that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life

The summer has come to an end, and so has (hopefully) my vacation from posting to this blog. This has been the longest period of no posting since I started this blog two and a half years ago, and it is high time I began again!  I welcome your continued reading and commenting!

Seasons of the Church (Part VI): Easter!

Christ is risen! 

Alleluia!  He is risen indeed!

You may wonder that I can start with this central cry of the Easter liturgy - wasn't Easter last week?  Yes, Easter Sunday was last week, but we are now in the season of Easter, the 50 days until Pentecost (or the 40 days until the ascension, depending on how you count).  I only learned of this season recently, and it makes so much sense.  In fact, it could be argued that celebrating the easter season is crucial to our spiritual life.  N. T. Wright says that "It's long overdue that we took a hard look at how we keep Easter in church, at home, in our personal lives, right through the system." (Surprised by Hope, p256)  There are many reasons why.

Easter in relation to Lent
Has it ever struck you as odd that we spend 40 days celebrating lent and only one day for Easter?  Wright points out,

Is it any wonder we find it hard to live the resurrection if we don't do it exuberantly in our liturgies?  Is it any wonder the world doesn't take much notice if Easter is celebrated as simply the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom?" (256)  

He suggests that "if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up" (257)

The centrality of Easter

We must realize the importance of Easter.  Wright says it well:

This is our greatest festival.  Take Christmas way, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else.  Take Easter away, and you don't have a New Testament; you don't have a Christianity; as Paul says, you are still in your sins.  We shouldn't allow the secular world, with its schedules and habits and parareligious events, its cute Easter bunnies, to blow us off course.  This is our greatest day.  We should put the flags out.  

At first this might sound a bit extreme.  (And don't worry, he is not downplaying the doctrine of the incarnation -without the incarnation the resurrection doesn't make much sense either!) But the more you think about it, the more you read Paul, for example, the more I think you will begin to agree. that Easter is truly the defining celebration of the Church. But do we really understand this centrality?  Kimberlee Ireton writes, 

Like the disciples trudging up the road to Emmaus,  I trudge through life as if Easter were just a nice day in spring and not the earth-shaking, mind-blowing, life-altering, cosmos-shattering event that it is. (The Circle of Seasons, p 96)

The Easter Season as a time to grasp the resurrection

Ireton makes a good point about the necessity of Easter as a season.  Not only does it balance out Lent in duration, but it helps us grasp the events we celebrate.  She writes,

If Easter were only a single day, I would never have time to let is incredible reality settle over me, settle into me.  I would trudge through my life with a disconnect between what I say I believe about resurrection and how I live (or fail to live) my life in light of it.  Thanks be to God, our forebears in faith [...] decided we simply cannot celebrate Easter in a single day, or even a single week.  No, they decided, we need fifty days, seven Sundays, to even begin to plumb the depths of this event.  They knew, as we too often do not, that the riches of this most important event in all of history cannot be exhausted in a single day.

As a student, I often find that Easter slips up during the busiest time of the semester.  If I'm not feeling 'in the mood' on that one day, does that mean I miss out on celebrating Easter?  Certainly, I should make every effort to celebrate on Easter Sunday.  But after that, the church calendar provides such a wonderful opportunity to integrate "Easter" into my day-to-day life.  What does this look like?  I'm only just beginning to see (and writing this post is helping me).  For me, I think it will involve a lot of visual things: 

• delighting in the new life springing all around me, and intentionally relating it to the resurrection
• putting out the eggs I blew and decorated on Easter Sunday as reminders throughout the season
• I will look for signs of the life of Christ in those around me.

Maybe I will go back and re-read the Easter liturgy.  Perhaps tomorrow I will play through some Easter hymns on the piano.  What will you do?

_____________________

Note: for a more extensive study on why the resurrection is important, I recommend N. T. Wright's book Surprised by Hope.  

Faith and Bodily Life

Prompted mainly by recent reading (especially Willard and Wright) I have been thinking about how vitally important it is that we grasp the reality of the spiritual world.  Even saying 'spiritual world' implies something other, but I don't know what else to call it.

First we must see the very physical nature of our faith.  As Willard points out,

"the foundational facts and teaching of the Christian religion essentially concern the human body.  The incarnation, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Christ are bodily events." (Spirit of the Disciplines, p 30)

The resurrection of Christ was the triumph of his flesh-and-blood-and-spirit life over sin and death. Thus it is not some disembodied spirit we worship, but the resurrected and triumphant person of our Lord.

The physical nature of our faith doesn't stop with Jesus, but has everything to do with how we live.  Whatever did Jesus mean when he said "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full" (John 10:10) if not life to our whole beings, including our bodies?  As Wright states, "We are saved not as souls but as wholes" (Surprised by Hope, p199)  And as Willard points out, the transformation of our selves through the life of Christ is a process which involves the training of our physical bodies.

This is all very good news indeed, since most of our daily life concerns our physical existence.

Secondly we must see that the unseen parts of our existence and spirituality are no less real because we cannot see them.  Rather than elaborate, I will let you ponder that for a moment, and consider its outworking in your own life.

