When miracles become ordinary. . .

The truth is that we have unrealistic expectations of nearly everything in life.  Among them is the idea of certain things being special -- so special, in fact, that every time we experience them we tingle with excitement and are awestruck before them.  And then it all becomes ordinary.  We spend a goodly portion of our lives trying to rekindle the moment and the make uncommon what has become routine.  It is an endless but fruitless pursuit.  Everything special ages into the ordinary.  That is not bad.  It just is.  Life is not lived in the spectacular but in the routine, not on the occasional mountain tops but in the regular valleys.  In some way we all know this but reject it in favor of the pursuit of the raw and edgy feel of the first experience.

This is true of nature.  I grew up in a farming community in a distinctly rural atmosphere.  There is little that is more miraculous than the tilling of the soil, dropping in a seed, and then feeding the world.  When an uncle of mine passed away, the Lutheran pastor who did not know him at all suggested that my uncle had regularly dipped his hand into the soil, lifted his eyes to the heavens and praised God for the miracle.  He did not.  He regularly complained to God about too much rain or too little, costs too high and the price of corn too low, etc...  He had lived too long with the miracle a child sees when he puts a bean seed into a jar of soil and watches it split open and send forth a stalk to the sky and it was all rather, well, boring.  He was not a bad guy but it happens to all of us.  The miracle becomes ordinary.

When you first taste of a perfectly grilled steak or a lobster tail drawn in butter or bread fresh from the oven, it is a magical experience.  But if you eat these regularly, they become routine and ordinary.  It is not bad.  It is life.  Some of us spend our whole lives trying to escape the ordinary and live in the specialness of a moment forever new.  Marriages fall apart because love becomes routine and its not the first kiss or touch.  We reject the ordinary in favor of the constant pursuit of life on the edge.   Thrill seeking seems romantic at first but it is a heavy burden to place upon life and soon the pursuit overtakes the end result.  It is that way with addiction in general but it is also a specific addition to the pursuit of what was or what never was.  It is, like nearly every addiction, a destructive one.  It does not add but constantly subtracts from life.  Like the life lived behind the constant scrolling of the screen, the thing no longer matters as much as the pursuit of what might be or what is behind the next change.

This is also true with the things of God.  We want things to be constantly special.  We have prayerbooks because prayer becomes routine and without the prompting of a form set before us, we lose interest and grow bored with it all.  We have a liturgy because the routine grounds us against the constant church shopping for an experience we have not had before.  It is a necessary anchor for a people constantly shifted by wind and wave, chance and change.  We have the Word near us but a lectionary prompts us to live in it when we put it down as a boring novel or history text and appoints us with a cycle of texts in which to live, to know, and to guide us into the rest.  We have the baptismal font front and center as we enter the sanctuary so that we remember we are baptized when our infant or childhood baptism is not recalled or its significance acknowledged amid all the other things in life that claim our identity.  We have the Eucharist not as something very special but as the regular table and regular food of the people of God.  We come not because it gives us chills every time we approach the Sacrament but because we need its food whether we are hungry for it or need to be called to the feast.  God lives in the ordinary and not simply in the special, in the routine and regular of Word and Sacrament as well as in the moment when their miracle becomes impossible to ignore.

I grew up with a Lutheran Church which had forgotten itself and consigned the Eucharist to four times a year and then not all commune.  While some are shocked by this in an age of more regular Holy Communion, Roman Catholics had the Mass every Sunday but more as a spectator event than a participant by weekly Communion.  They even removed the chalice from the lay as something too special and meant only for those in orders.  But we were fools.  The special character of the Sacrament does not proceed from its occasional encounter but from its life among us as the routine and regular place where we eat the flesh once for all broken for us on the cross and drink the blood that cleanses us from all sin.  It is the foretaste of the eternal feast not because it is so special but to point us to what is coming when every thing around us would point us to other things not so routine.  The Lord never meant it to be special but routine and ordinary, as oft as you eat and drink...  

Oftentimes converts become worn down and disappointed because the enthusiasm of the first experiences in their churches do not last.  Disillusioned by the special become ordinary, they sometimes switch churches in search of the spectacular only to wear themselves out into disbelief.  But God lives in the ordinary and routine, in the boring and common.  In six days of labor and the day set apart for the Lord.  Work becomes routine and so does the Sabbath.  God's work is not to keep propping up the ego for the excitement we seek but to make it plain and obvious that God lives where we live.  When the miracle becomes ordinary, God is still there.  Amid valleys and shadows, disappointment and despair, defeat and loss, pain and suffering -- God is there with grace sufficient and life stronger than death and forgiveness greater than the sin.  Once we begin to recognize this, we relieve ourselves and our faith and our life from the impossible burden of maintaining the chills and tingles of the first even while we are experiencing the last. 

