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September 21 - October 19, 2017
Even our disordered loves bear a backhanded witness to the fact that we are made in God’s image.
But we are loved into loving.
But just as no child can be awakened to love without being loved, so too no human heart can come to an understanding of God without the free gift of his grace—in the image of his Son.
Jesus is the smile of God. That incarnational impulse to provoke our responses is continued in his body in the tangible ways he nurses and nourishes our faith, giving us bread, wine, and water along the way.
We love because he first loved us, but we learn how to love at home.
While communal worship calibrates the heart in necessary, fundamental ways, we need to take the opportunity to cultivate kingdom-oriented liturgies throughout the week.
Our discipleship practices from Monday through Saturday shouldn’t simply focus on Bible knowledge acquisition—we
Recognizing worship as the heart of discipleship doesn’t mean sequestering discipleship to Sunday; it means expanding worship to become a way of life.
we should be attentive to the rhythms and rituals that constitute the background hum of our families and should consider the telos toward which these activities are oriented.
our domestic rituals might need to be recalibrated as a result of our auditing work.
We all need to locate our households in the household of God and to situate our families within the “first family” of the church.
The practices of Christian worship carry biblical truths that are sometimes more caught than taught; they picture what God desires for us in ways that might be more powerful than explanations.
As a sacrament, baptism is not a bottom-up expression of our faith but a top-down symbol of God’s gracious promises.
Through baptism God constitutes a peculiar people who make up a new polis, a new religio-political reality (what Peter Leithart calls a “baptismal city”8) that is marked by the obliteration of social class and aristocracies of blood.
The citizens of the baptismal city are not just “have-nots”; they’re “are-nots”!
While perhaps only one person is being baptized, all of us participate in this sacrament. We, the congregation, are not there merely as spectators.
Baptism is a practice that reconstitutes our relation to other social bodies such as the family and the state.
If we are a new configuration of the polis, we are also a new configuration of the family, “the household of God” (Eph. 2:19 NRSV). In the household of God there is a relativizing of bloodlines.
Instead, the church constitutes our “first family,”12 which is both a challenge and a blessing. On the one hand, it challenges yet another sphere of rabid autonomy in late modernity: the privacy of the family. On the other hand, it comes as a welcome relief: we don’t have to raise these kids on our own!
The rituals of political liberalism (whether one is ideologically more “liberal” or more “conservative”) paint a picture of the family as the incubator of good citizens, dutiful producers, and eager consumers at the same time that it shuts up the family in a private, closed home as part of the American ideal of independence.14 The result is an unbearable weight placed on the family.
The promises in baptism indicate a very different theology of the family, which recognizes that “families work well when we do not expect them to give us all we need.”
Baptism opens the home, liberating it from the burden of impossible self-sufficiency, while also opening it to the “disruptive friendships” that are the mark of the kingdom of God.
A tacit understanding of the family and household is enacted in baptism; it is also in our wedding ceremonies. We learn how to be families in these rituals, even if we’re not consciously thinking about it.
Our interest is in the spectacle of the wedding—the event in which we get to be center stage, display our love, and invite others into our romance in a way they’ll never forget.
As Charles Taylor might put it, in our “age of authenticity,” weddings are caught up in the dynamics of “mutual display”: what’s important is being seen.
Too many weddings are spectacles in which we celebrate your dyadic bliss.
The Triune God is the center of this ceremony, exhibiting a vision of marriage in which this is also true.
When the “natural” institution of their marriage is ushered into the sanctuary, it is “the entrance of marriage into the Church, which is the entrance of the world into the ‘world to come.’”
Their marriage is a mission; together they will bear witness.
The whole life was behind—yet all of it was now present, in this silence, in this light, in this warmth, in this silent unity of hands. Present—and ready for eternity, ripe for joy. This to me remains the vision of marriage, of its heavenly beauty.
These are not crowns of royal privilege: they are the crowns of the martyrs, bearing witness to Christ.
And henceforth every Lord’s Supper will be another wedding feast, another way we learn how to be married, in which we see and smell and taste the story of the Groom who laid down his life for his Bride. Every Sunday is a marriage-renewal ceremony.
Embedding our own households and families in the household of God at once decenters our tribe, with its tendency to become an idol, and simultaneously centers us in the only community that can sustain us: the Triune God.
Communal, congregational worship locates the family in the sweep of God’s story and in the wider web of the people of God.25 From there we are sent back into our households and families, where we then have an opportunity to extend the church’s worship into our “little churches.”
But we rightly have a sense of caution when it comes to the influence of the world on our families, especially on our children. Indeed, it’s a biblical admonition: we are both incubators and defenders of our children’s hearts and minds, stewards of their imaginations, responsible for their instruction.
What if we’re constructing defenses against the intellectual blasts of ideas and messages from the world but not insulating against the sort of toxic radiation that can seep through our intellectual defenses?
what does it look like to parent lovers? What does it look like to curate a household as a formative space to direct our desires? How can a home be a place to (re)calibrate our hearts?
We need to tune our homes, and thus our hearts, to sing his grace.
Thus each household and family does well to take an audit of its daily routines, looking at them through a liturgical lens. What Story is carried in those rhythms? What vision of the good life is carried in those practices? What sorts of people are made by immersion in these cultural liturgies?
Our liturgical temptations and deformations are always contextual.
First and foremost, our households need to be caught up in the wider household of God: the liturgies of our homes should grow out of, and amplify, the formative liturgy of Word and Table.
The formative liturgies of a Christian home depend on the ecclesial capital of the church’s worship.
To do so, such worship needs to traffic in the aesthetic currency of the imagination—story, poetry, music, symbols, and images.
There is something at work in the lilt of a melody and the poetry of a hymn that makes the biblical story seep into us indelibly.
This is an important point: the formative rituals of the household are not just “private” exercises; they have a public impact precisely insofar as household formation, like communal formation and worship, ends in sending.
Instead, we want to be intentional about the formative rhythms of the household
Creation is always more than we see. What might appear “natural” is suffused with God’s grandeur.
Micro rituals can have macro implications.
Even mourning takes practice: resisting the distractions that insulate us from facing up to the tragedy of the world in which we find ourselves, we need to teach our children to mourn for neighbors who bear the brunt of injustice, even though we grieve as those with hope (1 Thess. 4:13). Sometimes in this fallen world the best thing we can do is teach our children how to be sad.
“Cultivate Imagination,” it exhorts. Amen.
