About a year ago, a group of friends and I began a journey that we have since called community and named, The Netzer Co-Op. It was merely an experiment and yet it was also a daunting rethinking of what it means to be church in this time in place. When a community starts with a clean slate, everything is up for grabs and you have to decide what from your past will you carry into the future. Many of us grew up in the Lutheran tribe and other liturgical traditions. With out much deliberative dialog, we began to use the Revised Common Lectionary to guide our worship reflections on The Word. What began as instinct was soon understood as a rhythm of life and spirituality. The lectionary is not so much valuable in its shared liturgical unity across denominations and faith traditions, but rather the lectionary teaches what the Psalmist so eloquent announces, “You have made the moon to mark the seasons; the sun knows its time for setting.”[1]

Using the lectionary in community formation is about teaching a way of life that indeed knows the seasons and knows of the rhythm of the sun - a time for rising and a time for resting. The very nature of the seasons, the design of earth, has been created to teach us to live into a spirituality of rhythm and interdependence on creation around us. Metaphors and Imagination

Theology is at best a failed attempt to describe the indescribable. Pete Rollins, a scholastic philosopher, goes as far as to suggest that all theology must also be a/theology.[2]

This assertion resonates from his idea that theism is perhaps most fully understood as also a/theism. For our faith is in God whom we both know and about whom we haven’t the slightest clue. With this kind of theological discourse in mind, we consider the effect of the past five hundred years of philosophical scripting which suggests that certainty, objectivism and systematic ordering should be the dominant voices. And yet for Christianity in a post-modern cultural context, these dominant voices are met with resistance from voices of ambiguity, subjectivity and deconstruction. We are wandering in a desert exile and as my friend and pastor-theologian Jill Rowland reminds us:

God’s dream is that the people of God would show the way of justice, peace, and love to all the world, so after the people of Israel are led out of Egypt by Moses, God creates for them a wilderness classroom experience. God creates an opportunity for the people of God to develop a different imagination than the one they learned in Egypt...[3]

In this disorienting experience of being in the “wilderness” between modernity and post-modernity, I believe that God is calling us to be people of deep theological and missional imagination.
We wander into this liminal space equipped only with our broken metaphors, our incomplete theologies and our imagination. This journey is one of discovering (and re-discovering) how God has gone before us like a cloud in the day and a column of fire at night. In the moments of the everyday, God is present. Imagining what God is up to in the world is often only a matter of becoming aware that God is in every moment. So, what metaphors might we develop to keep us aware of the seasonal spirituality and its rhythm.

Lessons from the Farmer’s Market

The other day I was visiting our local farmer’s market. In my hometown, the market is located in the historic downtown square - a beautiful town center with fountain, historic markers and a giant statue of General Juan Seguin who fought in the Battle for the Alamo. In decades long past, the square would be filled with merchants and farmers on Saturdays, but now there is only a small number of trucks and booths. I asked the man who was selling squash what variety I was holding and he told me, “that there is a acorn squash.” In my ignorance I asked, “well, what would I do with an acorn squash?” - I had never seen or heard of such a vegetable. The man gently said, “well what I do is simply put some butter or oil on it with salt and pepper and then bake it.” It seem easy enough and so I took a few home with me.

That same day I was preparing to lead a conversation at our community’s worship gathering and I thought to myself - this is why we use the lectionary! The lectionary teaches that the scriptures are full of all kinds of fruit - some which we are familiar with and so we know exactly how to apply them (even if living them out is more difficult in practice). But then there are strange fruits too. There are texts which we hear as complicated or conflicting or even outright disturbing and we do not know what to do with these.

Our local grocery stores have mastered the art of marketing to us a diet of preference. We can get vegetables out of season because we have genetically engineered them to grow that way. We have our favorites and we can buy them whenever we want. This is also true among communities and faith traditions that do not use the lectionary. More often than not, the temptation is too great and we would simply not engage the troubling texts of scripture if it were not for a seasonal rhythm of the lectionary. Instead we pick and choose the flavors (usually favorites of our own denominational tribe) that work well for our own agendas.

