During 2012, The Center Blog intends to explore the theological, biblical, and practical implications of missional worship, which is also the theme of the Center’s Convocation in Chicago, IL on July 26-28, 2012.

Too often we think of worship as an escape from the harsh realities of the world, as a respite from our labors, as a sacred time and space separated from the real world. This is a complete misunderstanding….The liturgy of the gathered community is the epitome, the model, of our lifestyle, of our way of being in the world….Far from being a separate ‘religious activity,’ our worship is the paradigm for a way of being in the world of politics and economics, the world of responsibility and of labor, the world of relationships.¹

During 2011 we have been exploring what it means for the church to be involved in God’s Quiet Revolution. Such participation calls Christian communities to live simple lives of love, forgiveness, and unity.  Bringing this discussion to a close and saying thanks to Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove not only for his insightful writings but also for his dynamic witness (he actually practices what he preaches),  we look at the distinctive character of new monastic communities.

Monasticism has always helped the church remember its true identity in times of rapid social change. In the fourth and fifth centuries, desert mothers and fathers sought a way to live faithfully in the newly “Christian” Roman Empire. Almost every significant social crisis since then has given rise to monastic movements in Christianity. If there’s a word that a new monasticism has to offer the church in our time, I believe it’s the good news that Christianity as a way of life promises new possibilities in the tired debates between left and right. Indeed, it changes the question. ¹

Experiments in Radical Discipleship. At the margins of church and society, a “new monasticism” is emerging. This network of Christian communities seeks to enable its members to live out an authentic Christian life by loving each other and their neighbors. Believing that it is hard to be Christian in America, but also believing that God is faithful, these communities draw inspiration from the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “The restoration of the church will surely come from a sort of new monasticism which has in common with the old only the uncompromising attitude of a life lived according to the Sermon on the Mount in the following of Christ.” ²

Gathering together in a June 2004 conference, members of intentional communities, both old and new, developed a voluntary rule expressed as twelve distinctive marks of a “new monasticism.”  These are intended to connect like-minded communities and provide a discipline and structure for their many and diverse communities. “These marks show the common threads that connect Christian communities that might otherwise be seen as scattered anomalies, rather than vibrant cells of a body.” ³  What these experiments in radical discipleship have to offer the wider church is to stimulate faithful imaginations to envision new possibilities for witness as well as encouraging it to risk embodying the gospel in new ways in the midst of an alienated and fragmented world.

Mark 1: Relocation to Abandoned Places of Empire. In every age, God-seekers have made the radical decision to move away from the pressures, pleasures, and rewards of their society. As both liberation and challenge, relocation expresses conversion and commitment. It involves saying no to an old way of life and yes to a new one. Desert-inspired practices influence the way of life in the places abandoned by the world: God-seeking and prayer which is thoroughly integrated with life and witness. Hospitality in the form of sharing food, roof, and friendship with neighbors fosters both compassion and engagement in the search for solutions.

To continue discovering how this movement can enrich the life and ministry of  your congregation, various websites are recommended:

• New Monasticism
• The Simple Way
• Jonathan Wilson Hartgrove – The Everyday Awakening
• Community of Communities

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an Associate Minister at St. John’s Baptist Church and directs the School for Conversion in Durham, NC. Jonathan and his family live at The Rutba House, a new monastic community, and is the author of numerous books including New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church.

The Rev. Inagrace Dietterich, Ph.D. is the Director of Theological Research at the Center for Parish Development.

¹ Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Christian Century, August 11, 2009, p. 13.

² Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Testament to Freedom (HarperSanFranciso, 1997), p. 424.

³ Shane Claiborne, in “The New Monasticism,” Christianity Today, September 2005, p. 41.

⁴ School(s) for Conversion, p. 32.

⁵ Maroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon, 1996), p. 100.

⁶ School(s) for Conversion, p. 106.

(This is fourth and last in a series of talks given by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove at the Convocation in Chicago earlier this year).

Central to any community’s decision making process is the practice of discernment. We know the life we’re made for and see the road ahead as we listen to the Spirit. But how do we learn to hear God in community? Who tells our story? Whose needs are heard? God’s quiet revolution calls for the posture of obedience that gets people and congregations in touch with those things that touch the heart of God.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove at the 2011 Convocation

Another Way is Possible. I am sitting in the lobby of a small hotel in Baghdad, listening to an American grandmother who has spent her last six months in Iraq. She is a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a literal reserves for foot soldiers in the army of the Lord. Since 1986, CPT has made it their mission to “get in the way” of violence by practicing direct action nonviolence in conflict zones. I grew up singing camp songs about being in “the Lord’s army,” but never imagined the call of duty would lead me here.  Read More…

Divine Obedience. The witness of Christian Peacemaking Teams, strange as it may seem, has a long precedent among God’s people. When Moses declared to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” he had no power to liberate the Hebrew children from slavery. But Moses had met the living God in a burning bush and was filled with holy boldness to declare that God could make a way out of no way.  Read More…

God’s Peaceable Kingdom. Though the new era of God’s peaceable kingdom was real in the community of the Messiah, the early church knew from experience that the kingdoms of this world were also still present and very real. The advent of Messiah’s reign had not immediately ended the kingdoms of this world, though their ultimate defeat was assured at the cross.  Read More…

Communities of Peace. In the desert tradition there is a story about two monks who lived side by side for years without ever having any disagreement. “We should have an argument like other people,” one brother said to the other. “I will take this brick and place it between us. I will say: ‘it is mine,’ and you can say: ‘no, it’s mine.’ This is what leads to a dispute and a fight.” Through years of prayer and life together, these brothers had learned about the source of human conflict. What is more, they knew they were not immune from it. So the one brother said to the other, “The brick is mine,” and the other replied, “No, it’s mine.” They went back and forth like this until the second brother finally said, “Well, if it’s yours, then take it.”  Read More…

Choosing Life. How we live in relationship to other people and the world around us is often called “ethics” in Christian teaching. Because all of us have to make decisions every day about what we are or are not going to do, ethics is often portrayed as decision making, especially in extreme situations. We often think ethics is about whether Christians should fight in war, have sex outside of marriage, practice invitro-fertilization, or “pull the plug” when a loved one is at the end of life. These are, indeed, ethical considerations. But if we are to make these kinds of decisions “in Christ,” it is more important for us to know the peculiar way of Christ in a community of peace than it is to think hard about what we would do in an extreme case.  Read More…

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

Another Way is Possible. I am sitting in the lobby of a small hotel in Baghdad, listening to an American grandmother who has spent her last six months in Iraq. She is a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), a literal reserves for foot soldiers in the army of the Lord. Since 1986, CPT has made it their mission to “get in the way” of violence by practicing direct action nonviolence in conflict zones. I grew up singing camp songs about being in “the Lord’s army,” but never imagined the call of duty would lead me here. I am in a war zone, my head foggy from several nights of interrupted sleep, looking to a wiser soul for direction. Many of CPT’s Iraqi friends are suggesting that we leave. Saddam Hussein’s regime is crumbling, the city is under siege, and every night brings another series of bombs that shake the earth beneath us. We have been eager to know what we can do, but the locals know too well how little can be done when every night is spent hunkered down with the kids, listening to air raid sirens and waiting to see if the roof comes crashing in on you. Why be here if you don’t have to be—if it’s not your home, your kids, your city that you’re praying will be spared from this madness?

In the distance, somewhere out on the city’s edge, we hear bombing begin again. This brings a pause to the morning report, and I look around this circle of twenty peacemakers to gauge the general level of anxiety. An older gentleman across from me, his hands crossed on his lap, has his face turned up to the sky from which the bombs are falling. He begins to sing:

Over my head, I hear music in the air.
Over my head, I hear music in the air.
Over my head, I hear music in the air.
There must be a God somewhere.

I remember a few days ago hearing a reporter ask this man if he was afraid. “Oh, yes, I’m afraid,” he said calmly. Then, with a slight smile, he added, “but maybe not for the reason you think. I’m not afraid of dying. My life belongs to God. But I am afraid of the belief that war brings freedom. I am afraid to sit at home while this kind of violence is carried out by my government. I am afraid that what Martin Luther King said is true: our only choice now is between nonviolence and nonexistence.”

We decide to stay, at least for the time being, and we survive the bombing. A couple of days later, I go home as siege turns to occupation and terrorist cells spring up with the single mission of driving out US troops by any means necessary. CPT stays to accompany Iraqis through check-points manned by teenagers from the Midwest, to inquire about accusations of abuse at prisons, to train a Muslim Peacemaker Team, to say over and again, “Another way is possible.”

Divine Obedience. The witness of Christian Peacemaking Teams, strange as it may seem, has a long precedent among God’s people. When Moses declared to Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” he had no power to liberate the Hebrew children from slavery. But Moses had met the living God in a burning bush and was filled with holy boldness to declare that God could make a way out of no way. In a different context, when Babylon was the world power to deal with, three Israelites refused to bow down to a statue of the king and were thrown into a furnace of fire as punishment. The way the book of Daniel remembers it, they came out of the fire without so much as a hint of smoke on their clothes. Someone said they’d seen a fourth person walking with them in the flames.

Stories like this remind God’s people that the rulers and authorities of the world as we know it don’t have the last word. Kings and Presidents are used to people heeding their commands. If we do not, they have whole armies to encourage compliance. Violence is their trump card. But God’s people remember that no king is higher than the King of the Universe and that the Creator of life is stronger than death. If the law of the land contradicts the word of our Lord, we know whose command we must follow.

Jesus inhabits this tradition of divine obedience (and civil disobedience) when he is called before King Herod and Pilate in Jerusalem. From his triumphal entry to his cleansing of the temple to his death as a political criminal, Jesus challenges worldly authority by submitting to his Father. “Not my will, but yours be done,” he prays. Standing before earthly authorities, Jesus fulfills a long tradition of divine obedience over and against the powers that be in this world.

But Jesus is also doing a new thing. Through his death and resurrection in the face of the powers that be, Jesus is inaugurating a new era in human history. If he really is the hope of Israel, then Jesus is not only the epitome of its best ideals, not just the incarnation of its deepest logic. Jesus is more than that. If Jesus is Messiah—if Israel’s story advances to its conclusion in him—then something genuinely new has been actualized in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. What the church finds “in Christ” is not one more goal to strive for, but a new way of being human. Or, in the memorable summary of John’s first epistle: “as he is, so are we in the world.”

