fan of the computer? Most of the time these sounds fade into the background, but it’s amazing how acute one’s hearing gets when you sit down and attempt to pray. Especially when you attempt Contemplative Prayer.
EASTER, the Day of the Resurrection, is the most important celebration of the Church. From the beginning, the Church observed a period of fasting before Easter to prepare for the feast. This season of fasting was lengthened to forty days to correspond to the forty day fasts in the Bible: The fast of Jesus in the wilderness before he was tempted by the devil (Matt. 4:1), the fast of Moses on Mt. Sinai while he was receiving the Ten Commandments (Exodus 34:28), and the fast of Elijah when he fled from Jezebel (1 Kings 19:8).
The beginning of the 18th Century saw a dramatic decrease in religious fervor, though not necessarily in religious discipline or witness. The post-reformation period saw a community attempting to maintain a witness in a world that was seeing the growth of rational thought and scientific discourse. In terms of the Church, several important events took place.
