Church Year & Holy Days

HAPPY ADVENT!! {10}

/ Paul Burkhart / 10 Comments

Well, it’s here. The day we’ve been building up to and meditating upon. This is the day we joyfully celebrate the King who broke into our reality and ushered in His Kingdom and our salvation by coming in the form of a little child.

Even though this time can be tough for some (my grandfather died a year ago tomorrow), I do hope and pray that we are all able to have at least one good laugh this year and see the smile of at least one person we love and that we know loves us. And eat good food. And drink good drink. And listen to bad, cheesy music. (On a side-note: the picture above is a picture of the wall-hanging that went up in my house every year as I grew up. And now I have it. I love it.)

Don’t worry, this isn’t really a whole other post. This Advent season has been an especially fruitful time for my writing (as my Facebook Wall obviously shows). I want to thank everyone that has been telling me how helpful these posts were–or even those that just told me they were reading them in the first place!. I can’t tell you how much it affects me, sticks with me, and encourages me. But anyway, I just wanted to write this post so I could put up all these posts in one place for you easy reading pleasure, should you so desire. Happy Advent!
Continue reading →

What is the True Gospel of Advent? {9} (hint: it’s not your salvation)

/ Paul Burkhart / 2 Comments

As I mentioned in my previous post, my church has been doing an Advent series called “The Other Christmas Stories” where we’ve been looking at various texts (outside of the traditional Christmas narratives) that comment on the Advent event. Last week, our pastor preached from the book of Revelation, including some of these verses:

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down. They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them!”
–Revelation 12:11-12

Continue reading →

God loves me. But does he like me? (on being “Christ-like”) | Advent {8b}

/ Paul Burkhart / 8 Comments

[This is Part 2. Read Part 1 here.]

My church has been doing a series called “The Other Christmas Stories” where we’ve been going through other texts in the Bible that comment on and meditate upon the event of Advent. The first message was preached on that quintessential Advent text, John 1. The preaching on these verses really struck me:

But as many as received him, to them he gave power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
— John 1:12-13

The sermon went on to remind us that in these verses is a promise that the Advent did not happen in order to make us into something we are not, but rather to give us the power to become who we most truly are (children of God). Now, I want to be clear. I grew up in Church hearing that phrase “be who you are” (and hearing it in music), and in certain seasons that thought has been helpful to me, but I’m not quite trying to express the same sentiment.
Continue reading →

God loves me. But does he like me? (on being “Christ-like”) | Advent {8a}

/ Paul Burkhart / 8 Comments

UPDATE: Part 2 of this post is now up.

I have a quick confession. I technically ascribe to the “flavor” of Protestantism called “Reformed” that takes the roots of its doctrinal tradition all the way back to the leaders of the Reformation. The first church I really learned much of anything about Christianity and theology is Reformed…ish. The seminary I went to prides itself in being the bastion of orthodoxy for “Reformed” theology. My church is a member of the Reformed Church in America family of churches.

But, I’m not a good Reformed man.
Continue reading →

There is No One Like You (Adv, Days 23/24; HelloGoodBye 09/10) by David Schrott [GUEST POST]

/ napoleonsays / 1 Comment

[Through college up through about a year and a half ago, I ran a little online magazine called Reform & Revive. It’s dead now. While it was going on, one of my best friends, David Schrott, was one of our contributors. He’s an amazing drywaller, photographer, writer, person, and boyfriend (also here, here, and here). This is a post he wrote for R&R back in 2009 at the end of a particularly trying year for him. It’s one of my favorite Advent meditations I’ve ever read, and so I wanted to share it with all of you. Enjoy.]

_______

“I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer.”
–I Timothy 2.8, NIV

There are these days, when it is so difficult to find words that wrap around concepts, that, no matter how concrete in one’s mind, find it impossible to find substance in the barrier we use to communicate called language. In those moments, it seems that experience does precede existence and existentialism, for a moment, seems fun (and fun is clearly the wrong word, but for to-day, for this beautiful-day-before-Advent, will have to do).
Continue reading →

Catholics Aren’t Crazy: an Advent & Communion Theological P.S. (for those who care) | Advent {7a}

/ Paul Burkhart / 9 Comments

After my previous post on how Communion is no more a “symbol” than Advent itself, I can already hear some people right now thinking: “Wait. Isn’t this the Catholic idea of communion?” (As if that would be the worst thing.) I’ve mentioned some of my Communion views before in this ongoing series, and what I articulated is a synthesis and summary of the ideas of many theologians, both Protestant and Catholic. The pop idea of the Catholic view on the Eucharist is not really right or helpful (as is the pop conception of most of Catholic doctrine). Catholicism’s “Eucharist problem” is more historical and rhetorical than theological.

