Our Humble and Hearty Thanks

"There is something about gratitude that is so fundamentally different to grumbling." 

Back in February I wrote a piece that prescribed thankfulness as an antidote to grumbling, and speculated that the authors of the Book of Common Prayer had noticed the same dynamic. Well, it seems that the good folk at the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation are also aware of this dynamic, as David Powlison - editor of the excellent Journal of Biblical Counseling - describes in this video:

Why Liturgy?

Alison and I recently put together a Lenten supplement to our work last year during Advent. What follows here is the introduction I wrote for the resource, briefly outlining the place of worship in formation. You can view the rest of the resource here.

One way of approaching Christian anthropology is to say that humans are lovers. We are what is known as Homo Liturgicus; liturgical animals, who can‘t not worship. That before you say anything else about humans, whether it be as rational beings or believers, you must say that we are lovers. The centre of gravity of a human person is not the brain but the kardia – the heart. Although there is deep and complex relationship between our heart, mind, will, affections, and body, we are, when it comes down to it, made to love and be loved. 

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”
                                                                                    (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’”
                                                                                    (Matthew 22:36-39)

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."
                                                                                    (Augustine of Hippo)

It follows then that one of the major changes wrought on humans by the entry of sin, evil and death into God’s good world was on our heart. We become people who loved the wrong things. We love the creation rather than the creator. We make good things ultimate things, instead of receiving them as gifts of a kind and gracious Father. And instead of cherishing something for the thing itself, we use and abuse them, as we look to them to give something they weren’t created to provide. Our desires are disordered.

The work of the Holy Spirit amongst who have been united to Christ and justified by grace through faith is to reorder our desires so that we love in the right way. This is the work of sanctification, grounded in our justification that changes our hearts to love in a right way. One of the ways this happens is through worship – as we apprehend the generosity of our heavenly Father and the work of his Son, our affections change. As we hear the gospel again, we apprehend the beauty and majesty of Christ, and so worship him. And this happens with our bodies. You and I are embodied beings. We inhabit a body. As we stand, sit, or knell, as we sing, pray, or declare, as we partake in the sacraments, we worship with our bodies. And what we do with our bodies has the power to shape and drive who or what we love. That is to say the practices in which you habitually engage have such power to shape what you ultimately love. Our heart’s desires are shaped and moulded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate daily and weekly.

Worship plays a transformative role in our growth towards Christ likeness. And liturgies – the practices that we habitually partake in – when they are charged by God’s word and his Spirit, they reorder our hearts and minds to desire God and his kingdom. It expels the disordered loves that have occupied our heart, and brings forth a new affection. Worship forms who we love. And we are what we love.*

* James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom.

Body of Liturgy III

Humans are embodied creatures, who cannot be reduced to their mind, soul, or even belief. We are heart, soul, mind and strength. Following a Biblically informed anthropology, liturgy is able to minister to the whole-person by encouraging whole-bodied love for God. That is the argument of theological anthropologist James K.A. Smith; Christian liturgy is designed to minister to the whole person. Within corporate worship, liturgy deepens our imagination for the Kingdom: reading and teaching the word, prayer, confession and assurance, welcoming and hospitality, sending out, the ecclesiastical calendar and singing. Indeed, the call to worship in song follows the call of the Psalms to fulfill our vocation as humans who worship their creator (Psalm 95:6-7). Even in the sacraments, we are given a tangible enactments of the gospel, depicting God’s grace towards us in Jesus Christ.[1] Through touch and taste and sight, their rhythms remind us that we live by faith, remembering the past in anticipation of the future: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). Christian liturgy is formative because it is charged by the word and the Spirit in embodying the gospel.[2]

 

Christian liturgy invites us to taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8). The liturgical habits of corporate worship, and the flow-on affect they have in the daily liturgies of the week, offer practices which are “dense” and charged with formative power through the Spirit. As Cranmer noted, these liturgies encourage “the most perfect and godly living”.[3] Insomuch as the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is re-enacted through these habits, our hearts are also directed towards loving God and desiring his kingdom. The habits of corporate-worship are a guard against alternative secular-liturgies that also seek to from our hearts and desires.

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[1] The same is true of Israel’s festivals outlined in Deuteronomy 16. See David Peterson, Encountering God Together: Biblical Patterns for Ministry and Worship (Nottingham: IVP, 2013), 63-66.

[2] Cf. James K. A. Smith, ‘Sanctification for Ordinary Life’, Reformed Worship 103 (March 2012), 20.

[3] Thomas Cranmer, ‘Of Ceremonies: Why Some be Abolished, and Some Retained’ in The Book of Common Prayer 1662 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xii.

Body of Liturgy II

Whilst scripture generally discourages the practice of consulting the advice of demons (1 Timothy 4:1), we may allow an exception in this instance: 

“At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.” - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 16.

