I’ve started to read Job again, and since many consider it to be the earliest recorded book of the Old Testament I have been thinking about the great narrative of God. This prayer for communion is a testimony to the long arc of God’s story: May the God who was slow to anger with our [...]
As an appendix to this week’s guest posts on creativity and worship, I thought that this prayer of St. Gregory of Nyssa: You truly, O Lord, are the pure and eternal fount of goodness; … who did curse, and did bless; you did banish us from Paradise, and did recall us; you did strip off [...]
There is no greater thing, when after learning of something depressing or traumatic (like how someone stole some books out of a shipment I ordered—Harry Potter books no less!), than to pray the shema: Hear O Israel! The Lord your God, the Lord is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, [...]
Co-authors Nehemia Gordon and Keith Johnson explore the Hebrew foundation of the Lord’s Prayer in their book A Prayer to Our Father: Hebrew Origins of the Lord’s Prayer.
The authors intend for this book to be very exciting. They are excited people. They are Hebrew nerds, and they go on a dramatically and suspensefully told quest to plumb the depths of time and manuscripts to flush out the Hebrew underpinnings of the Lord’s Prayer, or in Hebrew, the Avinu Prayer.
Gordon and Johnson do not publish anything radical, controversial, or suspect. They back up their supsicions and hunches with adequate scholarship. The book proves to be part theological book and part travelogue as the pair criss-cross continents and the Holy Land in search for the authentic roots of the Lord’s Prayer.
Their quest is admirable, and achieved, but its not one I really wanted to go on. If you are a language nerd or think of reading a Hebrew dictionary or studying Hebrew as a fun and enjoyable activity, I suggest you buy this book. You’ll enjoy it.
Myself on the other hand, the book started boring me about half way through. I just am not interested in the peculiarities of Hebrew to Greek to English translations, and most of their insights I had read in N.T. Wright’s book The Lord and His Prayer.
The book does try to be exciting, and it deserves much credit on that point. It just didn’t click with me. There are many books I read (and review) that people would find boring as well, so this book is in the eye of the beholder, and at $19.95 for a paperback (a high price in my opinion) I would suggest that unless you are a Hebrew nerd or transfixed by the Holy Land buy Wright’s The Lord and His Prayer instead (it’s $8 on Amazon).
This is the prayer I gave yesterday during our worship service:
Lord make us humble.
May we not see what we want to see,
but see what God Our Father sees.May we not do what we want to do,
but do what Christ would do.May we have poverty, may we be poor in spirit,
so that we do not see and do what we want to,
but see and do with the power of the Holy Spirit.In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
"America is going to become increasingly secular and hostile to the church. But what will build the bridge to whatever authentic Christianity emerges next is going to be a serious practiced Christianity. I think there’s going to be a revival of religion." -Todd Hunter in "The Accidental Anglican"
In the doomsday, apocalyptic scenario of post-modern, post-Christian society, where beliefs and truth becomes meaningless, what is never lost on us is practice. I don’t believe anyone has ever discussed a post-practice era, where people don’t do anything (I guess someone could make a case for The Matrix, with us sitting around in embryonic fluid living out our lives as batteries, but I digress). Something that has never been really solved by the skeptics or the despairing existentialists is that even if life becomes meaningless we still do things.
So it only makes sense that Todd Hunter is giving true foresight when he suggests that the next authentic Christianity amongst evangelicals will be one that does not have to be rotely believed as a set of moral platitudes, but is instead one practiced.
I think it is worth noting here that this is a serious correction to the arc of evangelicalism, and one that is welcome as seriously practiced Christianity becomes a liturgical Christianity that is the public work. But as history testifies, we must be cautious to always retain the manifold gospel witness of Christianity within our public work and not just switch from "don’t have sex" platitudes to "just love everyone" platitudes. For every fault of conservative Christianity is an equal fault of the social gospel waiting to be reinvigorated. We are fall so quickly into error.
I shared on Wednesday about praying lamentations with a shrug and a sigh, sharing a prayer at the end that was a model of what I view as a prayerful lament, one prayed full of doubt yet knowing that there will be a turn of hope and joy. I wanted to share how I think laments turn by sharing the final stanza of that prayer poem and how doubt and a feeling of absence is closer to faith and fullness than we sometimes realize–lament and praise form a tension that is appropriately called life.
And yet hope be not lost
(we cannot afford it)
For the absence of light
Is the memory of light
Permeating the minds of all
And stirring the pollen
Of plums, and peaches,
And the prairie grasses.
EJ: As a woman and
mother how do you think of your personal theology and practice? Is
it more down to earth and practical? Does academics only go so far?
KCI: I must confess
that I actually like academics. I have a spirituality of the library,
you might say. I meet God most often in books and words and ideas.
This gets tricky when you’ve got little kids asking questions about
death (our beloved cat died last summer) and Heaven. How to take
those beautiful academic ideas and translate them for a
four-year-old?
As I participated in planning the first Good Friday service at The Plant I wrote
four different services, each unique in their own way and highly
adaptable to many different traditions and needs.
The other three services are available for download here (Seven Words A), here (Seven Words B), and here (Stations of the Cross Service).
I have attached a copy of the "Stations" service as a pdf. The full text of the service is after the jump
As I help to plan the first Good Friday service at The Plant I wrote
four different services, each unique in their own way and highly
adaptable to many different traditions and needs.
The other two services are available for download here (Seven Words A) and here (Seven Words B).
