The Great Litany is a list of petitions the Church offers to God "especially in times of war, or of national anxiety, or of disaster (The Book of Common Prayer, 154)." You can find the liturgy for The Great Litany HERE.
Pentecost & The Killing of George Floyd
[This article was originally published for BreakPoint and you can find it here.]
O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere and fillest all things; Treasury of Blessings, and Giver of Life – come and abide in us, and cleanse us from every impurity, and save our souls, O Good One. – Eastern Orthodox Prayer
This past Sunday was the Feast of Pentecost for many Christians around the world. It’s the day we celebrate the Holy Spirit’s descent. At my church there were assigned prayers and readings that reflect upon the meaning of Pentecost. Usually, (outside of a global pandemic) everyone wears clothes of red, the liturgical color that symbolizes the Holy Spirit, as in red tongues of fire. It’s also one of the five feast days when, ordinarily, the sacrament of Baptism is celebrated. This fact invites us to reflect on the role of the Holy Spirit in salvation.
Looking over the prayers and readings for Sunday, one Pentecost theme stands out above all others: The Holy Spirit reunifies a divided humanity. This theme is clear in the fundamental story of Pentecost found in Acts 2. When the Holy Spirit comes, the division of humanity that occurred at the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 is reversed. From chaotic division to gospel unity. That’s what the Holy Spirit does.
On Pentecost Sunday, our worship reflects this theme explicitly, over and over again. We begin our service with these words:
Celebrant: There is one Body and one Spirit;
People: There is one hope in God’s call to us;
Celebrant: One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism;
People: One God and Father of all.
– The Book of Common Prayer (BCP), 299.
Then the Priest prays the prayer of the day:
Almighty God, on this day you opened the way of eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit: Shed abroad this gift throughout the world by the preaching of the Gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever, Amen. – BCP, 227.
Then we have the Acts 2 reading, followed later by the renewal of baptismal vows when we are asked:
Celebrant: Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
People: I will, with God’s help. – BCP, 417.
Friends, this is not only the providence of God on display, it is the counter-cultural nature of Christian worship at its best. This Sunday we were invited to reenact God’s story in such a way that we remember His vision for a redeemed humanity, one where “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).”
We are called to grieve how far from this vision our sinful divisions have taken us. And we will sing, pray, and long for the fulfillment of that vision once again.
In other words, in this Feast of Pentecost, Christians around the world can grieve a world in which George Floyd has died, yearn for a world where racism and all other human divisions are no more, and expect the comfort and assistance toward this end that only God, the Holy Spirit, can bring.
This is the world that awaits, where “the songs of peaceful Zion thunder like a mighty flood” because “Jesus out of ev’ry nation has redeemed us by His blood.” (William Dix, Alleluia Sing to Jesus).
Christianity, Tech, & Grief in our Viral Moment
THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST WRITTEN FOR AND PUBLISHED BY BREAKPOINT.
For the past two weeks, my church in Orlando has been, like many churches around the world, hard at work responding to the coronavirus crisis:
How will we care for those effected by the virus? How will we continue our worshiping life, carry on leadership meetings, and handle a possible loss of financial support?
One of the tools helping us answer these questions has been technology. In fact, technology has been one of the only tools available to us in a time when local officials have asked us to stay home. So, we began livestreaming our liturgies and communicating daily with our congregation through emails and social media platforms. This has given all of us comfort and a needed (albeit disembodied and virtual) sense of connectedness during the uncertainty of this pandemic.
But I have to make a confession. A quiet unease has been lurking in my soul with every virtual worship service I participate in. It’s a dissonance between the reality of the global pandemic and my (subconscious?) attempts, via technology, to keep my life as “normal” as possible, in the realms where such false normalcy is possible: my emotions, my relationships, and my spiritual life.
“The six feet of physical distance between me and the person in line at the grocery store, not to mention the empty streets and closed businesses in my city, confronts me with this reality.”
Let me explain.
Physically speaking, the truth of the tragedy facing our world is unavoidable: the entire globe has ceased to function. The six feet of physical distance between me and the person in line at the grocery store, not to mention the empty streets and closed businesses in my city, confronts me with this reality.
But, if I so choose, with technology, I can leave this bleak physical existence and, thanks to emotion-numbing Netflix series, small group Facetime hang outs, and live-streamed worship, live relatively the same life I had before this whole thing started. Pandemic who?
