Tag: Acts 2

Inhabiting — Chapter Four — Habitats For Humanity

This was a sermon preached at City South Presbyterian in 2024. You can listen to the podcast here, or watch it on video. Some of the block quotes were on screen and summarised but have been included in full.

You can’t believe everything you read on the Internet. In July, rumours of the death of former U.S. President Jimmy Carter circulated, leading to an outpouring of grief for the 99 year old some months before his actual death. Carter was an interesting guy if you watch the horror show that is U.S. politics; he seems to be universally loved — and one of the reasons he was loved, was because of his work with the charity he helped make famous, Habitat for Humanity — it is a charity that builds houses — habitats — for humans.

It exists in Australia as well — and it is built from the recognition that we need a home; a habitat to survive and thrive, as we inhabit time and space. The spaces and places we call home — their rhythms and rituals, the furniture and the people who fill them — form us.

Back in week one of this series we were in Athens and we imagined the shift facing Damaris and Dionysius — these two people who believed the Gospel (Acts 17:34) — from the architecture of Athens and its idols to the rhythms we saw in our reading from the start of the church — both the rhythms of meeting together with other Christians — a new household — and of meeting in a very different sort of sacred space — the home (Acts 2:46–47).

This is the architecture described in the New Testament as the first habitat for this new community, the church, which we saw last week is called the household of God; a kinship network that teaches us how to be human — the church and our households within it — as we wisely build our lives — and we saw the way the New Testament uses the metaphor of building a house for this process.

The physical spaces we live in, where we meet together and eat together, structure our lives. And to live in the household of God means changing the furniture — these structures — the architecture of our lives as our habits change.

And so I wonder, first up — if you think about your house — what are your physical spaces geared towards; what are they producing in you? What about your workspace or other places you spend time habitually — what about church?

What are the rhythms and rituals in your habitat? Who lives in your habitat with you?

What changes can we make to our habitats to become the humans God is inviting us to be in his household — and so we offer the hospitality and transformation of his household to others drawn in to this ecosystem?

How is your home shaping you?

I want to acknowledge up front that many of us are living in non-ideal situations; not where we imagine for ourselves, and we are already at the limits of what we can afford in the current economy — interesting if you remember last week that is a household word — we are finding the household management of the world pretty unbearable.

And so what I am not saying is move — change in ways we cannot afford; but maybe there are changes to how we live in our spaces — whether at home or in shared spaces that we cannot afford not to make — especially because we will see this idea as we explore our two readings is about both our habits and who we are habitually connected with.

Anyway. Here is a tour of our house — I took these photos when there were dogs around, but fewer humans than normal — and this is not me saying our house was well designed to form us — it was a mix. The photos are our house as it was — since preaching this series we moved out and conducted significant renovations.

When you walked through our front door there was a hallway, and on the wall there were pictures our kids have made hung on a string.

On the left of the hallway were our bedrooms — there were three of them for five of us — we added another bedroom to minimise fights between the residents who share — the kid ones — and to provide a little more space away from each other — I will not show you pictures of the bedrooms both because they are pretty much just bedrooms, and because of privacy and mess.

Bedrooms are for sleeping — although there is a desk in our room, and bedside tables covered in books, that are also where we charge our devices. Which means they are on hand as we go to bed or wake up in the morning.

Our living area is open plan — we like this because it means we can see what our kids are up to. We built these desks into this set of shelves so kids would work there and not take screens into their rooms.

We really love our kitchen where there is a big communal island bench, where multiple people can prep food together — and breakfast bar — there is a fruit bowl in the middle to encourage us all to eat fruit, and some flowers because they are beautiful, and mess because we are a family and both parents are working pretty much full-time jobs and we still had not cleaned up fully from Growth Group a couple of nights before.

There is the coffee machine that keeps me sane — one that is great for firing up to make coffees for more than one person at a time.

A dining table in the corner crowded in by the dog crates — and our couches, which are both pointed at the TV so that when we collapse onto them once the kids are in bed we are inevitably drawn in to the screen.

The next biggest thing on our wall is the clock — well, it is maybe the painting — but in the morning we are ruled by the clock; racing against time to get everyone out the door in chaos.

Out the back we have got another table — with more clothes and toys — and a pizza oven in the corner so we can have people round, and play equipment for the kids because we want them to be habitually active.

This is the habitat shaping our household — it is built for chaos and hospitality — filled with marks of conflict, and mess, connection and distraction — and there are good and deliberate bits built around eating together and being together, but other bits that rule us more than they should; the screens on our wall and on our bedside table — part of thinking through our architecture means curating what is on our screens; and where our screens are — both the TV screen and all the stuff you are paying for to stream distraction into your life, and the stuff on your phone and in your browser.

What does your habitat look like? Are there ways you have set it up to make certain practices repeatable and easy? As an expression of your values — or just as something shaping them by shaping your habits?

Most of us spend lots of waking hours at work — like I said last week, my workspace tends to be my couch — or the desk in our room — or the dining table — when I am not working from a café or meeting people — but I used to work in a cubicle, and so I wonder how your workspace is set up…

Maybe you have a cubicle — what pieces of “flair” — the idea made famous by Office Space — is expressing your personality but perhaps even drawing your eye and prompting your thoughts when you have a moment in your cubicle? What is on your screen?

What your space looks like is going to vary widely based on what sort of job you do — you could drive heaps where your only real decision is what you listen to on the road, or if you hang something from your mirror that reminds you to pray, or something like you will often find in a car driven by someone whose religion involves more icons or images.

