James 24:7

lV

Reading and praying the Psalms puts us in the company of all the saints who have preceded us.

I read this morning that Etta Baker has died at the age of 90.   Etta Baker was a Piedmont Blues guitar player who influenced every finger-style guitar player there is- whether he or she knows it or not.  Any picker who plays a Merle Travis lick or even a Chet Atkins riff can thank Etta Baker for inspiring those guys to pass along the pickin'.   

Few people outside the fingerstyle or blues community have ever heard of Etta Baker. (She spent most of her working years laboring in the Buster Brown factory in North Carolina)   However, her finger plucks, picks, and pulls reverbrate through  generations of players. 

Of course, each of those players adds their own twists and turns.  Every so often one of them, usually some kid still wet behind the thumbpick, brings along an innovation and leaves us older guys scratching our heads wondering "why we never thought of that"- if we can even make out what the kid is doing.

However, true innovation is rare.  I suppose you could say true innovation- that is, bringing something new to the world- happens...oh...once in a not-ever. 

Most pickers are part of a tradition and are damn proud of it.  To be told that you played something as well as Chet or with as much life as Merle Travis or in the style of Doc Watson is be truly complimented.  To be told that you are an innovator is good too...but only if the innovation pays homage to the Ettas, Chets, Merles and Docs who have gone before you.

Playing with the pickers of the past is a fine way to spend an lazy evening or a lifetime.

To read and pray the Psalms is to pray with all of the saints who have gone before you.  You may be praying with your grandma, or your great, great grandpa.  You will certainly be praying with Martin Luther and Thomas Aquinas.  You will also be praying with the Apostle Paul and Peter, James and John.  You will utter the words that helped shape Jesus' prayers.  You will weep and praise with all those Hebrew saints who worshipped God in the Temple, the synagogues and  out on the hillside.  

Think about it: It is quite something to utter the words of David, the King- the man after God's own heart.

When we read the Psalms...better...when we pray the Psalms we enter the company of the beloved saints of God.  Their voices become our voices; their habits become our habits.

I firmly believe that many of us have shot ourselves in the foot by falling so deeply into the "contemporary."  Contemporary music.  Contemporary worship.  Contemporary ministry.  Contemporary..."with the times."  We have especially shot ourselves in the foot if we are so arrogant to think that what we have brought upon the earth is anything truly innovative.

Recently I've rekindled my interest in poetry.  I dug around and found a book by the American poet, Mary Oliver.  Here is what she says about the "contemporary" as it applies to young poets and their poetry:

"...since you want to be a contemporary poet, you do not want to be too much under the influence of what is old, attaching to the terms the idea that old is old hat-out of date.  You imagine you should surround yourself with modern only.  It is an error.  The truly contemporary creative force is something that is built out of the past, but with a difference.

Most of what calls itself contemporary is built, whether it knows it or not, out of a desire to be liked. It is created in imitation of what already exists and is already admired.  There is, in other words, nothing new about it.  To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain.  Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air." (A Poetry Handbook, p. 11-12)

When we read and pray the Psalms we enter into a tradition and we praise and cry and rage with that great cloud of saints who cheer us on and wait for us to join them.

Recently I read and reviewed Bishop N.T. Wright's latest book called Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense.  In the first four chapters of that book, Bishop Wright describes four common, if not universal, concerns: (1) the struggle for justice, (2) the search for meaning, (3) the yearning for deep relationship, and (4) the longing for beauty. While one would be hard-pressed to prove that those were all universal concerns, I think most folks would agree that it at least makes sense that everyone hungers for those four things. 

We all seem to have questions as to rightness and fairness, whether there is something larger than ourselves, something ultimately truthful that can claim us, whether true deep relatedness and community is possible, and whether and how we can experience beauty. 

In his book, Bishop Wright seeks to demonstrate how Christian faith answers to those yearnings.

As I drove home yesterday after worship I thought about Bishop Wright's 4 yearnings and how the very sermon I had just preached spoke to them.  I began the sermon by reading the words of Paul where he says that when we are baptized we are buried with Christ and that we rise from the death and burial of baptism  "just as Jesus was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father"  to walk in newness of life.

We rise to walk in a life marked by ressurection.

I then read a quote from Dallas Willard's new book, The Great Omission, in which he speaks of the Great Disparity- the gap between what we claim as Christians and what others observe about us: we claim to walk in this newness of life but, by most measures, live like most everybody else.  

Where is this ressurection life, this abundant life, this new creation about which the Bible speaks and  which we claim to live?

I thought it would be worthwhile to look at an example of what the ressurected life looked like and so we turned to the picture of the church drawn by Luke in Acts 2-4.  There we found a community marked by 3 characteristics: they attended to the essentials, they demonstrated gracious sharing and and they lived truthfully.

The disciples of Jesus attended to the essentials.  They gave themselves to the fellowship, the Apostles Doctrine, the breaking of bread and to prayer.

They shared with one another even if it entailed selling one's own property to do so.    The outcome of such sharing was that there was no needy person among them.

They lived truthfully with one another such that the fundamental characteristic of any community (or relationship), trust, was abundant. (The negative case of Annanias and Sapphira in Acts 5 demonstrate that hypocrisy and dishonesty are death to a community.*)

I tried to make the point that the ressurected life into which we are born is not a life marked by goose-bump inducing spiritual or emotional experiences but a life of graciousness and truthfulness.

