During these days after Easter I have been thinking about Pentecost. I’ve been wondering what a creative liturgy would look like for a Pentecost service. Liturgical churches read the Pentecost passages but don’t often practice much in the way of spiritual gifts. Some churches mention Pentecost and the power of the Spirit and stop there. [...]
Paul S. Fiddes, who I looked at with some skepticism based on what he wrote down below, is a very smart man, David Opderbeck assures me. I trust that opinion and must confess that even though a lot of us are wicked smart, we still often write things that just don’t quite add up (I am sure you can find some thinking like that on this blog). One of the necessary elements of theological or any other thinking person’s inquiry is that sometimes we have to push the bounds into things that will just never make sense, a brainstorm or thinking game to stretch our minds. That being said, I feel it is important to bounce off of Fiddes resent burst of provocativeness on the Eucharist:
Summary of "Sacraments in a Virtual World"—An avatar can receive the bread and wine of the Eucharist within the logic of the virtual world and it will still be a means of grace, since God is present in a virtual world in a way that is suitable for its inhabitants. We may expect that the grace received by the avatar will be shared in some way by the person behind the avatar, because the person in our everyday world has a complex relationship with his or her persona.
An avatar, for those who don’t know, is the visual representation of one’s self in a virtual world. Most often these are the pictures you have in Yahoo! chat or in a game like Second Life. First, Fiddes makes an overall excellent point about the boundlessness of God, and he really pushes us to see God present everywhere, even in the virtual extensions of computing, because all computers and the Internet has a physical base to its virtualness. There is light and pixels and servers running on electricity behind every virtual world.
What is lacking in this understanding of the Eucharist, and Fiddes hints at it himself when he writes that the Eucharist performed virtually is "an extension of the church sacraments," thus separating the virtual sacrament from the physical sacrament of the Eucharist. Physicality is the key here, for the bread and wine of the Eucharist are properly a symbol of the incarnation to all of us, as it is both spiritual and physical food. Part of the problem with an understanding of virtual worlds is that they are too often equated with the spiritual or supernatural world, because they are both unseen or "other-ly" worlds, but this is dead wrong. The spiritual world we live in is extra-dimensional, in the sense that it is real but beyond us in many ways, whereas the virtual worlds of computers are simulations: extensions of our own physical world and are never "other" by any ways or means other than what Tolkien called suspended disbelief. We enter into virtual worlds like we enter into novels or movies.
The spiritual world meets the physical world in the Eucharist, and as such the physicality of the sacrament is what makes it sacramental. Just as Christ was fully man and fully God, so to is our experience of the sacraments: it is both fully divine, a gift from God, and fully physical, prepared from dust to dung to fertilizer to seed to plant to crop to harvest and then to bottle, or then for bread from harvest to millstone to flour to dough to oven to loaf. Hands touch these things, the weather and the climate touch these things. Truckers and shippers and boxers touch all these things. The Eucharist is a feast of new creation, of our salvation, and this must be always held before us as an immensely physical happening. N.T. Wright can only sound the alarm so many times that heaven is not a disembodied place but instead a real, physical New Earth and New Heavens. Going down the road of Fiddes thinking separates physicality from the sacraments and begins to blur the lines between spirituality and virtuality.
A dubious publication called the Christian Courier published an article called The "Emerging Church"-The New Face of Heresy with this spectacular showing of poor journalism, scholarship, and lack of basic thought processes:
“Emerging” churches are restructuring the worship format. The Lord’s supper is being offered in conjunction with special events, e.g., weddings. The communion memorial is not restricted to the Lord’s day; instead groups step beyond the biblical pattern and provide it on weekdays, ignoring a New Testament that is [sic] undergirded with historical truth, namely the Lord’s resurrection on Sunday.
1) Jesus had the Last Supper on a Thursday…that’s historical truth for ya.
2) I didn’t want to waste a lot of time researching this, but I easily found evidence that in English language traditions the sacrament of communion was included in wedding liturgy since about 1078 under the Sarum Rite.
3) And some guy named Paul wrote that "whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes." Whenever is a whole lot different than "on Sunday."
Do you like movies?
Do you take communion?
If so, you’ll enjoy Kara Picken’s essay "The Necessary Yet Unsatisfying Table", a discussion of communion and Ingmar Burgman films.
Even if you don’t take communion or hate movies Kara’s a prolific writer who will wow you with her insight.
Projects with a multiplicity of views have been stalwarts of theological formation at the undergraduate and seminary level for some time now. A book with more than one view, each written by a proponent of that view, bridges the gap between Wikipedia and a full-length scholarly book on each view. Books with four or five views are like reading five books in one, and then sitting around a coffee table and discussing the views with the scholars themselves.
I have fond and frustrating memories of "views" books. I remember gleefully chuckling to myself at the spot-on, spitting mad critiques of George Eldon Ladd in "The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views" and how I soaked in all his arguments as a scholarly backing to my theological movement away from the dispensational pre-millennialism I was surrounded by back in the glory days of the Left Behind series. As I look back, one of the most frustrating feelings about those books is that I took some of the angst of Ladd along with my changing theological views, and that was not a good thing.
Eucharist Images in the Films of Ingmar Bergman
by Kara Pickens
Introduction
Ingmar
Bergman’s film Winter
Light
opens with a scene familiar to any son of a Lutheran minister: "It
is twelve o’clock, midday, a Sunday at the end of November….[i]t is
holy communion, and the introit hymn has just been sung."1
For the next fifteen minutes, the film moves slowly through this
Christian ritual, as Bergman painstakingly details the service. While
the words are borrowed from an ancient liturgy, the images Bergman
uses throughout the scene bring new symbolic meaning to the service.
Take and eat,
You say.
But
taking
requires more of my self
than I can offer.
So
I eat in vain,
hoping to swallow nothing more
than bread.
—K.C. Flynn
Four Thoughts About the Possibilities of Liturgy and Locality
Introduction
by Tim Ghali
As a Post-conservative Evangelical
reflecting on the sacrament of the Eucharist, I am compelled to say
that it’s always been a beautiful and reflective time of worship
for me. There are times when I do feel that many of the churches
I’ve been a part of have been guilty of stripping the beauty and
significance of it by making it once a month, using the crackers (The
Body as a cracker? Does your NIV read, "I am the cracker of life"
in John 6?) and grape juice. Then there’s the attitude behind it
that concerns many.
What I have appreciated from my
tradition is that we have not been exclusive about it. All who
profess to know and love Christ can participate. In the "Who is
allowed to worship, teach Sunday School, drive the church van"
debates, it seems the greater question which is often overlooked is
who is allowed to receive of among the most sacred of moments, the
Eucharist or also put, "Communion" as referred to in my church.
At first glance, this may point out an inconsistency or it may lead
us to a richer hospitality of who comes through our doors and whose
cell phones we call.
A
Historical and Contemporary Examination of the Most Sacred Sacrament
By
Scott A. Klepach, Jr.
Introduction
