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January 4 - January 8, 2022
They let us be as complex as we actually are.
Many feel that the church (if it’s necessary at all) is primarily intended to serve our individual spiritual needs or to group us together with like-minded people—a kind of holy fraternity.
If we believe that church is merely a voluntary society of people with shared values, then it is entirely optional. If the church helps you with your personal relationship with God, great; if not, I know a great brunch place that’s open on Sunday.
God is never less than an intimate relationship with Christ, but it is always more than that.
“He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”
When we confess in the Nicene Creed that we believe in “one holy, catholic, apostolic church,” we are confessing that we cannot know Christ on our own, or merely with a small cadre of our friends.
I used to attend together, often asked us to imagine the communion table stretching on for miles, to remind us that when we take Communion, we mysteriously feast with all those who are in Christ.
Yet many believers of my generation are not sure what the church is for. Some have denigrated the need for it all together. We have produced a me-centered faith that would be foreign to most Christians throughout history.
Flannery O’Connor said, “You have to suffer as much from the church as for it. . . . The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed.”
Ramsey challenges us: Before Christians can say things about what the church ought to be, their first need is to say what the Church is, here and now amid its own failures and the questionings of the bewildered.
Some of those I practice call and response with each week would not be people I’d ever want to go with on a long road trip.
The people of God are the losers, misfits, and broken. This is good news—and humiliating.
Lesslie Newbigin put it, “None of us can be made whole till we are made whole together.”9 If we are saved at all, we are saved together.
it was the church, not Starbucks, that created coffee culture.4 Coffee was first invented by Ethiopian monks—the term cappuccino refers to the shade of brown used for the habits of the Capuchin monks of Italy. Coffee is born of extravagance, an extravagant God who formed an extravagant people, who formed a craft out of the pleasures of roasted beans and frothed milk.
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
Chesterton
It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.
Chesterton
We learn what we believe, as James K. A. Smith says, from our “body up.”
But it takes strength to enjoy the world, and we must exercise a kind of muscle to revel and delight.
“You don’t need to give anything up. Your whole life is Lent right now.”
[We] shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest.
My disordered sleep reveals a disordered love, idols of entertainment or productivity.
Sleep habits also reveal and shape what we trust.
Wendell Berry warned, “It is easy . . . to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
Worn-out ministers are part of our evangelical heritage. They’re our predecessors and our heroes. And many of us continue in that legacy. We are worn-out ministers, worn-out parents, worn-out business people, worn-out believers.
“The liturgy is the place where we wait for Jesus to show up. We don’t have to do much. The liturgy is not an act of will. It is not a series of activities designed to attain a spiritual or mental state.”
Eugene Peterson says, “The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace. We go to sleep and God begins his work.”
In his brief theology of sleep, Scottish pastor John Baillie writes that in Christ, we “wake up better men than when we went to sleep.”16 If it is hard for us to believe that God is at work in us and in the world even while we sleep, it reveals who we truly think is the mover and maker of our lives and spiritual health.
What if Christians were known as a countercultural community of the well-rested—people who embrace our limits with zest and even joy?
And glory be to the Word, from whom any goodness in our little words flows, and by whom they will be redeemed.