God’s Peaceable Kingdom. Though the new era of God’s peaceable kingdom was real in the community of the Messiah, the early church knew from experience that the kingdoms of this world were also still present and very real. The advent of Messiah’s reign had not immediately ended the kingdoms of this world, though their ultimate defeat was assured at the cross. Christians understood themselves to be living the way of the peaceable kingdom right alongside the violence of an order that was passing away. The challenge was not to overcome the world. Jesus had already done that. The challenge was to faithfully inhabit Jesus’ way of engaging the powers. The “new thing” they found in Jesus was a new way of being in the world.

When Christians gained considerable worldly power, first in the Roman Empire and subsequently in other kingdoms and nation-states, Jesus’ peculiar way of nonviolent love seemed less realistic and, to a growing number of believers, irresponsible. How can any authority both establish the rule of law and turn the other cheek? What decent person who had the power to stop a Hitler would not kill a tyrant to save a whole people? Still, as necessary as violence seemed to many Christians, the conviction that Jesus inaugurated a new era in human history has always meant that Christians have a problem with war. In order to name when war is unjust, and thus not permissible for any Christian, the church developed criteria for a “just war.”

In considerations of the Christian tradition on war and peace, “just war” is often presented as the majority position over and against the minority stance of pacifism or Christian nonviolence. Such a presentation of church history, however, does not recognize the fact that just war teaching always limited violence to adult men in police or military units. This actually excluded the vast majority of Christians from the use of violence, simply by virtue of their being women, children, clergy, monastics, or everyday citizens not engaged in a just war or police action. What is more, it was assumed for most of the church’s history that participation in acts of violence—even acts deemed “just”—was a concession to the ways of the world that no doubt led Christians to sin. The church made provision for repentance and reconciliation—not celebration—when soldiers came home from battle. Even when war seems inevitable, our hope is not in military victory but in the reconciliation of all things through Jesus Christ.

When God’s people hold onto the hope of reconciliation through the peculiar way of the cross, we interrupt the assumptions of a culture of violence. But the truth is that all of us—not just soldiers and police officers—are well practiced in the use of worldly power. Those of us who come from positions of privilege in society lean on the silent power of money and social norms, trusting in systems of control that have favored people who speak our language or share our skin color. At the same time, people who live with their backs against the wall resort to subversive acts of violence, carving out a space for survival by manipulating the fears those who seem to be “in control.” We can see these dynamics at work in local and international political negotiations. And, if we pay attention, we can see the same habits worked out between husbands and wives, parents and children, bosses and co-workers, pastors and congregations. In the world that is passing away, violence rules. But in the new world that has already begun, Jesus shows us a better way.

Communities of Peace. In the desert tradition there is a story about two monks who lived side by side for years without ever having any disagreement. “We should have an argument like other people,” one brother said to the other. “I will take this brick and place it between us. I will say: ‘it is mine,’ and you can say: ‘no, it’s mine.’ This is what leads to a dispute and a fight.” Through years of prayer and life together, these brothers had learned about the source of human conflict. What is more, they knew they were not immune from it. So the one brother said to the other, “The brick is mine,” and the other replied, “No, it’s mine.” They went back and forth like this until the second brother finally said, “Well, if it’s yours, then take it.”

Monks who have lived together in community over generations remember this story because they know from experience how hard it is to give our lives over to the way of Jesus when we have to deal with other people. Those of us who have lived with spouses, siblings, or friends can empathize. We all have things we cling to—a favorite possession, our “free time,” a sense of control, the belief that we are right. When other people lay claim to these things, we feel threatened. Our gut reaction is to defend ourselves, and we use the power we have to do it. Maybe it’s a harsh word or maybe it’s a cold shoulder. Maybe it’s the decision to leave. But even conflict avoidance can be an exercise in worldly power. When we trust our own power to overcome the differences between us, we are not trusting the way of Jesus. The two monks in the desert cell knew this. Part of being a community of Christ’s peace, they saw, was learning to fight fair and trust a power greater than the violence of an order that is passing away.

Thinking about the petty differences we have with people close to us can seem like a completely different subject than martyrdom in global conflicts, but the New Testament wants us to see how these two go together in a single way of life. Why Christians would rather die than kill is not only about why we have a problem with war, but also about why we persist in life together with people whom we often don’t even like. “If anyone would be my disciple,” Jesus said, “he must take up his cross and follow me.” This cross that is necessary to discipleship is not the generalized suffering of humanity. As true as it may be that we all have burdens to bear, the particular burden of the cross is the cost of turning away from worldly power and trusting the power of Jesus’ love, both in our most intimate relationships and in our political relationships. In short, to live as communities of peace is to live in the conviction that we know in Christ a new way of engaging the world

Choosing Life. How we live in relationship to other people and the world around us is often called “ethics” in Christian teaching. Because all of us have to make decisions every day about what we are or are not going to do, ethics is often portrayed as decision making, especially in extreme situations. We often think ethics is about whether Christians should fight in war, have sex outside of marriage, practice invitro-fertilization, or “pull the plug” when a loved one is at the end of life. These are, indeed, ethical considerations. But if we are to make these kinds of decisions “in Christ,” it is more important for us to know the peculiar way of Christ in a community of peace than it is to think hard about what we would do in an extreme case.

In this regard, actual extreme cases sometimes make the point best. In the midst of World War II, when Nazi Germany was committed both to the extermination of Jewish people and to expansion in Europe, a village in occupied France quietly harbored hundreds of Jews, sparing their lives. Given the lack of resistance in so many places—and the high cost that so many resisters paid—it was a heroic act. Yet, when asked why they did it, most of the villagers simply said, “We never thought of not doing it.” For years a priest named André Trocmé had patiently taught Jesus’ example of forgiveness and nonviolent love at the village church. Over time, these people had become a community of peace. When the extreme case happened, the way of Jesus was an unquestioned habit.

“If anyone is in Christ Jesus,” the apostle Paul wrote to the early church, “there is a new creation.” Yes, the patterns of an old and broken order continue, causing a great deal of suffering and frustration. But the advent of a whole new world is the basis of New Testament ethics. The “old nature” that Paul calls us to battle against is part of the old order that is passing away. It is the set of habits that humans developed in a world where violence had the last word. In Christ, however, we are raised to a new reality. Because this reality of new creation re-defines how we see the world, it re-frames our habits of social engagement. Disciples take up their cross and follow Jesus not because they have learned to make the hard choice in an extreme case, but because they can’t imagine acting differently in light of the good news they have heard and seen. Their habit of choosing life is one they have learned by getting to know the way of Jesus among the people who are Christ’s body. It is, for the most part, slow and undramatic work. It is also how God chooses to engage our world in love.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Where do you see evidence of the view that “war brings freedom”?
2. How does Jesus manifest a new way of divine obedience? How does that relate to issues of conflict and war?
3. Where do you see evidence of a “culture of violence”? Within the wider society? Within your congregation?
4. How does Jesus’ peculiar way of nonviolent love interrupt the assumptions of a culture of violence?
5. What does it mean to say that “Christians would rather die than kill”?
6. What would it take for your congregation to choose life, to reframe its habits of social engagement, to become “communities of peace”?

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an Associate Minister at St. John’s Baptist Church and directs the School for Conversion in Durham, NC. Jonathan and his family live at The Rutba House, a new monastic community, and is the author of numerous books including New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church.

The Rev. Inagrace Dietterich, Ph.D. is the Director of Theological Research at the Center for Parish Development.

(This is third in a series of talks given by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove at the Convocation in Chicago earlier this year).

The desert tradition tells a story about how Abba Anthony struggled with prayer in his cell until he saw a vision of another monk going into his cell to pray, then coming out to weave baskets, then going into pray again. This rhythm of “prayer and work” became a touchstone of the monastic tradition. What does it mean for a congregation to find healthy rhythms of prayer and work to share in common? How does this lead us deeper into God’s quiet revolution? The simple life embodies a practical theology of prayer and work.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove at the 2011 Convocation

The Power of Speed. God’s quiet revolution calls for Christians to cultivate stability. By “standing in place” Christian communities root themselves deliberately in the place where they live. Stability enables and encourages Christians truly to engage with the people they are with, to slow down and live the simple life, to participate in the simpler rhythms of life.  Read More…

The Noonday Demon Acedia. The desert monastics conceived of stability as a cosmic struggle. Echoing the combat imagery of Scripture, they aimed to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power,” taking up the weapons of prayer and fasting so that they might “stand up against the wiles of the devil.”   Read More…

The Manifestation of Acedia. The midday demons are stubborn. They do not give up easily, but rather meet our response to their temptations by re-presenting the same lack of care under a different guise. There are two key manifestations of acedia in our contemporary world. One is the hyperactivity of ambition’s frenetic activity and the other is the desperate restlessness of boredom.  Read More…

The Rhythm of Prayer and Work. The good news is that the Christian tradition, and the monastic tradition in particular, offers tactics for subverting the schedules of these “midday demons” that will inevitably assail us as we attempt to participate in God’s quiet revolution of love, forgiveness, and unity. Crafty though they may be, the demons that come to attack us midway along our journey are not stronger than the God in whom we trust.   Read More…

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

The Power of Speed. God’s quiet revolution calls for Christians to cultivate stability. By “standing in place” Christian communities root themselves deliberately in the place where they live. Stability enables and encourages Christians truly to engage with the people they are with, to slow down and live the simple life, to participate in the simpler rhythms of life. The contemporary experience of placelessness is intimately related to the speed in which we are invited to live in our culture. Placelessness is tied to mobility and it means that you have to be moving, moving, and often pretty fast. What the automobile and the construction of interstate highways created in America was the idea that we could venture forth into places that we had never known before. This was a huge transition from a culture limited by how far a horse could travel. The proliferation of fast food restaurants such as McDonalds means that we can easily get food in our cars on the go which, of course, makes it easier to keep going. But various studies have demonstrated how both fast living and fast food is bad for our bodies and for our spiritual well-being.

