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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1 Samuel 1-9 (tldr)
Ah, summer… a time of barbeques, sandals, and mosquito bites. For those of us living into the church Kalendar (the ‘K’ makes it extra churchy), it is also the time when we renew our relationship with 1st and 2nd Samuel during the Daily Office of Morning Prayer. Here’s a brief recap of what happened this week.
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The Artist as a Channel of God's Charity
Today, I wish to consider the self-death necessary to the vocation of the artist. This is an essential topic for creative people to consider. I suspect an unhealthy self-preoccupation haunts current dialogue around the question of what it means, and why it matters, to be an artist. Many contemporary creatives seem frequently, if not constantly, concerned with using their art to create or define themselves, and often get lauded for this work.
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Joshua's Eulogy for Moses
In our first morning prayer reading with Deuteronomy 34, we mark the end of the life of Moses. As we do every year in the Daily Office, this is a story that began in Lent 12 weeks ago, with Baby Moses, a basket and the Bulrushes in Exodus 2. Except for two breaks, we have followed the story of Moses and the Exodus through the Easter and Trinity seasons. To mark this ending, this morning I offer a eulogy for the great prophet Moses—one as I imagine Joshua might have given upon the death of his mentor and teacher.
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Touch and See (Mystagogy, Part 5)
One of the great questions in the Church’s understanding of Christ concerns the properties of His resurrected Body. From the time Jesus exits the tomb, there is something evidently different about His embodied life from how it existed prior to His Resurrection. The Evangelists take special care to demonstrate that Jesus continues to have a body, that His body is continuous in some ways with the body the disciples had known before the Passion; yet His body now possesses new properties that begin to reveal and oblige a new relationship that Christ will have with His disciples as He ascends to the Father and the Spirit comes upon them. For the final entry in our series on mystagogy, then, we turn to the sense of ‘touch’ and its place in our worship of the risen Lord.
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The Ascension as an Icon of the Church
One of my favorite aspects of icons is how they meet and include the viewer. When I look at an icon, I’m always reminded that these saints and stories are real, and that they happened, and of my part and place in the story of the Church. One of the ways icons meet the viewer is through symbols and structure. Let’s unpack an example of how icons meet us by using the image of the Ascension.
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Ears to Hear (Mystagogy, Part 2)
One of the most frequent refrains in the New Testament are the words: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” On the surface, this may sound to us like an unnecessary and obvious command. What else do ears do but hear, after all? We take for granted that our ears hear, but take a moment and listen. Now listen for the sounds that you had previously filtered out, perhaps the sound of an air conditioner or fan, the sound of people or birds outside, the sound of the refrigerator condenser or dishwasher. Did those sounds begin to exist when you heard them, or did you begin to attend to them with your ears? If you had not done so, would your life have been different?
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A Little Leaven
My sourdough starter, Xeno, turns ten this year. Short for xenophilius or, roughly, ‘the one who loves the stranger,’ he has helped us to create food both sweet and savory to host anyone who comes to our house, to provide a gift for friends and family in seasons both festive and mournful. Xeno has sired many starters over the years, and the last I checked is now officially a grand-starter with his composition of yeast and lacto-bacilii replicating as we speak in mason jars all over Southern California.
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On Liturgy: Liturgy and Experience
There is a resurgence in attraction to liturgy. This is, in part, a reaction against the subjectivity of contemporary worship. The latest new thing in worship can diminish in attraction over the years. It can come to feel like the latest attempt to manipulate the emotions—like most communication in the marketing and consumer culture.
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On Liturgy: The 1928 Book of Common Prayer
This will be the first of several posts on the topic of liturgy. The word liturgy means literally “the work of the people.” It was used in ancient Greece to refer to offerings made for the public good. However, in the church the word liturgy refers to acts of corporate worship that form us into the Body of Christ.
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Behold, the Bridegroom Cometh
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. The advent of Christ – that Coming we’ve anticipated for weeks – is imminent. Like the virgins who await the bridegroom in Matthew 25, we must wake up and trim our lamps. The Bridegroom comes. It is time to meet him.
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Our Debt to the Heretics
In our exploration of Christian heresies, we see much of the problem stems from the effort to square Jesus’s life and ministry with the oneness of God. In other words, how can there be only one God, as the Old Testament affirms, then how does Jesus fit into that equation? The heretic, whatever his motivation, usually winds up denying some aspect of Jesus in order to ‘fit’ Him into their view of God’s oneness, usually either by denying His humanity or His divinity.
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Wordlessness
The Story of a Soul is St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s spiritual autobiography. It tells the story of how, at a very young age, she conceived a passionate desire to become a Carmelite nun. She fought hard to be admitted early entry, and took the veil at the young age of 15.
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Telling Stories
Once upon a time there were no stories. Nearly 14 billion years worth of tales untold until suddenly, Man, sitting around a fire telling stories. Some were true, some were lies, and some were fictional but somehow still true. But what is a story? When someone asks for “your story”, when my mom used to make sure she was home at noon every day to watch her “stories”, or when a reporter “smells a story”, is the same word being used for the same thing or is there a core thing we call a story? How can a painting tell a story, or a piece of music? How can a shoe on the side of the road have a story behind it?
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Apollinarianism
Despite the undivided church coming together at the Council of Nicaea to lay out the basics of its understanding of the Trinity in the year AD325, the heresy of Arianism continued to flourish. If you’ll recall, Arianism posits that Jesus was not eternally present with God the Father but was rather a created being. That is why the Nicaean Creed states of Jesus;
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Adoptionism
I was not always a Christian. In fact, I wasn’t baptized until I was 40 years old. Befitting someone whose family on his mother’s side could trace their lineage to the Pilgrims, a group who thought Calvin was too Catholic, my father was not a fan of infant baptism. On the other hand, Pappy, his paternal Grandfather, had emigrated from England and inherited from him that Anglican dislike of a firm position. The result of which was that I was to ‘make my own choice,’ which took a long, long time.
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