Great lines from an old classic. . .

Often what sticks with me even longer than a plot or a complete work are the great lines that seem to be bigger than the book itself.  This is true of many works but especially of the great works.  Dante is responsible for a couple of them I have written on paper and keep on my desk.

We would expect that Dante's Inferno would speak of dramatic sins but the reality is that dramatic sins are salacious but not always profound.  Adultery is a dramatic sin as is murder but it is ordinary in the way that both have been going on since the Fall and seem to be favorites of mankind.  The more profound sins are those of the lukewarm whom God will chew up and spit out, those neither hot nor cold who seem perfectly comfortable in and outside the Church.  They live in lives of moral ambiguity certain that there is no black and white but shades of grey that call the wise to be silent more than to cry out.  They tend to recede into the background of wherever they find themselves and offend no one -- not even God. 

These are those who are sheep no longer desiring the Shepherd, hearing His voice but not following, and living on the edges of the flock.  The Kingdom of God lives not simply in the dramatic moments but in the sphere of every small choice in which the Christian either manifests that he belongs to God or not.  There is, of course, the presumption that a sort of neutrality in which the soul yearns for and seeks another way without the messiness of witness might exist and this is what blinds the soul to the consequence of being comfortable neither of God nor against Him.  It is a quiet withdrawal which chokes off faith but does not quite make the sinner a dramatic force of evil.

Dante understood this and it is manifest throughout his work.  There, at the threshold of Hell, before he encounters the usual suspects of tyrants, murderers, traitors, and violent sinners who everyone knows and expects to populate the deeper realms of hell, he sees sees the souls of those who never truly chose God nor reject Him.  They simply live in ambiguity.  Their lives are, according to Dante, sanza ’nfamia e sanza lodo—“without infamy and without praise” (Inferno III, 36).  They are not alone on earth for Dante also connects them with the angels who were “neither rebellious nor faithful to God” (Inferno III, 38–39).  Perhaps they had conscience and moral strength enough to refuse great evils and yet they could not bring themselves to stand forth for good.  They live in silence rather than conviction, choosing safety and security here over truth, comfort and ease over martyrdom, personal pleasure over sacrifice, and self-preservation over faithfulness.

Why this scene is chilling in Dante is because he does not begin his sojourn through Hell with monsters and notorious evil whom everyone expects to be there but with those who insist upon belief but lack conviction, who insist upon good but live in the realm of the morally evasive. Their sin is not dramatic and would merit no mention in the tabloids that chronicle our evils but they are even more profound. They have refused the dignity and danger of choice, teaching us that neutrality is not innocence. It is as if they say, “I belong to Christ, but I will not stand with Him publicly.”  It is the realm of fear.

The Church and Christians have lived with this fear for too long and it has become usual and familiar.  The Church has become daring only insofar as this is the same edge on which lives public opinion and the direction of society.  The Church has become reluctant to call a sin a sin and lives too easily within the realm of silence for the things that the Word of God condemns.  It is not all nor everyone but it is the many who claim to be authentic and who insist that they love Jesus.  They love the idea of Jesus more than His reality and the false image of the Savior over the One who insists upon dying for sins because they cannot be forgiven any other way.  It is the quiet Christianity in which the witness is more to a conceptual love than the love revealed in suffering on the cross.  It is the silent Christianity which speaks of this idea of love while refusing to upset things by addressing the sins for which Love was born.  But Dante's witness is clear as is Revelation.  The lukewarm who live in vagaries and uncertainties and fear find the gnashing of teeth and not comfort at the day of judgment.  They have refused the cover of Christ's love in life and so it abandons them in death to reveal that their sins, not dramatic but profound, lack the cleansing of the blood because they refused to see them as sin.  

This is the affliction of modernism that brings rot to the institution of the Church.  Some are confused by righteousness to presume moral authority to judge in the place of Christ but this is no answer.  The refuge of the soul lies always in the Love that suffered and died, in the sin admitted and confessed, in the body laid in the tomb for the dead.  When this is no longer our message and we live in the convenient realm of simple do gooders who seek to improve today rather than proclaim God's tomorrow, we betray our calling as Christians and our identity as the Church.  At some point, the emptiness of what passes for Christianity will no longer be able to live in the shadows and must either stand close enough to Christ to be splattered with His blood or live in the clean clothing of the world that offers nothing of real hope.  Perhaps that day is coming soon.

 

Prayers hard to pray. . .