The emerging field of attention science indicates that the speed of our society has to do not just with mobility but also with how we work in our workplaces. The speed at which we move is actually decreasing our ability to pay attention. Research indicates that the average knowledge worker, people who work in offices, schools, and churches, changes tasks every eight minutes. Once we change tasks, they have found that it takes at least three times as long to get back to what we were doing. When things get hectic and we are busy, we can be bombarded with demands: the phone is ringing, text messages coming in, email is happening, and, of course, checking out our facebook page. People are continually trying to get in touch with us and they tend to expect instant responses. It begins to feel that we are into this constant loop. So the forty hour work week becomes forty-five or fifty or more. We find ourselves stretched into a never ending work time in which we are constantly being interrupted by all kinds of things.

The Noonday Demon Acedia. The desert monastics conceived of stability as a cosmic struggle. Echoing the combat imagery of Scripture, they aimed to “be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power,” taking up the weapons of prayer and fasting so that they might “stand up against the wiles of the devil.”

Cassian was a young man who heard the early monastic stories and made the rounds to sit at the feet of some of the desert’s most acclaimed teachers. The abbas told him the truth about stability’s challenges, describing the “noonday devil.” Attempting to embody Paul’s call to “pray without ceasing,” they found that when beginning to pray in the morning they had a lot of energy and focus, but by the middle of the day when the sun is high and beating down, a series of thoughts begin to be distract them from their vocation of praying for the world. As the joy of morning wore off in the desert, the hard part about staying was that it got boring. With the sense of adventure gone, Cassian reported, new temptations set in. Writing about what he heard, Cassian described this as acedia, literally as a lack of care, as a spiritual malady. Once acedia set in, putting down roots of love—for God and for others—seemed impossible.

In a hypermobile culture where we are always on the go, we who hear the call to stay put might imagine ourselves as a type of spiritual athlete, not unlike the desert monastics who aimed to do combat on the cosmic frontlines. Standing against the seas of constant change also means acknowledging that stability is a practice fraught with contradictions and tensions, making us susceptible to temptations we would not otherwise have the occasion to know.

The Manifestation of Acedia. The midday demons are stubborn. They do not give up easily, but rather meet our response to their temptations by re-presenting the same lack of care under a different guise. There are two key manifestations of acedia in our contemporary world. One is the hyperactivity of ambition’s frenetic activity and the other is the desperate restlessness of boredom. If ambition tempts us to a hyperactivity that fragments our focus and distracts us from daily tasks, another of acedia’s faces—boredom—invites us to adopt a carelessness that exhibits nearly opposite symptoms. Whereas ambition pushes us toward perpetual motion, boredom paralyzes, leaving us unable to love our neighbors or even take care of our own basic needs. Though different in character, these midday twins tempt us to the same lack of care, to not paying attention to the particular place or people or things that are in front of us. In their grip, it is impossible for us to find joy in community.

Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche is one of the great wisdom figures in the community development. Founded in 1964, L’Arche communities cultivate inclusive communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities share faith and friendship. In these communities there are core disabled members as well as other people—the “temporarily abled”—who come to live with them. Vainier once commented on the most difficult part of his ministry: the hardest part is the people who come, often young people, with lots of energy and very committed, dear, dear people. And they spend a year or two or three with us. Then they say “this has been a transformative experience for me” and then they leave. This is an expression of the restlessness of acedia, the temptation to reduce our vocations to experiences that we can wrap up and then move on to something else.

The Rhythm of Prayer and Work. The good news is that the Christian tradition, and the monastic tradition in particular, offers tactics for subverting the schedules of these “midday demons” that will inevitably assail us as we attempt to participate in God’s quiet revolution of love, forgiveness, and unity. Crafty though they may be, the demons that come to attack us midway along our journey are not stronger than the God in whom we trust.

A rhythm of prayer and manual labor can, over time, help shake the stranglehold of the spiritual malady of acedia. Preserved among the sayings of the desert tradition is the story of Abba Antony who was struggling with acedia when he had a vision that he knew was from God. In this vision he saw a monk sitting in his cell praying. And then this monk went outside and began weaving a basket, he would put the basket down and go back into his cell and pray and then come back and weave another basket. That was the whole vision. This was a great gift to Antony, it was what he had been looking for. What God was saying was that the vocation to which he had been called—to pray without ceasing—was a vocation both of sitting in silence and of working with his hands. And so he began to teach the other monastics this basic rhythm of life. They would weave baskets and then they would sit and pray and then weave baskets and then sit and pray.

What this beautiful story tells us is that careful attention to the mundane tasks of daily life is the process by which we exorcise both ambition and boredom and grow in love. While manual labor is no panacea for the ills of acedia, almost anything that gets our bodies moving can be a real help for weary spirits. Participating in God’s quiet revolution within Christian communities depends on a healthy rhythm of working together with our spirits and our bodies. For example, when we put our bodies to work to share a meal together, we may find that our spirits are renewed to sing and pray together in worship. The temptations of both frenetic activity and of restlessness boredom subside, and we have the opportunity to enjoy one another again. The simple life, stability’s wisdom insists, depends not only upon constant prayer by also on our hands finding good work to do.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. What are the benefits of stability for Christian communities?
2. Where do you see evidence of the destructive influence of speed within your life? Your family’s life? Your congregation’s life?
3. What are some of the contradictions and tensions associated with stability in our contemporary culture?
4. What does it mean to identify hyperactivity as a spiritual malady? What within your congregation’s life encourages hyperactivity?
5. Where do you see evidence of the negative influence of the restlessness of boredom? Within your life? Your family’s life? Your congregation’s life?
6. How does the rhythm of prayer and work combat acedia?
7. What within the life and ministry of your congregation encourages people to “get the rhythm right”: to slow down, to pay attention, to truly care for themselves and others?

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an Associate Minister at St. John’s Baptist Church and directs the School for Conversion in Durham, NC. Jonathan and his family live at The Rutba House, a new monastic community, and is the author of numerous books including New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church.

(Link from “…the simpler rhythms of life” )

See Jonathan’s book, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture, where these themes are addressed more fully.

(Link from “…experience of placelessness”)

See older post “Finding Our Place” to learn more about the experience of placelessness in our society.

(Link from “…cosmic struggle”)

The cosmic struggle is an overarching theme in the book of Ephesians. Get the convocation printed resource that includes a Bible study on Ephesians. Also, see Gombis’ The Drama of Ephesians, a powerful study reflecting the church’s contemporary struggle with the ‘powers and authorities.’

The Rev. Inagrace Dietterich, Ph.D. is the Director of Theological Research at the Center for Parish Development.

(This is second in a series of talks given by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove at the Convocation in Chicago earlier this year).

When Israel is set free from the bondage of Egypt, they move from a death-dealing system into a new way of living. But that way of living requires a place—a holy land. When Israel goes into exile, they learn to “seek the peace of the city” where they are, to see that every place can be made holy in God’s kingdom. God’s quiet revolution recalls the ancient practice of stability and its lessons for the contemporary church as we seek to find a place for a simple life with God and other friends to happen.

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove at the 2011 Convocation

New Jerusalem Now. Take the elevated train north from Philadelphia’s Center City and you soon find yourself in a post-industrial wasteland. Old factory buildings are surrounded by boarded up row-houses, interrupted by empty lots where plastic bags from corner stores roll like tumbleweeds. You might mistake some blocks here for a ghost town, except for the ceaseless noise that arises from the chaotic lives of people who are not so much ghosts as dead men walking—lives abandoned when everyone who could get out of this place did.  Read More…

The Promised Land. From the very beginning of the story of God’s people, the promise of life with God is tied to a place on earth. God’s promise to make Abraham into a great nation is not only a promise of children, but also of land. “I am the LORD, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.”  Read More…

Placelessness. But we are not accustomed to being placed people. For all of the ways our story ties us to the ground from which we’re made and the particular places where our God has met us, we also live in a culture of placelessness. We pride ourselves in being “global citizens” who know more about what’s happening in New York and Tokyo than we know about the contours of the watershed in which we live and move and feed our children.  Read More…

Engaging Our Place. Where we live matters because, as living members of Christ’s body, our vocation is to make true worship possible in our place. This worship is not confined to a house of worship. Gathering places are needed, and it is a great gift to have a room or building devoted to prayer. But church buildings do not define holy ground for those who are “in Christ.”  Read More…

Standing in Place. To confess that Jesus took on flesh and moved into the neighborhood is to see that we are invited to dwell in our places and grow up into “the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.” We are not in charge of securing our own place in the world. Jesus told Peter, the rock upon whom he promised to build his church, that he should put away his sword in the garden of Gethsemane.  Read More…

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

New Jerusalem Now. Take the elevated train north from Philadelphia’s Center City and you soon find yourself in a post-industrial wasteland. Old factory buildings are surrounded by boarded up row-houses, interrupted by empty lots where plastic bags from corner stores roll like tumbleweeds. You might mistake some blocks here for a ghost town, except for the ceaseless noise that arises from the chaotic lives of people who are not so much ghosts as dead men walking—lives abandoned when everyone who could get out of this place did. The souls who were left to scrounge in these ruins eke out their existence from plastic wrappers and brown paper bags. Heroine has left so many of their eyes hollow that they mostly look down—or through you—when you pass them on the street. The train car rattles away overhead, stirring a wind at your back that brings with it the smell of urine mixed with dust. You have come to an abandoned place.

In the midst of this urban desert, on Norris Street, a sign hangs over a simple door proclaiming “New Jerusalem Now.” Here the sidewalk is swept clean. If you follow it past the house you can see a garden in full bloom, flowers surrounding Swiss chard and heirloom variety tomatoes, ripe on the vine. An inner-city oasis, this community is home to a couple of religious sisters and fifty recovering addicts. They begin their day with an hour of group Bible study, followed by household chores and two and half hours of community service. Members of the community feed their neighbors, tend the garden, run a small bio diesel station, and offer Alternatives to Violence seminars. In the living room where they study Scripture together, a sign hangs on the wall: ‘My recovery will never be complete until I help to heal the society that made me sick.’