But there is a different way. The way of the lectionary is an embrace of a spirituality of the seasons. The farmer’s market is a metaphorical reminder that there is a diversity of narrative fruit available to us in the scriptures. The rhythm of the lectionary and the rhythm of the season teaches us as the people of God that,

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.[4]

When a spirituality of the seasons is embraced, the liturgical texts take on a new meaning. The liturgical response of the community after readings of The Word, is for the leader to announce, “The Word of the LORD,” and the community to respond, “Thanks be to God.” This is not a cheap kind of thanksgiving. Rather, it is the affirmation of the community, a commitment to struggle, to be confused, and to engage in conflict with The Word. This is part of leiturgia as the work of the people.

[Author]itative Texts

I wonder what this kind of struggling with the texts of strange fruit might mean for our world emerging from the wake of foundationalism. I manage a small coffee shop in downtown Seguin and last week one of my employees asked me why I believe in the Bible. I thought this was a good question given the absurdity of polarized theological debates between liberals battling with their historical-critical weaponry and the conservatives lashing back with cries of certainty and condemnation. What seasonal spirituality might teach us is that these strange narrative fruits and their formative rhythms are valuable as authoring texts. The scriptures then, become authoritative in their ability to author us. As Wendell Berry comments on the crisis of individualism,

The problem, of course, is that we are not the authors of ourselves. That we are now is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly, or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product.[5]

And so what of this authorship, this relationship between humanity, nature and God? It seems that all of creation has been designed with clues in mind for restoration of relationship with our Creator. Nature has been designed with interdependence at its core. The people of God are called to this same kind of dependence on one another. Seasonal spirituality teaches us that we are called to the interdependence of community! As Berry further suggests,

Community, then, is an indispensable term in any discussion of the connection between people and land. A healthy community is a form that includes all the local things that are connected by the larger, ultimately mysterious form of the Creation.[6]

Thus, the authoritative texts, in rhythm of the seasons (The Lectionary) is meant to author us into interdependence on the God of creation. Our authoritative texts author us into interdependence with God and with one another.

The Brokeness of Our Metaphor

As mentioned, every metaphor is merely an attempt to point us toward an ultimately mysterious God. Seasonal spirituality may end up breaking down at several points - I am sure it does not complete your sense of God. But, perhaps most profoundly is how it breaks down because we find ourselves in the midst of environmental crisis. Seasonal spirituality might be more helpful if we did not have a distorted paradigm of our environment. Not only does our creation suffer from the crippling effect of decades of abusive relationships between humanity and nature, but even our way of addressing the “crisis” prevents our metaphor from producing a full harvest. Again we turn to the words of Wendell Berry who prophetically announces,

A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. The “environmental” crisis, in fact, can be solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the “environmental” crisis is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as familiy members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an “environmental” crisis because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, the god-given world.[7]

It is my hope that you might engage both the lectionary and the farmer’s market. I hope that you might experiment a little and seek out the rhythm they offer to a world so resistant to interdependence. Perhaps you will find it as beautiful as it is messy.

Works Cited

[1] Psalm 104: 19 (New Revised Standard Version).

[2]Pete Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God (Brewster: Paraclete Press, 2006), 26.

[3] Jill E. Rowland, “Breaking Open the Alabaster Jar: Assessing Vitality in Missional Emerging Congregations )doctoral D.Min thesis), Luther Seminary, 2008 176.

[4] Eccles. 3: 1-8 (NRSV).

[5] Windell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace. (Counterpoint: Washington, DC 2002), 137.

[6] Ibid., 202-203.

[7] Ibd., 250-251.

Timothy K. Snyder will earn the Bachelor of Arts in Theology in December 2008 from Texas Lutheran University. He is concurrently a graduate student at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Tim is the founding community developer of The Netzer Co-Op, a missional community in the Lutheran (ELCA) tradition. He lives in a community house of the Co-Op in Seguin, Texas.

Tim is a contributor author to EverydayLiturgy.com and The Everyday Journal.

You can reach Tim via email at tim [at] netzerco-op.org.