Let me be clear. Technology isn’t the enemy. I’m no Luddite. I’ve read recent articles addressing these issues that sound, to my pastoral ears, unsafe on the one hand, or grumpy on the other. I’d prefer to avoid both postures, if possible. I believe technology is great until it becomes, like any gift of God, one more creative way we avoid the frailty of our humanity and the hunger of our souls; that is, our need for God.
But our use of technology the past few weeks has come dangerously close to the story of Job whose friends repeatedly offered him cheap answers to the question of the overwhelming tragedy that had beset his life. Such answers were no doubt attractive options for Job in ending the tension he lived between a God who claimed to be good and the unspeakable tragedy that God allowed. (In the end, even God Himself refused to give Job explanations for the evil he had endured, opting instead to remind Job of the trustworthiness of His own authoritative identity as God, the maker of heaven, earth, and every mystery in between.)
Aren’t Christians people who tell the truth, as best we can, according to God’s word, about ourselves, our world, and about God? To lose this calling is to lose ourselves and our mission, right? This was the kind of prophetic calling that Flannery O’Connor embraced. She awakened readers to their universal need for God’s grace by refusing to shield them from the violence and grotesque brokenness of a world in need of a savior. In the face of Covid-19, I believe this is now our calling, too.
What if this pandemic is offering us as Christians an opportunity to show the world not how to avoid human pain, but how to process it with honesty, endurance, sacrifice, Christ-like compassion, and most importantly, the hope of eternal life offered in Jesus Christ?
Normally, in these articles, my thoughts would end here. If you’ve had your fill, stop now! If, on the other hand, you want one (admittedly technology-addicted person’s) practical suggestion for moving into the days ahead, read on. It’s actually just one word.
“Grieve because, “Jesus wept.” This verse of Scripture, infamous for its brevity, is a profound statement about dealing with tragedy honestly as the beloved people of God.”
Grieve.
Grieve because the overwhelming presence of laments in the book of Psalms, more than any other genre, are instructive for us in all times of life, but especially during a global human crisis. Psalm 4, for instance, is a Psalm of Lament prayed in the liturgy of Compline right before sleep.
Grieve because, “Jesus wept.” This verse of Scripture, infamous for its brevity, is a profound statement about dealing with tragedy honestly as the beloved people of God. Be sure to read the context of the verse- that wonderfully moving story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Incidentally (providentially) this was the gospel story assigned to be read in many churches all around the world this past Sunday, March 29th!
Finally, grieve because sadness is what healthy humans do with tragedy in a fallen world. Grieving evil will actually move you toward sanity, toward healthy relationships, and toward intimacy with God.
I’ll leave you with these encouraging words from author, Mike Mason, in his work, Practicing the Presence of People, about the nature of grief:
Sadness signals change…It is an intermediate emotion, a feeling that is going somewhere. Like a seventh or a ninth chord in music, it is rich in subtle tones that tend toward resolution, lean toward home. This is what distinguishes sadness from moroseness, self-pity, or depression, all of which have a feeling of stuckness. Sadness is always in motion in the backfield. You will know the real thing by this sense of movement toward happiness. In photographs, crying and laughing are hard to tell apart.
Sadness is like that moment in a rainstorm when the rain has not yet stopped, but there is a perceptible brightening, and there comes that subtle change in the atmosphere signifying the imminence of a rainbow. Sadness is hopeful. Anger feels hard in the body, fear feels alien, and depression is like a dull poison. But sadness is at home in flesh and blood. It is a soft and relaxed presence, a comfortable garment for the heart.
FORMA Podcast
The Chaos Of Christmas
This article was first written for and published by BreakPoint.
Have you ever noticed how in the Christmas movies that they always seem to involve Christmas in chaos? For Charlie Brown, it’s commercialism. For George Bailey, it’s financial ruin. For Chevy Chase, it’s cousin Eddie and a violent, loose, squirrel.
Vanity Fair observed a few years ago out that it was Ralphie with his Red Ryder BB Gun and dysfunctional family in 1983 that upended the sentimental old order of Christmas movies by showing something every family could recognize, but I think the connection between chaos and Christmas goes back earlier than that . . . way earlier.
Songwriter Andrew Peterson describes the chaos poignantly:
It was not a silent night. There was blood on the ground.
You could hear a woman cry in the alley ways that night
on the streets of David’s town.
And the stable wasn’t clean. The cobblestones were cold.
