With the 1st of May, comes  a new issue of Worship Leader Magazine, for whom I’ve been a columnist since the first of the year. The lead article this issue happens to be mine, a meditation on the Holy Spirit’s role in worship. To read the whole article, of course, you have to subscribe. But here’s the Introduction, Headings (with summaries), and the Conclusion:

One minute the puppy was playing on the side of the street. The next, he darted into traffic. That was it. I saw him spin off a passing car’s wheel and collapse in a lump at the side of the road. A police officer happened by and stopped to see if he could help. I expected him to feel for a heartbeat. Instead, he took off his sunglasses and held them to the puppy’s nose.

“No breath,” he said to me, “he’s gone. Poor guy.”

Worship Leaders and the Spirit — Leading worship is the privilege it is because it amounts to cooperating with the life-giving Holy Spirit.

The One Worship Leader and the Spirit — Jesus cleanses the Temple as a sign that his sacrifice will end sacrifices, and as a sign that He is going to build a new building, one made of us.

The Spirit in John’s Gospel — Jesus’ sayings and conversations in John’s gospel give us a glimpse into the vision that animated Jesus that day he cleansed the Temple.

The Holy Spirit and Worship — What characterizes Spirit-led worship? Are there marks of the breath of the Spirit?

The Spirit Creates Life — G. K. Chesterton suggests that the only way to explain the fact that the church hasn’t died over time as one cultural, political, or philosophical support after another has fallen away, is that there is a Presence in the church that won’t go away. If Arianism, Gnosticism, Pelagianism, imperial patronage, humanism, scientism, modernism, and postmodernism can’t make the Holy Spirit go away, I probably can’t either.

The Spirit Makes One out of Many — Unity is not difficult to sustain when everyone shares the same preferences - musical tastes, “age and stage” affinity, theological nuance, Myers-Briggs profiles. When there’s unity despite differing penchants, a unity that is born out of heroic forbearance and costly deference, it seems more likely that it is the Spirit who is at work.

The Spirit Exalts Others — A fundamental characteristic of the Holy Spirit is that he does not call attention to himself: “He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you,” said Jesus (John 14:16).

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Of course, there’s so much more to say about the Spirit and worship — about the mission, about the gifts, about uniting old and new. But for now, this will have to suffice: not unlike that lifeless puppy I saw on the side of the road, we were dead to intimacy with our Maker, and dead to the way our relationships with one another were to mirror the eternal communion within the Trinity — until the Son came, died, rose, and breathed the breath of God into us.

As a worship leader there’s probably nothing greater that I can contribute to worship than making sure that I keep breathing God’s breath myself. In the Word daily — breathe in. In prayer daily — breathe out. Confess “my stuff” — breathe in. Lift his name in praise and adoration — breathe out. Come to the Table — breathe in. Wish my neighbor Christ’s peace — breathe out. Ponder the wonder of his grace to me — breathe in. Find the lost, tell the story, feed the hungry — breathe out.

I grow more and more convinced that Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus have been wrongly written off as flat and unimaginative. In fact, they offer some of the apostle’s most creative theologizing.

One of Paul’s finest moments is his finding in an unnamed pagan prophet from Crete’s past a diagnosis for which his own gospel is the antidote (compare Titus 1:12 with 2:12).

“We Cretans are (religious) liars,” confesses the prophet. “God’s grace became incarnate to teach us godliness,” counters Paul.

“We Cretans are vicious beasts” admits the prophet. “God’s grace came to teach us justice,” urges Paul.

“We Cretans are lazy gluttons,” bemoans the prophet. “God’s grace came to teach us self-control,” offers Paul.

I wrote all that up in more scholarly form some time ago in “Titus as Apologia: Grace for Liars, Beasts, and Gluttons” (for a copy, click the link), insights from which my friend Phil Towner adroitly worked into his truly outstanding NICNT commentary, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (Eerdmans, 2006).

My main summer project has been completing a short writing project for Baker Book House: essentially fifty-plus words per verse of commentary on these three letters to Paul’s two most trusted lieutenants.

The writing comes on the heels of three lectures and some valuable interchange with University of Florida students at the Christian Study Center (headed up by Richard Horner, himself an exceedingly astute scholar of Western intellectual history) in Gainesville during this past spring semester. My lectures, How Pauline are the Pastorals … and why does it matter?, are available in mp3 format from the CSC website).
That lecture series and this summer’s writing have provided the first chance I’ve had in a while to work carefully through these last of Paul’s letters. It’s been both bracing and convicting.

