remember

For: The Institute of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

Remembering is not one of my strong points, at least in certain areas. If I meet you for the first time, I will invariably ask you what your name is a few times before I get it. When we go to a movie, a week or two later I will not be able to tell you the main character's name. I am admittedly a person who lives most of her life in the here and now. While I see that as primarily a good thing, a fresh and engaging way to live my life, it does mean that I can miss out on important lessons and resources that are embedded in the past.

This week we started reading a book about the importance of forming spirituality by living the Christian year (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, etc.) along with all its implications. Ritual has very little appeal to me, and I will usually look for a way to extract a modern and meaningful application from any liturgy or tradition. That's not a bad idea, but after reading a few chapters in this book (Ancient-Future Time by Robert E. Webber) I realised that no one has ever explained the profound reason and purpose behind all of these traditions.

Simply stated, remembering all of these events is a way to live our lives in the pattern of Christ. We suffer with Christ, we are crucified with Christ, we die with Christ, we are buried with Christ, we are raised with Christ, we live with Christ. It is turning our lives from one where we live our own way with our own patterns and behaviours to one that centres and takes its cues from the life of Christ. We proclaim his life and death not only in our words and worship, but in our seasons. Cool, huh?

I don't exactly know what the implications of this will be in my life. At the very least, I will think of Jesus and his life more often as the calendar months flip by. Hopefully, some of what I am learning and thinking about will also show up in a meaningful way to enrich our faith community. Above all, let us be a people who reflect the entire life of Jesus in every part of our living. Let the place where this eternal life of God touches our history become a place where we can touch the eternal.

This is Jazz watching some of this week's video teaching for Essentials Red. Honestly, she really does this all on her own, this is not a set-up shot.

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun. I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading. One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others). Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding. Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity. In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007. “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’ Consider but a sampling o

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim

outWORD by Matte Downey

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Names of God

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

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