Author: crc

Wine Before Breakfast
Wycliffe College Chapel, 5 Hoskin Ave.
November 9, 2010

Empire, Money and Anxiety

Last week I went to hear Brian McLaren speak at the Church of Redeemer and in response to a question about atonement he began, “When Constantine converted Christianity …” and then paused. “When Constantine converted Christianity, not when Constantine converted to Christianity, things in our view of atonement changed.”

Now this email isn’t about atonement theology, as interesting as that may be, but rather about what happened when Constantine converted Christianity. Well, one of the things that happened was that the Sermon on the Mount had to be relativized, reinterpreted, spiritualized, marginalized and, in the end, fundamentally dismissed.

Okay, so the church historians out there (are there any church historians on the WBB email list?) are bristling at this gross overstatement. But think about it.

“You cannot serve God and wealth.”

How can a church wedded to empire ever possibly believe such a thing? I mean the church has been proving Jesus wrong on this one for centuries upon centuries. Heck, we take the folks who have most clearly managed to serve God and wealth and appoint them to the boards of our churches and Christian organizations, and when they give enough money we name buildings after them!

So then when he concludes this section of the sermon by saying “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added to you” we actually manage to interpret this as a guarantee of prosperity!

Well if last week’s section of the Sermon on the Mount cut through the bullshit of much of our prayer life then this week is going to cut through the bullshit of how we relate to money and wealth. And Jesus is also going to deconstruct much of the anxiety we have when it comes to security, money and status.

Bethany Osborne will be preaching and has also written the prayers.
David Julien will be breaking the bread,
and Sara DeMoor has crafted the liturgy with Deb’s well chosen music.

Rich faire, but not the kind of riches that Jesus is telling us to shun.

Hope to see you in the morning.

Brian

Wine Before Breakfast
Wycliffe Chapel @ 7.22am
Breakfast to follow.

Wine Before Breakfast
Wycliffe College Chapel, 5 Hoskin Ave

Dear friends:

You’ve all heard the saying, “the bigger they are the harder they fall.”

Well there are corollary insights to that one. For example, the most holy the place, the most profane and idolatrous can be its distortion. The principle is pretty simple. The goodness of a thing, its significance and meaning, will have a proportional evil when it is misdirected, ideologically deformed.

Perhaps the most important example of this principle in Scripture is that when the creature who is created and called to bear the “image of God” rejects that call the only possible result is the demonic power of “graven images” or idols in human life.

Well, this principle of proportionality also works for prayer. I mean what is more sacred in human life than prayer? What time is more holy than time in prayer? When do we get the closest in our relationship with God than in prayer? And when, therefore, do we come to a most honest and truthful understanding of ourselves than when we stand (or kneel) before God in prayer?

And yet there is more bullshit in prayer than perhaps in any other dimension of our lives! There is more posturing, more hypocrisy, more self-centredness and more ideological self-justification going on in prayer than anywhere else. Or at least sometimes it seems that way to me.

Again, the deeper the goodness of a thing, the deeper is its distortion.

So it is not surprising that Jesus takes time in his Sermon on the Mount to instruct his followers of what prayer looks like in the Kingdom of God. He strips them (and us) of the pretense and hypocrisy as he strips down prayer to its bare essentials.

As a community of prayer, as a community that comes together every Tuesday morning with our thanksgivings and our petitions, as a community that prays a Eucharistic prayer every week, we do well to pause and listen to Jesus on one of those very few occasions when he actually teaches about prayer. And we will again follow his example as we pray, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed by your name ….”

Wine Before Breakfast
Tuesday @ 7.22am in Wycliffe Chapel

David Neelands will be preaching and presiding.

Title: Wine Before Breakfast
Location: Wycliffe College Chapel, 5 Hoskin Ave.
Description:

“Love your enemy.”

I’m not sure that three more subversive words have ever been spoken.

Love your enemy.
Can you imagine anything more ridiculous,
more counter-intuitive, more impossible than this?

With these three words everything that we know about statecraft,
everything we know about human affairs,
everything we know about the history of humanity,
indeed everything we know about our own hearts,
is turned on its head.

How do you kill the enemy that you love?
How do you objectify that enemy as evil incarnate?
How do you go to war, regardless of how “just” you think it is,
when you love your enemy?

And this guy is proclaiming a “kingdom”?
A kingdom that loves its enemies?
What part of ‘impossible’ doesn’t he get?

I don’t know how he’s doing in the polls,
but I can’t imagine this thing going too far.

Wine Before Breakfast
Wycliffe Chapel @ 7.22am
Tuesday, October 26

Walsh preaching,
Asbil presiding,
Whelan leading the band.

I tend to be a rather ‘direct’ kind of a person. I like to look a person in the eye when I meet them. Heck, I like to look strangers in the eye as we pass on the sidewalk.

But I learned early that such directness, especially on the street, and especially with women, is usually unwelcome.

I don’t know if other guys reading this email feel the same way, but I am embarrassed that most women that I pass on the street will immediately avert their gaze (often in the direction of looking down at the sidewalk) if I glance their way. I am embarrassed because I understand that ‘looking away’ as a defense mechanism in the face of the “male gaze.”

The male gaze. That look that is undressing a woman. That look that is a potential sexual and violent threat. That look of power. That look that spells ‘threat’. And we wonder why some Islamic women prefer to where the burkha.

Jesus understands the male gaze and names it for what it is. Such a sexually aggressive gaze isn’t just a matter of male hormones kicking in. More importantly this is a matter of the heart. This is a matter of imaginative rape.

Once we started down this path of hanging out with Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount we knew that things were going to get heavy. Like Moses in Sinai, Jesus is going to leave nothing unexamined. That includes our sexual imaginations.

It might be painful.

