Thoughts

Jesus Christ, our High Priest, arises to this rank not because of his physical ancestry, but “thought the power of a life that cannot be destroyed” (Heb 7:16).

I’ve been reading Fr. John Behr’s book The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death, and one of his assertions is that the death and resurrection of Jesus were not “self-interpreting” events.

So the early Christians didn’t actually understand that Jesus had a “life that cannot be destroyed” until after they reflected on his death and resurrection through reading the (Old Testament) Scriptures in a new way… that is, as the Scriptures that, as Jesus said, “spoke of him.”

There are lots of implications of this that I’m actively thinking about right now, including the radical difference between this allegorical reading of the Scriptures the early church did with the predominant historical-critical reading we do today.

It feels obvious that the way to interpret Scripture is to try and figure out “what was really happening” in the author’s mind who wrote it, and I think there is some value in this, but the early Christians didn’t seem to be bothered by this question at all.

Instead, they assumed that the foundational reality to read the Scriptures from is now the death and resurrection of Jesus, so now they take on new meaning that the original author could never have dreamt of.

This kind of allegorical approach, though, is perhaps more familiar to us than we realize. Every time we preach a text of Scripture as Scripture, we are assuming that God has something to say to us today that the original author of the text we are preaching from could never have imagined, yes?

It will, of course, have coherence with what God said then, but God will be saying something new today, through these Scriptures that speak of Christ, who is indeed alive and working now.

“Normal” church life has been disrupted by the pandemic, which has given many people an unexpected opportunity to rethink what worship is, and what it’s for.

This week I’ve been thinking about this quote from Gregory the Great (Bishop of Rome, died 604 AD), who is talking about how worship works, and how to worship in spirit and truth: “If the sacrament of the Lord’s passion is to work its effect in us, we must imitate what we receive and proclaim to humanity what we revere.”

We must “imitate what we receive.” Isn’t that interesting? To imitate the body and blood of Jesus is to “take on the form and pattern of Jesus’ death,” as Paul said it to the Philippians. We offer ourselves as a living sacrifice just as Christ offered himself as a sacrifice for sin.

And then we “proclaim to humanity what we revere.” We speak. We allow what has been embodied in us to be proclaimed intelligibly to all who would hear it, calling them into the life we ourselves have received. The shape of “effective” worship, then, can be outlined like this:

1. We hear the Word (Jesus in Scripture),
2. We respond to the Word (in prayer and surrender),
3. We receive the Word (in Bread and Wine at the Table of Jesus), an
4. We are sent to imitate and proclaim the Word (in service and witness).

This is nothing new, of course, but it was an interesting angle on it that Gregory’s quote got me thinking about… maybe it’s helpful for you, too, as you think about what it means to worship and be the church these days.

I am fresh off two weeks of vacation, and one of the major shifts that took place for me during this time was my mind got “unhooked” from social media.

Before this vacation, with the pandemic and the protests, I was noticing that my mind would anxiously drift toward wanting to “check and see what’s happening right now” in an effort to figure out what to do and how to lead. I was falling for a leadership fallacy I learned about from Edwin Friedman’s book A Failure of Nerve: believing that newer and better information would help me lead well in these times. (It doesn’t and won’t.)

Unhooking from the social media “drip” has been profoundly helpful for my ability to focus and actually ?lead? the people I’m responsible to lead. I’m also thankful that, even after being back to work for a week, my mind has been able to stay unhooked from the anxiety, even though I’ve been a bit more engaged in “what’s happening out there” via social media.

Social media’s tricky, eh? If you want to reflect a bit more on this, check out this podcast my friend Matt and I recorded about the complexities of navigating social media as a leader.