How have you structured things to aid your work? Or your formation? Some of this is silly window dressing, but changing our habitats can shape the way we work. Carpenters in their workshops use these things called jigs — deliberate structures they will turn to for repeated tasks that make them faster and more automatic.

The author Matthew Crawford is a motorbike mechanic and philosopher — he is all about keeping our heads and our bodies connected. He reckons we could all learn from carpenters and have jigs that produce the repeated habits we want to see more effortlessly; where our habitat assists us automating our habits. He defines a jig as:

“A device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such a way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without having to think about it…”

— Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

This fits with the brain science we have been looking at a bit this series; the idea that we think about things in one part of our brain, but have this automatic set of processes on the other — one of the guys who made this brain-system thing popular, Daniel Kahneman, says we form the fast side of the brain the way we learn skills with our body — through repetition; habit — and the best way to fast-track that is to set up our environment — our habitat — to produce the behaviours we want to repeat.

“The acquisition of skills requires a regular environment, an adequate opportunity to practice, and rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.” — Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow

We will find these jigs — this environmental organisation — working to form us in ways we do not notice in stuff designed to addict us, to automate harmful behaviours — and in things like weight machines at gyms as opposed to free weights that guide our motions along a repeated path to help us develop a muscle.

So what about this habitat? Where we repeatedly come together — habitually — how are we being shaped as we walk through these doors and sit in rows — learning not to look at each other eye to eye, which we saw last week is super important — but to stare at and listen to people up the front — and some of that is feeding into the slow-process part of our brain — the rider of the elephant — and this is important. The rider’s job is to steer things around and decide what skills to develop and how to do that — we focus on hearing from God’s word; and we participate in habits with our bodies — standing and sitting to sing; engaging in prayer, sharing communion — breaking bread together up here, and then eating together downstairs.

But what are our jigs? The structures that guide our actions in church life? The pews… the pulpit… the communion table… the baptismal pool… the coffee machine… the tables where we eat together downstairs?

The architecture of this space works to produce behaviours that we repeat that work to produce us.

I wonder how this architecture could shift — or how we could think of our movements through this space — so we are working not just on knowledge but on attachment and joy and skill development — learning the skills of loving others intuitively because we love God intuitively; because we have learned that intuition through practice.

And who are we gathering with? Who are the people forming our habitat? Our household?

If we want our habitats to be jigs that help us learn a skill; set up to make repetitive right action shape us, we want to make sure both the context and the content of what we are trying to form in ourselves — who we are trying to be, with a picture of how we are going to get there — like a trainee carpenter — an apprentice in a workshop, or someone working out in a gym — it helps to have teachers around too. Examples who are part of the furniture; the habitat, and who are teaching us and correcting us as we practice our humanity.

I reckon that is what we see in Acts, as these believers whose hearts are being reformed to be directed to God are devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to time with God in prayer while eating together in houses in this new community. And in Hebrews, the writer is building on this idea that we are located in God’s house now — behind the curtain in the Temple, as we saw last series — we are living in holy space; this is our habitat (Hebrews 10:19–20). We have Jesus as our holy personal trainer; the master builder who is the priestly head of the household of God (Hebrews 10:21), and we are caught up in this exercise of coming to God (Hebrews 10:22) — this is the practice that will shape us most, knowing our hearts have been cleansed; our sins have been forgiven through the blood of Jesus, and we have been cleansed so we can come close to God — and the writer of Hebrews pivots from this to say “OK — the goal is drawing near to God” to the call to “hold unswervingly” to this hope. This is an active thing — a directed thing — “hold this hope” (Hebrews 10:23). This is a practice. Practice hoping because God is faithful.

Our habitat should be jigged up to teach us this skill of hoping; knowing that God is faithful to his promises — and what else? To ‘love and good deeds’ — we spur one another on — encourage one another towards practices that shape us as God’s children. “Love and good deeds” — the stuff Jesus taught and calls us to practice (Hebrews 10:24).

And how do we do this? We stay in the habit of meeting together (Hebrews 10:25); we habitually enter habitats that will shape us in a certain way in our practice of meeting and our practices together — especially the practice of encouraging one another. And why — well — because of where we are going — towards this Day. Now. I almost stopped here. This would have been an easy thing to apply, and to talk about — but the passage keeps going. Verse 26. It is a doozy. I reckon the hardest verse in the New Testament to balance against our understanding of the Gospel.

“If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.” — Hebrews 10:26.

It is a warning to persevere — to keep building wisely rather than turning away from the foundation that is Jesus; those who are saved will be those who stick at it, those who do not stick with Jesus will — the foolish builders — well, the storm that will hit and test our house is not just suffering in this world — it is the testing of God’s judgment. This feels weird coming hot on the heels of a claim that we should come to God with full assurance…

But this is a theme the writer of Hebrews has banged on about all the way through the letter; the way to have assurance that you are part of God’s family (Hebrews 3:16), his household, is if you are hanging on to hope that God will be faithful, because Jesus is faithful, and we have just read about the practices that will keep you there — the practice of sinning, rejecting Jesus, will stop you being faithful to Jesus (Hebrews 10:29). I do not know about you, but I can forget that hope, or feel it slipping in moments when I turn to sin — and that is a pathway that leads to bad places.

