Abba Agathon said, 'There is no greater labor than prayer to God. For every time someone wants to pray, their enemies the demons want to prevent them, for they know that it is only by turning that person from prayer that they can hinder their journey. Whatever good work someone undertakes, if they persevere in it they will attain rest. But prayer is warfare to the last breath.'
Huzzah! We are back to blogging about Sabbath by Wayne Muller. You can go to Megan's blog here, or to Cristopher's post here. They both had interesting insights to offer per usual. As Megan said, it is great to share the blogging on this book. The widened conversation has been a great gift.Muller wants us to think about the innumerable choices available to us in our culture. Go to the grocery store and choose a type peanut butter. No, not that one, the other one. No wait, maybe cashew butter. Or should it be the creamy free-range almond butter this week? My, it is hard to choose!
He also seems to think that we have fallen prey to the thinking that everything, people, communities etc, can be lumped into this practice of making choices. And this can pain us just as much as it is freeing. Choose a spouse. Choose a school. Choose someone, something, somewhere...Yeah. It can become overwhelming. Our freedom to choose can become a spiritual distraction. So, he suggets that sometimes Sabbath can be found by setting limits. I agree. This is what happens for me every week with my sermons.
Now, let me first say that I am completely aware that I have limited success with this practice. It is my constant reminder of my own humanity. Ah, blessed humbleness...or something.
I begin each week with about ten ideas for the sermon on the approaching Sunday. When I first started preaching I was able to reduce that number to three by the time Sunday came around. These days I have better success at getting the sermon down to one idea. But it is hard. I am constantly intrigued and engaged by these new ideas. It is an actual mental discipline to take an ideas as it comes and put it aside. I am constantly seeing something new and different for myself. I am constantly making connections. It is an unconscious process...a habit that I cannot quit. I am not even sure I even want to, but there has to be some coherency in my sermons. So, I endeavor to keep the options to a dull roar. This is completel counter intuitive, but it has proven to be a great thing to practice for me. There is a certain liberty in being able to focus on just one thing and not ten.
Wayne may be the kind of personality who is as easily distracted as I am. Perhaps not. I think that some people may find Sabbath in a break from the monotany...an opening of options may be Sabbath as well. Either way, it is an interesting line of thought...choice and Sabbath.
Posted by tripp at April 24, 2007 10:29 AMI'm curious about how one's priorities can tame the T-rex of choice. Muller seems to suggest that we have NO guide to use when facing the plethora of choices our consumer society presents us with. But I find that that's not true.
To build on your peanut/cashew/almond butter example, if I know that supporting organic farming with my buying dollars is important, then it's easy to disregard all the non-organic options. Where's the stress in that?
Posted by: Megan at April 24, 2007 12:01 PMI agree with you. We do have mores/ethics/codes/notions that guide us as people. And he seems to forget that.
But then I am reminded of a friend who lived in Hong Kong (Not Sarah). When she returned to the US, the biggest reverse culture shock issue for her was the grocery store. There were so many options, so many products presented. Even with a clear set of standards, the basic sensory overload was distracting.
She made her choices, but she had more information to filter out.
Posted by: Tripp at April 24, 2007 01:40 PMTripp, the Abba Agathon quotation is highly welcome to me. I've printed it and need to read it daily. Thank you.
Posted by: Scott at April 24, 2007 01:43 PMEugene Peterson and Marva Dawn wrote a book about ministry a few years ago (of course, the title escapes me at the moment). One of the concepts they addressed was a modern phenomenon called Low Information Action Ratio. That is, there is so much information flowing into our conscious minds in modern life that we become immobilized due to the massive amount of filtering and sorting required just to survive. One of their recommendations for churches and ministers of the Gospel was to try to move from Low Information-Action Ratio (LIAR) to High Information-Action Ratio (HIAR). Fascinating stuff, much of which I think Muller would support.
Posted by: Scott at April 25, 2007 07:46 AMScott (the latter),
I love Peterson. I'll have to check that book out of my local library. And the idea you lifted out of it sounds like a good one. Have you read Leaving Church by Barbara Brown Taylor? Give it a go. I think that we pastors burn ourselves out trying to duplicate the "tyranny of choice" in our congregations with program after program after service after meeting...
Posted by: Tripp at April 25, 2007 09:37 AMAnd there's the rub - what if one of the programs you decide not to support, in the name of preventing "tyranny of choice," is the one program that will nurture a given parishioner's spiritual growth?
Posted by: Megan at April 25, 2007 11:45 AMEvery community has limits. We cannot be all things to all people. The congregation is not the whole of the church. This is why congregations have to do things with one another, develop relationships and share resources.
Posted by: Tripp at April 25, 2007 12:10 PMI don't understand what you're getting at. If the congregation is not the whole of the church... what is?
Oh, wait -- I think you're hinting at cross-congregational service offerings, so every individual congregation doesn't have to offer every single service. So if one church offers nursery care for infants & toddlers during services, two other churches can park their babies there.
Sort of the church-version of four neighbors sharing one communally owned lawnmower or snowblower, rather than each household putting out the resources to buy, store and maintain its own.
Am I understanding you correctly?
Posted by: Megan at April 25, 2007 12:46 PMSurely.
Both my congregations are small. So, there are limited resourses of time and cash. So, we can only have but so many programs. And if someone's needs are not being met, it's good to know that the Presbyterians across the street have "Program X" when we don't.
Worship services, day care, therapy, whatever you can imagine is more easily shared between congregations than for every congregation to try to offer everything.
Other services may be offered by local service organizations as well. There's no shame in a church suggesting that their members take advantage of that stuff.
Willow Creek, with 20,000 people showing up during the week, can offer a lot. But they have a couple hundred pastors...we cannot even begin to do what they do on the scale on which they do it. We have a dozen that show up at Reconciler and maybe 70 that come to CCW. We have to share and embrace organizations outside our own.
Posted by: Tripp at April 25, 2007 01:00 PMOkay, I get it. Would you come back to this question that I asked above: "If the congregation is not the whole of the church... what is?"
Posted by: Megan at April 25, 2007 01:09 PMI think that the congregation is an iteration of the whole church. It's not just "part of the church." That would say too little about the nature of the gathering of people in a specific place and time. But it is not the whole church.
For example, if you and I are both in the Church but live in different areas, we will attend different congregations. One congregation is not the whole church.
Boy, some old school Baptists would have a hard time with me. There are still some Baptist churches that make new members get baptized even if they were born, raised and baptized in a community with exactly the same theology. They do so because in their theology, the Church begins and ends with their specific congregation.
I can't go there. But it is interesting theology.
Why did you ask?
Posted by: Tripp at April 25, 2007 02:42 PMYour original remark that "the congregation is not the whole of the church" suggested to my mind that the church had some ingredients other than congregations.
And given the context of the discussion of congregations reaching out to avail themselves of the services offered by non-church organizations, I feared that you were somehow psychologically annexing those organizations into your vision of "the church." To which I think they would object, strenuously. :-)
Posted by: Megan at April 25, 2007 03:17 PM