This summer happens to find us in the midst of a political season. For that reason, when the writing brought me at long last to the beginning of Titus 3 and to Paul’s instructions on civic virtue there, I found myself having to linger a while.

In a word, Paul says that Christians should not only be passively obedient, say, in praying for government (1Tm 2) and in paying taxes (Rom 13), but beyond those duties we should be ready “for every good work” (Titus 3:1). He’s talking about works done in the public square, not in the Christian ghetto.

Moreover, as if to anticipate those who assume he means we should lead with indignant anger and strident denunciations of all that is wrong with the world, Paul urges us: “to slander no one, to be peaceable and considerate, and always to be gentle toward everyone” (Titus 3:2 TNIV).

I thought those words were worth calling attention to during the summer of a presidential race, so a few days ago I posted some reflections at Glenn Lucke’s Common Grounds Online community, “Paul to Titus: On Christians in the Public Square.” I’d be pleased to have friends drop in there to continue the conversation about what Paul would have us do.

But before I stop keyboarding, I also have to recommend a sobering article by David Brooks of the New York Times, “The Great Seduction: America’s Next Moral Threat Isn’t Sexual — It’s Financial” (NYT, June 10, 2008). Brooks, in turn, refers to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s “A Nation in Debt: How We Killed Thrift, Enthroned Loan Sharks and Undermined American Prosperity”).

Its Puritan theology and Franklinesque ethic of prudence, opines Brooks, originally enabled the U.S. to be wealthy without being corrupted by wealth. But that legacy has given way to a culture of financial decadence, an explosion of debt, and the division of our citizenry into an “investor class” and a “lottery class.” At our peril, may I suggest, we neglect the prospect of resentment-fueled class war.

Between them, Brooks and Whitehead offer various suggestions for turning things around, e.g., tightened usury laws, raised awareness about debt, access for the poor and middle class to financial planning, re-purposed lotteries, foundation- and church-based short-term loans.

What they leave for somebody else to say is this: What’s going on around us in the collapse of the housing market and in the skyrocketing of personal debt has everything to do with what happens when we do not pay attention in the marketplace and in the public square to the basic values the gospel teaches: truth will eventually out us, and we can only deny the claims of justice and self-control so long (Titus 1:12). If we’re a city on a hill, as it was put by the One who came to teach us to deny ungodliness and worldly passions and to live soberly, justly, and piously, now is a time for shining (see Titus 2:11-12; Mt 5:14-16).

In sum of this post and of my explorations in the Pastorals over the last few months: we dare not keep our faith in the prayer-closet — and we could do worse than to heed the apostle’s considered judgment as to how he wanted his theology to be applied in the next generation.

The Athenians waived their claim in the interest of national survival, knowing that a quarrel about the command would certainly mean the destruction of Greece. They were, indeed, perfectly right; for the evil of internal strife is worse than united war in the same proportion as war itself is worse than peace. It was their realization of the danger attendant upon lack of unity which made them waive their claim, and they continued to do so as long as Greece desperately needed their help. (Herodotus, Histories 8.2)

Following the deaths of the Spartan King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” at Thermopylae in 480 B.C., the various Greek city-states decided they needed to pull together. Xerxes’ gargantuan army and navy were poised to overwhelm Greece, indeed the whole of Europe. At the eleventh hour the Greeks realized they needed each other.

Traditionally, Greece looked to Sparta for leadership on land and to Athens for leadership on the sea. But in this case there were misgivings about giving Athens command of the city-states’ combined fleets (despite Athens’ contributing the largest number of ships). Herodotus isn’t clear whether the reluctance was due to lack of confidence in or envy against Athens, or due simply to a recognition of Sparta’s moral capital.

The point is: Athens “got it,” to quip Herodotus: civil war in the face of an external threat is suicide.

Or, in Facebook-speak: mutual defenestration means self annihilation. When the enemy is at the gate, that’s not the time to be throwing each other out the window.

Rather than lobby for their traditional right to command, Athens accepted Spartan command of the navy as well as of the army. The result: two brilliant victories — one by Greece’s combined navies (at Salamis) and one by Greece’s combined armies (at Plataea) — and one huge and final retreat by Xerxes. The result: daughters of neither Athens nor Sparta were exported to harems in Persepolis.