There is a particular warning here against finding life in Jesus; building on him, and then deliberately, habitually, rejecting him and turning away. To do this would leave us especially deserving of punishment — knowing the holiness of God and treading him through the dirt. The writer of this letter is making a pretty strong case to choose life and joy and God’s love in the face of this Day, rather than the alternative. And the point of this rhetorical move, like in Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, is to choose life, not death; blessing, not curse; and to build habits that will prepare you for that Day so that you can endure all the other days between now and then (Hebrews 10:32) — and any conflict or suffering — as people of joy and hope — connected; not alone. In The Other Half of Church the authors talk about that connected joy we looked at last week, where we are together with people who are glad to be with us — reflecting God’s delight to be with us — being vital for growth — it is also vital for surviving suffering.

“Our identity is built and formed by joy-bonded relationships. The identity center in our brain grows in response to joy.”

— The Other Half of Church

It protects us from trauma; which they reckon happens when we suffer alone; without joyful security and people to process with.

“Suffering turns into trauma when we are unable to process our suffering with God and other people.”

— The Other Half of Church

The writer of Hebrews does not want people suffering alone; or suffering without having habitually built the relationships that might protect you from traumatic harm. They say “remember how just after you trusted Jesus you endured suffering” (Hebrews 10:32); being publicly insulted, persecuted… being side-by-side with those suffering and being persecuted (Hebrews 10:33) — suffering with those in prison — hoping together (Hebrews 10:34). This is a picture of occupying a household together; a habitat — they even had property confiscated and stayed joyful because their true home is in God’s presence… and holding on to our hope; our confidence — persevering — habitually — leads to being home with God.

Drawing near to God.
Holding on to and professing their hope.
Spurring one another on toward love and good deeds.
Meeting together habitually.
Encouraging one another.

You imagine they are doing what the Acts 2 church did too — praying. Studying the teaching of the apostles; the Gospel. Breaking bread — communion and eating together — in houses. Learning by heart the skill of hope and perseverance and joyful connection to God and each other.

Our habitats matter — who we fill them with matters — because our habits matter; cultivating habits of perseverance in faith and hope; drawing near to God through Jesus is how we exercise our faith and how we are formed; how we hold on to rather than throwing away Jesus (Hebrews 10:35). This is what persevering looks like; and persevering is what forms us as we draw near to God (Hebrews 10:36).

We are formed in this habitat for our new humanity; as we learn skills by heart; as we automate this perseverance by habit. And we form habits — getting in the groove of godliness — by structuring our environments and repeating our actions in loving environments. So it becomes easier to repeat right actions than wrong ones, and so we limit our freedoms to choose badly.

This might mean keeping your phone out of your bedroom — or screens away from places where you know you are likely to engage in bad habits when nobody is around — it might mean turning couches towards each other, or eating at the table, or all sorts of things — it might mean reaching for God’s word in the morning, whether that is in a physical Bible or an app, before you reach for or hook into an algorithm; it might mean not being ruled by the clock — it might mean adjusting how you redeem the time in your car or your cubicle or the little visual prompts you use that remind you who you are at work, where things get stressful…

It might mean changing how we approach church so it is not just a place where we sit and look forwards and hear one or two people speak, but a community where we gather together to look at one another and direct each other’s gaze to the throne room; encouraging one another.

People are part of our habitat — perhaps the most important furniture in our lives — so tweaking our environment involves making sure we are connected to God’s household in a real way — that joyful and connected way we talked about last week — and this is not just about meeting together where safety and joy are the end point; those things are the soil that enables transformation when we encourage one another towards our goal; our hope.

This also means choosing not to meet together with God’s people is a choice to be formed by a different habitat — to not be encouraged by God’s people, or to encourage God’s people as we do this for one another. To risk not persevering.

So what is this encouragement thing — really — I reckon sometimes it is the “keep going” idea — where we suffer together and say “keep going,” “hold on,” “remember the destination”… stay faithful… prodding each other towards perseverance… holding on to the hope we profess — but part of this will be about calling folks back to holding on. Back to hoping. Back towards love and good deeds; towards being and becoming the sort of people Jesus calls us to be (Hebrews 10:25).

I reckon we are comfortable working at being a joyful and connected community — even with eye contact (which we “practised” at communion and in singing together the previous week) — one where we want people to be included and feel safe and maybe hear some good stuff or sing some good stuff to each other — I am sure we can get better and better at noticing the good things people do as part of cultivating joy and gratitude — being glad to be together — but I reckon some of this encouragement stuff is actually about saying hard things to one another — calling one another back to being who we are meant to be — and our habitat needs the sort of people who teach us skills by telling us when we get things wrong — and by showing us how to be who we are learning to be.

I am not sure we always have the relational security or the joyful attachment we need for that sort of speech to happen well — and then I am not sure we have practised this encouragement and spurring one another on when the pressure is not on, so that we are able to do it when it is real…

After joy and hesed, this is one of the practices suggested in The Other Half of Church for forming this side of our brain; forming our character. The authors talk about building a habitat of relationships in terms of forming group identity and calling each other to live together in this community — now — the book warns about how this can go wrong in cults and abusive contexts, we should not be naïve about this — but I reckon those of us who have experienced abuse and trauma — abuses of power or authority — can respond by rejecting all authority and just trying to do our own thing — which is another way of being formed but one that leaves us alone, or just with peers, or people we have got authority over like our own kids, or people we are teaching in various contexts.