The truth that Screwtape refers to is that humans are fully embodied creatures (Genesis 2:7). We are not merely cognitive beings; humans are whole-persons composed of mind, body, soul, desires, emotions, etc. The anthropology that emerges in the Bible is that humans are an intended part within the good creation, made in the image of God and for communion with God (Genesis 1:26-31).[1] Our purpose is liturgical in the sense that we live for the praise of God.[2] The antithesis of this reality is humanities failure to worship God, described by Paul a refusal to glorify or thank God (Romans 1:21).

Humans cannot be reduced to their soul, mind or worldview because we are liturgical beings. “To be human is to love, and it is what we love that defines who we are.”[3] The question then is: ‘What do we love?’ If Smith’s is correct in assessing that there are a whole range of secular liturgies nurturing people’s love and their imagination of human identity, then we are loving and being shaped by things that lead us to deny God the glory and thanksgiving that is his due. Keller articulates this as whatever captures our desires and imagination also captures our heart, becoming an idol.[4] However, Smith’s suggestion is that whilst liturgies can confirm our idolatry, they can also be used to nurture our attachment to the Kingdom of God and our love for Jesus. Not only can our love be aimed away from God, it can be aimed towards God.[5] The particularly Christian approach to this has been through liturgy, or worship. Liturgy is so effective in forming the whole-person – head, heart and hands – because of its bodily practices. Kneeling, standing, singing, head bowing, clapping, tasting bread and wine, all these embodied actions stoke the imagination for the Kingdom of God.

“Worship forms us and aims us because its concrete, material practices catch hold of our imagination. This is why worship is more like art than science, more like literature than logic. Worship is fundamentally aesthetic.”[6]

The necessity of liturgy was recognized by Broughton Knox, who wrote that without it congregations are reduced to an audience.[7] But if these liturgies are to have any effect, they must not be artificial or spectacle, otherwise they fail to be liturgical. All liturgies are not just symbolic and ritualistic; they are enacted stories that are (1) repeated and (2) participatory. Christian liturgy re-enacts the gospel, bringing body and mind together.[8]

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[1]Kevin Vanhoozer, ‘Human Being, Individual and Social’ in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (ed. Colin E. Gunton; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 164.

[2] Vanhoozer, ‘Human Being, Individual and Social’, 166-167.

[3] Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 51.

[4] Timothy J. Keller, ‘Talking About Idolatry in a Postmodern Age’. n.p. [cited 29 May 2013]. Online: http://thegospelcoalition.org/resources/a/Talking-About-Idolatry-in-a-Postmodern-Age

[5] Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 54-59.

[6] Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 144.

[7] D. Broughton Knox, ‘The Biblical Concept of Fellowship’ in D. Broughton Knox Selected Works: Volume II - Church and Ministry (ed. Kirsten Birkett; Kingsford: Matthias Media, 2003), 82-83.

[8] Cf. Timothy J. Keller, ‘Reformed Worship in the Global City’, in Worship by the Book (ed. D. A. Carson; Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2002), 214-217.

Body of Liturgy

For sometime now there has been a Hauerwas' quote floating around the internet about the value of liturgy. It goes like this: 

"One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend." — Stanley Hauerwas, The Truth About God: The Ten Commandments in Christian Life, p.89.

I first came across this quote seven years ago, and at the thought it was overstatement and hyperbole. But recently, thanks to James K.A. Smith and the Journal of Biblical Counseling, I think I now understand how it could be true. What we do with our bodies matters. As embodied beings, our habits and practices are training our hearts and our minds in particular ways.Smith defines liturgy as the habit-forming practices that shape and mould our love and desires:

“Liturgies—whether ‘sacred’ or ‘secular’—shape and constitute our identities by forming our most fundamental desires and our most basic attunement to the world.” James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 25.

This is a broader definition of what liturgy is, which usually describes what happens in corporate worship. These include the customary patterns of church, but also include the habits of daily life, including sitting in front of the television for three hours each evening, or visiting the shopping mall. Smith defines liturgies as the habitual practices which have power to shape what one ultimately loves. Inasmuch as liturgies are the embodiment of our desires, they are pedagogical stories told by – and told upon – our bodies, thereby embedding themselves in our imagination, becoming part of the background that determines how we perceive the world. Our habits train our desires, and nurture our love towards something. For example, one does not wake up and suddenly decide to ignore one’s family; it is an attitude that has been formed by years of tardiness and missing family meals.

Habitual actions matter in our sanctifcation, whether  seemingly  mundane  (brushing  your  teeth),  or  seemingly  unproblematic (going to the mall), or presumably serious (participating in worship). “Our heart’s desires are shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate daily and weekly."

Up on a Mountain Our Lord is Alone

Up on a mountain
Our Lord is alone
Without a family, friends, or a home
He cries, "Oo, oo, oo, will you stay with me?"
He cries, "Oh, oh, oh, will you wait with me?"