And little Mary full of grace with tears upon her face,
According to the Gospel of Matthew, the chaos of the very first Christmas included a shameful public scandal, frightening visits from other-worldly messengers, a harrowing escape from a maniacal and murderous politician, and a birthing room would have made Motel 6 look like a resort.
Matthew tells us, “When Mary had been engaged to Joseph, before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit…”
It’s easy to read this story and forget that, for Joseph, as it would be for any unsuspecting husband in the months before his honeymoon, the news of Mary’s pregnancy meant betrayal at the deepest level. It meant, most likely, the loss of his future plans- a life together with Mary and whatever family they may have had. It also meant the end of a mutual financial arrangement between the couple’s two families.
Matthew goes on: “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly.”
More than just a story of personal betrayal, this unplanned (and inexplicable) pregnancy before marriage meant, in those days and in that culture, almost the certain punishment of death for Mary. Scholars point out that Joseph would have been within his rights according to contemporary customs to turn Mary in and let her face this punishment.
Are you feeling the “Christmas spirit” yet?
The chaos keeps coming:
An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife…She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.
In other words, God is asking Joseph to let go of what most men in that culture valued most: the continuation of one’s own family lineage through the natural birth and naming of a firstborn son.
Joseph’s chaos included losing this dream, too.
On the third Sunday of Advent each year, my church prays a famous prayer used by Christians in worship since the 700s A.D.
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us . . .
When I think of the chaos of Mary and Joseph’s Christmas, and our own, I’m tempted to qualify the petition with something like:
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us . . . but not with a job loss, Lord! Don’t come among us with that. And please don’t come among us with a trip to the hospital or a family argument…
The Church has long pointed to Joseph as a model Christian father, and rightly so, because Saint Matthew concludes Joseph’s story like this:
When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him…
In other words, instead of quietly dismissing Mary, which could have been Joseph’s otherwise reasonable attempt to avoid the chaos, suffering, and disruption, he obeyed God.
Maybe the reason we all connect with the chaos of Christmas specials is because they shine a light on the fundamental- but unsentimental- truth that our salvation appeared with suffering, that divinity arrived with disruption, and that Christmas came, all those years ago, in the midst of chaos.
This year, instead of quietly dismissing the chaos, suffering, and disruptions, what if we engaged it with faith and obedience, trusting that God’s disruptive activity in our lives will lead, like it did for Joseph, to the welcoming of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
A few years ago, I recorded an arrangement of Joy to The World that sought to capture the juxtaposition of the joy and chaos of Christmas. You can check it out below.
Christ In My Heart, in My Mind, in Ten Thousand Places
THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST WRITTEN FOR AND PUBLISHED BY BREAKPOINT.
As a kid in church I remember singing, ad nauseam, “I’ve got that joy, joy, joy… where? Down in my heart.” So, one day I prayed that Jesus Christ would come into my life, but then I wondered where he would live. And my childlike theology answered, “Oh, right. Down in my heart.”
As I grew to an adolescent, I asked a Sunday School teacher how I would know God’s will for my life, particularly the important things like whether I should date Lindsay, from the 9th grade, and he told me, “Pray and you’ll know in your heart what God wants you to do.”
Now, it’s easy to poke fun at this kind of thinking, but this focus on my heart as an essential and precious lesson for any young Christian. It is a lesson evangelicalism teaches well in its songs, prayers, preaching, and culture. It’s one I’m grateful to have learned.
Unfortunately, in my context, this lesson was matched with an equal disinterest in anything outside of my heart. The physical stuff around me, for example, was apparently going to hell in a hand-basket, and Christians were just a-passin’ through this world on our way to heaven. We learned that if we turned our eyes on Jesus, the things of earth would “grow strangely dim.”
In other words, by age ten, I was a Christian with a more or less Gnostic understanding of the Christian faith. As I saw it then, my relationship with God belonged to the spiritual, not the physical, world.
Christ In My Mind
Eight years later, I attended a Christian college where I was introduced to Christian thinkers like C.S. Lewis, John Piper, and the Westminster Divines. I experienced a new (and needed) lesson about faith that A.W. Tozer sums up well in his often-quoted line, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
Majoring in Bible, I took courses on epistemology and theological method, and participated in late-night dorm room discussions on the Five Points of Calvinism. It was invigorating and fresh and I was happy to be exercising these new “muscles” in the mental gymnastics of theology. In fact, this brave, new, intellectual world of Christianity gave my faith a new lease on life, especially since my typically tumultuous adolescent experience had left me cynical of my “heart.”