I know I have struggled to work out what authority is and even if it can be used well, without harming others. I have found this part of my job the most difficult bit; because I recognise the harm done to so many of us through bad authority, and I do not want to compound that, but this fear — driven by love — pushes me — and others — away from hard and necessary conversations.

This is not who we are invited to be for each other. It is not who we say we are for each other. One of the values of our church is that we speak truth in love to one another in vulnerability and honesty. This love bit involves that security and joy — but this speech bit can be hard. Scary.

“We are vulnerable and honest about our own sin and brokenness, living and speaking the truth to one another in love, and welcoming to those not yet trusting Jesus.” — City South Presbyterian, Mission, Vision, Values

And while there might be a role for spiritual parents or those in authority to have these conversations, this is a one-another job — we are to spur one another on as we meet together — and the authority we are trying to point to is Jesus’ authority, not our own; we are part of his household, not our families of origin or our ideal communities, and so this sort of conversation involves discernment.

Anyway — the book talks about how important it is not just to talk about beliefs but about values; the sort of people we are and who we want to be, not just what we think — and about the need to proclaim these values habitually.

“One way a community can build a strong character identity is by speaking regularly to each other about what kind of people we are.” — The Other Half of Church

They say some traditions recite doctrinal statements — like we do with the creed — but we have also got to learn the vocabulary for how we live; our shared values — the commands of Jesus — so that when we are not being consistent we have a framework we can use to call people back to love and good deeds.

“Some traditions recite doctrinal statements as part of their Christian practice. We also need to do the same with how we live. We need constant reminders.”

— The Other Half of Church

This kind of correction is hard because it involves shame, inevitably — when we are told we are doing something wrong — but when there is genuine love and joyful connection, shame does not threaten our relationship or isolate us, knowing we are loved and secure helps us regulate that shame response and direct it towards growth — when this speech is genuinely encouraging it spurs us not just away from wrong action, but towards a correct path.

“Without hesed, shame will push us to isolate and hide, which naturally sinks us into unhealthy shame. Our hesed helps us regulate the emotional energy of shame.”

— The Other Half of Church

They talk about a template for this sort of conversation — a skill to develop as we seek to help one another be transformed by the renewing of our minds; as we proclaim the Gospel to one another to build hope and to persevere together — their template involves a reassurance of the hesed — the love — that connects us to God and each other, and by saying “I believe you did this,” not “you did this,” invites a conversation and listening.

“I love you but believe that you stopped acting like yourself. Let me remind you how we act in this situation.” — The Other Half of Church

Framing the “spur” or prod as a recognition of where we have stopped acting like who we are, with an invitation back to shared values and action, does not cast out — like bad shame — but invites closer; prodding; spurring; encouraging. It is a terrifying idea, right?

This sort of speech takes real love; and real agreement on shared values for it to be helpful.

We will not always get this right; and sometimes someone might raise something with you, in love, where they are wrong — that is an opportunity for more encouragement, and perhaps to invite spiritual parents — those more mature than us — into the mix if it feels like it is going wrong.

Our habitat will shape us not just when we structure our physical environments right, but when we fill them with people filled with God’s Spirit — God’s household — who love us and direct us towards Jesus.

September 29, 2025 Add Comment

The Worship Wars (6): A place for ‘Liturgy’ in our shared liturgies

Flannery O’Connor once told a young friend to “push as hard as the age that pushes against you.” The church is to be a radically alternative people, marked by the love of the triune God in each area of life. — Tish Harrison Wells, Liturgy Of The Ordinary

worship-wars
This is the final (probably) post in this series contemplating what it looks like to see the church as being a worshipping community at war with the ‘gods’ who compete with God for our love and worship. It suggests winning that war is about sharing practices that orient us towards the love of God we find in the Gospel; so that our love for God prevents us loving other gods; both by pushing them from our hearts, and then by occupying them.

In my last post I suggested these practices should be built from Romans 12’s description of worship, and the sort of shared life we find in Acts 2 (and the early church); and that somehow this is perhaps descriptively liturgical rather than prescriptively Liturgical. I’m wanting to take on board much of the recent work of James K.A Smith (in his Cultural Liturgies series), and more recently Tish Harrison Wells in Liturgy Of The Ordinary, without totally swallowing their suggestion that the answer to the worship wars is capital-L ‘liturgy’; the ‘traditional forms’ of the church’s worship (which to me feel like the medieval forms of the church’s worship, or perhaps the forms of the church’s worship detached from the 24/7 rhythms that supported those forms in Acts 2). I think the 24/7 rhythms of the church in Acts 2 were the ‘ethos’ that gave life and plausibility to the ‘liturgy’ of the early Sunday service, not the other way around (but that’s probably a false dichotomy); whereas I feel like Smith and Wells see it the other way; where the Liturgy on a Sunday feeds into the rhythms of the week.

I suggested the picture of the church community who held everything in common and met every day is the sort of ‘worship’ that I see helping win the worship war; that that’s the sort of context in which we can be formed and forged into people who will love God and hate idols. Or love God, and so have our love for the good things he made properly ordered… That picture excites me.

The sort of Liturgical life Smith and Wells invite me to pursue doesn’t.