There are times that call for a sense of measure and proportion — times when you need not to be doing a smack down on each other. Fifth century B.C. Greece it figured out. Will we?

On one front, we face militant Islamists who have declared a reverse Crusade on us, demanding we either grovel before a disincarnate cosmic monad, or die.

On another, Mormons, arguably the fastest growing religion on the planet, knock on our doors with their terminal niceness (with, as Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven chillingly recounts, notable exceptions) and their uber-Disney promise that not only can you wish upon a star but you can get your own star where you’ll be a god or goddess.

Then there are the angry atheists who grouch about the immorality and intellectual suicide of faith. And just wait until this Christmas season’s (how deliciously ironic) release of the movie based on Philip Pullman’s vision of anti-Narnia: The Golden Compass.

Meanwhile, mainline Western churches languor under the sway of pre-pagan eros and post-Christian heterodoxy, embodying in a way that couldn’t be more precise Jude’s prescient warning about “ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 4).

It’s an extraordinary time for evangelicals to rediscover the stability of the Bible’s meta-narrative of creation, fall and redemption —  the one true and enduring story that puts the lie to the false stories of jihad, of self-deification, of autonomy, of faux Christianity. A stability that allows us to read each other’s odd takes on the story with sufficient grace to account for the Grace that took on flesh to cover all our inadequacies.

In the end, much more is at stake than when the beneficiaries of the sacrifice of King Leonidas and “his brave three hundred” took stock of the price that had been paid for them. Nothing less than the opportunity to embody an answer to the prayer of the Second Person of the Trinity: “May they all be one as you, Father, are in me and I in you: may they be in us that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21).

The enemy outnumber us a paltry three to one. Good odds for any Greek. This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny — and usher in a future brighter than anything we can imagine. Give thanks, men, to Leonidas and the brave three hundred — to victory.

I know it’s a comic book version of history, but I am irresistibly attracted to 300 — both Frank Miller’s graphic novel [i.e., comic book for “grown ups”] and the movie it inspired. Forget the poetic license (we don’t know why the shepherd Ephialtes betrayed the Spartans, we don’t know how King Leonidas’ wife supported his campaign back home, we don’t know if the doomed king made anybody like the above-quoted Delios return home to tell the tale and marshal support for the next campaign) — 300’s license is no greater than Braveheart’s. Forget the over-the-top visual and auditory reconstruction — yeah right, the Spartans fought with exposed six-pack abs and celebrated to heavy metal music while Zeus punished the Persian navy. The genre is Classics Illustrated on steroids — perhaps literally to judge from how buff this Leonidas and his Spartan warriors are.

The fact is: Europe came close to capitulating to Persian conquest in 480 B.C. — save for the time purchased and the example set by 300 brave Spartans (and others, to be sure) who perished in the shade of Persian arrows (a line Frank Miller takes directly from Herodotus) at Thermopylae. Fictional though the character is, and fictional though his lines are, Delios’ (and through him, Frank Miller’s) homage is apt.

“Huzzah!” for the 300 who didn’t come back, either “carrying” or “on their shields” (another great line Miller took from historical sources — this time from Plutarch). And “Huzzah” for leaders who understand the stakes are as high for us today. I’m glad I’m not “The Decider.” I don’t know if George W. Bush was naive about how much harder winning a peace would be than winning a war. I do know brave men and women are giving it their best shot … in that regard, I commend, in passing, Peggy Noonan’s piece “To Old Times” in the Wall Street Journal (8/25/07; Page P14), her own “Huzzah!” to American soldiers in Iraq: “I always notice the pictures from the wire services, pictures that have nothing to do with government propaganda. The Marine on patrol laughing with the local street kids; the nurse treating the sick mother. A funny thing. We’re so used to thinking of American troops as good guys that we forget: They’re good guys! They have American class.”

Anybody who has questions about what has been at stake at least since the attempted bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and its actual destruction in 2001 would do well to read the Christian sociologist Jacques Ellul’s impassioned and insightful The Betrayal of the West (Seabury Press, 1978), a plea for a defense of what is good in Western civilization. Ellul understands two things many pundits don’t. First, he understands that the contemporary war against the West began before 1993 and that it was launched by voices internal to the West (but that’s not the subject of this posting). Second, he understands that what makes the West worth fighting for is that it itself succumbed to a more lethal attack from the East, an attack that followed Xerxes’ by half a millennium.