In the earliest decades and centuries of church history, people were able to simply maintain the simple doctrine that at Communion, they are receiving the true presence of Christ in the Bread and the Wine (source, albeit biased). In the middle ages, though, people starting asking themselves “Wait, what does that actually mean?” Differing answers started forming and a diversity of opinion about the Eucharist began taking place. The leaders of the Church tried to bring some commonality to this. In fact, the medieval Catholic church made a few “errant” teachers affirm these statements in 1078 and 1079:
Continue reading →

The Holy Sacrament of Advent {7}

/ Paul Burkhart / 4 Comments

There is an abiding idea and assumption that plagues us humans. It has come up at various times in various worldviews with various names. It’s found in the implications of what Zoroastrians called the conflict between “Asha” and “Druj”, what Plato called “Dualism”, Diogenes called “Cynicism”, first-century heretics called “Gnosticism”, Descartes: “Rationalism”, Kant: “Idealism”, Bacon: “Empiricism”, French Enlightenment-ers: “Materialism”, Modernists: “Realism”, Postmodernists: “Pragmatism” and “Constructivism”, so on and so forth through the ages.

The thing all of these ideas have in common is a separation between the material and the immaterial; the abstract and the physical; the temporal and eternal; the objective and subjective; the spiritual and the human. Further, they tend to elevate one over the other.

We can’t really escape this (I’ve written about this before).

One of the basic obvious tenets of finitude is that we can’t be in two places at once, neither physically nor intellectually. To perfectly hold the delicate balance between these poles of the seen and unseen is difficult, if not impossible.

But Advent can help us.

Continue reading →

The Formation of God | Advent {6}

/ Paul Burkhart / 5 Comments

All last week, I offered some meditations on this season of Advent. I actually have several more I’ll be posting more or less every day until Christmas, but today I’ll be offering the last in this little alliterated series in which we’ve been exploring how in the Advent event, Jesus took on our creaturely form, care-taking function, comprehensive fallenness, and now, communal formation.

We spend a lot of time and energy in this season focusing on how Jesus has changed everything and how the implications of Advent change much of our lives and existences. But Jesus did not merely come to change and affect things, but to also be changed and affected by them.
Continue reading →

Artist John Singer Sargent on the Advent {5}

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

image

“Being made man, I am maker of man, and redeemer of what I have made. God in the flesh, I redeem body and soul.”

“On the cross is the figure of the dead Christ, with the figures of Adam and Eve, typifying Humanity, kneeling on either side. They are bound closely to the body of Christ, since all are of one flesh, and each holds a chalice to receive the Sacred Blood. About the feet of Adam is entangled the Serpent of Temptation. Above the arms of the cross there is inscribed in Latin “The sins of the world have been redeemed.” At the foot of the cross the Church is symbolized by the Pelican feeding its young, while around it doves symbolize the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit.”

Read a full description of the pieces here. Find the official website for the commission here.

__________

Continue reading →

What Christ did not taste, Christ did not redeem. | Advent {4}

/ Paul Burkhart / 12 Comments

This Advent season, we’ve been meditating on how the Advent reminds us how God took on our creaturely form, care-taking function, comprehensive fallenness, and communal formation.

First, a question.

Think back on the Christmas story. After Jesus is born, when he’s about three years old, the wise men go to King Herod and say that they’re looking for this newborn King. Herod is shocked to hear about a child-king having been born right under his nose, whose potential future reign threatens his own, and so he puts out a decree calling for the death of all children ages three and under (in history and art this is referred to as “The Slaughter of the Innocents”. An angel comes to Joseph in a dream and tells him to flee to Egypt to prevent this from happening.

Here’s the question:

Why flee to Egypt? If they stayed and Herod killed the child Jesus, would that not still be Jesus, the Son of God–the Incarnate God–dying unjustly at the hands of a Roman provincial governor attempting to cement the reign of the powers and principalities of the world? Why go to all that effort to wait 30 years later for the same thing to happen on a cross?
Continue reading →

our failed function, God’s full faithfulness | Advent {3}

/ Paul Burkhart / 15 Comments

This week, I’m meditating on a few particular aspects of the Advent event. I’m thinking through and writing about how, in Jesus, God inhabited our creaturely form, care-taking function, comprehensive fallenness, and communal formation.

As I said in the teaching I gave over the summer about the Nature and Narrative of the Bible, the opening chapters of the Bible describe this divine act of creating in very architectural terms; the same words are later used in describing the building of the tabernacle and the temple. In this we see that God’s act of creating was, in essence, building this world as his temple in which he would rest (for more on this see John Walton’s amazing book, The Lost World of Genesis One, or just watch this short video).