This is all meant to be about shaping our loves; but I just don’t love that way. This is where I suspect some of my discomfort with Smith and Wells and their push for a liturgical life kicks in. Personally I find the whole liturgy thing a bit boring; it doesn’t mesh with who I am, it doesn’t float my boat or fire my heart, or stoke my imagination. I know it should, and it’s a discipline, and that discipline might actually help me relate to people not like me. But when I read Smith (and to a lesser extent Wells) I love the system of thinking but loathe the application…

But here’s the thing; this vision of the Romans 12/early church picture sounds ideal and refreshing to me; but it sounds like something that would exhaust my introverted wife. If this is how the ‘worship wars’ must be fought, then I’ll be an early casualty; but, if they’ve totally got to be fought on my terms, in a shared life, open home, messy hospitality, constant-presence-in-the-ups-and-downs-of-life, reflecting-the-gospel ‘sacrifice,’ then my wife will be an early casualty; and either way we (our family) lose.

So here’s my thesis…

Worship needs to be all of life in a way that takes me as I am and uses the ‘gift’ I am in my renewed-createdness for the sake of others, in service of the gift-giver.

And part of that means acknowledging that my createdness; and the best of me; looks different to the createdness of others. This means the liturgy will look and feel a little different for all of us; while being geared towards the same ends (the benefit of the body, the demonstration of the Gospel, and the cultivation of our love for Jesus). In pushing for a single ‘form’ of liturgy, Smith advocates a one-size-fits-all for all time liturgy. I think that runs the risk of de-humanising those who don’t love like he loves. Wells is a useful additional voice on this because she’s exploring how Smith’s stuff, and a love for Liturgy, shapes the every day.

I do love the way she does this; she takes the structure of a Liturgical service and reframes everyday activities like making the bed, showering and cleaning your teeth, fighting with your family, losing your keys, being stuck in traffic, drinking tea, and sleeping as things that can teach us our story.I really like the way Wells writes; and the way she breaks down the secular/sacred divide by taking up this ‘worship-is-love-shaped-by-habit’ framework… but often it’s just not corporate enough for little extroverted me. It’s fantastic. I love her stuff on Romans 12 that reflects on how it’s all about embodiment; and I think this is powerful when paired with the plural your in the verse she’s writing about:

I needed to be trained to offer my body as a living sacrifice through my body. We learn how our bodies are sites of worship, not as an abstract idea, but through the practice of worshiping with our bodies. Each day our bodies are aimed toward a particular end, a telos. The way we use our bodies teaches us what our bodies are for. There are plenty of messages in our culture about this. The proliferation of pornography and sexually driven advertising trains us to understand bodies (ours and other people’s) primarily as a means of conquest or pleasure. We are told that our bodies are meant to be used and abused or, on the other hand, that our bodies are meant to be worshiped. If the church does not teach us what our bodies are for, our culture certainly will. If we don’t learn to live the Christian life as embodied beings, worshiping God and stewarding the good gift of our bodies, we will learn a false gospel, an alternative liturgy of the body. Instead of temples of the Holy Spirit, we will come to see our bodies primarily as a tool for meeting our needs and desires. The scandal of misusing our bodies through, for instance, sexual sin is not that God doesn’t want us to enjoy our bodies or our sexuality. Instead, it is that our bodies—sacred objects intended for worship of the living God—can become a place of sacrilege. When we use our bodies to rebel against God or to worship the false gods of sex, youth, or personal autonomy, we are not simply breaking an archaic and arbitrary commandment. We are using a sacred object—in fact, the most sacred object on earth—in a way that denigrates its beautiful and high purpose…

But when we use our bodies for their intended purpose—in gathered worship, raising our hands or singing or kneeling, or, in our average day, sleeping or savoring a meal or jumping or hiking or running or having sex with our spouse or kneeling in prayer or nursing a baby or digging a garden—it is glorious, as glorious as a great cathedral being used just as its architect had dreamt it would be.

This is terrific stuff; I just want to say “yes… and”… and this ‘and’ is part of me trying to articulate where I feel both Smith and Wells sell us a little short in their conclusions about worship (and I want to stress this is perhaps as an extrovert with, as Myers Briggs puts it, an emphasis on ‘intuitive’ processing of the world). It all feels a little bit introspective, or seeing worship predominantly in a vertical ‘God-Me’ frame; where it could be more horizontal and vertical in a ‘God-Us’ frame…

So this stuff about the body from Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 6-10 is great, but Paul’s logic about the body in 1 Corinthians isn’t just that our bodies belong to God; though they do; it’s that via our union with Christ our bodies belong to each other; not in a way that totally does away with bodily autonomy so that I have to give me to anyone who wants me, however they want, but in a way that stops me using my body for idol worship/sexual immorality (and in a way that my body does belong sexually to my spouse and me). This fits with the plural in Romans 12 too…

And here’s an itch I just can’t scratch when it comes to both Wells and Smith; something that just doesn’t sit quite comfortably on my creaturely shoulders; though I’m sure their push for Liturgy and liturgical calendars, and tradition, and imagery, and structure, works for others. But for me — and this is largely ‘personal preference’ and intuitive pushback, I’d really like a book on imagining the kingdom to leave more room for the imagination (while acknowledging that our imaginations will be fired in helpful directions by totally different sorts of stimulus). I feel like Paul is pretty descriptive when it comes to what embodied corporate worship should look like (in both Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12-14); but the jump to big-L Liturgy feels a bit prescriptive to me. There’s lots from You Are What You Love and Liturgy Of The Ordinary that I’ll take on board; some of it because the idea of incorporating the ideas into the rhythms of my life with my family and church seems usefully formative, and some of it precisely because it grates, and in grating, it might push me to a different sort of formation that will be more beneficial to others (especially my family). But not all of it… where Smith seems to give permission for some innovation around his insights about worship, while making the case for most of our ‘rhythms’ to be set Liturgically, I want to say Liturgy might play some part in our worship, but I don’t think I can rely on it in quite the same way he does; and I suspect this is true for a host of people like me. It’s ironic how much what follows is built around ‘I want’… but we’re talking about what it takes to calibrate our hearts in a particular direction, so there’s something intensely personal about this. I want to take the descriptive stuff on corporate worship and ‘formation’ in Romans 12, Colossians 3, and 1 Corinthians 12-14 and play with it using my imagination; not just for my sake, but for the sake of being a rich and diverse community that accommodates people in their difference.