According to Ellul, a smaller but deadlier army came against the West when the Apostle Paul, in Turkey at the time, had a nighttime vision of a Greek pleading for him to cross the Aegean Sea and bring the good news of Jesus Christ from Asia to Europe (Ac 16:9-10).

As Ellul puts it:

Upon this vision the specific character of western civilization depends; at this moment the mystery peculiar to the West and the contradiction that runs through western history come into being.

Imagine Christianity expanding toward the East instead of toward the West. The result? Western history would have been radically different, proving that all the major historical events were secondary in comparison with Paul’s dream. If the Persians instead of the Greeks had won at Marathon [ed. note, where Xerxes’ father, Darius had been turned back in 490] or Salamis [the turning point of the campaign against Xerxes some months after Thermopylae], western civilization would not have been different. …

If, however, the Mediterranean world had remained pagan, had developed according to its native genius, and had expanded under Germanic auspices, how differently the West would have turned out! The course of history would have been radically altered if the western will to power had been given free rein, unhindered by a bad conscience. The Middle Ages would have been different, and so would capitalism. Paul’s vision was thus the crucial moment for western civilization. It was the moment when God took radical action in the political and intellectual spheres. (pp. 73-74)

Beginning the day the Apostle’s feet hit European soil, God’s self-giving agape has been conquering Europe’s eros, its pride, and its autonomy. Jesus’ ambassadors came in love rather than imperial arrogance, but they came nonetheless with a demand as fundamental as the Persians’ “earth and water”: “There is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved” (Ac 4:12).

So, “Huzzah!” indeed for King Leonidas and Sparta’s brave 300. But “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!” for ambassadors of the King.

For my friend Richard Pratt who tirelessly urges American evangelicals to prepare for the coming conflict with Islam.

For courageous African Anglican bishops who extend the agape of pastoral care to U.S. believers whose church leaders have reverted to pre-Christian eros.

For Emad (not his real name), formerly in the personal guard of the deposed head of state in what was once Xerxes’ Persia, who trains for gospel ministry in exile praying for the day he can return home. For Fadilah (also not her real name) whose Mideast politician-father was martyred for his Christian faith and who herself lives and ministers in the Mideast knowing she may pay the ultimate price as well.

For Joyce (her real name), my administrative assistant, who took Jesus’ footwashing example to the Mideast and found, to her delight, that Christians there were eager to take this modeling of Jesus’ cruciform life to Christian neighbors elsewhere in the Mideast.

For countless Christians in China, many of whom worship in secret as they prepare for their own missionary campaign to their west — places where we Westerners have long lost our voice.

Whatever the odds against us, they are paltry to King Jesus and his brave three hundred. As Frank Miller’s graphic novel concludes: “The order is given. The battle flutes play. To victory — we charge.”

Women, more especially,—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion,—or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought,—came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. (ch. 24)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter revolves around three sinners who respond to their sinfulness in wildly different ways and with wildly different results. The adulterous pastor Dimmesdale hides his sin, and nearly loses his soul in the process. The sinned against physician Chillingworth never forgives. Instead, he grows obsessively vengeful and finally becomes devil’s food. Hester Prynne owns her guilt, accepts the full consequences of her sin — and even goes the second mile, so to speak, by generously (if misguidedly) protecting the identity of both her paramour and her husband. In the end, she emerges with a quiet radiance about her. She becomes a magnet for others whom sin has left “wounded, wasted, wronged, and wretched,” especially women. She can comfort and counsel chiefly because of her crucible.

It was impossible for me to read The Scarlet Letter and not burn with Hawthorne’s anger at a world and a church that suffered the male pastor’s hypocrisy and the male physician’s duplicity at the sinful woman’s expense. Yet the world Hawthorne longs for in the future — one in which “the whole relation between man and woman” is established “on a surer ground of mutual happiness” — I find in the new creation Jesus came to inaugurate in the first place. How sad that it remains so elusive.

