Day 074: Let God Live in You

"He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.  You are therefore greatly mistaken."  Mark 12:27

This is an admonishment that Jesus tells us every day.

It seems to be the answer to many people's questions about declining church attendance.  We have let God become the God of those who have died way in the past, people we don't even know personally.  We allow ourselves to be absorbed in motions and customs that we don't even believe in.  Why do we do this?

Perhaps we do this because of the fact that we are afraid of God: not with a godly fear, one that brings us closer to God, but a phobia, one that just forces us to run away from God.  We're afraid to explore our relationship with God, so we let those who have dared to draw closer to God guide us with their mere words.  However, I don't think that that's what those saints before us would have wanted.

What happens to you when you see something amazing?  When you go to a breathtaking beach for the first time, or climb up the top of the Great Wall of China?  You take pictures, you make your personal mark, and you tell every single person around you.  In the same way, those who have experienced God in so many ways have given us their postcards, their accounts, their videos, their selfies.  When we show off our pictures and talk about our experiences, we almost always conclude with the same recommendation, "you have to go do this."  And that's what the saints of the past are telling us, living in their words and their histories.

Sometimes, though, when we walk into church, pick up a prayer book, mouth the songs, or watch the priest do her thing, we are just there.  Imagine going to a foreign country for the first time and just walking around everywhere without taking a moment to breathe the new air, look at the new sights, or even taste the food.  You just wasted a trip.  In the same way, by not engaging in church, you're just wasting your time.  You are allowing God to be the God of the dead.

It will definitely take some effort, but a long line of saints will tell you that the results are worth the effort.  Raise your hands, think about the prayers, sing your best, just do something when you are in a spiritual space.  Allow for the Holy Spirit to enter you.  The only way you will truly reach God is by reaching out towards God, just as God is reaching out to you.

This Lent, take a moment to think about the different prayers you say in church, or think about your favorite hymn/worship song.  Think about how all the words can become part of your everyday life.

Day 058: Edification

"How is it then, brethren?  Whenever you come together, each of you has a psalm, has a teaching, has a tongue, has a revelation, has an interpretation.  Let all things be done for edification."  1 Corinthians 14:26

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about how I personally like to worship.  In sum, my preferred style is traditional but not impractical.

However, when I talk to other people around me, even those closest to me, we all have different preferences.  Some love the organ while others loathe it.  Some love modern language and others find it sacrilegious.  I have friends of different denominations: Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Episcopalian, and even non-denominational.  And, yet, each person has her own preference for her worship.

As I've been reading 1 Corinthians more carefully, I've been thinking a lot more about how we need to be aware that everybody will worship a little differently, and that's okay.  The root of the message, though, is that all worship should be to edify those who are participating - those who are involved should feel closer to each other as they observe their worship.

But then I'll see other people bash on different practices.  I guess since I'm a musician I've seen most of the bashing occur around the idea of what music is best or the most appropriate.  The only answer I can bring to the question is this: whatever works.  Not everybody is going to respond to the same kind of music in the same way.  Look back on history, how things have changed so much.  The earliest Byzantine chants must have resembled their Jewish counterparts.  Many hymns that were written throughout the second millennium were based on popular songs of the day.  Of course, now we probably wouldn't recognize the songs as such anymore, especially since they've become elevated under the cover of hymnals.  Contemporary Christian music, which is a blanket term for a great variety of music today, usually draws on different musical traditions, pointing them to God.

And that's the point.  We are called to direct our lives to God.  If an organ and hymnals brings you there, do it.  If a five piece band with projected lyrics and unison singing get you there, do it.  However, through the different styles of worship, we all report to one God.  So, be sure to respect how someone's traditions bring her closer to God.  In reality, your preferred traditions were probably considered wild and sacrilegious in their early days.

Day 055: Traditions

And He said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.  Therefore the Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath."  Mark 2:27-28

This verse bears an important message that gets lost many times in the Church.  We like to get caught up in our traditions and customs many times, making sure that everybody around us takes part in them, but we often forget what they're there for.  Just as the Sabbath was made for humankind, so are the fasts, the feasts, and traditions.

Don't get me wrong, I love traditional worship - the older, the better.  But, we do have a problem with how we ostracize those who don't always celebrate the way that we do.  I remember when I was a part of certain Facebook groups, people used them as grounds merely to complain about how terrible modern worship is, how music is falling apart in the Church and how liturgical worship is being desecrated by Father X and Mother Y.  Yet, what does Jesus have to say about this?