I want worship that feels like it is reinforcing our corporate reality; not just my own relationship with God, but ours; that acknowledges the horizontal as well as the vertical, that isn’t just corporate by virtue of me going to the spiritual gym next to a bunch of other ‘worshippers’ on Liturgical-treadmills (and we can’t escape the corporateness of the sacraments or ‘Liturgy’ anyway), but that is corporate because the essence of worship-as-ritual is corporate. Again, it’s hard to say Smith and Wells don’t want exactly the same thing; there’s always a corporateness to what they write. What I suspect I’m reacting against is an approach to a paradox that doesn’t quite emphasise what I most naturally do… Perhaps because I’m extroverted, though perhaps simply because I lean this way as a corrective to a society that has gone too far in the other direction; I want to emphasise our ‘corporateness’ above our individualness when thinking about worship. I want my practices to be corporate much more than individual. I want ‘noisy time’ not ‘quiet time’… the paradox of our existence is that we’re both individual and individuals-in-relationship.

I’m human; and that necessarily means there’s a corporate element to my creatureliness. I want to do all this stuff she imbues and enchants with sacred, Gospel, truth, but start with the default assumption that I’m a person-in-relationships, not a person-then-relationships. I’m a son before I’m even conscious of my existence, a husband in a ‘one-flesh’ relationship by vow and practice, and a father before my kids know it… not to mention a child of God. I’m defined by my relationships as much as by my individuality be that the way my body, mind and soul work, or the products of those pieces of me: my personal narrative, loves, habits, desires and imagination. My relationships shape those things too — whether by nature or nurture. My habits are caught, mostly, and they infect… or they’re things I do with others (things ‘we do’). As I read these great books I feel like they’re telling me to work on getting new habits, and while the solution is corporate it’s about participating in shared capital-L liturgy with others; when the small-l liturgies are where 97% of the week is lived.

That’s where the Acts 2 picture of worship as sharing ‘everything in common’ ‘every day’ has so much power. There is, of course, a corporate element to everything both Smith and Wells talk about, it’s really just a vibe thing; one little example is this epiphany I had as I read Wells talk about thankfulness; thankfulness is a thing we’re encouraged to do in Colossians 3 (amongst other places), and it’s a discipline I’ve been practicing on social media this year. It has been helpful. But it occurred to me that the thankfulness in Colossians 3 is corporate; it’s celebration; it’s thankfulness not just about the good in my life, but ‘rejoicing with those who rejoice’ even if I feel more like mourning.

I’d been scratching this itch for quite a while before I went through this document called ‘personality and type’ with my mentor; he was challenging me to cultivate spiritual disciplines that don’t just fit with my personality type, and gave me a document called Looking at Type and Spirituality that suggests (based on the Myers-Briggs types) that different types of ‘habit’ or different ways of seeing the world will come more naturally to different people. I’m pretty sure the document is one he’s paid for, and is under copyright, but here’s a snapshot of one comparison between two different types… Notice “values well written liturgies or patterns of worship” and “enjoys writing or putting together new processes or patterns of worship”… I’m an “F”… My guess is that Smith and Wells might both be Ss.

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I don’t know how much weight to put on Myers-Briggs personality stuff; but what I do know is that people are different, and we get excited about different things, and God created and accommodates those differences (and sin/idolatry works differently for different sorts of people); and what we really need if we’re going to be an Acts 2 type community is not to mandate types of worship that fit our particular personality and experience; but find ways to be a community that is rich because it provides ‘rituals’ that help different people cultivate their love for Jesus.

It’d be a real shame to take this sort of insight and say ‘Liturgical churches will reach S-types while non-Liturgical churches will cater to the N-types”… if everybody worshipped the same, we’d get tired of worshipping with each other; and we wouldn’t be doing the Romans 12 thing of learning to live together as a diverse body.

I know there are quite a few people in our church community who are much more Liturgical than I am and that my wife and children operate differently to me… When it comes to our church community; some enjoy Advent, others love old church architecture, some pray through the Prayer Book, others want our sacraments to be more beautiful. It’s not loving for me to set rhythms that don’t help them love Jesus. And if I choose to be ‘not loving’ then I’m actually not ‘worshipping’ in the Romans 12 sense… Because worship is ultimately about love it’s also about understanding and listening; first listening to and understanding God, but in turn, because God calls us to sacrificially love others, it’s about listening to and understanding others and how they tick and sacrificing on their terms, not my own. That’s why I’ll heartily endorse Smith and Wells and try to get everyone I can to read their books (especially Liturgy Of The Ordinary and You Are What You Love). They have given me some insight into the value of those practices I am inclined to toss because they do ‘nothing for me’… but because I see the benefit to others, and have perhaps even been convinced of the beauty of some structure (especially by Wells), there are Liturgical practices in those books that I hope to take up. I’ll do so both to push myself beyond my comfort zone, but also in order to love others better so they might love Jesus more (which in turn will shape my love for Jesus). There are also liturgical practices that I hope will shape our community in such a way that it makes loving Jesus more plausible for people who are wired to be like me…

That’s how I live out the truth that I am both ‘me’ and ‘me-in-relationships’ — that my body is God’s, but also belongs to others…

The challenge for those of us who have a hand in shaping the culture and rhythms of church, and family, life is to do it in a way that caters for the other; and that might involve participating in ‘Liturgy’ or ‘ritual’ that doesn’t float your boat, because that, in itself, is an act of sacrificial love for the other, and so, whether you like it or not, it’s worship.

