Marginal Christianity

 AUGUST 21, 2017 BY  LEAH D. SCHADE    14 COMMENTS 147      Psalm 137 is rarely ever used in worship. Why? Because it is a dangerous psalm.  But we need to read it, study it, and listen to the voice of anguished rage.  Because God is listening to those voices as well. I remember the first time I heard this music from  Godspell .  What a beautiful, mournful song, I thought to myself.  And I know I’ve heard those words before . . . “On the willows there we hung up our lyres.”  Such beautiful, haunting words.  Where have I heard them before?  And then it hit me – Psalm 137.  But I noticed that the song’s lyrics stopped short of the last verses of the Psalm:  “Happy will be the one who does to you what you did to us, O Babylon.  Blessed will be the one who dashes your little ones, your babies against the rock.” What an awful image! It’s hard to believe a Psalm like this is in the Bi...

Lent: Call to an Altared/Altered Life Romans 12:1-2 12  1-2  So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.   (The Message) Second Sunday in Lent Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Lent is about re-Altaring and re-Altering our lives. Worship (Altaring) and our response (altering) go hand-in-hand. -Hands and feet will follow our he...

Revelation 1:4-8 (04) Before we begin today it might help us get where we need to be to by considering this paragraph of A Declaration of Faith , a PCUSA piece and, imho, a very fine piece of narrative theology. Reflect on the following for a few moments before picking up our exposition of Revelation as a “Resistical” Worship service. We are certain that Jesus lives.                                                                                He lives as God with us,                                                     ...

A Proposal for Reading this Book (02) Jesus Messiah vs. Trump – that’s the version of Empire we’re called to engage at present. Empires being empires are always idolatrous (it’s the nature of the beast). In fact, that’s the way our book, Revelation, portrays the empire it engaged – a beast (Rev.13). It ill behooves us too misunderstand this. This beast certainly does not lie beyond God’s sovereignty or ability to use (Rom.13:1-7) or ours to use it benefits when appropriate (Acts 22:25-26) or its ultimate judgment and destruction (Rev.19:17ff.). Nevertheless, this beast lives as the dragon’s chief agent and antagonist to God and God’s people. Remember Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia?   The Trump version of American Empire tends in these early days of its reign to the “more" side of the “more of less” continuum of overt beastliness. As Steve Bannon, Trump’s confidant, comment, “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when the...

by Peter J. Leithart 11 . 19 . 15   Modern sports are not simple competition between the two teams. If they were only about physical competition, games would be shorter, less glitzy, less energetic. Sports are ritualized events, liturgies. The crowd’s behavior is deliberately intensified with ritual elements – with mascots who emblemize the team, with fight songs that energize and bind the fans into a single singing unit, with the moments of drama like the team’s bursting through the paper barrier as they come onto the field from the lockerrom for the first time, halftime entertainments. At higher levels, the ritual gets more complex. The Super Bowl is the great annual rite of America’s athletic-military-entertainment complex. The game is integrated into the American dream not only by the singing of the national anthem, but by the F16 flyover. Halftime is extended to make room for popular celebrity singers to perform to raucous crowds. You don’t have to be at the g...

Written by Keith Anderson . Posted by Bearings on May 7, 2015 , in 21stCenturyMinistry Can you hear it? It’s the sound of Mainline ministry leaders around the country breathing deep sighs of relief, patting themselves on the back, and smiling in self-congratulation in response to the recent news that what Millennials—that generation woefully absent from their churches—really want from the church is . . . the sacraments. In her new book, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church , Rachel Held Evans chronicles her journey from the evangelicalism of her youth and young adulthood to The Episcopal Church. That shift is grounded in, and the book is organized around, the seven historic sacraments recognized by Anglo-Catholic Episcopalians: baptism, confession, holy orders (ordination), communion, confirmation, anointing the sick, and marriage. In a recent and widely shared opinion piece for The Washington Post , “Want millennials back in the pews? Stop trying to m...

Thesis “Church” is a word that has suffered the death of a thousand indignities, many of them self-inflicted. The word does little more now than name an irrelevancy, a blasphemy, or danger for many in our culture. It badly needs rehabilitation of its identity and integrity. Essential is a fresh image that captures what church is about that has been lost or obscured and rendered in an idiom that recaptures the sharp edge of its calling. In America, I contend, that image is the church as God's “Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement” (SCRM). After Genesis 3 the nature and shape of God's people has been a community sent by God to subvert the attitudes, actions, relationships, patterns, and social organizations set humanity in revolt against God. This subversive counter-revolutionary action is the kind of life God intends for all humanity. It takes it subversive counter-revolutionary shape in a fallen world because of the resistance God's people meet and has to act ...