In the story, he builds and establishes this Temple-World, and then creates and ordains two priests–Adam and Eve–to be his representatives in this temple to care for it and work in it faithfully. In the ancient world, temples were usually placed in the midst of large and beautiful gardens which acted as extensions of the temple itself; to care for the garden was to care for the temple, and to make the garden larger was to expand the scope and size of the temple.
Continue reading →

Advent, Evolution, & Absolution

/ Paul Burkhart / 22 Comments

It’s Advent. A time where we especially orient ourselves towards rejoicing and celebrating the fact that God did not remain far off and merely create a “legal” or “dogmatic” satisfaction for the plight of his creation and creatures. Rather, he broke into it and came into his creation and among his creatures. In this year’s Advent series, we’re exploring how, in this Coming, Jesus took on our creaturely form, care-taking function, comprehensive fallenness, and communal formation.

First, God took physical, human, creaturely form. In the study I did–and subsequent lecture I gave–on Beauty a couple of years ago, I defined “Beauty” as the attribute of something that expressed complexity simply. Is not this God-in-human-flesh (theologically referred to as the Incarnation) the most beautiful of all miracles to take place? The Infinitely Complex God inhabits the simplest of human forms: a child.
Continue reading →

Welcome to Advent. 2011. {1}

/ Paul Burkhart / 11 Comments

Yesterday was Day 1 of the season of the Church Calendar known as Advent (latin for “coming) . From now until Christmas, we spend time intentionally mediating upon the truth this season brings: God has come among us, clothed in the vestiges of human flesh.

Yes, this time of year was arbitrarily chosen centuries ago to recast pagan lunar festivals in a new light. Yes, many of the traditions of Christmas (fir trees, gift-giving, wreaths, etc.) find their source in pagan socio-religious rites. Yes, Jesus was probably more likely born in April, not December. Yes, Christmas has been co-opted by commercialism and consumerism. Nevertheless, this time has been set aside for nearly two millennia so that Christians around the world could, with one mind and heart, dwell upon the depths of the glory given to us in the events that transpired all those years ago.
Continue reading →

The Scandal of Holy Week {v}: conclusion & benediction

/ Paul Burkhart / 5 Comments

As I said in Part 1, this series was originally given as a sermon to a group of prisoners attending my church’s prison ministry. This is the conclusion and benediction I gave them at the end. This post picks up right after the end of Part 4, where we listed out practical ways that Jesus prepares his disciples for them forsaking him and the ways he reveals himself to already-wayward disciples, thereby calling them back to Him. I encourage you to read the other parts of this message: Part 1: the forsaking of God; Part 2: the Grace of Jesus; Part 3: the limits of Grace?; Part 4: the restoration of disciples; Part 5: conclusion & benediction]

Conclusion

These are not guarantees: all these different practical things I’ve mentioned are not the “magic formula” for how to restore your faith if you feel you’ve lost or forsaken it. Sometimes none of these things are necessary; the Centurion did not seem to have any of these things. Sometimes, you’ll do all of these things for years–decades, even–and nothing will change.

All I can tell you is that He is worth it. The God of Holy Week is a God worthy to be wrestled against for years and years and years and years until he finally meets you, even if it is for the briefest of moments before slipping away back into frustration, doubt and sin.
Continue reading →

The Scandal of Holy Week {iv}: the restoration of disciples

/ Paul Burkhart / 7 Comments

[Update: this series has been completed. Part 1: the forsaking of God; Part 2: the Grace of Jesus; Part 3: the limits of Grace?; Part 4: the restoration of disciples; Part 5: conclusion & benediction]

In Part 1 of this series, we saw that we will all forsake Jesus many times in our lives, just as the disciples did on the Thursday night of Holy Week. In Part 2, we saw that in light of this abandonment, Jesus responds to those that forsake him by being unconditionally and unlimitedly gracious towards them in their forsaking of him. In Part 3, we looked at just how scandalous and beautiful this grace is and how and why we often try and limit it. Today, we give practical ways that we can prepare ourselves to come back to our Lord, even after we have forsaken him in our own “Thursday” seasons.

As we saw in Part 1, Holy Week was a week-long process in which everything–creation, creatures, and God Himself–all forsook Jesus, turning their back on him. We’ve said several times now that true disciples of Jesus are not those that never forsake Jesus, but they are those that after forsaking him, turn back. And so, to help us see how we do this, let’s look at the first person in this story to turn back.

Continue reading →