For these brothers and sisters, healing begins on Norris Street. The new life they seek is not far away in a land they dream of, but right here in the abandoned place they call home. Though this street has been overlooked by city government, “red-lined” by lenders, avoided by real estate agents, and preyed on by hucksters, God is present on Norris Street. It’s not just a feeling some people have here. You can see it. “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,” the apostle John writes in his Revelation. If you listen closely to the people who are finding new life at New Jerusalem Now, they echo the declaration that accompanied John’s vision: “God’s dwelling place is now among the people.”

The Promised Land. From the very beginning of the story of God’s people, the promise of life with God is tied to a place on earth. God’s promise to make Abraham into a great nation is not only a promise of children, but also of land. “I am the LORD, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it.”

Conviction about promised land gives rise to the agony of Israel’s exile: “How can we sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land?” Relationship with God is so connected to relationship with the land that Israel cannot initially imagine worship in a new and foreign place. But this crisis of dislocation does not severe Israel’s connection to place. It radically redefines it. “Seek the peace of the city to which I have carried you into exile,” God says through the prophet Jeremiah. Place matters, but Israel learns in Babylon that their God can hallow any ground. Indeed, “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” When we pay attention to our story, the centrality of our place on earth emerges as an essential element of what it means to be people of God’s promise.

Placelessness. But we are not accustomed to being placed people. For all of the ways our story ties us to the ground from which we’re made and the particular places where our God has met us, we also live in a culture of placelessness. We pride ourselves in being “global citizens” who know more about what’s happening in New York and Tokyo than we know about the contours of the watershed in which we live and move and feed our children. While local culture may seem quaint (especially when we’re on vacation), the ways and means of local places are not our standard models of success. The place we call home in a technological era is increasingly the bedroom community from which we connect by Internet or airplane with the people and issues that matter to us, wherever they happen to be.

Still, we long for home—for community, for roots, for a basic sense of belonging. No one knows this better than our marketing firms. A thousand times a day we are sold the experience of home. Whether it’s in a car, a bank, or a cup of coffee, we are invited to buy a little bit of the stability that we can’t seem to find in a culture where most of us are always on the go. But when the gift we were made for is reduced to a commodity, it cannot satisfy. A placeless culture threatens to hold us captive in the cyberspace of endless desire.

But God’s desire for us is still more powerful. Scattered though we may be by the desires of our twisted selves, God insists on meeting us in the particularity of our daily lives. The chaos of a blighted neighborhood is interrupted by a New Jerusalem Now. The busy life of a contemporary church go-er is confronted by words plainly spoken from a pastor tearing a piece of bread: “This is my body, broken for you.” These signs are not the norm in our world, but neither are they an anomaly in the story of God’s people. Concrete interruptions, they point to the peculiar way God is in the habit of breaking into a broken world. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

Strange as it seems, God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham and to Israel that God would make a home with us. God dwells with people in the particularity of our place and culture not so we can learn to transcend these particularities but so that we can know that our material lives have been redeemed. To stand with Jesus is to stand on holy ground.

The places where we live matter because we are, each of us, invited to participate in the mystery of Christ’s incarnation. The New Testament calls the church the ‘body of Christ’ because it assumes that Jesus’ incarnation on the ground that was hallowed by his presence is extended into all the earth through the flesh and blood of people who have died to themselves and found new life by the Spirit. To live a life “in Christ” is to live in place, growing day by day into the fullness of the One who showed us how to engage our world faithfully. It is to pray not only with our words, but with our whole lives: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Engaging Our Place. Where we live matters because, as living members of Christ’s body, our vocation is to make true worship possible in our place. This worship is not confined to a house of worship. Gathering places are needed, and it is a great gift to have a room or building devoted to prayer. But church buildings do not define holy ground for those who are “in Christ.” The ground we till to plant a garden, the streets connecting us one to another, the homes where we live, the shops where we work, the “third spaces” where we meet neighbors, the forests where nature’s rhythms are preserved, the abandoned lot we overlook—all of these places are holy now. God wants to meet us here, and to meet our neighborhoods through us.

Monastic wisdom points us toward this understanding of being a placed people. The monos in monasticism is Greek for “one.” From the very beginning of their life in the church, monks sought to focus their full attention on one thing. To pray without ceasing, to marry Christ, to worship God in spirit and in truth—this is the monastic vocation. It exists as a gift to all of us, as a concrete reminder that this is really all that any of us were made for. The whole point of human existence, as a later catechism taught us, is to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

If we pay attention to the monastic witness, its radical focus reveals something about how true worship compels people to engage our places. While monasticism began as a movement of solitary prayer in the desert, it quickly took on a communal expression. Pilgrims who found hospitality in the early desert communities brought their wisdom back to cities, integrating a vision for true worship into the life of the whole church. In Western monasticism, this wisdom was best summarized in Benedict of Nursia’s Rule, a document that not only shaped monastic spirituality, but the life of Western civilization.

Giving themselves to the Rule’s pattern of ora et labora—prayer and work—Benedictine communities became anchors of society in Europe during the Middle Ages, offering stability and life-giving compassion to those around them through turmoils that were unimaginably chaotic by our contemporary standards. While critics have rightly observed that some Benedictines were corrupted by the power they amassed in Europe, their communities became a force in Western society while committed to nonviolence and gospel poverty. They grew both in number and influence not because they were eager to “change the world” but because they understood their vocation to be the worship of God in an authentic engagement with local places.

Standing in Place. To confess that Jesus took on flesh and moved into the neighborhood is to see that we are invited to dwell in our places and grow up into “the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.” We are not in charge of securing our own place in the world. Jesus told Peter, the rock upon whom he promised to build his church, that he should put away his sword in the garden of Gethsemane. The violence of this world’s kingdoms would not be the means by which God would establish the peaceable kingdom here on earth. Jesus’ refusal of worldly power is not, however, a passive submission to the status quo. Jesus stands before Pilate, just as the martyrs would stand before authorities after him, neither backing down nor succumbing to the ways of an order that is passing away. “Fight the good fight of the faith,” Paul exhorted his young disciple, Timothy, recalling that Timothy had made the same “good confession” Jesus made while testifying before Pontius Pilate. It was a confession made not so much with his mouth as with his feet. In the power of the Spirit, he stood his ground.

The recovering addicts at New Jerusalem Now in North Philadelphia cannot imagine their own redemption apart from the redemption of their place. They know in their bones that they must be born again; they know just as surely that they need new homes and new businesses, new manners and new friends, new food and new fun, a new heaven and a new earth. It is striking, though, that even as they are giving their whole selves to building a new society in the shell of the old, they are equally committed to unlearning the habits of power and control that those who are apparently successful in our society often assume. Their Alternatives to Violence seminars, alongside their vigils against war and capital punishment, testify to the way they are learning to ‘fight the good fight of faith.’ To pay attention to their witness is to see how the transformation of our own places depends on learning the peculiar way of standing that we see in the stories of Israel and Jesus.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Imagine “an inner city oasis,” in the midst of decaying neighborhoods in your community. In what ways could it manifest God’s quiet revolution? What can your congregation learn from such communities? What excites you about such a project? What disturbs you?

2. What can we learn from the journey of the people of Israel about the ways in which God’s promise is “tied to a place on earth”?

3. What is meant by “placelessness”? Where do you see evidence of placelessness? What is the effect of placelessness?

4. In what ways has the experience and expression of Christian faith been disconnected from place?

5. How does the incarnation transform our vision of how God dwells with human beings?

6. Why does place matter? In what ways could your congregation more fully engage its place?

7. What would it mean for contemporary congregations to become “anchors of society”? What can we learn from the monastic tradition about worshiping God in engagement with our place?

8. What do we learn from Jesus about “standing in place”?

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an Associate Minister at St. John’s Baptist Church and directs the School for Conversion in Durham, NC. Jonathan and his family live at The Rutba House, a new monastic community, and is the author of numerous books including New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church.

The Rev. Inagrace Dietterich, Ph.D. is the Director of Theological Research at the Center for Parish Development.

(This is first in a series of blog posts on lectures by  Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove given at the 2011 Convocation in Chicago on the theme: The Simple Life: God’s Quiet Revolution of Love, Forgiveness, and Unity).

When we think about the difference God makes in our lives, we often think first about ideas, emotions, or a sense of purpose. But the story of Jesus begins with the incarnation: God taking on human flesh and getting tied up with “stuff.” To be Christ’s body in the world is to take seriously the material conditions of our daily lives and of the life we share in common as local congregations. A key aspect of the simple life is a spirituality of “stuff.”

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove at the 2011 Convocation

Stumbling to Follow Jesus.  As a way of introduction, I want to share a bit of my personal story. I grew up in a little place called King, North Carolina, out in tobacco country. And I was raised there by Southern Baptists, good Southern Baptists who taught me to love Jesus and to memorize the Bible. We studied the King James version, after all, if it was good enough for Jesus it was good enough for us!  Read More…

A New Revival.  In several segments of America’s fragmented church, we hear the rumblings of revival today. Some of these movements seem only partly right to me, but I’m most interested in what they have in common.  Read More…

A New Monasticism.  Stumbling to follow Jesus, I found my way into an intentional Christian community and learned to read the Bible anew with them. The story of the people of God came alive in that context, and I began to see how God has moved through the centuries to remind the church of her true identity through monastic movements.   Read More…

Conclusion.  The prophets and monastics who have called us back to our roots generation after generation remind us that the roots of God’s kingdom spread beneath the surface, effecting change from below. It is a quiet revolution—one that is often ignored by the newspapers and missed by the historians.   Read More…

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

Stumbling to Follow Jesus. As a way of introduction, I want to share a bit of my personal story. I grew up in a little place called King, North Carolina, out in tobacco country. And I was raised there by Southern Baptists, good Southern Baptists who taught me to love Jesus and to memorize the Bible. We studied the King James version, after all, if it was good enough for Jesus it was good enough for us! And in that context, I wanted to do all that I could for Jesus. I knew who Jesus was, I knew what Jesus had done for me and for the whole world. By the time I was in high school, I knew that the best thing I could do for Jesus was to become the President of the United States. While still a student in high school, I made my way to Washington, D.C. to work as a page for Strom Thurmond, then president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate.