Jesus comes to an adulterous woman’s defense, demanding that the sinless among the (male) scribes and Pharisees throw the first stone, and setting her free when her accusers wither at his challenge (Jn 8:1-11). Jesus accepts the hospitality of Samaria’s infamously five-times-over serial-adulteress (Jn 4). Jesus allows the up-close-and-personal touch of a woman who is marked out only by the moniker, “a sinner” (Lk 7:36-50). Jesus chooses women as first to witness his resurrection, and with his “Go tell …,” makes them, if you will, apostles to the apostles (Mt 28:1-10). Surely, this is part of what he did to “make all things new” (Rev 21:5).

Even the apostle Paul — whom Hawthorne’s Puritans would arguably have considered more an authority anyway — sees a different and new place for women in Jesus’ new creation. Paul notes approvingly the fact that women are praying and prophesying in church — a sign of the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy that the day would come when God would pour out his Spirit on all people (1Co 11:2-16; Joel 2:28-32; and cf. Ac 2:16-21). He calls Phoebe a “minister,” employing the same term he applies to Jesus, to himself, to Timothy, and to what appear to be junior officers in the church — in fact, he (at least as I understand the text) lays out in his first letter to Timothy specific requirements for women who are to fill this office (Rom 16:1; 15:8; 2Co 3:6; 1Tm 4:6; 3:8-13, and note. v. 11). He may number a Junia among the “apostles” (interpreters disagree) in the same way Luke numbers Barnabas among them (Rom 16:7; Ac 14:4). Paul accepts the hospitality of Lydia, an unattached, business woman — no doubt one of those “new Roman women” whom Bruce Winter’s scholarship has brought into relief (Ac 16:14-15). And so important are his women Philippian “coworkers” Euodia and Syntyche — “who have been fellow athletes with me in the gospel” (to render his phrase overly literally, just to make the point) — that he urges their reconciliation for the sake of the ongoing ministry (Php 4:2-3).

To be sure — if I correctly understand two passages in Paul’s letters, 1Co 14:29-63 & 1Tm 2:9-15 — there is a point of demurral. A point at which women in the church defer to, as an Episcopal bishop recently put it to me, “a male presbuterate.” But what that point of demurral is isn’t obvious. And I would submit that according to Jesus and Paul, it’s not the first thing you look for. In fact, you only realize what it’s there for in an atmosphere that is alive with men and women co-laboring together in the gospel ministry. There have to be a thousand ways ecclesiologies can respect the dance that Paul envisions — and the whole argument about “ordination” is altogether beside the point.

In the last few years, I’ve been blessed with a number of relationships and models that have made it more important to me to urge us all to work harder to approximate the world of vibrant male-female co-laboring in ministry that Paul experienced and promoted.

Just for starters …

There’s Carla Waterman, with whom I team-teach in the Robt. E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies. Carla is the sister I never had. It’s amazing to me the way she completes my sentences. My, “That you may have life,” inevitably leads to her, “And that more abundantly.” My, “That reminds me of a carburetor that’s got too rich a mix of fuel and air,” invariably prompts her, “You know, it’s like your yard is a jungle you want to make into a garden.” Carla says she looks to me for grounding. I look to her for wings.

There’s Carolyn James, whose books, When Life and Beliefs Collide and Lost Women of the Bible, boldly, biblically, and astutely encourage women to become students and sharers of God’s Word regardless of the shape of specific vocation.

There’s Geri Scazzero who complements her husband Pete’s (author of The Emotionally Healthy Church and Emotionally Healthy Spirituality) voice so nicely, if forcefully — using her public strength to urge him to protect her by telling people the truth, not necessarily what they want to hear.

There’s Vicki Taylor, my co-laborer at Orangewood Presbyterian, whose own tutelage in Christ’s school of suffering gives her a whole-souled winsomeness, whether she’s singing or counseling or mothering or speaking in public.

Of course, there’s Shari, my wife, who has chosen to teach her sons at home, all the while supporting my various ministries — nobody will ever know how much of what I teach or write that is of any value has really come from her.

And, finally, there are any number of women who have come to a testosterone-rich RTS/Orlando for training in ministry. Often from left-of-whoopee denominations, these sisters have convictions that have led them — often in defiance of church officials — to come to us for training that is theologically orthodox. They do so just so they can stand in pulpits that otherwise would be sub-orthodox. Their courage shames me because, unlike them, I’m in a theologically “safe” denomination — gee whiz, the most courageous thing I’ve done in years is force my eyes to accept contact lenses. But these sisters’ bravery bespeaks the promise that Jesus is not finished with his new creation.