We like to point our fingers when we have nothing else to do, and that's a big issue in our spiritual life.  When we come to church, we have to remember that it is not we who are in control, but God.  Yet, that seems to be a problem for many, if not all, of us at some point.  We may be used to running things at home, at our jobs, at school, in our ensembles, our troops, our businesses, but when we come to church, we are no longer in control.  We come together to worship God, not to worship ourselves.  Just look at the politicians who are running all over this country if you want to find an example of self worship.  Follow only them if that's all you want to do.

We as a church need to start acknowledging that we worship the triune, living God, the God who moves all of us in many different ways.  Maybe we can't behold everything that is God at the moment, but through God's grace in the form of revelations, we can learn a little more every single day.  During this season of Lent, ask your fellow Christians about what they are doing, if they are willing to share.  Let this season be one where you will do much more observing and listening than forcing.

Day 051: Holiness

"For I am the Lord who brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God.  You shall therefore be holy, for I, the Lord, am holy."  Leviticus 11:45

Over thousands of years, we have learned more ways to become holy before the Lord.  According to the Old Testament, there was a pretty quick and easy way to achieve this, although today we can look at it as being a backwards method.  Perhaps I could explain this with a parallel image from my personal experience.

Back in high school, I was approaching my unhealthiest state of being, with my years of refusal to perform any physical activity (I'd found a loophole out of it in middle school, and my high school had no physical education class) or to eat healthily.  So, starting around my second year in high school, I started to exercise regularly.  I made some great progress in terms of weight loss.  At the end of my third and final year, I finally learned how to cook, which was a skill that I worked on immensely in my freshman year in college.  During that freshman year, I began counting calories, following guidelines from my own research, and made even more leaps and bounds down the scale.  However, I was quite compulsive with my counting that it was a sort of distraction (mind you, this was in a journal I carried around everywhere).  It was annoying to have to look up every detail about different food that I would eat.  So, after a few months of doing that, I switched over to cutting carbohydrates entirely from my diet (save a cheat day once a week), and I sped down to my final weight (although somewhat far from my unhealthy goal).  In fact, I still must say that cutting carbs entirely is the easiest thing to do since I'm not responsible for portioning things out and keeping track of them.

That's how I see these food laws from the Old Testament: a quick and easy path to sanctification.  It's one thing to keep track of different fasts, prayers, goals, feasts, and traditions, which can seem to be overwhelming to almost anybody.  It's another, though, to paint things in black and white, which makes a complicated thing to be very simple.  It may sound rough, but still simple.

Paul, though, gives us many examples about how we can live out our faith, our holiness, in the New Covenant through Jesus Christ.  We read that we can become teachers, preachers, healers, speakers, evangelists, interpreters, and servants.  We can live a dynamic faith now.  However, that's where we know that we have a large responsibility to God.  God has given us so many ways to be holy, so what is our issue?  We turn away from God.  We need to come back to God.  We need to start taking care of ourselves, sanctifying ourselves through our talents, through our time, through our treasures.  We need to start preparing ourselves to become perfect offerings before God.  Lastly, we need to become the unified body of Christ, with all the many different parts, working for our corporal sanctification.

Day 042: Customs

"Therefore let us pursue the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another.  Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food.  All things indeed are pure, but it is evil for the man who eats with offense."  Romans 14:19-20

The history of the Church is quite dismal, to say the very least.  On the one hand, it has spread beyond the borders of the Holy Land to most of the earth; but on the other hand, it has seen so many fractures that we can't keep track of all the different traditions and factions.  There are some that claim to have heritage all the way to the first days of the apostolic church, denouncing all other traditions as simple heresies.  But, in reality, all of our denominations can be traced back to the apostolic church.

Of course, this dispute can be taken to the secular world as well, where we are constantly afraid of those who speak a different language, or those who are a different color, or those who wear different clothes.  But even this secular worldly fear breaks into our churches as well, for such a denial or dismissal of the others is a way that we destroy the work of God.

God is the only one who has constantly been bringing all of creation together.  God called people to join in the family by living holy lives.  God sent Jesus to unite people with a common message of faith and love.  But our taking of the reigns has been our downfall.

So much of the Church's history is riddled with grudges, some held for over a thousand years.  But we are called to turn away from all of that.  We are called to unity.  Unity is something that we can achieve only if we put aside our prejudices and start trying to learn more about and understand the others around us.

During this Lent, we should remember to reach out to the world around us, so that many more can understand our relationship with God.  We also should go out of our way to learn about new traditions.  There are many denominations that observe Lent, and there are some which are observing it starting next month.  There is so much we can learn around us, and that brings up the central point of our faith: that Jesus is revealing himself to us in so many different ways.  If we learn to accept that Jesus is not reserved for just one kind of person, we can learn so much more about Jesus and strengthen our relationship with him.