SIGNS

Today we had borrowed road signs and set them up with cones leading into the building and then in the entry and in the church space itself. We took time in gathering for worship to acknowledge that we are a part of a long story of God’s creativity. (Psalm 78). We spoke of beginnings, we told again the Exodus liturgy, we considered exile and ‘home’ and wove throughout it our sense of journey with signs of God in our mission today aware of the past signs guiding and the signs we need to have eyes to see for today. We had everyone with a postcard of signs and got them to answer some questions –

::There are signs all around us each day, but as
Christians what are God’s signs to us as a church today ?

::Things from our past that I think we should still hold onto today...

::Given the way God has always led his people into new ways and given our sense of God leading us today, I think the following ways of being the church in mission
on Highgate should be considered...

After response time we asked everyone to hear these words of offering our
selves as God’s people -
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you:
Take your everyday, ordinary life—
your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—
and place it before God as an offering.
Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can
do for him.
—Romans 12:1,

We then got up, with music from ‘Furious Angels’- (Rob Dougan, track –Will you follow Me?) and placed our offerings and all went outside for the Blessing, physically and visibly reminding us that the story we had heard this day was for this purpose of our being ‘sent out as God’s people’ there was a sense of being on the edge of something impossible and bigger than us that calls us to trust in the impossibilities beyond our management and in the incomparable possibilities with God.

Critical Christianity

The reforming processing took place with influencers such as Duns Scotus, 13th Century Scottish Franciscan who advocated a practical theology whereby theology should have no separation from prayer, nor dogma from doxology, nor knowledge of God from living communion. The task of theology was/is to guide the life of prayer, praise and communion. Going further back it was an understanding of Anselm’s faith seeking understanding of the Triune God. A rooting of text back into daily life. Then there is the likes of Erasmus, (widely misunderstood in his day) who advocated a Critical Christianity denouncing the pharisaical religion made up of routine practices and works drained of their spirit, a religion of false devotio (that made too much of practices devoid of any honest heart pietas response to grace) which became nothing more than the accumulation of observances. Erasmus returned to essentials of inner piety and the Gospel. So the ground was prepared for the Reformers to continue honing a reformation theology that grew out of their own medieval matrix out of which some was affirmed, modified or abandoned.
It seems to me that any significant ‘reforms’ in church history have all been concerned with a recovery of how we read scripture and it’s place among the community of God’s people and in relation to how it is communicated afresh in the context of that day and provides the necessary ‘constraints’ of Scripture and Tradition. This highlights the under-girding tension of tradition and improvisation into the ‘new emergent’. Begbie (Theology Music and Time) speaks of liberating constraints and in an exploration of Church tradition (noting several points) states that ‘improvisation reminds us powerfully of the futility of searching for a tradition – free environment of creativity.’(217) He reminds us that the intelligibility of any music depends on proven traditions of practice, interpretation and belief as an interpretative grid. There is a necessary apprenticeship required before one can move to find one’s own place and voice so to speak and improvise. Put another way, ‘Spontaneity.. is but the outcome of years of training and practice and thousands of experiments’ Hauerwas (Against the Nations,95)
I do believe that today’s emergent, particularly within the mainstream establishment Presbyterian, Baptist or otherwise, is concerned with living in the in-between place where liberating constraints are beginning to operate. Constraints like it or not give us our identity – one being Scripture. Engaging with this and negotiating this and other constraints (occasional – such as those localized, specific to a social, spatial, situation; cultural – those aspects which come from our own experience, frames of reference, etc; continuous- those things that condition us and are givens) requires improvisation that enables freedom to flourish, is risky and is not predictable. Certeau’s ‘making do’ seems to me to be similarly concerned.

When we bring such things to bear upon worship and the totality of ministry in the emergent then it is concerned with making disciples and learning what it is to be the ‘body’ of Christ. Yesterday we asked “IF we are the body …”

It integrated Romans 12 v1-8 and Ephesians 4 v1-16 as with references to Matthew 18-20 (instances of Jesus teaching of radical new practices of the Christian community). We explored the invitation to live in God’s presence and the realisation that each belong to all in the body with diverse gifts. What does the body-ness of the church look like ? Everyone had a coloured card tile and was asked to come to the front where we had a Bible, baptismal font and Table with Communion cup on. They were invited to take a coloured tile and place it on the Table around the cup and remain around the front of the Church. Once this happened I asked them to look around and see everyone gathered around the now colourful table. We then blessed one another. It was good to see everyone then instantly mix and chat and wander off to coffee.