But in my rush to follow Jesus to the White House, I almost tripped over him one day on my way to lunch at Union Station. Just outside the doors of that great building, a man was crouched down, holding a Styrofoam cup. He asked if I could spare some change, and I looked at him without saying a word. I remembered what I’d heard back in King, NC about how poor folks in the city were lazy and begged money to buy drugs and booze. A country boy in the city, I was dressed in my Sunday best, doing everything I knew how to fit in. I didn’t want to look naïve. So I looked straight through the man and kept walking.

But about the time I stepped through those glass doors into Union Station, I recalled one of my memory verses from vacation Bible school. These were the words of Jesus, ringing in my head: “Verily, I say unto you, inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me” (Matt. 25:45 KJV). I knew that if those words were true, I had not only just ignored a fellow human being: I had completely missed the Lord I was trying to serve. I turned around and ran all the way back to my little dorm room on Capitol Hill, found one of the Billy Graham tracts my church had sent with me to the big city, wrapped a twenty-dollar bill around it, and returned to Union Station to deposit it in the man’s Styrofoam cup. It was the only thing I could think to do at the time. I just didn’t want to miss Jesus.

The experience got me thinking about the tension between the ways I had imagined following Jesus and the things Jesus taught about how to live with God in the world. I thought Jesus wanted me to get up at 4:00 a.m. and work as hard as I could every day to prove that I was good enough to run the United States of America. But in my rush to achieve power and fight for justice and truth, I had rushed right past Jesus as he begged with a Styrofoam cup. Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God,” but I was rooming with a Congressman’s son, trying to hide my hick accent and prove that I could stand with rich boys “in the loop.” Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” but I was carrying session notes to the Senate Armed Service Committee and listening to discussions about appropriations for the world’s largest military. Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart,” but I was lusting after everything I laid my eyes on and starting to feel as if that was what this whole page program was about.

Listening to the discussion at the 2011 Convocation

I remember Lloyd John Ogilvie, chaplain of the Senate at the time, saying that while leaving to return home, one of the pages had told him that he would be back, only next time he would have a seat on the Senate floor. “Just don’t let it cost you your soul,” Ogilvie had replied. When I heard that, I started to realize just how hard it is to be a Christian in America.

A New Revival. In several segments of America’s fragmented church, we hear the rumblings of revival today. Some of these movements seem only partly right to me, but I’m most interested in what they have in common. In many of our low income communities, like the one where I live in Durham, North Carolina, the “heath and wealth” gospel has become popular over the past decade. From Joel Osteen to T.D. Jakes, preachers are connecting the promise of abundant life with people’s real economic needs in the here and now. I’m committed to engaging the health and wealth gospel because Osteen and Jakes are partly right: the church has too often spiritualized the gospel to the point that it offers nothing in the here and now. Now, is what they are preaching the way of Jesus? I don’t believe so, but they are reacting against something that is also not the way of Jesus. The energy of the health and wealth movement comes from the fact that people are hungry for a gospel that speaks to something that is concrete, to their material conditions.

These basic needs are also fundamental to several contemporary movements made up primarily of people from middle class privilege. They are variously labeled as “progressives,” “emergents,” “post-evangelical” or “new monastics.” What they have in common is the conviction that the biblical words of Jesus matter not just for the after-life, but for our lives here and now. Thus they are sometimes called “The Red Letter Christians.” Though they don’t agree on everything, they feel deeply the need for the hope of the gospel to connect with the material needs of our world today.

I believe this will be the hallmark of America’s next revival: an embodied faith that makes the connections between conviction and practices, between Spirit and flesh, between the world that is and the world that ought to be. Something is stirring in a dozen different movements today to teach God’s people to pray: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

A New Monasticism. Stumbling to follow Jesus, I found my way into an intentional Christian community and learned to read the Bible anew with them. The story of the people of God came alive in that context, and I began to see how God has moved through the centuries to remind the church of her true identity through monastic movements. Monasticism, I learned, isn’t about achieving some sort of individual or communal piety, it is about helping the church be the church.

In the midst of the madness that overwhelmed Nazi Germany, the Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter to his brother: “The restoration of the church will surely come from a sort of new monasticism which has in common with the old only the uncompromising attitude of a life lived according to the Sermon on the Mount in the following of Christ.” It was the prayer of a desperate man, but it was also a prayer which a community called the Bruderhof was already beginning to answer. Led by Eberhard Arnold, this group had fled Berlin saying, “We want a genuine school of life….We need brotherhood and sisterhood. We need to live Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We need to show that a life of justice and forgiveness and unity is possible today.”

Jonathan and Paul Dietterich

At the margins of church and society, there is a growing movement of committed Christians who are recovering the radical discipleship of monasticism and unearthing a fresh expression of Christianity in America. It is not centered in a traditional monastery, but instead its members live intentionally, settling in abandoned sections of society, submitting to community, sharing incomes, serving the poor, and practicing spiritual disciplines. I’ve come to think of both the old and the new monastic communities as little laboratories where people are given the freedom to experiment with what the practices of the faith can look like in a changing context.

Conclusion. The prophets and monastics who have called us back to our roots generation after generation remind us that the roots of God’s kingdom spread beneath the surface, effecting change from below. It is a quiet revolution—one that is often ignored by the newspapers and missed by the historians. But it is, in the end, how God plans to save the world. Yes, it is hard to be a Christian in America. If realizing that pushes us to go back and listen to Jesus again, then I believe it’s good news. With God, all things are possible. May we slip God’s kingdom into the cracks of the world’s broken systems.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. Where in your congregation do you see the tension between the ways we imagine what it means to follow Jesus and what the Bible says about how to follow Jesus?

2. What does it mean to say that it is hard to be a Christian in America?

3. What can we learn from the “health and wealth” gospel? What is problematic about it?

4. Where do you see evidence of a new revival that seeks to connect the hope of the gospel with the material needs of the world?

5. In what way is the new monasticism a “genuine school of life”?

6. What can mainline congregations learn from small intentional Christian communities located on the margins of church and society?

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is an Associate Minister at St. John’s Baptist Church and directs the School for Conversion in Durham, NC. Jonathan and his family live at The Rutba House, a new monastic community, and is the author of numerous books including New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church.

The Rev. Inagrace Dietterich, Ph.D. is the Director of Theological Research at the Center for Parish Development.

In 2011, I am blogging on the theme “The Simple Life: God’s Quiet Revolution of Love, Forgiveness, and Unity”

The primary way in which the church engages its culture with the gospel is through worship. All other efforts—outreach, social activism, or even evangelism—are secondary. The image of “gathering within the church” and “scattering within the world” tends to imply that church and world are two separate and distinct spheres. Worship is an experience of “the most-real world, the world revealed as God’s, a world believed to be invaded by God’s grace and turning on the pivot of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.”

IN THIS POST:

• The Hope of Feasting
• A People of Hope
• Sabbath Festivity
• Sabbath Feasting
• The Lord’s Feast
• Questions for Reflection and Discussion

Too often we think of worship as an escape from the harsh realities of the world, as a respite from our labors, as a sacred time and space separated from the real world. This is a complete misunderstanding….The liturgy of the gathered community is the epitome, the model, of our life-style, or our way of being in the world….Far from being a separate ‘religious activity,’ our worship is the paradigm for a way of being in the world of politics and economics, the world of responsibility and of labor, the world of relationships.¹

The primary way in which the church engages its culture with the gospel is through worship. All other efforts—outreach, social activism, or even evangelism—are secondary. The image of “gathering within the church” and “scattering within the world” tends to imply that church and world are two separate and distinct spheres. In reality, the church is inescapably within the world and the world is always shaping the church. In fact, the world may be more a part of the church that is usually recognized. Not only the habits and attitudes of members of the community of faith, but also the patterns, structures, and services of the church may be more shaped by the surrounding culture than by theological commitments.

What is desperately needed in the missional church is not new worship that attempts to be more relevant to the modern person, but a rediscovery of the rich meaning and power of worship. Authentic worship, rather than a retreat from reality is an exercise in vision, a practice in seeing. While God is at work in all of life, humanity is a blinded race. God has granted the Christian community a special sight, a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that “having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you” (Eph. 1:18). Thus worship offers a vantage point from which the church can see more deeply into the reality of the world. Through acts of gratitude and adoration, by blessing and thanking God, the community of worship begins to see the world as God sees it. Worship is thus an experience of “the most-real world, the world revealed as God’s, a world believed to be invaded by God’s grace and turning on the pivot of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.”²

THE HOPE OF FEASTING.  The practice of sabbath time is a practice of worship. Celebrating God’s creating, liberating, and transforming activity, the repentance, faith, joy, and hope of sabbath time expresses the desire for and the experience of communion with God. The whole of life is viewed not as an end within itself, but as God’s gracious gift. All rejoicing and suffering, all beauty and frustration, all hunger and satisfaction are referred to God and thus become meaningful and life-giving. Based in and shaped by the public worship of the gathered community, the sabbath time practice of worship extends into and involves the whole of life as a “living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1).

Alexander Schmemann observes that the “image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life. It is the image of life at its creation and also the image of life at its end and fulfillment: ‘that you eat and drink at my table in my kingdom.’”

A PEOPLE OF HOPE.  Believing in a “God of hope” (Rom. 15:13), Christians are empowered to be a people of hope. And that for which they hope is the eschaton, the “end times” when God’s redemption of creation will be complete. Hope implies the trust in and expectation of something that is not yet fully present. And as expressed in the classic definition, hope is intimately bound up with faith: “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). It is in worship, as it offers up its illusions of self-sufficiency and recognizes its total dependence upon God, that the community receives the courage to face the brokenness of the world with eyes and hearts filled with hope.

While not yet fully realized, Christians declare that the substance of Christian hope has been made known through God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The eschaton—the destiny and end of history—has been accomplished and revealed in Jesus Christ. In his ministry, death, and resurrection, God’s ultimate hope for the world has already been inaugurated. In this person God’s redemptive love and mercy for a rebellious world took flesh and was incarnated within human history. But as evidenced by the pain, alienation, and violence of the present world, the fullness of God’s hope is not yet present. The daily newscasts testify all too clearly that God’s will is not yet done on earth as it is in heaven.