I will admit that too many of our table prayers have made their way into the formal or informal realm of prayer before Holy Communion.  Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest... is known and beloved to us all but it is not the sum or summit of the prayers we pray as we come to receive the body and blood of the Lord.  In fact, it is no wonder that we struggle with the idea that Holy Communion is not y'all come precisely because we do not believe that the Lord's flesh and blood can be taken for any but salutary effect.  St. Paul's words of caution in I Corinthians confuse and confound us so we explain them away.  Oddly enough, the Orthodox seem to have kept this concept although I do not know how wide spread.  Really, can you imagine any modern day Christian praying as such before receiving the Sacrament?  If you cannot, then our catechesis is not as good as we think it is.  We approach the Lord's table not with casual abandon but with awe, reverence, and a somberness that befits what we are receiving and how it can benefit us or harm us.

Take a look at the prayers below and think this over.  Can you drink of the cup of which I drink?  If this is Jesus' question to Sts James and John, then it should not be far from our minds as well.  The boundary of closed communion is not to separate us from God but to make sure we can come to Him in the right manner and receive His gift as blessing and not to our harm.  From the moment when sin corrupted our relationship with God and resulted in our expulsion from the Garden, God set up an angel at the gates to prevent us from entering in the wrong manner (and thus bring upon us an even worse destruction).  This boundary was a salutary one and not simply punitive.  1 Corinthians 11:17-34:

¹⁷ But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. ¹⁸ For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you. And I believe it in part, ¹⁹ for there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. ²⁰ When you come together, it is not the Lord's supper that you eat. ²¹ For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. ²² What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not.

²³ For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, ²⁴ and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” ²⁵ In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” ²⁶ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

²⁷ Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. ²⁸ Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. ²⁹ For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. ³⁰ That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. ³¹ But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. ³² But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.

³³ So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another— ³⁴ if anyone is hungry, let him eat at home—so that when you come together it will not be for judgment. About the other things I will give directions when I come.

Prayers of Holy Communion:
I believe, Lord, and I confess, that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, Who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first. Moreover, I believe that this is Your immaculate Body, and that this is Your precious Blood. Wherefore, I pray to You: have mercy on me, and forgive me my transgressions, those voluntary and involuntary, those in word, those in deed, those in knowledge and those in ignorance; and make me worthy to partake of Your immaculate Mysteries without condemnation, for the remission of sins and life everlasting. Amen.

Approaching for Holy Communion, read the following verses from Saint Symeon the Translator:
Behold, I approach for divine Communion;
Creator, burn me not as I partake;
For You are Fire, which burns the unworthy.
But, rather, cleanse me from every impurity.

Then the following Troparion:
Of Your Mystical Supper, Son of God, receive me today as a communicant; for I will not speak of the Mystery to Your enemies; nor will I give You a kiss, as did Judas, but like the thief I confess You: Remember me, Lord, when You come into Your Kingdom!

Then again the following verses:
Be awe-stricken, O man, beholding the deifying Blood;
For it is a lighted Coal that burns the unworthy.
The divine Body both deifies and nourishes me;
It deifies the spirit, and wondrously nourishes the mind.

And these Troparia:
You have smitten me with yearning, O Christ, and by Your divine zeal You have changed me; but burn away my sins with immaterial Fire, and make me worthy to be filled with delight in You; that, leaping for joy, O good One, I may magnify Your two comings.

Into the brilliant company of Your saints, how shall I the unworthy enter? For if I dare to enter into the bridal chamber, my garment betrays me, for it is not a wedding garment, and I shall be bound and cast out by the Angels; Lord, cleanse my soul of pollution, and save me, for You love mankind.

And the following Prayer:
Master, Who loves mankind, Lord Jesus Christ my God, do not let these Holy Things be to me for judgment because of my unworthiness, but rather may they be for the purification and sanctification of soul and body, and as a pledge of the life and Kingdom to come. For it is good for me to cleave to God, to put my hope of salvation in the Lord.

And again:
Of Your Mystical Supper, Son of God, receive me today as a communicant; for I will not speak of the Mystery to Your enemies; nor will I give You a kiss, as did Judas, but like the thief I confess You: Remember me, Lord, when You come into Your Kingdom! Remember me, Master, when You come into Your Kingdom! Remember me, Holy One, when You come into Your Kingdom! 

Of Saint Symeon Metafrastes (Saint Symeon the Translator)
You Who have willingly given me Your Flesh as food, Who are a burning fire to the unworthy, do not consume me. No, my Creator; rather penetrate into my members, all my joints, my organs, and my heart. Burn all my iniquities like thorns; cleanse my soul, make holy my thoughts, make firm my knees and my bones as well. Illumine my five senses and make vigilant my entire being with the fear of You.  Watch over me always; shield and protect me from every deed and word which corrupts the soul.  Cleanse me, purify me, and put me in order; adorn me, give me understanding, and illumine me.  Show me to be the dwelling of Your Spirit alone, and not the dwelling place of sin; so that when You enter into the home of Your communion, every evil doer and every passion will flee from me as from fire.