As I drove home I thought about that early community and about what a wonderful and remarkable thing was born into the world when the church was born on Pentecost. 

The commitment to the essentials devoid of the institutional, doctrinal and theological wrangling that has become so much a part of the contemporary church, the grace-filled sharing of goods and resources and self, and the freedom from status seeking and acquisitiveness that enabled truthfulness to flourish made the first church, in its earliest days, an image of God's longing for humanity.

For a brief moment and only by the power and grace of God, the church got back to the Garden.

As I thought about that I thought about N.T. Wright's 4 hungers: the hunger for justice, meaning and purpose, relationship and beauty and realized that the earliest moment of the church fed those four hungers.

Justice was realized...there was no needy among them.

Meaning and purpose was received...each disciple and all of them together were caught up in God's new thing.

Relationship, broken by the power of sin, was restored...each shared with the other even if it entailed expense to himself or herself.

And beauty...well, just look at them reveling in the joy of community, basking in the sun of fidelity , attuned to the essentials of life in Christ.

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(* I am indebted to my friend Wye Huxford of the European Evangelistic Society for this insight...among others!  Also, I have been reading N.T. Wright's book Following Jesus: Biblical Reflections on Discipleship and Luke Timothy Johnson's Living Jesus:Learning the Heart of the Gospel.  Those books have been of immeasurable help in expanding my understanding of "ressurection".  I don't have any original thoughts, which is a very good thing and a confession I happily make.

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I have been AWOL from my blog because we have been moving the North River Community Church to a new location.  For those of you in the Atlanta area, we are now located at 1725 Spectrum Drive, Suite B in Lawrenceville, Ga.  Here are some directions if you are ever in the area...click rat cheer.

I love the 16th Psalm.  I love it for its boldness. I say "boldness" because the Psalmist begins by putting God in a bind.  In effect he says, "God I take refuge in you so you have little choice but to keep me safe!"

Once you see that the whole Psalm opens up to you.  If God is obligated to keep safe those who take refuge in Him, then life can be lived in confidence and fear can be held at bay.

"God...I don't know what to tell you but I've crawled into your pocket and do not intend to move.  What can you do but look after me now?"

The Psalmist goes on to praise "the saints."  (vs. 3)  My paraphrase of that verse is something like this: "Lord, I look around me and see your saints and they all shine like the sun!  I am delighted by them because I see that even in my doubt I can rest in their faith; even as I sink into despair I am lifted up by their hope."

When I was going through a hard time I was comforted by the prayers of friends.

This morning my agent, "Irv", sent me a prayer she picked up from Beliefnet.org.  The prayer is by Vienna Cobb Anderson and it about says it all...

Prayer for Friendship

You have blessed us, O God,
with the gift of friendship,
the bonding of persons
in a circle of love.
We thank you for such a blessing:
for friends who love us,
who share our sorrows,
who laugh with us in celebration,
who bear our pain,
who need us as we need them,
who weep as we weep,
who hold us when words fail,
and who give us the freedom
to be ourselves.
Bless our friends with health,
wholeness, life, and love.
Amen.

This past Sunday I preached at North River on how critical friendship is to our growing toward wholeness in Christ.  If we are going to attain to the measure of the fullness of the stature of Jesus (Ephesians 4: 13), we are going to need the help of friends who are committed to that end themselves. 

No one bootstraps himself to wholeness.

However, part of our problem is that we have such a fuzzy understanding of what friendship is.  We use the word “friend” to describe I-know-him-when-I-see-him acquaintances and we use the word “friend” when we speak of one who knows us through and through.  The word “friend” gets applied to everyone from “those with whom I am friendly” to those who are our “second selves.” 

As Aristotle noted, even years before Jesus, the word friend is applied to those who give us pleasure (“My friend, Rex, always makes me laugh.”) and to those who are simply useful to us (“I have a friend, Rocco, who’s in the business.  He’ll hook you up.”)  While we need people around us whose company we enjoy and need people who are useful to us, we also need friends of a third order.  We need those who join us in the journey toward the good, toward wholeness, toward completeness in Christ.

Such people may not bring us worlds of pleasure and they may not know how to fix our cars, but they are ever-present to us joining us on that journey toward maturity in Christ.  These kinds of friends know how to “speak the truth in love” and evoke aspects of ourselves that we may not have even known existed. 

The church- the gathered community of disciples of Jesus- ought to be that kind of friendship.

Yet we have so many barriers…

We have our busy schedules.  I think of a woman who once said to my wife, “Gosh, I’d love to get to know you but I just don’t have time for anymore friends”.  At least she was honest… but then maybe silence is sometimes the better side of honesty.

We have the demands of life.  So much is required of us- even taken from us- in our daily work that we are more than happy to retreat into the cocoon of home and withdraw from the pressures of life.  

We are daily reminded through ads and entertainment that romance is the better part of relationship.  Being “transported” seems far more exciting than the daily requirements of friendship.   

Friendships which are primarily concerned with the journey toward wholeness in Christ take time and they require attention and the scarcest resources in our lives are precisely time and attention.

Is it any wonder that our world is filled with loneliness? 

Could the community we call “church” have any higher calling than to become a people marked by friendship?