Andrew will preach and preside.
Jake has crafted our prayers.
We’re praying that Deb Whelan will get over a whopper of a cold so that she can lead our music.

And while Bethany will be baking the bread, we don’t really know who is bringing muffins since no one signed up (hint, hint).

Start Time: 7:22am
Date: 2010-10-19

In her wonderful book, Radical Gratitude, Mary Jo Leddy says that we live in a culture of ingratitude in which we are held captive by a consumer induced longing that can never be fulfilled. Our lives become enslaved to dissatisfaction and incessant craving. We always need more. “Enough” just isn’t in our vocabulary.

Radical gratitude, Mary Jo argues, is what can liberate us from such a captivity.

Radical gratitude engenders a spirituality of gift in the face of self-made accomplishment.

Gratitude is born of an economy of enough in the face of the hyperactivity of “more.”

Gratitude is rooted in grace, while a spirituality of entitlement is decidedly a spirituality of self-salvation.

Gratitude abandons the sullen adolescence of our culture and embraces a humility and gregarious openness born of a mature spirituality.

So there is something ironic about Thanksgiving. Let there be no doubt that this is a consumer festival, an occasion for gluttony, where the word “enough” is only uttered much too late.

And yet … there is the possibility in the midst of this secular holiday to rekindle a Kingdom ethic. There is the possibility that we can enter into an intentional feast of thankfulness that will radically undermine such consumptive greed through radical gratitude.

Will gratitude dismantle  the political, military and economic imperial realities of our day?

Perhaps not. Or at least not immediately.

But without gratitude, without a sense of the profound gift-character of all of life, without a deep sense of grace and the thankfulness that such grace engenders, then all of our struggles for Christian authenticity won’t matter.

You see, the empire will have so captivated our hearts that all of our expressions of Christian faith will be little more than posturing.

Wine Before Breakfast
Tuesday @ 7.22am
Wycliffe College Chapel
Judith presiding.
Brian preaching.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets;
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”

“Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees,
you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven.”

This is how our passage from the Sermon on the Mount begins and ends this week at Wine Before Breakfast. And we’re going to limit a Baptist preacher named Joe Abbey-Colborne to a maximum of twelve minutes to unpack this for us. Twelve minutes for a Baptist. I know, it is cruel and unusual punishment, but Joe is definitely up to the challenge.

Now I don’t want to scoop Joe here, but you gotta ask, why would Jesus have thought that the folks listening to him might have thought that he wanted to abolish the law and the prophets? I mean, when you get to thinking about what other people are thinking then things are likely going to get messy.

But Jesus is pretty sure of himself here. “I know what you are all thinking. You think that I’m offering something that is so out of line with biblical orthodoxy that I’m simply throwing the whole thing out the window!”
Read more Wine Before Breakfast

Having lived during the eight years of a George W. Bush presidency I have come to have an almost allergic reaction to that deeply biblical phrase, “A city set on a hill.”

America is a city set on a hill!
That has been part of the religious rhetoric of America from its beginning, but I’m not sure that any president employed the phrase more often than Bush.

Of course, it wasn’t just the pretentiousness of it all that got under my skin.
Empires are always pretentious, and they always make exaggerated world historical claims for themselves.
That’s just the way empires are.

No, it was that this bit of pretension was also blasphemous.
Jesus said, “you are the light of the world,
a city set on a hill cannot be hidden.”
President Bush appropriated that language for America.
America is the light of the world,
America is a city set on a hill that cannot be hidden.

And all of this justified,
provided deep sacred legitimation
for Bush’s foreign policy,
based as it was in deceit.

I know, I know, maybe this weekly Wine Before Breakfast meditation is degenerating into a bit of a political rant.
And I know that it can be pretty cheap and easy for Canadians to poke fun of American rhetorical excess.

But what are we to do when we hear Jesus talking about a city set on a hill and the voice of George W. Bush insinuates itself into our consciousness?

Maybe we need to hear how audacious this language was coming from the mouth of Jesus in the first place.
Read more Wine Before Breakfast – A city set on a hill

Title: Wine Before Breakfast
Location: Wycliffe College Chapel, 5 Hoskin Ave.

Lewis, Cockburn and a Jesus Way of Seeing

Do you remember Uncle Andrew in C.S. Lewis ‘s The Magician’s Nephew? While Aslan is singing Narnia into being and talking animals are springing to life, the children can see and hear what’s going on and rejoice in it. Uncle Andrew, however, only sees ferocious animals (Aslan being the worst of the lot as far as he is concerned) and hears the most bestial and frightening of sounds.

Lewis explains in his narration that “what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”

In his song, “Child of the Wind,” Bruce Cockburn gets at the same thing:

Little round planet
In a big universe
Sometimes it looks blessed
Sometimes it looks cursed
Depends on what you look at obviously
But even more it depends on the way that you see

What you see depends on where you are standing and what you look at.  In the Sermon on the Mount we have already seen that, for Jesus, standing with the poor, with those who mourn, with the meek and those who hunger and thirst for justice is the only standpoint from which you will see the Kingdom of God. Standing anywhere else will render you blind.

And now as we continue our meditation on the Beatitudes we learn that what you see depends also on “what sort of person you are,” “on the way that you see.” Read more Wine Before Breakfast

Wine Before Breakfast is for hungry people.

If you are full,
if you are satisfied with yourself,
if the world is as it should be,
if you’ve got it all together,
then why get up early to go to church?
On a Tuesday of all things!
At 7.22!

No, you’ve  got to be hungry to come to WBB.
You’ve got to have that gnawing hunger in your soul,
in your heart.

And you’ve got to be thirsty.
You need to have a sense of parched lips,
in a parched land.

Read more Wine Before Breakfast is for Hungry People