A lesson learned too well. . .

The language of healing has always been a part of the Christian faith.  It is there both in the telling of the stories of God's healing grace at work to remedy the human ills of disease but also in the overall description of God's salvific work.  We have always said God is a healing God, taking what is broken and making whole and taking what is diseased and granting health.  They are good and salutary (itself a healing word) terms and descriptions of what God has done.  But at some point, the words stole the message.

Therapeutic deism did not begin recently.  It goes back to the demand of the sick for God to fix what was wrong and to the demand of the hungry to be fed without earthly labor to provide the food.  We have always found a temptation to substitute the present for the eternal.  At some point, however, it become the dominant image of God and the dominant image of salvation.  We are no longer the guilty or shameful who are searching for cleansing or the sinners in search of redemption.  We have become the discontent in search of pleasure, the sad in search of happiness, the bored in search of excitement, the lonely in search of friendship, and, under it all, the spectator in search of entertainment.  The problem with this is that you do not need a Savior, a God incarnate, or a cross and empty tomb to provide these things.  These live not in eternity but in the present, in the moment, if you will.

Though it would be tempting to place this blame at the feet of the liberals, we are all to blame.  We have so eloquently described God as healer that the people no longer look for or need a God who redeems.  They are looking for a therapist to listen, for someone to approve and commend them as they are, and for anyone to show them how they might satisfy their longings rather than reorder them according to God's will and purpose.  Christianity’s dalliance with healing and therapy has become greater than the quest for redemption, for salvation, and for righteousness.  When Jesus sent forth His disciples to heal (therapeuete) the sick, we all took Him at His word and made it into a promise that would be fulfilled now.  All of our expanded analogies using healing to describe salvation have born the wrong fruit.  We want and expect God to do more for us today than for eternity.  We want to flourish in the here and now — body, soul, heart, and mind — and this is what have come to expect and demand from God.  To quote Captain Piccard, "make it so."  

We were encouraged along the way by things outside the faith to look to our thoughts, emotions, and desires to define what happiness looked and how to live well.  We learned from society that our stories were more important than real truth and experience was more reliable than facts.  We have told ourselves this over and over again until we were convinced that this was God speaking to us and so the cultural mythology of the moment overwhelmed the Scriptural expression of need and Savior, sin and redemption, hell and heaven.  The worst evil was that which inhibited or put value judgments on those thoughts, emotions, and desires.  The best good was that which allow those thoughts, emotions, and desires to flourish unhindered by challenge or what others think — much less God.  Authenticity was to the self and the self-authenticating self desired and accepted approval only and nothing less.

When even conservatives stopped speaking of sin or of the evils of sin and began accepting brokenness and pain and disappointment as primary, we became mere puppets of the culture and weak echoes of what everybody already knew and believed.  Who needs heaven when you can expect it or find it on earth and who needs a Savior when the worst sin is not living by your unfettered desires and wants?  We ended up trying to sell the need for God in ways that made sin a sideline and the world loved it.  That is why there are so few churches and preachers speaking about sin and death, forgiveness and life, in the same terms as Scripture and why the substitutionary atonement model of salvation became a pariah to the pulpit as well as to the modern mind.  Lets admit it.  We all joined on the moralistic therapeutic deism model in some way or another and now we have to dig ourselves out of it before nothing of the real Gospel remains.

A few numbers and a thank you. . .

Since beginning this little enterprise some 16+ years ago, the readership has constantly surprised me.  So far, since the blog began, some 17 million folks have tuned in, fewer in the beginning and it has grown.  Every day some 6,000-10,000 people get on the blog for one post or another, some 60,000-100,000 monthly, and a million or so annually.  Obviously, some days more than others and some posts are better than others.  Some tune in and never come back.  Most return with varying degrees of frequency.  I deliberately have not monetized this blog though I have had tempting offers.  It was never mean to bring in the cash.  I like writing the blog posts.  I enjoy reading and my head is filled with useless information and a few decent pastoral and meandering thoughts.  Thank you for reading.  If I offend or upset, I do apologize.  If I get you thinking, I am glad because something got me thinking.  If I repeat myself, well, I am getting old.  LOL.  Cut me some slack.  Do I have familiar themes -- you betcha.  Am I always right?  Well, I think I am at the time I wrote it but I do change my mind and I have no guarantee of infallibility -- think what I could have accomplished if I had!!!  I do not know how long I will keep this up or keep up the pace of posting but it is still going strong.  And so am I.  Thank you all.  When I run into you and you mention the blog, it encourages me -- even when you think I got it wrong!  I am humbled by your kindness -- like the guy I ran into in the Denver airport who said, Are you Pastoral Meanderings as if I were somebody important.  Thank you, really, from the bottom of my heart.  And God bless you all.