It is the recognition of the incompleteness and future-oriented nature of the Christian life (and indeed all of creation) which indicates the relevance of hope. It is hope that recognizes the difference between what is and what could (or should) be. It is hope that creates the space for freedom and creativity. It is hope that gives the missional church the courage to confront the uncertainty and to embrace the possibilities of the future: “For in this hope we were saved” (Rom. 8:24).

Now hope is not just a nice addition, something to call upon when things get tough. Hope is the very foundation of the way in which the church understands and experiences reality.  “The hope of Jesus Christ is never a dash of pepper or a spoonful of mustard. It is bread and wine, the essential and basic food itself, without which there is only the delirium of knowledge and the illusion of action. It is essential that hope be the all.”³   Living as a people of hope is crucial for those who in the in between of the already and not yet “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7).

SABBATH FESTIVITY.  “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice” (Phil. 4:4). As a people of hope, the practice of sabbath time involves fun and laughter, singing and dancing.  In other words, contrary to the dreary regulations of the “blue laws,” part of what it means to observe the sabbath is to have a good time. According to some Jewish rabbis, sabbath is a good time for married couples to affirm their love by engaging in sexual intercourse. Appreciating God’s goodness and delighting in the wonders of God’s creation, sabbath is a time of celebration. Focusing upon the abundance of God’s gifts, sabbath festivity is a foretaste of the wholeness—the peace and joy—of God’s redemption of creation.

Celebrating the sabbath involves the heightened awareness and enjoyment of all of the human senses. “As part of our Sabbath keeping we open our eyes in new ways to gaze in wonder at the beauty of God’s creation—in nature, in words of art, in people. We open our ears afresh to hear the thrilling news of God’s love and grace as it comes to us in Word and worship, in concerts and the songs of birds, in rollicking laughter and chuckles of delight, in the breathing of those we love as we sit close beside them. We taste God’s goodness in the bread and wine of communion, in the unusual flavors of special Sabbath foods, in the crisp air on our walk. We smell the sweet perfume of Sabbath peace in the fragrances of worship incense, of flowers, of burning logs or glowing candles, of meals baking in the oven. We touch the tenderness of God in the hugs and kisses of our loved ones, in the familiar binding of the Bible that we read, in the physical sensation of well-being as we walk and talk with friends or plunge into the stimulating waters of a lake, in the sweet breeze as we picnic on the shores, in the intimacy of such shared special moments and activities.”⁴

SABBATH FEASTING.  Human beings do not simply eat to live. In a world of McDonalds, Pizza Huts, and Dunkin Donuts, the consumption of food can easily become compulsive. The growing number of overweight adults and children reflect the popular belief that it is a positive virtue to fulfill every human appetite. So-called “comfort foods” are offered to satisfy a wide variety of hungers that have little to do with nutrition.

The common understanding of feasting may have more to do with gluttony than with celebrating the wonder of God’s gracious gifts. Sabbath feasting—celebration and festivity—is meaningful because of its contrast to the simplicity of daily life. For a people who have special foods to eat every day, the only way to make special days special is by eating more. It may be that contemporary people do not know how to feast because they do not know how to fast. In his account of spiritual disciplines, Richard Foster observes: “More than any other single discipline, fasting reveals the things that control us.”⁵   The preoccupation with eating, with satisfying our appetites, often covers over many important issues. The discipline of fasting can bring clarity and freedom as it strips away the distractions: “I humbled my soul with fasting” (Ps. 69:10). What is at issue is not an excessive ascetic practice but the realization that human cravings and desires are not always of God.

THE LORD’S FEAST.  Within the Gospels, Jesus’ meal patterns receive special attention. A frequent charge against him was not that his theology was bad, but that “this man receives sinners and eats with them” (Mk. 2:15-17; Matt. 11:19; Lk. 15:1-2). Jesus welcomed everyone to his table and to his contemporaries this was shocking and objectionable. His behavior indicated acceptance and friendship with those who had been judged to be unfit for table-fellowship: the tax collector, the Gentile, the prostitute. Jesus’ table manners were not accidental, but reflected the very purpose of his life and ministry. His open invitation “manifested the radically inclusive nature of his kingdom, a kingdom that cuts across the barriers we erect between insiders and outsiders, the saved and the damned, the elect and the outcast—barriers often more rigidly enforced at the table.”⁶

The heart of sabbath feasting, that which provides its motivation and shape, is participation in “the Lord’s feast.” And this feast is not just any meal. As offensive as it may sound, this meal involves eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a man put to death by the “good” religious people of his day. It is the stark reality of the lengths to which God will go to redeem God’s people that provides the base for the celebration and festivity of sabbath time. The scandal and foolishness of the cross is a judgment upon and liberation from all of the ways in which human persons seek to secure and justify their own lives—to satisfy their appetites. The hope of sabbath feasting is found not in the elevation of saints in the resurrection but in the justification of the ungodly in the cross of Jesus Christ. “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world….so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor. 1:27-29).

In 2011, I am blogging on the theme “The Simple Life: God’s Quiet Revolution of Love, Forgiveness, and Unity”

The commandment in the Decalogue to “remember and keep the sabbath” does not immediately bring to mind joy and rejoicing. In fact, for many people the practice of sabbath has a bad reputation. Rather than glorifying God and abiding in love, sabbath observance has all too often degenerated into routine and drudgery.  Sabbath keepers have appeared to be “killjoys.”

IN THIS POST:

• The Joy of Embracing
• Embracing Intentionality
• Embracing Christian Community
• Embracing the Wholeness of Shalom
• Questions For Reflection And Discussion

My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete (John 15: 8-11).

The commandment to remember and keep the sabbath does not immediately bring to mind joy and rejoicing. In fact, for many people the practice of sabbath has a bad reputation. Rather than glorifying God and abiding in love, sabbath observance has all too often degenerated into routine and drudgery. Sabbath keepers have appeared to be “killjoys.” For example, stressing worship and upright behavior, the Puritans of New England developed the most detailed and the strictest sabbath in Christian history. Enforced by legislation (called “blue laws” because they were first printed on blue paper), the compulsory observance of sabbath became oppressive. While initially intended to enable everyone to rest from work, worship God, and enjoy family and friends, the practice of sabbath became an end in itself. As contemporary congregations begin to develop ways to remember the sabbath and keep it holy, Martin Luther’s advice is timely: “If anywhere the day is made holy for the mere day’s sake, then I order you to work on it, ride on it, to feast on it, to do anything to remove this reproach from Christian liberty!”¹

All the great motifs of our Christian faith are underscored in our Sabbath keeping. Its Ceasing deepens our repentance for the many ways that we fail to trust God and try to create our own future. Its Resting strengthens our faith in the totality of God’s grace. Its Embracing invites us to take the truths of our faith and apply them practically in our values and lifestyles. Its Feasting heightens our sense of eschatological hope—the Joy of our present experience of God’s love and its foretaste of the Joy to come.²

THE JOY OF EMBRACING. As with many of the really important aspects of life, what is meant by the term “joy” is not always clear. “Usually, we employ this word to communicate our intense satisfaction, our sense of well-being and our underlying contentment at having experienced something for which we have earnestly longed, something that we have deeply desired.”³ In order for sabbath time to be a time of joy, it is important to be clear about that which is to be desired, the way of life which is to be sought and embraced.

The experience of joy is often associated with happiness. Happiness is usually related to the possession of the “good things” of life. Within modern cultures the pursuit of happiness has become identified with the relentless pursuit of personal pleasure. And that which will give pleasure is more and more shaped by the marketing and advertising professionals. Over and over again consumers are told that buying and using certain products will meet their deepest needs and desires. What is promoted, and what is bought, is not the particular material object, but friendship, intimacy, love, beauty, adventure, well-being—happiness. The problem is that none of these products actually fulfill human desires, and so more and new products are sought to do the job. Pursuing happiness for its own sake leads to anxiety and frustration, not to joy and contentment.

Scripture offers a different perspective. Genuine joy is shaped not by the desire for happiness, but by the desire for God. More than the superficial pleasure connected with human circumstances, joy is found in relationship with God. “Joy does not depend on emotions but reflects the will’s awareness that all is well when we are God’s.”⁴ Being with and belonging to God involves desiring that which God desires. God’s commandments, rather than legalistic demands, are the expression of God’s desire for God’s people. Thus it is by obediently embracing God’s commandments that true joy is known: “Let the righteous be joyful; let them exult before God;  let  them  be  jubilant  with  joy”  (Ps. 68:3).  Abiding  in God’s love, bearing fruit as disciples, keeping God’s commandments, and experiencing joy are all bound together. The Christian community is called to be holy, to glorify and desire God, as it finds in God’s commandments a life worth living, a life of “indescribable and glorious joy” (1 Pet. 1:9).

EMBRACING INTENTIONALITY. In the busyness of daily life it is easy to fall into the patterns and habits of the world. Caught up in the pressures of work, family, leisure activities, civic duties, and even church responsibilities, there is seldom the opportunity to be careful and deliberate about choices. Embracing intentionality means taking care about where energy is expended and how attention is focused. Sabbath time can provide the opportunity for reflection and discussion about the choices which must be made in order for the disciples of Jesus Christ to glorify and desire God. Intentionally ceasing from work and worry and being deliberate about participation in grace-full rest says clearly that the Christian community is not going to do what everybody else does.

While Christianity does not provide an elaborate set of instructions for the practice of sabbath time, it is vital that each faith community be intentional about how it is going to nurture and support a distinctive people living a distinctive lifestyle. What is at stake is a different ordering of priorities, a different mindset about what is important. Embracing God’s commandments and guided by the Spirit, the community of faith deliberately rejects and intentionally embraces a particular way of life. “In a society that chooses promiscuity, we intentionally pursue faithfulness and chastity. In an age that chooses materialism, we deliberately seek to share with those in need. In a world that chooses violence, we take care to build peace and to be agents of reconciliation wherever possible.”⁵

EMBRACING CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY. Christians often dismiss the Jewish practices of sabbath as legalistic and ritualistic. Yet during the years of exile the insistence on behavior that set them apart from their culture may well have prevented their faith and its particular commitments from being swallowed up by the hostile surrounding culture. Without a temple within which to worship, they were forced to develop an alternative—keeping the sabbath.