January 5, 2017

I, Crucifix

I’ve loved Leonard E. Read’s I, Pencil since the first time I read it. I’ve been struck recently that the crucifixion of Jesus was much more complicated to orchestrate than a simple pencil. These words from Peter, in Acts, have been bouncing around in my head (along with John calling Jesus the “lamb slain before the creation of the world” in Revelation.

“This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.” — Acts 2:23

Some of the below either borrows, or quotes, I, Pencil. Which you should read for this to make as much sense as possible (though it should work without that).

I am the crucifix. Those two wooden planks, fixed together in the shape of the letter t, a symbol familiar to boys and girls and adults throughout the world. A symbol of hope. Affixed to hospitals, churches, and flags. Carried into battle, marking the resting place of the fallen. I am the world most recognised, most powerful, most confused, brand.

I am simultaneously wondrous, and cursed, celebrated and condemned, wisdom and foolishness, power and weakness, honour and humiliation, love and loathing, an instrument of justice and of mercy. I am both physical, and symbolic. I was made to bring darkness and death, but now represent light and life. I do these things, and more. I am taken up in service of many causes, and cause many acts of service.

I am where the triune God, who created the world wrote his signature on the earth, in blood. I am the canvas for a divine masterpiece where His image was held up, writ large, for all to see.

I am the scene of the culmination of his carefully orchestrated plans for his world.

I am so significant that the books written about me could fill a library, and the pieces of me held in churches around the world as relics could fill a ship. Yet nobody knows what tree became me.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story has transformed the history of the world. And yet, I am a mystery, more than a pencil, a sunset, a flash of lightning, or even the cosmos itself. Sadly, I am taken for granted, as if I were a mere incident, and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For the wise G.K Chesterton observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”

I, Crucifix, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone — if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile, or an airplane, or a mechanical dishwasher, or even a pencil, because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when we see that Rome once crucified 6,000 slaves at once, hung on crosses just like me, planted on the Via Appia.

Ponder me. A stauros. A cross. Consider my stipes and patibulum. The post and bar. Two planks of simple timber. Fixed together. What do you see? Not much that meets the eye. A few metres of hardwood. Splintered and bloody. Stipes implanted in the ground. Reused for victim upon victim. Some ropes. Some pegs and nails. I am physical, and yet symbolic. I have been emblematic for various causes through history, from warriors to medics, from haters to lovers. As an instrument of death in the hands of the Roman Empire I evoked horror, and humiliation, the very people who employ me most are terrified of my power — the orator Cicero insisted Roman citizens should not be confronted with the barbarity of even my name.

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

My family tree may seem, simply and literally, to begin with a tree; a cedar, an olive, or a fig tree, a tree of unknown species, grown somewhere around Jerusalem. Perhaps even the mystical dogwood — though unlikely. I grew from seed, sprouted, shot upwards, branched out, before being felled by an axe and stipped of branch and bark, turned to timber. My construction might seem simple. Two logs held together, and my victim affixed, by spike and rope. You may wish to contemplate the axes, rope, horses and carts, and countless other tools used in harvesting and carting logs to Golgotha and the barracks. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of iron and its smithing into axe heads and blades, the growing of nile grass and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong papyrus rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess tents, the slaves and soldiers overseeing the work, the cookery and the raising of all the foods to feed these mouths. Why, untold numbers of persons had a hand in every cup of wine the soldiers drink, and every piece of armour they wear! Timber was scarce in Jerusalem so my upright pole, my stipes, remained rooted, planted, at the place of the skull, while my victims bore the patibulum from their trial to their deathly destiny.

Don’t overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in creating me, not simply my physical reality, but my meaning.

My origins may seem arboreal, and, indeed, corporeal, and yet, it is the ethereal, symbolic sense of my significance that is where my family tree truly begins. Erected, as I was, in Jerusalem, I carry the stench of a curse for the Hebrew, and the aroma of abasement for the Roman. These odours were cultivated by years of tradition and practice. My ancestors were creations of Darius I of Persia, and employed by Alexander the Great. The Romans perfected my use and made me the most despised symbol in all the world — 6,000 slaves, the army of Spartacus, were once nailed to my predecessors and dotted liberally, one every 33 metres, along the Appian Way, a bloody road map to Roman supremacy. Dionysius of Halicarnassus in book VII of his Roman Antiquities from 7 BC, described the path an individual would take on his journey to death on the wooden arms of my forefathers…

“A Roman citizen of no obscure station, having ordered one of his slaves to be put to death, delivered him to his fellow-slaves to be led away, and in order that his punishment might be witnessed by all, directed them to drag him through the Forum and every other conspicuous part of the city as they whipped him, and that he should go ahead of the procession which the Romans were at that time conducting in honour of the god. The men ordered to lead the slave to his punishment, having stretched out both his arms and fastened them to a piece of wood which extended across his breast and shoulders as far as his wrists, followed him, tearing his naked body with whips. The culprit, overcome by such cruelty, not only uttered ill-omened cries, forced from him by the pain, but also made indecent movements under the blows.”