The design of a space is never neutral; it always communicates some specific value. For example, what does it say about someone’s values if they set their living room T.V. off in a corner, while all the furniture is turned towards a window looking out into the back yard? The way a room is set up communicates certain values. Physical spaces have a way of shaping our feelings and even behavior. The church worship gathering is no different.   How we design the physical space of our worship gatherings matter.   How does our gathering space shape us for mission? How does it shape us for community?   We already ask interrogating questions in relation to preaching since we are so intensely an information-transaction-culture. Yet we often forget to inspect the mediums we are using to communicate those messages.  What if the medium we use has a message of its own?  The very spatial mediums we use to communicate those messages shape and architect  us...

December 26, 2014 Lessons & Carols at St. James Church on Madison Avenue. Sadly, I was not here on Christmas Eve. I WAS a visitor this year at the midnight service on Christmas Eve in a venerable, colonial-era parish here in our fair Diocese of New York. The distinguishing feature of the service, other than beautiful music, was its utter theological barrenness. There was, apart from what the layman could take for himself from the lessons (and, of course, the theology-heavy Christmas hymns), not a thing by way of instruction in “this thing which is come to pass.” Eucharistic Prayer D most certainly did not contribute any theological content, and the sermon was dead on arrival. But the first sign that something was amiss came at the end of the Old and New Testament lessons, where, omitting the customary (and very fine) The word of the Lord , the bulletin instead enjoined the congregation to Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people . As we have already dispatched ...

  October 8, 2013 In the continuing scholarly discussion about the origins and nature of earliest “Jesus-devotion” (my term for the reverence given to the risen/exalted Jesus in early Christian beliefs, proclamation, and worship), a question repeatedly emerges, especially from the general public:  Did Jesus demand that he be so reverenced? In fact, not long after my book, Lord Jesus Christ:  Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity appeared (Eerdmans, 2003), I was invited by the editor of Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus to address basically the question of what kind of reverence was likely offered to the “earthly” Jesus.  My article on the question appeared in the journal in 2003 (pp. 131-46):  “Homage to the Historical Jesus and Early Christian Devotion,” and was re-published as a chapter in my book, How on Earth did Jesus Become a God? (Eerdmans, 2005, pp. 134-51). Essentially, I contend that a critical sifting of ...

The Holy Eucharist is supposed to be boring. So claims the Catholic theologian James Alison . He says, “When people tell me that they find Mass boring, I want to say to them: it’s supposed to be boring, or at least seriously underwhelming. It’s a long term education in becoming un-excited.” He’s right, I think. Let me explain. Alison’s claim about the Mass being boring or unexciting comes in the course of his contrasting false worship with True Worship. Alison has a broad understanding about what counts as worship. In a manner similar to James K.A. Smith’s arguments about liturgy, Alison finds instances of worship in many cultural practices: “football matches, celebrity cults, raves, initiation hazings, newspaper sales techniques and so on,” pretty much any cultural practice that involves the formation of a group of people. For Alison, all these forms of worship are part of the warp and woof of the violence of this devastated world. So, while Christian worship is analogicall...

  Brain research says our efforts to make church comfortable may backfire.  My six year old daughter is the most competitive personality in our home. While the other kindergarteners on her t-ball team are picking dandelions in the outfield, Lucy remains vigilant and “baseball ready” to make the play of the game. She recently came home from a summer backyard Bible camp disappointed. “The games were too easy,” she insisted. “They need to make it harder to win.” Lucy’s desire to be challenged reveals a fact often neglected in our culture--we only grow when we are uncomfortable, and too much comfort is not only be harmful but can be downright dangerous. For example, a recent FAA study found that pilots are losing critical flying skills because they are under-challenged by state-of-the art planes that virtually fly themselves. Ironically, the push for safety through computer flying is leading to more accidents as pilots “abdicate too much responsibility to automated systems....

http://www.missioalliance.org/in-defense-of-the-boring-church-sitting-still-for-the-spirit/?utm_content=buffer842f8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer 0 Sidenotes What do you think? A few Monday mornings ago worn out after a full Sunday of worship services, I made the mistake of rolling over in bed, picking up my cell phone, and opening my mobile Facebook page. Staring at me from my “news feed” was a picture of inflatable Bible figures in what looked like a red-walled dance club posted by a member of my congregation. I knew immediately that this scene wasn’t from mychurch, and the accompanying comment confirmed my suspicion. +   This young family was leaving my church for brighter, flashier, and more exciting ecclesial pastures. They had finally found a church their son could be happy in (and so they were happy, too). He had even received an ice cream sandwich after the Bible story time. Who can blame the parents’ r...