What would happen if Christians were forced to give up their church buildings? What would hold congregations together? How would the distinctiveness of Christianity be expressed? In this vein, one theologian comments: “I have images of what a church ought to look like, not necessarily a building with a steeple, but a group of people who are committed, long-suffering, courageous in witness, and bonded together in love.”⁶ Such a vision may not require the demolition of church buildings, but it does focus attention in the right place, on the formation of Christian community.

The sabbath gathering of Christians is not simply a way to strengthen the commitment of individuals. A distinctive and intentional common life is itself the way of life of the Christian faith. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost brought into being a particular kind of togetherness, a new social reality. By becoming God’s beloved children in Jesus Christ, Christians also become brothers and sisters of one another.

A Picture of Community. Acts 2:42-47 describes the qualities of Christian community: (1) a continual and steadfast commitment to the formation of community; (2) a desire to have their lives guided by the instruction of God’s Word; (3) knowing and sharing deeply in each others’ concerns and carrying one another’s burdens; (4) breaking bread and thereby “discerning the Body of Christ” which transcends all human boundaries; (5) time spent in earnest prayer for one another and for the whole of God’s creation; (6) holding possessions in common and thereby increasing resources to share with those in need; (7) meeting regularly in temple and home to share meals with gladness; (8) experiencing the signs and wonders of God’s transforming presence in their midst. ⁷

This description is both comforting and challenging. It is comforting because in a world of lonely, isolated, and competing individuals, many persons hunger for the love and support of community. It is challenging because participation in such a community calls for basic changes in commitments and life style. To embrace Christian community means that people are devoting significant time to, for, and with one another. It takes time to become “of one heart and soul” (Acts 2:32). Observing the sabbath (in worship and prayer, song and conversation, study and reflection, play and enjoyment of one another), provides the intentional time for the deepening of communal bonds  with God and with one another.

EMBRACING THE WHOLENESS OF SHALOM. Usually translated as “peace,” the Hebrew word shalom cannot be captured in a single word or idea. A cluster of words is required to express the various dimensions and subtle nuances: well-being, harmony, love, loyalty, truth, grace, salvation, justice, blessing, righteousness. Shalom indicates the wholeness of God’s creation, a vision in which a disordered, unproductive, and unfulfilling world becomes a joyous and peaceable kingdom. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke boldly against the social and personal disorder of their time. Yet they were concerned not simply with isolated ethical violations, but with the disruption of God’s intention for shalom. Within the New Testament, the rule or reign of God inaugurated in Jesus Christ incarnates  the wholeness of shalom. “His acts  of healing the sick, forgiving the guilty, raising the dead, and feeding the hungry are all actions of reestablishing God’s will for shalom in a world gone chaotic by callous self-seeking.”⁸

In a world committed to the thinkable, the manageable, and the measurable, sabbath time is an expression of vision, hope, and imagination. Abiding in God’s love, the people of God declare that the fragmentation and alienation of human life are not the final word. In Jesus Christ the power of hurt and hate, the force of death and destruction, have been overcome: “he is our peace” (Eph. 2:14). It is on this  basis that the community of faith is given the courage and the capacity to be amazed and surprised by the God who declares: “Behold, I make all things new” (Rev. 21:5). As its life and lifestyle is shaped by God’s commandments, as it desires that which God desires, as it bears the fruit of discipleship, the community begins to embrace and to embody the joy of shalom.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. When you hear the word “joy,” what comes to mind? What shapes the modern definition of joy? How does this understanding relate to what the Bible has to say about joy?

2. Why is it necessary for congregations to “embrace intentionality” in regard to the practice of Sabbath time?

3. How significant is the church building in your congregation’s understanding of itself? What are some other ways to have a distinctive identity?

4. In the picture of community, what catches your attention?  What is intriguing? What is challenging?

5. In what ways can the practice of Sabbath challenge the consumerism of our culture?

6. What would be involved in embodying the joy of shalom? What would be given up? What would be embraced? How would behavior and attitudes be changed?

In 2011, I am blogging on the theme “The Simple Life: God’s Quiet Revolution of Love, Forgiveness, and Unity”

All the great motifs of our Christian faith are underscored in our Sabbath keeping. Its Ceasing deepens our repentance for the many ways that we fail to trust God and try to create our own future. Its Resting strengthens our faith in the totality of God’s grace. Its Embracing invites us to take the truths of our faith and apply them practically in our values and lifestyles. Its Feasting heightens our sense of eschatological hope—the Joy of our present experience of God’s love and its foretaste of the Joy to come. (Marva Dawn)¹

IN THIS POST:

• Sabbath Time
• Ceasing Work and Achievement
• Ceasing Worry, Anxiety And Tension
• Ceasing Trying To Be God
• Conclusion
• Questions For Reflection And Discussion

At a time of economic uncertainty, with many people either unemployed or underemployed, with local, state, and national budget deficits, with the gap between the haves and have-nots increasing, the church has the opportunity to proclaim a message of hope. While joining in efforts to improve economic well-being, as well as programs to care for those most affected by the downturn of the economy, the opportunity is to witness to an alternative way of life, a simpler lifestyle that is not dependent upon worldly success. Indeed, the message of God’s quiet revolution of love, forgiveness, and unity may be easier for people to hear as they realize that they cannot secure their own material well-being. Thus the Beatitudes in Matthew and Luke proclaim God’s blessings upon the poor and the powerless—“the broken-hearted” (Isa. 61:1). The intent is not to celebrate poverty, but to affirm that human wealth and strength may prevent people from relying upon God’s mercy and love. “The ‘poor in spirit’ are those who stand without pretense before God, stripped of all self-sufficiency, self-security, and self-righteousness.” ²

The practice of sabbath time holds promise as a way to begin experiencing and experimenting with what it means to live a simple life, a life of discipleship trusting in and waiting upon God. Marva Dawn in Keeping the Sabbath Wholly, offers a perspective which brings the theological, practical, and missional aspects of sabbath keeping together. Over the next few months, this blog will draw upon her work to consider: (1) The Trust of Ceasing: The experience of freedom from and repentance for work and worry. (2) The Faith of Resting: The renewal of life in grace-full faith. (3) The Joy of Embracing: The intentionality of commitments and lifestyle. (4) The Hope of Feasting: The fun and festivity of a weekly eschatological party.

SABBATH TIME. The English word “sabbath” comes from the Hebrew verb shabbat, which means primarily “to cease or desist.” To practice sabbath time means that the community stops doing what it normally does, that it ceases the activities that fill up the “work-week.” The biblical accounts of God’s creative endeavors indicate that the rhythm of six days of work and one day of ceasing work is a pattern not only recommended but also modeled by God. After working for six days to made heaven and earth, on the seventh day, God “ceased and was refreshed” (cf. Ex. 31:17). God’s sabbath calls for all human labors to cease. Time and opportunity are thus made available for repentance, for the confession of the many ways in which we human creatures try to be God by attempting to secure our own lives and create our own future.

CEASING WORK AND ACHIEVEMENT. Western civilization is built upon the work ethic. Identity, security, and status are all dependent upon the ability to work, the drive to be productive, and the desire to achieve. It is hard to escape the impression that people are valued in large part because of their busyness. Admiration is given not to the poet or artist, but to the hard driving entrepreneur who works 80 hours a week. The Bible offers a different perspective. Rather than congratulate those who keep working despite physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion, it declares that the failure to set appropriate limits on work is a criminal offense of the highest order (cf. Ex. 31:12-17). While it is questionable whether sabbath violators were ever put to death, the strong rhetoric indicates the importance attributed to the sabbath. As “a sabbath to the LORD” (Lev. 23:3) no work is to be done in order to give honor to the covenant God.

Not only ceasing to work, but putting work within a proper perspective is an important part of keeping the sabbath. In the biblical  stories of  creation work is not the primary purpose of human existence. Rather than work, it is companionship with their Creator and with one another than marks the life of the first couple. While Adam and Eve were expected to tend and care for the garden (Gen. 2:15), it was not hard, exhausting labor that was intended. What God wanted was a good garden: “a friendly world of friendly folk beneath a friendly sky.” ³ What God got, due to the human rejection of God’s intention, was a thorn-choked world of weeds, rocks, and dust that would yield its fruit only with hard work.

The Bible does not glorify human labor for its own sake. Work is understood to be a part of humanity’s service in the care of God’s good creation. Beyond the garden, hard work must be done for the preservation and maintenance of life. Yet joy and fulfillment come not in relation to work but in relation to doing the will of God. The work of human persons is to fit within the larger and more basic purposes of God. Only within this context do the professions and occupations of human persons have value. “God intends that human beings act in relationship to the divine blessing, find the fulfillment of their lives in the world where they have been placed, both by working and more particularly by resting from work.” ⁴

By advocating the ceasing of work the practice of sabbath time is counter-cultural. Challenging the work ethic, it calls into question the frantic efforts to prove human worth by accumulating possessions and accomplishments. While the exact definition of “work” can be debated, basically what is meant is that for one day a week all activity that requires changing the natural, material world is to be stopped. By letting God’s world be, the created world can be celebrated and the Creator offered praise and thanksgiving. “To refrain from working—not every day, but one in seven—opens up temporal space within which a glad and grateful relationship with God and a peaceful and appreciative relationship with nature and other people can grow.” ⁵

Sabbath ceasing from work and achievement declares that identity is found in relationship with God. It is the God who created, formed, redeemed, and called God’s people by name who makes human beings valuable: “Because you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you” (Isa. 43:4). One of greatest gifts of practicing sabbath time within the Christian community is the nurturing of a sense of personal worth that is not tied in with usefulness and/or success.