By the time I got to seminary my heart loved Jesus, and my mind wanted to know Him, but the rest of me, and the rest of the world, was still nowhere to be found in my faith. The gnostic dualism of physical against spiritual was very much alive.
Christ In Ten Thousand Places
Near the end of seminary, I read the late Eugene Peterson’s book, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. The book’s words deeply impacted me. Peterson took his title from this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
I say móre: the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is — Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
[To hear a great conversation between Eugene Peterson and Ken Myers about Peterson’s book, go here.]
Also, around this time, I began visiting churches whose liturgies reflected the more embodied theology and practices of the ancient Church. The sensory experiences of liturgical worship matched what I had learned from Peterson: Jesus Christ is not just in my heart and mind; He’s in my body, and in ten thousand other physical places in this world, “Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.” Wasn’t this the point of His incarnation?
Altogether, this meant that, finally, for the first time in my Christian life, the existence of the physical world was no longer extra, or mundane, or some kind of danger to my spiritual life. Instead, I realized, it was sacramental, full of the grace and meaning given to it by Christ’s incarnation! All water suddenly became a reminder of my baptism. All bread and all wine were now reminders that God became man to make all things- visible and invisible- new.
In the end, my journey of discovering Christ in ten thousand places found its way into a song. You can hear it below.
Count The Stars: Hope
This article was first written for and published by BreakPoint.
One clear night, I went camping with friends on the banks of the Chickamauga Lake, just down the street from my house when I was a teenager in Tennessee. About one or two in the morning we put a canoe in the water and rowed out into the middle of the lake 150 yards from shore, until our campfire became a tiny dot of orange on the sand.
There, in the middle of the lake, surrounded by darkness and the sound of water splashing up against our canoe, we’d lay back and stare in awe at the millions of stars above our heads, stars that were only visible to us because of the blue, purple, and black darkness of the night sky.
Little-known poet, Sarah Williams, wrote, “I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.” My song, “Count the Stars,” is a song about this: being too fond of the stars to be afraid of the night. It’s a song about being too fond of God’s promise to surrender to my doubt, too fond of Christian hope to surrender to despair.
“Count the Stars” was written a number of years ago for my church as we studied the darkness, doubt, despair – and hope – of Abraham and Sarah from the book of Genesis. Theirs is a heartbreaking story of infertility, but also one whose promise of hope was declared in the stars lighting the darkness.
Astute Bible readers will note that the entire biblical narrative hangs on whether or not God blesses them with a son. Only through Abraham’s lineage do we get the Messiah. Only through the Messiah do you and I get grafted in to Abraham’s family. In other words, there is a sense in which weare some of the stars God told Abraham to count in Genesis 15!
Back at church, during the sermon series, some close friends of ours were, like Abraham and Sarah, struggling with infertility. Our community watched as Paul and Jessica longed for a child month after month. Amidst the tearful conversations and processing we had with Paul and Jess, one truth hit me the hardest: the emptiness of Jess’ womb was not the worst part of the pain.
The worst part was the hope required of Paul and Jess to continue coming to church, to continue praying, to keep rejoicing with every new expecting mom in our church, and to keep trying – again and again – for a child of their own. Hope was the hardest part.
Hope, according to philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Camus, is absurd, senseless, and stupid; especially religious hope. “Hope,” wrote Nietzsche, “is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
People with religious hope, Camus said, are like the character of Sisyphusfrom Greek Mythology, a man sentenced by the gods to roll a rock up a hill everyday only to have it tumble back down once he reached the top.
But, their “hope” is not our hope.
Abraham and Sarah’s story in Genesis is paradigmatic of God’s hope-filled way of doing things in the Scriptures. Their story asks us to read the Bible through a kind of hermeneutic of hope.
God seems drawn to human emptiness like a moth to a flame, anxious to fill the widow’s jar with oil, the barren wombs with life, the darkness with light, the wedding jars of Cana with wine, the bellies of the crowds with loaves and fish, and the tomb with resurrection. Against the backdrop of human doubt, God’s glory, like the stars, shines brightest.
May the same be true for us – that we would see God’s glory, especially in the Promised One, Jesus Christ, shining brighter than our dreams for ourselves.