This ties into a passage I heard today, 1 John 4:5-6:

They are from the world and therefore speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them.  We are from God, and whoever knows God listens to us, but whoever is not from God does not listen to us."

I've been realizing lately how sometimes the ways I think and act make little sense to others because I am assuming a different reality than they.

Thanks be to God for providing this new reality which fits so well with who we were made to be, this new life that in its fullness transforms every part of us!

cell phones and sacraments

Last week I had a dream in which a cell phone alert persisted.  I don't remember who's cell phone it was, but it went off every five minutes or so, and for some confusing reason whoever had the phone wasn't turning it off.   This probably made the dream annoying so I woke up.  It was only then that I realized that the alert was coming from my own cell phone, which was running out of battery life on the other side of the room.

This would have been no more than a quirky event in my life, except that it tied into what I read a few days later.  In the conclusion of his book, N.T. Wright discusses the implications for our spirituality of Jesus's resurrection and the central Christian hope of new creation.  Foundational to our spirituality are the sacraments of the church, such as baptism and the Eucharist.  Here is what Wright has to say:

I have come to believe that the sacraments are best understood within the theology of creation and new creation, and of the overlapping of heaven and earth, that I have been exploring throughout this book. The resurrection of Jesus has brought about a new state of affairs in cosmic history and reality.  God's future has burst into the present, and (as happens sometimes in dreams, when the words we are saying or the music we are hearing are also happening in the events in which we are taking part) somehow the sacraments are not just signs of the reality of new creation but actually part of it.

I found this connection helpful, since often there is so much confusion (historical and contemporary) regarding the sacraments.

I can relate to the man who asked Jesus (Luke 10), 'what must I do to inherit the eternal kind of life'?  In other words, something is clearly happening here - what does it mean to live in this new world order?  Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the very complexity of living, and wonder how my daily life relates to God's kingdom.  And yet Jesus tells this man that he already knows the answer.  It is an answer incredibly simple and profound: 'Love God with everything you are, and love your neighbor as yourself.'  I find it comforting to know that, even as we seek to better under stand the mysteries of our faith, our goal in this kingdom living is summed up in this statement.  It is not always an easy thing to do, but at least it is clear.

Seasons of the Church (Part IV): Salvation and Ordinary Time

The fabric at church was all changed back to green this week, signalling that we are back in ordinary time. Ordinary time comprises the largest portion of time in the church calendar (see image). The current season of ordinary time lasts until Lent (the other  one is between Pentecost and Advent) Ireton, in her book The Circle of Seasons, gives more meaning to the name:

The word ordinary is rooted in the word ordinal, to count.  Thus these "days between," as writer Wendy Wright calls them, are not simply ordinary in the way we use that word -- uneventful, unimportant, boring -- but are actually "Counted Time," time that counts, that matters.  Designating the bulk of each liturgical year as "Ordinary Time" is a profound way of recognizing that the daily, ordinary rhythms of our lives are sacred [...] that God is just as present in the grittiness (and the glory) of an ordinary day as in the great celebrations of Christmas or Easter or Pentecost. (61)

Since learning about Ordinary Time in college, I have found this view helpful and relevant.


But what does this have to do with salvation? Isn't salvation what we celebrate in the spring? Why, then, did I include it in the title of this post?  It turns out that salvation has everything to do with ordinary time.  I am still reading N. T. Wright's book, and I have been realizing how much our understanding of things like 'heaven', 'salvation' etc, affect our daily Christian life.  Importantly, with respect to salvation, we must understand that "it is about the present, not simply the future" (Wright, 200).

But first things first.  What is salvation?  What is being saved? Wright takes great pains to emphasize that it is not a disembodied soul which is saved.  And nor are we saved just to 'go to heaven when we die'.    Rather, Salvation is "being raised to life in God's new heaven and new earth" (198).  There is, of course, much more that could be said about the theology of salvation, but this will suffice for this post.

What does this have to do with the present, you ask?  Wright explains,

For the first Christians, the ultimate salvation was all about God's new world, and the point of what Jesus and the apostles were doing when they were healing people or being rescued from shipwreck or whatever was that this was a proper anticipation of that ultimate salvation, that healing transformation of space, time, and matter. The future rescue that God had planned and promised was starting to come true in the present.  We are saved not as souls but as wholes. (199, emphasis added)

The kingdom of God, or 'the kingdom of heaven', begins to make more sense in this light.  Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, all start to fit together.  And, as Wright points out, salvation is "about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us." (200)  Thus, the mission of the church has everything to do with salvation.  And the life of the church is lived out in ordinary time.

I don't think I really understand the implications of this in my own life yet, but I want to.  Thankfully, God does work in our daily lives, changing us, helping us to see and to grow.  The light whose coming into the world we just celebrated at Christmas is still in the world, ever growing.  Oh, that we would all grasp this in our churches!  What could better express this longing than that prayer taught to us:
Your kingdom come, your will be done - on earth as it is in heaven.

Advent Hope

This passage in Wright's Surprised by Hope struck me yesterday, particularly because of its relation to the present season:

"Christ has died," we say in the Anglican Eucharist, "Christ is risen; Christ will come again."  And of course in the creed too: "He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead."  If we sing it once during the season of Advent, we sing it a dozen times.  "Alleluia! Come, Lord, come!"