“Any song that makes you think you’re born to lose, bound to lose, no good to nobody, songs that run you down or poke fun at you because of your bad luck or hard travelin’, I’m out to fight these songs to my very last breath of air, to my last drop of blood. I’m out to sing the songs that will prove to you that this is your world, no matter what color, what size you are or how you were built.” — Woody Guthrie

I never thought I’d be naming Woody Guthrie my theologian of the week. I never thought that crusty folk singer would put me in mind of the hope Christ came to bring. But today he reminded me of how tired I am of fear-based and hope-bereft theology. Somebody gave Eeyore the microphone, and it’s time to take it away.

This past Sunday during church I happened to be in a position to watch people’s faces while a women’s ensemble sang Nicole C. Mullens’ “Call on Jesus.” Our preacher (who this week was Orangewood Presbyterian’s much loved founding pastor, Chuck Green) had just challenged the congregation to consider the way the Lord had responded when Elijah called to him (contrary to the Baals who were apparently unable or unwilling to respond to their 450 prophets — see 1 Kings 18).

The song was rendered in solo/ensemble fashion, and we hadn’t distributed nor were we projecting the lyrics. I thought we’d surely field complaints about lack of visual support for the song’s text. Curiously though, I watched tearful faces silently mouthing the words, “When I call on Jesus all things are possible.” I was reminded both how desperately we need to know that hope, and how magnificently true it is.

Our God is not like the Baals. He’s not too busy. He’s not going to the bathroom (for which the Bible’s “turning aside” is a euphemism). He’s not on a journey. Not asleep and in need of awakening (see 1Kg 18:27).

Well, correct that: in fact, he did busy himself — thus, Jesus Christ stood before his friend Lazarus’ tomb and “stirred himself” (Jn 11:33). Coming as one of us, he experienced all of what it means to be a human — and that’s got to include “turning aside.” He undertook the most momentous of journeys, as Richard Baxter penned, “from heaven to earth, from earth to the cross, from the cross to the grave, from the grave to glory.” As a result, Paul notes, the risen God-man now sings his all-conquering love all around the world (Romans 15:9).

What Guthrie’s lines put me in mind of is how profoundly the song of the reality of Christ’s resurrection drowns out the nay-saying Eeyore songs. The songs that run, “Lord, have mercy … even though I know you never will.” It’s time to lose the “you’re born to lose, bound to lose, good to nobody” defeatism. It’s time to refuse the voices that bring only condemnation. Whether it’s the internal voice of self-condemnation: “I blew it so bad this time, he’ll take me back.”

Or the voices whose “Onward Christian Soldiers” is but a veiled carping against others in the camp: “You’re so concerned to stress that Jesus died for individuals, you’ve lost his vision for the church. You’ve lost the gospel.” Or the converse: “You’re so focused on the institutional church, you’re robbing true believers of their individual assurance of salvation and simultaneously offering nominal believers a false assurance. You’ve lost the gospel.”

Hello. The gospel is that Christ died for our sins according to Scripture … and rose to make all things new. New hearts and a new creation. Each and all. Somebody take Eeyore’s microphone and give it to Woody.

As all my friends know, because I can’t not talk about it, my youngest son and I have been studying a form of Japanese swordsmanship for a little over a year and a half now. Well, we were finally invited to do our first testing this summer, and we both passed. My son did so somewhat more respectably than I. To mix metaphors (well, to mix sports), I hit a single just inside the baseline, while my son hit a double off the wall. Regardless, we’re now both “first rank” (in the U.S., not the Japanese, association), though that’s not something you’d ever actually mention — which is one reason this whole sword thing is so cool.

The predominant lesson is one I’ve ruminated about before: the “way” of submission I’ve seen in my Scottish-bred, Key West-born sensei. He doesn’t cut corners. He has given himself in humility to learn what his Japanese sensei wants him to know. He has no patience with “know it alls” and self-promoters. He’s learned a power of greatness that comes from taking the lowly path. For my son and me, what we learned from testing is something we already knew: testing isn’t the deal — making progress in the art of the sword is.