Up on a mountain
Our Lord is afraid
Carrying all the mistakes we have made
And He knew
It's a long way down
Do you know
It's a long way down?

Up in the heavens
Our Lord prays for you
He sends His spirit to carry us through
So it's true
That you're not alone
Do you know
He came all the way down?
So it's true
That you're not alone
Do you know
He came all the way down?

- The Welcome Wagon, Up on a Mountain. Listen here.

I've always been struck by the end of Tenebrae service on Maundy Thursday, when all the candles are snuffed out, the communion table stripped bear, the lights turned off and congregation leaves the building in darkness and silence. It mirrors the loneliness of Jesus in Gethsemane, and ultimately on the cross, when all his disciples have been scattered and fled, and the last Israelite - the true image of his Father - is cut off from the land of the living.

World Without End?

ALMIGHTY God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us, and to all men; [*particularly to those who desire now to offer up their praises and thanksgivings for thy late mercies vouchsafed unto them.] We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.

Can any one explain why 'world without end' has completely disappeared from our 'formal' and 'informal liturgy'? The only contemporary usage of that I can think of (besides Ken Follett) is a song by Christian ska band Five Iron Frenzy >>>Listen here.

Any ideas?

Picture from Flickr.

A Rant on the Current State of Church Services

Once upon a time, you could walk into any Anglican Church in the world and you would know exactly what was happening in the church service. For centuries the Anglican church around the world had followed the same pattern of liturgy and worship. All this changed in the twentieth century with the updating of language and customs - which was quite right given the great difference in language from the 1662 to the 1970's when the first modern Anglican prayer book was published in Australia. But since then the rate of revision had been rapid and astronomical. After three centuries of exclusive use of the Book of Common Prayer, the Diocese of Sydney (formally) went through 3 different prayer books in just 30 years. Besides this, many churches have moved to type of informalism for their services.

Many of these changes have been necessary to keep up with the development of Australian society over the past 50 years. But accompanying this has been a worrying tendency. It has become all to easy to throw out anything the is old, traditional or formal (i.e. the creeds, communion, confession) for the sake of informality. Informalism for the sheer sake of informalism is not a desirable thing. In fact, if anything, it has often resulted in church services that are half-baked, half-arsed, and run according to whim. In pursuit of the noble cause of being informal, our church services are reduced to cliche's and entertainment - the congregation has no idea what will come next and so are reduced to being an audience as they await the next move.

The other problem is that the pursuit of this highest ideal is that our informal services are often just as unintelligible and alienating as the liturgy that they replaced. I saw this problem in my old church. The theory was that no one in the town would step into church, but they would spend all their time in cafes. So turning the church service into a cafe seemed the obvious thing to do. Except that it was a poorly run cafe - why go to there when people go to a nice and comfortable cafe two doors up the road. Nor only did it fail misread to the culture, it also failed to serve the people actually at the church. And has been stated elsewhere:

'The reason we eschewed formality in church services was because that was what WE on the inside wanted (or some of us, anyway) - the missiological reason was in fact only a justification for it'

Of course formalism for the sake of formalism is also dangerous. One of the great strengths of Anglicanism has been it's quality to culturally contextualise it's form and identity to whatever situation it's in. The challenge we face in our contemporary liturgy is to provide church services that allow for spontaneity the relaxed felling that informal service provide, whilst not descending to pure laziness or rejecting good practices on the basis of how formal they are. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

See also: Missiological assumptions?

A Guest Post

Hebel's first guest post is by Michael Wells, of St. Hilda's Katoomba, and Lord willing a 2007 first year Moore student. It's a post from sydneyanglicans.net and you'll find the original context here (basically a debate, some how spinning out of discussion on the New Capital Works project, on whether or not liturgy still has a role in church). "As a 20's person, I want to bolster the case for liturgy, if it is owned and believed by the congregation. To a certain extent I think we have been sucked in to the secular idea that 'church' only exists on Sundays. So we try and do everything on Sunday, proclaim the word, worship together and try and make meaningful contact and fellowship. We rightly see that the church has a vertical relationship to God and horizontal relationship to others, and an outward one to those in the community. But do we have to cram all these into our Sunday meeting? I wonder whether by making all (almost) Sunday services informal, we miss out on the rich majesty of our God and the biblical significance of our meeting together, whether we swap true fellowship for a 15 minute chat over coffee and whether we are left with much to invite our friends and neighbors to. Traditional liturgy made the whole church service proclamation, in which the whole congregation participated, and my worry is that we slide into a position where only the precher proclaims. Perhaps we need to encourage young people to be creating not bland informality, but their own symbolically rich (yet biblically sound as a pound!) corporate expression and proclamation." - Michael Wells 10 points if you can name the Cathedral.