Observe my function, and my meaning. I am a well-honed instrument of humiliation and torture, the end of a torturous road for the accursed. Those designated as less than nothing in the eyes of the world. I am an instrument of death, and a symbol of power.

“Whenever we crucify the condemned, the most crowded roads are chosen, where the most people can see and be moved by this terror. For penalties relate not so much to retribution as to their exemplary effect.”—Quintilian, Declamation 274, The Tyrant Struck By Lightning.

For the Jews, I am anathema. Moses proclaimed that one hung, executed, upon a tree, a tree like me, was accursed by the living God. By the time Rome occupied Israel, death on a tree was a special punishment for traitors — those who sold Israel out to foreign powers, the Temple Scroll discovered amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, says:

“If a man slanders his people and delivers his people to a foreign nation and does evil to his people, you shall hang him on a tree and he shall die. On the testimony of two witnesses and on the testimony of three witnesses he shall be put to death and they shall hang him on the tree. If a man is guilty of a capital crime and flees to other nations, and curses his people, the children of Israel, you shall hang him also on the tree, and he shall die. But his body shall not stay overnight on the tree. Indeed you shall bury him on the same day.” —11QT Temple Scroll LXIV

My history, my family tree, as it were, the origin story behind my significance began even earlier than the practice of crucifixion.

It was no accident that my symbolic was turned upside down, that the Cross became a symbol of glory, and hope, of life, rather than death. It was part of a plan.

A plan that began with two other trees — a tree that brought life, and a tree that brought death. God’s plan to destroy evil, and his promise to crush the Serpent. Satan. A promise centred on the “lamb slain before the creation of the world”— the Lamb, the Son, whose hands flung stars into space and hold heavens and earth together.A plan that would see those hands skewered with odious spikes, on a cursed tree. His feet pierced, his side lanced.

The events that took place, painted in blood on my splintered canvas, were planned from the very beginning, even from before the creation of the world. It was no accident that the divine son of God, the Son of Man, found his arms affixed to mine, it was no accident that those looking on at these events hurled insults — they could do no less. It was no accident that the child of promise arrived at a time in history when I stood tall as a symbol of human power. The symbol that best represented the might of the god-kings of Rome, and their superiority over any who claimed to oppose their right to rule. It was no accident that Jesus was tried as a traitor by both Jews and Romans, and sentenced to an exemplary, cursed death. For many before him, I was a final resting place, corpses were left to rot on my cruel axis. But not for this one. And from this moment on, the fabric of the world was torn asunder, this rending of the heavens, itself, symbolised in the tearing of the Temple curtain, with this shattering of what was, and re-creation of what is, my significance was inverted. The curse reversed.

Does anyone wish to challenge the assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Indeed, every human hand that has been and will be — hands raised in rebellion against God — play a part in holding the divine Son’s hands to my boards, to holding me together at the centre of history. Every life gives significance to my promise of judgment or mercy. Judgment for the death of the Son, or mercy bought by the blood spilled into the grains of my beams, and on to the earth beneath.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the Romans who appointed me to my task, nor the Jewish crowd who looked on, not the governor, the timber workers, the soldiers, the quartermaster, the slave, the high priest, the Pharisees or teachers of the law, nor even those hung on my contemporaries on Golgotha, know how I came to be, nor wanted me, or wanted to understand my significance. Certainly I do not occupy the same place in their life, or those lives that came after me, that I do in space and time, or in God’s plans. The motivation of these people is other than me.

Perhaps it is something like this; when people are at last confronted with my significance and place in the plans of the God who orchestrated space and time such that his own shoulders rested on my wood, they are left wanting my significance to be their significance, their motivation, perhaps, at this point shifts, so I am the symbol they take up in order to live and know life.

The master-mind at the heart of my story, my creation, is astounding. The strings of history pulled, twisted, laid out and brought together in my being, and doing, are the product of an invisible hand at work. Not the work of an apprentice, but a virtuoso.

It has been said that “only God can make a tree.” Why do we agree with this? Isn’t it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable! If this is true of any tree — how much more of this tree. The tree at the centre of the universe?

I, Crucifix, am a complex combination of miracles: wood, rope, metal and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies and co-ordination of human history, superstition, culture, and power structures — millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolise, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.” For, if one is aware that I sit at the heart of divine creativity, that I am the backdrop for the divine drama writ large in history, authored and orchestrated from the beginning of life in this world, then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: faith in God. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

If I, Crucifix, were the only item that could offer testimony to what God accomplishes by divine creative expression, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it’s all about us and on every hand. Sunrise, sunset, the cosmos itself and its beauty is a testimony. The best of our humanity — love, the creation of relationships, life, art, and complex systems that enhance these things. Our co-creativity, our ability to write and appreciate stories, to bring threads together, woven into rich tapestries. The production line for apparently simple devices, like the pencil. The creation of supply chains. Human ingenuity and problem solving as a reflection of the divine nature.

Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person’s home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one’s range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Let the event at the centre of the world shape life in it. Take up your cross and follow the one whose hands were nailed to my arms. Merely organise society— starting with your own life— to act in harmony with this lesson. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Crucifix, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

April 21, 2015