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June 5 - June 8, 2024
There can be a deep sense of purposelessness in modern work, in our day in and day out punching the clock.
“ministry of competence.”11
In our modern-day society, when we are blessed and sent to go do the work God has given us to do, we are sent into a culture where work can become all-consuming and boundless.
Hilton challenged this man to stay in his profession and to embrace “a third way, a mixed life combining the activity of Martha with the reflectiveness of Mary.”
This third way avoids the frenzied workaholism that arises from our attempts to earn our own blessedness and steer our own destinies. And yet it doesn’t abandon our daily tasks, nor does it devalue them as less holy.
Living a third way of work—where we seek vocational holiness in and through our work even as we resist the idolatry of work and accomplishment—allows us to live with work as a form of prayer.
Christians are people who wait. We live in liminal time, in the already and not yet. Christ has come, and he will come again. We dwell in the meantime. We wait.
In the church calendar we learn the rhythm of life through narrative. Every week we reenact God’s creative work and rest. Every year we retell the story of Jesus. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany: the story of God’s people longing for a Messiah, Christ’s birth, and then, slowly, his revelation as a King to all the world. Lent, Easter, Pentecost: the story of Christ’s temptation, life in a fallen world, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension, and then the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church.
When we practice the Sabbath, we not only look back to God’s rest after his work of creation but we look forward to the rest ahead, to the Sabbath to come when God will finish his work of re-creation.
Before Easter, we have Lent. Before Christmas, we have Advent. We fast. Then we feast.
Time is a gift from God,
time is not a commodity that I control, manage, or consume.
Practicing the liturgical calendar is a counterformation to a culture of impatience. It sets us apart as a peculiar people who resist what James K. A. Smith calls “the incessant 24/7-ness of our frenetic commercial culture.”6
“I always felt like I was waiting for the gift. But I’ve come to see that the waiting is the gift.”7
Our waiting is active and purposeful. My
We are oriented to our future hope, yet we do not try to escape from our present reality, from the real and pressing brokenness and suffering in the world.
Christian friendships are call-and-response friendships. We tell each other over and over, back and forth, the truth of who we are and who God is.
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.
it is impossible to have a relationship with Christ outside of a vital relationship with the church, Christ’s body and bride.
“He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”
paradosis—the faithful handing down of the gospel, a process that is always embodied and that happens in real time with real people (1 Cor 11:2; 2 Thess 2:15).
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.
There is no merely private faith—everything we are and do as individuals affects the church community.
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.
We do not know this Messiah solely through the red letters in the gospel texts. We know him in his fullness because we are joined to him in his Body, the church. In this joining, we do not lose our individuality or our individual stories of conversion and encounter with Christ. Instead, our own small stories are wrapped up in the story of all believers throughout time, which are together part of the eternal story of Christ.
Yet Christ’s bride and body, which will one day be spotless and whole, is currently blemished and broken.
Any of us who have hung around the church long enough have a few scars to show.
was once deeply wounded by someone in a position of power in my church. Suddenly, a place that had always been a refuge for me became a place of rejection and condemnation.
I take hope in what the church will one day become—that we, despite our sin, failure, and pain, will one day be made beautiful and new. Yet our task is not simply to dwell on what the church will one day be, but to face what she currently is squarely and honestly, and to seek Christ in
And here’s a further complication: the church is not an entity outside of me. I do not stand on the outside looking in. I am as much part of the church as (in the words of Paul) a hand is a part of a body.
in this body of Christ, we find a place where we can be gloriously and devastatingly human. We find a place where we can fail and repent and grow and receive grace and be made new. Like a family—but even closer than a family—we can learn to live together, weak and human, in the goodness and transformation of God.
A local congregation, a parish, is our small, concrete entry into the universal church. It is the basic unit of Christian community and the place where we encounter God in Word and sacrament.
The people of God are the losers, misfits, and broken.
God loves and delights in the people in the pews around me and dares me to find beauty in them.
We work out our faith with these other broken men and women around us in the pews.
To be clear, Rebekka and I are not the church by ourselves. Nor are our relationships with close friends a stand-in for the church. The church is an eternal body, an international organism, an institution made of every tribe, tongue, and nation (Rev 7:9).
After God finishes each creative work in Genesis 1, he declares his creation “good” and lavishly gives us free reign to enjoy its goodness.
Pleasure is our deep human response to an encounter with beauty and goodness. In these moments of pleasure—of delight, enjoyment, awe, and revelry—we respond to God impulsively with our very bodies: “Yes, we agree! Your creation is very good.”
Our culture’s relationship with pleasure is complex. On one hand, we seem obsessed with pleasure. We overindulge and overeat. We are addicted to amusement and are overwhelmed by pornography, sexual gratuity, and violence, both on screens and off. Ironically, greed and consumerism dull our delight. The more we indulge, the less pleasure we find. We are hedonistic cynics and gluttonous stoics. In our consumerist society we spend endless energy and money seeking pleasure, but we are never sated.
A culture formed by the gospel will honor good and right enjoyment, celebration, and sensuousness.
When we enjoy God’s creation, we reflect God himself.
Chesterton imagines that God revels in the pleasure of his creation like an enthusiastic child:
Our God-given, innate thirst for enjoyment and sensuousness is directed toward the one who alone can quench it, the God who we were made to enjoy forever.
The word sanctuary refers to a holy place but, because churches were once places of legal asylum, the term has also come to mean a place of shelter, a haven, or a refuge.
But it takes strength to enjoy the world, and we must exercise a kind of muscle to revel and delight. If we neglect exercising that muscle—if we never savor a lazy afternoon, if we must always be cleaning out the fridge or volunteering at church or clocking in more hours—we’ll forget how to notice beauty and we’ll miss the unmistakable reality of goodness that pleasure trains us to see.
“You don’t need to give anything up. Your whole life is Lent right now.” He told me to take up the practice of pleasure: to intentionally embrace enjoyment as a discipline.14
Pleasure is a gift, but it can become an idol.
Enjoyment requires discernment.
My pleasure in wine or tea or exercise is good in itself but can become disordered. As we learn to practice enjoyment, we need to learn the craft of discernment—how to enjoy rightly, to “have” and “read” pleasure well.
If rest is learned through habit and repetition, so is restlessness. These habits of rest or restlessness form us over time.