And if we are ordinary mainstream Christians in Britain today - and in many other places too, including parts of North America - we may well add under our breath, "even though I haven't a clue what it means." The so-called second coming of Jesus is not a hot topic in the preaching of the mainstream churches, even in Advent. (117)

The truth of this struck me, both saddening me and making me want to read on to better understand the theology of the church in this matter.  Wright goes on to first discuss why it is that people have become confused on this topic and then to carefully explain the problems with some of the troubling but popular perspectives on this.  He begins by writing,

At one end, some have made the second coming so central that they can see little else.  At the other, some have so marginalized or weakened it that it ceases to mean anything at all.  

Both positions need to be challenged.  I shall shortly show that the focus on the so-called rapture is based on a misunderstanding of two verses in Paul and that when we get that misunderstanding out of the way, we can find a doctrine of Jesus's coming that remains central and vital if the whole Christian faith is not to unravel before our eyes. [...] (121)

Side note: 
Please don't mis-interpret this quotation as leading into a speculative chapter on end-times.  Instead, Wright calls the church back to orthodox theology (based on careful study of the New Testament) and warns us of the dangers of diverging from this  (for example, an escapist perspective which abandons the world to its future destruction).   It is not so much "who has the right interpretation", but "is it sound?" and "does it fit with scripture as a whole?" As he states,

We must remind ourselves yet once more that all Christian language about the future is a set of signposts pointing into a mist.  Signposts don't normally provide you with advance photographs of what you'll find at the end of the road, but that doesn't mean they aren't pointing in the right direction. (132)

I highly recommend this book to all of us who pray, "come, Lord Jesus, come" during Advent, with only a dim sense of what that ancient prayer has meant throughout the history of the church and of what it means to us today.

A Scientist and the Resurrection

The resurrection of Jesus is central to the Christian faith.  In his book Surprised by Hope, N. T. Wright argues that we must grasp its significance in order to understand the present and the future.  A physically alive, transformed and risen Jesus Christ is indeed the worshiped Lord of the church.

The problem is that this event - bodily resurrection - doesn't fit into our framework of how the world usually works.  Wright gets at the heart of this in a passage in his book I will now quote.  In addition to its centrality in his argument, I think this passage is especially relevant to those of us in science - even (or perhaps even more so) simply to those who subscribe to a scientific worldview.

But how far does the "scientific" position go?  When we ask what a scientist can believe about something, we are asking a two-level question.  First, we are asking about what sort of things the scientific method can explore and how it can know or believe certain things.  Second, we are asking about the kind of commitment someone wedded to scientific knowing is expected to have in all other areas of his or her life.  Is a scientist, for example, expected to have a scientific approach to listening to music?  To watching a football game?  To falling in love?  The question of whether a scientist  can believe in Jesus's resurrection assumes, I think, that the resurrection, and perhaps particularly the resurrection of Jesus, is something that might be expected to impinge on the scientist's area of concern, somewhat as if one were to ask, "Can a scientist believe that the sun could rise twice in a day?" or "Can a scientist believe that a moth could fly to the moon?"  This is different, in other words, from asking, "Can a scientist believe that Schubert's music is beautiful?" or "Can a scientist believe that her husband loves her?"  There are those, of course, who by redefining the resurrection as simply a spiritual experience in the inner hearts and minds of the disciples pull the question toward the latter pair and away from the former.  But that is ruled out by what, as we shall see, all first-century users of the language of resurrection meant by the word.  Resurrection in the first century meant someone physically, thoroughly dead becoming physically, thoroughly alive again, not simply surviving or entering a "purely spiritual" world, whatever that might be.  Resurrection therefore necessarily impinges on the public world.

But at this point we meet a third element in knowing, a puzzling area beyond science [...].

The challenge is in fact the challenge of new creation.  To put it at is most basic: the resurrection of Jesus offers itself, to the student of history or science no less than the Christian or the theologian, not as an odd event within the world as it is, but as the utterly characteristic, prototypical, and foundational event within the world as it has begun to be.  It is not an absurd event within the old world but the symbol and starting pint of the new world.  The claim advanced in Christianity is of that magnitude: Jesus of Nazareth ushers in not simply a new religions possibility, not simply a new ethic or a new way of salvation, but a new creation."

(p 66-67, boldface added)

Our celebration of Christmas is not complete without understanding the resurrection.  The resurrection means we celebrate not just a historic event of God coming to us, but a present reality as well.  I hope the above quotation, though perhaps a bit lengthy, was as helpful to you as it was to me on this topic.

Surprised by Hope

What is the central Christian hope?  What happens to you when you die?  These are questions that N. T. Write seeks to answer in his book Surprised by Hope.  This book was highly recommended to me by my family and I am enjoying reading it so far.  Reading of this book - as well as a nearly finished knitting project - are the main reasons for my lack of posting earlier this week.  I apologize for the delay and hope that, in the meantime, you can have a chance to ponder the two questions at the beginning of this post.  Or maybe just browse the archives... or go make Christmas cookies or cards ... or find that book to read it for yourself!