A second lesson has to do with the cumulative power of little acts of obedience when combined with a master teacher’s powers of observation and timely guidance. It has only been since the spring that the sword thing has become enjoyable. That’s because there have been several “breakthroughs” for me recently — that is, finally “getting it” about certain mechanics of the discipline.
What it’s taken to finally understand things I’d merely heard for months was a combination of my doing the best I could over and over and over again even though I was doing things wrong, and my sensei’s sensing the timely moment when an individualized word could be heard — that is, his recognizing “teachable moments”:

“Throw the tip of the sword as though you were casting a fishing rod, like this….”

“Keep the pad of your left palm on the sword all the time, like this ….”

“On the left-to-right side cut, keep the right wrist cocked, like this….”

At long last, when I do my forms, I don’t feel like a klutz, and when I approach a tatami to cut it, I expect to cut it cleanly and with an angle that’s at least close. I’ve had to do mongo-numerific repetitions, but sensei had to offer timely corrections, otherwise I’d still just be doing things wrong.

By my daily practice, I put myself in the line of fire for illumination. By his attentiveness, my sensei metes out his best instruction when it can be heard. The whole dynamic is, for me, a window into the way God relates to those he’s adopted into his family through Jesus.

Lectionary Devotions. Not unrelated to the above has been my use of the lectionary for personal devotions. For years I’ve done Bible reading on a “read through” basis, trying to get through the whole Bible in English every year and through the Greek NT once a year too. The latter’s been fairly consistent, the former pretty spotty.

A few months ago I changed over to following the Presbyterian Church (USA) lectionary, where the typical daily pattern is: a psalm or two, an Old Testament passage, a paragraph or so from a New Testament epistle, and a Gospel pericope. In recent years, I’ve picked up more friends from a liturgical tradition, and I’ve been intrigued, first, by how much more actual reading of Scripture there is in their Sunday worship services (a topic for another day!), and, second, by what an oddly satisfying thing it seems to be to them to be reading Scripture daily in concert with a vast number of fellow believers around the world. They seem to have a keener sense than I of being caught up in a shared story with a worldwide, heaven-and-earth-transcending communion.

At any rate, I’m giving myself to the daily lectionary readings for now. To facilitate that for myself and anybody else who cares to join in, I’ve posted an RSS link to the daily lectionary from my website (in the left hand column of this page).

A few observations.

Every day I have at least one psalm to meditate on (I usually use the chants from the Book of Common Worship). The psalms — especially as sung — sort of force a more personal engagement, and remind me that Scripture promotes doxology and authenticity. Lex canendi, lex credendi. Sing praise. Understanding will follow.

Old Testament stories come in smaller bits. Following the lectionary, I’ll read about half a chapter a day instead of, like, three chapters in the annual “read through” track. That means the stories unfold a bit more leisurely, suspense building from day to day. Tracking Samson’s sorry tale over the course of several days, for instance, is quite a different matter than running through it in a day. You come back to him each morning waiting for him to wake up from his spiritual stupor and ethical torpor — but he doesn’t, until his days on this earth are spent. You see yourself in a mirror, and you cry out, “Lord, have mercy!” The Old Testament has suddenly become more like what it actually is, the poignantly dramatic unfolding of God’s story of his reclamation of this out-of-control planet he nonetheless loves.

No matter what, in the lectionary you always end with a gospel reading — that means (like any good children’s sermon) you always end up with Jesus. In the Protestant tradition that has shaped me, we prize the epistles (especially Paul’s), where the implications of Jesus’s coming — his death, his resurrection, and his guidance via the Holy Spirit — are spelled out. But the actual person — the one Martin Kaehler liked to refer to as the “historic Christ” of the gospel accounts — can go relatively unattended in our tradition.

It takes far more intuition and imagination on your part and far more illumining work from the Holy Spirit’s side, to go daily to the gospel accounts and get your bearings from Jesus. Today, for instance, I was reminded that it isn’t in Scripture as such that “eternal life” resides (we’re a religion “of the book,” so to speak — but the book isn’t the religion); rather, “it is they (the Scriptures) that bear witness to me. And you aren’t willing to come to me to get that life” (John 5:39-40). I realize the gospel writers are no less mediators of the “actual Jesus” than are the epistle writers. Nonetheless, through them I’m being reminded more directly my Jesus’s meddlesomeness, not to mention his refusal to be refashioned in my likeness.