In the Coracle
“It’s almost like you’re writing a book one post at a time” - Kedge
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Snippets of Truth
For completely unrelated-to-church reasons, I recently came across this snippet about snippets:
“Our Lord was careful to consider the text in relation to the context and the whole tenor and teaching of Scripture. The habit of taking a little snippet of a verse from any part of the Bible and making it the subject of discourse, exposes the preacher to the danger of an unbalanced statement of truth, which is very prejudicial. Nothing is more perilous than the partial knowledge of God’s truth, which is based on sentences torn from their rock-bed and viewed in isolation from their setting.”
- Frederick Brotherton Meyer, 1912I love that quote. This past Sunday - uh… isn’t that just yesterday?!?? - we looked at Genesis 10-11, and the weekend before we read and discussed through Genesis 6-9. The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 sets an point on the arc of God’s story that also includes Acts 2:1-12, and Revelation 14:6, and we discussed that arc.
I love my community of faith and our willingness to dig deep, together. We’re learning what it means to understand Scripture in is literary, historical and Biblical context, so that we might do Scripture in our own context.
Two Great Easter Sermons about Itching Ears
Easter weekend brings us two timely sermons on similar topics from wonderful communicators:
From Anglican Bishiop N. T. Wright:
And the reason that I labour this alternative worldview, and highlight the ways in which it represents not just a variation on the genuine path of Jesus and his first followers but a full-scale rejection and overturning of it, is because it has become, in our own day, a major if not the major alternative, in the popular mind, to the true path of the kingdom, the sacramental path, the path of healing and baptism and consecration to which we rededicate ourselves today. The reason for the astonishing popularity of The Da Vinci Code on the one hand, and for the huge current media hype about the so-called ‘Gospel of Judas’ on the other, is that so many in our day are eager for enlightenment, hungry for spirituality, and yet desperate to avoid the way of the cross, the genuinely revolutionary kingdom of Jesus.
And from Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams,
One of the ways in which we now celebrate the great Christian festivals in our society is by a little flurry of newspaper articles and television programmes raking over the coals of controversies about the historical basis of faith. So it was no huge surprise to see a fair bit of coverage given a couple of weeks ago to the discovery of a ‘Gospel of Judas’, which was (naturally) going to shake the foundations of traditional belief by giving an alternative version of the story of the passion and resurrection. Never mind that this is a demonstrably late text which simply parallels a large number of quite well-known works from the more eccentric fringes of the early century Church; this is a scoop, the real, ‘now it can be told’ version of the origins of Christian faith.
You’ll recognise the style, of course, from the saturation coverage of the Da Vinci Code literature.
When You Don’t Know What to Preach
Frequently I have no idea what to preach* about. Usually I have a Biblical text, or an understanding of what our need for spiritual formation is, but every so often I have no idea how a sermon can flow out of it. So in that circumstance usually I give up, bring the text to the group, and we discuss it together.
Last Sunday we did that. We did something of a cross between a group lectio divina with a guiding question.
We looked at Hebrews 10:19-12:3. I introduced it by saying that we wanted to practice, for the first weekend of Lent, the spiritual discipline of Listening. I asked people to practice listening to the text, to the voice of God for you in the text, and the voice of God for us in the text.
We read it three times. Each time was by a different person, and that person read the whole passage (and that’s a LONG passage).
The first time through I asked people to simply listen for a word or phrase that caught their attention. We read the passage, then sat in quiet for a minute or two, then shared what we heard.
The second time through I asked people to listen to what the Word might be saying to you individually, asking you either to do or to be. Again we read the passage, then sat in quiet for a minute or two, then shared what we heard.
The third time through I asked people to listen to what the Word might be saying to us as a church, asking us either to do or to be. Again we read the passage, then sat in quiet for a minute or two, then shared what we heard.
It was incredibly powerful. There were tears. There was also joy as one of our members who has a difficult struggle in his faith chose to read 3rd, and he did a wonderful job. There was encouragement, both for individuals and especially for us as a replanting church. I’m incredibly happy that I didn’t just hammer out a speech to give, but that we just went into this time asking to listen together.
There are really good lectio resources here including a good passage on group lectio. Note that usually, lectio divina considers a much smaller passage of Scripture, but for this weekend we were aiming for a different thing.
* I do the one-way “preaching”, the speech/lecture thing so infrequently it’s silly, but hopefully you get the drift
Sermon//Discussion - How does Jesus train his disciples?
As I wrote a while back, we’re doing a parallel processing exercise at the moment, looking at Jesus from a fresh perspective and discussing our way through all 4 gospels at once.
This past Sunday we discussed the question, “how does Jesus train his disciples?”. I recorded the discussion on my iRiver, did some very light postprocessing on it (amplifying the volume, that’s it), and posted it to a share point.
Here’s a link to that discussion. 40 min, 18mb or thereabouts.
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