The Compost pile of Text and TXT

With a simple historical reading, devotio post-moderna(emerging) in part is about questioning. It asks- how do we handle the text in a txt world ? How to communicate this dangerous text of scripture? Walter Brueggemann states that ‘The Bible is the compost pile that provides material for new life.’
The Reformation stands in a way for the re-discovery of the living God of the Bible. In a fashion the Reformation arose from a long line of ‘protestings’ that challenged those aspects of the Christian Church that were concerned with other means of artificial fertilizers at the expense of the ‘compost pile’ to nourish. Historically, scholasticism which was essentially summed up and strongly optimistic of rational knowledge in handling the text and the methodology applied to faith seeking understanding in many instances degenerated into dry, even ridiculous discussion. Sadly though all it did was over intellectualise and further distance the text from the world. A divorce happened if you like, between theory and practice. The 16th Century’s intellectualsing theology gave rise to a sterile theology and undernourished spirituality. (It must though be said that it was a lively and not all bad, but became so and indeed took root in the later isms tat came with training manuals for right belief and so on. Eg. within Calvin-ism, etc). Perhaps in a similar way the ailing of the Church arises from the lost message in its midst that has been supplanted by so much ‘other stuff’ that has dried it out.

::
Brueggemann (Texts Under Negotiation) proposes a shift from an objective claim of hegemony to a contextual, local perspective. He further states

the end of modernity requires a critique of method in scripture study. It is
clear to me that conventional historical criticism is, in scripture study, our
particular practice of modernity, whereby the text is made to fit our modes of
knowledge and control. As we stand before the text, no longer as its master, but
as its advocate, we will have to find new methods of reading (p11)

This places us with freedom to ‘be our confessing selves in a faith community and that our knowing consists in the actual work of ‘imagination’ which he understands to be the ‘human capacity to picture, portray, receive, and practice the world in ways other than it appears to be at first glance when seen through a dominant habitual unexamined lens.'

The ‘compost pile’ metaphor is useful. For me it means that the lead in to preaching, is as others speak of, a matrix of text, experiences, other readings, others, culture, reason, revelation. All of this enriching us as God’s people freeing us in 'imagination' too. For years now, my contexts have mean me always reading and doing the hard yards some of which never comes out in preached ( for me it is important to have some depth). But also at ways this text allows us to respond, to enter the subversion, the counter drama as Brueggemann says, that enables us, challenges us to respond and participate in God’s presence and purposes for now. This means presenting the text, exploring the text among us through various means. I am further remined of Hans Frei for whom Scripture and community wer key categories for his 'communal hermeneutic' and further the key is not interpretation for abstract knowing sake. Rather it concerns a piety and worship centred on the Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ as centre. So the goal of the 'sermon' is not conclusion, but the ongoing story in which we participate and the ext forms this alternative community of Christ in the 'city'.
::
We have recently completed a journey of threads through Lamentations. Last week we listened, but also used cups/water and a jug in a bringing before God our lament and that of others we knew in visible form of water representative of our tears in the jug. At our Caim (our midweek quiet space) this week our text spoke of being poured out as a drink offering. We used a form of lectio and concluded with symbolically pouring water out into the baptismal bowl and then gathered and anointed with oil as a sign of wholeness and unity as God’s people. We have been seeking to provide daily reading and daily psalms and have the Caim as a place where we gather to do this midweek. It is about allowing the text of scripture to ‘form us’ as God’s people. Indeed, we are re-discovering together, telling our stories, insights around this text in fresh ways that are invigorating. Sundays and Wednesdays and the offering of texts each day we trust will provide the dynamism for the Spirit to re-form us in this place or as Anselm said encourage a ‘faith seeking understanding in the Triune God’.
[My thoughts here aim to extend thinking in my last post, but also in relation to posts relating Chris Erdman and Steve Taylor.]


Erasmus