CEASING WORRY, ANXIETY AND TENSION. It may be easier to cease working than to cease worrying. Life within modern societies provides a great deal to be anxious about, just scan the daily news. Or notice the increase of stress-related illnesses such as heart attacks and depression. Alcoholism and drug use as well as spousal and child abuse can be linked to the tension of contemporary living. As hostility and alienation grow, as incidents of road rage and school shootings increase, more and more people are withdrawing into gated communities. “Our society seems to be increasingly full of fearful, defensive, aggressive people anxiously clinging to their property and inclined to look at their surrounding world with suspicion, always expecting an enemy suddenly to appear, intrude, and do harm.” ⁶

To such a people and in such a world, the Christian community is called to “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Ex. 20:8). Rather than setting aside the dangers and difficulties of daily life, sabbath time brings the life-giving gospel into concrete engagement with the death-giving aspects of culture. It is a time to gain new perspectives, new priorities, and a new sense of God’s presence. By providing the opportunity to bring forward, lift up, and let go of the often-terrifying circumstances of daily life, hope can emerge from despair, light from darkness. Sabbath ceasing thus does not mean ignoring but rather confronting the distorted reality of an alienated world. The community of faith in and through its worship—praying and singing, confessing and forgiving, proclaiming and celebrating—announces to itself and to the world a different reality: this is God’s creation and God is in charge. On this basis it can also declare: “Fret not yourself …commit your way to the LORD; trust in him…be still before the LORD, and wait patiently for him” (Ps. 37:1, 5, 7).

To keep the sabbath is to practice Paul’s advice: “Rejoice in the Lord always….Do not be anxious about anything but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Phil. 4:4, 6). As surprising as it might be the most frequent command in the Bible is “Don’t be afraid. Fear not.” This Good News does not reflect naive optimism, but is the affirmation that in the event of Jesus Christ the principalities and powers of a fallen and hostile world have been overcome. And even more, it is the promise and assurance that through the power of the Holy Spirit God is actively present to all those who call upon the Lord. “To celebrate the Sabbath is to rejoice in God’s presence. Our practices for the day include extra moments of thanksgiving and special times of prayer and petition, by which we can lay our anxieties and worries before God so that God’s peace, which both bypasses and surpasses our understanding, can guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” ⁷

CEASING TRYING TO BE GOD. The practice of sabbath time is a witness of confidence, trust, and hope. It declares that God governs this world and therefore human beings do not have to work and worry about making everything come out right. This affirmation goes contrary to the wisdom of the world which believes that one of the marks of maturity is the ability to be self-reliant, to be independent, to be in charge of one’s life. Individuals are taught to put stock in their own abilities, efforts, and initiatives as if their very lives depended upon it. Rather than God’s gracious gift, life is what we humans make of it. Indeed, one of the primary sources of worry, anxiety, and tension is the expectation that each person is on their own, in charge of their own destiny, and therefore must, in effect, be their own god.

But the wisdom of the world does not always coincide with God’s wisdom. Karl Barth opens his discussion of Christian ethics with this reminder: By demanding that men and women rest from their own works, it [the sabbath command-ment] explains that the commanding God, who has created humans and commissioned them, is the God who is gracious to them in Jesus Christ. Thus it points them away from everything that they themselves can will and achieve and back to what God is for them and will do for them. ⁸

One of the reasons Sabbath ceasing can be so freeing is that when persons cease to work and worry, they also cease trying to secure their own lives and create their own future. In other words, they let God be God! The people of Israel were taught this important lesson during the wilderness experience. The story of God’s provision of “manna” (Ex. 16:13-30) illustrates not only God’s care for God’s people, but also the difficulty of believing and relying upon that care. A work and achievement oriented people will always have that difficulty. As they worry about the future, they will continue to gather more than they need. And in their self-reliance, they will continue to ignore the fact that all of their stockpiling efforts will get pretty wormy once they lose track of God’s provision.

CONCLUSION. The practice of sabbath time, a time of ceasing, a time of abstaining from work and worry and reflecting upon the wonders of God’s work, will not come easily to contemporary communities of faith. Repenting of all the ways in which they try to be God will not come naturally nor will it be comfortable. Turning to God with hope-filled minds and hearts, trusting in God’s promises, means that they must stop, take their hands off the controls, quit their restless tinkering with the world, precisely in order to observe the power and grace of God. While there is much for God’s people to do as they participate in God’s mission in the world, the first step is to slow down, step back, and withdraw from the frantic pace of the world—and of the church. “Letting God be God in our lives does not, of course, mean passivity. We do not simply sit back and say that God is in charge of our work. Rather, when we get our priorities straight and remember that God is God and that we are merely [God’s] servants, we are empowered to do all that we can to be good stewards of the gifts and resources we have been given.” ⁹

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Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. How can the practice of sabbath time lead to participation in God’s quiet revolution of love, forgiveness and unity?
2. Read Exodus 31:12-17. Notice that God rested from the work of creation and “was refreshed.” Why should God’s people keep the Sabbath?
3. How can the practice of sabbath time engage anxieties and fears?
4. What does the phrase “hope of ceasing” mean to you?
5. Identify key obstacles to ceasing from work and worry and placing full trust in God?
6. How can your congregation more fully communicate a vision and provide support for a simpler way of life, a life filled with the practice of Sabbath time?

Admittedly, with our present nature, without God, we humans are incapable of community. Temperamental mood swings, possessive impulses and cravings for physical and emotional satisfaction, powerful currents of ambition and touchiness, the desire for personal influence over others, and human privileges of all kinds—all these place seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the way of true community. But with faith we cannot be deluded into thinking that these realities are decisive: in the ace of the power of God and [God’s] all-conquering love, they are of no significance. God is stronger than these realities. The unifying energy of [God’s] Spirit is stronger than these realities. The unifying energy of [God’s] Spirit overcomes them all.”¹

IN THIS POST:

• Living in Community.
• The Servant Community.
• Those who believed were of one heart and soul…”
• Life in the Spirit.
• Questions for Reflection and Discussion.

Living in Community. Eberhard Arnold, who founded a small community of families and singles now known as the Bruderhof (“place of brothers”), identifies both the obstacles and the motivation for community. In the midst of a disconnected and depersonalized society, many persons hunger for community—for a place “where everyone knows your name.” Yet alongside this yearning, there is also widespread apprehension. Living closely with other persons—sharing life, work, worship—brings not only the benefits of companionship and shared values, but also restraints, demands, and responsibilities. Authentic Christian community is not a romantic or idealized dream, but a concrete way of life which has practical and definite consequences. Embracing rather than glossing over the differences, the ambitions, or the conflicts, such community is only possible through the creative power, redemptive love, and transformative presence of the Triune God. Thus, in responding to the question “Why do we live in community?” Arnold declares: “We must live in community because all life created by God exists in a communal order and works toward community.”² This movement of small intentional communities seeking to live according to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, bears witness to the life-giving and community-building power of God.

The church is challenged to pay attention both to the longing for and the resistance to community, while at the same time affirming the relational quality of life within the reign of God. Paying attention to one another within the Christian community not only provides support for the journey of faith, but also offers a testimony to God’s vision for all of humanity. If the gospel of Jesus Christ is to be more than an intriguing idea, it must become visible in a people whose life together is the first fruit of the new social order intended by God for the whole of creation. “God’s reign comes when we can regard all strangers as sisters and brothers; when we can embrace those from whom we are estranged; when we can unite in one congregation diverse racial, social, political, economic, and ethnic groups; when we can seek justice for those who are least deserving or lovable; when we are freed from private life, private property, and private commitment and led into public life, public property, and public commitment; and when the needs and concerns of the world’s outcasts are made our agenda for prayer and service.”³

God’s quiet revolution of love, forgiveness, and unity does not come about through secular power and influence. The world learns about the quality of life within God’s reign through the life, practice, and witness of missional communities. Such communities are shaped by their discernment of and participation in God’s redemptive activity in a broken and alienated world. On the one hand, this seems to be an audacious statement which unduly exalts the church. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that the formation of Christian community can have any influence at all upon the world.

The Rev. Inagrace Dietterich, Ph.D. is the Director of Theological Research at the Center for Parish Development.

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¹ Eberhard Arnold, Why We Live in Community (Plough Publishing House, 3^rd English Edition, 1995), p. 4.

² Ibid., p. 1.

³ John H. Westerhoff, Living the Faith Community: The Church That Makes A Difference (Harper & Row, 1985), p. 21.

⁴ Jim Wallis, Agenda for Biblical People: A new focus for developing a life-style of discipleship (Harper & Row, 1976), p. 120.

⁵ Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion: Recovering the Gospel for These Times (HarperSanFrancisco, 1982), p. 123.

⁶ Luke Johnson, Sharing Possessions: Mandate and Symbol of Faith (Fortress Press, 1981).

⁷ Marva Dawn, Keeping the Sabbath Wholly: Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Feasting (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 116.

⁸ Gordon Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul (Hendrickson, 1994), p. 385.
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March 2011

Inagrace Dietterich

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing….But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matt. 6:25, 33).

The Gospel of Matthew offers concrete advice about how to live the good life by recommending a simple life which trusts in God. This vision of life is not a pie-in-the-sky otherworldly dream. Rather than rejecting or ignoring bodily concerns, the Bible is intensely interested in the human realities of hunger and thirst. The goal of the Christian life is not an escape from the world or an abstract communion with God, but a way into the realities of the world through an alternative vision and way of life. Participation in the life, worship, and witness of the church is an invitation to a new communal life, a new social identity, and a new way to receive and to share the basic necessities of life. It is by recognizing their own hunger, their own need for forgiveness and reconciliation, that Christians learn how to stand in solidarity with the hungry, the dispossessed, and the fearful. Seeking God’s reign and God’s righteousness, Christians are nourished and strengthened. As they pray, study, and break bread together in Christian fellowship, Christians are drawn into God’s quiet revolution of love, forgiveness, and unity.

During 2011, Center Letter Blog intends to explore the theological, biblical, and practical implications of living the simple life, which is also be the theme of the Center’s Convocation in Chicago, IL on July 14-16, 2011 (see www.missionalchurch.org ).

IN THIS POST:

• Excursus: Presuppositions of  Center Letter Blog
• “Do not be anxious….”
• “Seek first God’s Kingdom….”
• “Blessed are….”
• Questions for Reflection and Discussion