why nude art can be good for children

Nude Christ by Melanie Cooper Pennington

Recently, the principal of Tallahassee Classical School in Florida resigned in response to complaints submitted to the school board by at least one parent after a sixth-grade class was shown a picture of Michelangelo’s David sculpture as part of their curriculum. Apparently, the parent said the sculpture was “pornographic.”

Setting aside the fact that one would expect students at a classical academy to learn about classic art such as this, I am dumbstruck by the fact that so many Christians would applaud the school board’s discipline.

As an ordained minister who has studied childhood spiritual development by working with children and partnering with church-going families over several years, I would like to explain why I think it is GOOD for children to see (and have the chance to reflect upon) nude forms in art. My rationale is rooted in a variety of theological distinctives inherent in the Christian tradition.

First, Christian teaching holds that the human body is intrinsically good. This idea is rooted in the creation account itself and reaffirmed in Scriptures like Psalm 139:14, which declares that human beings are “fearfully and wonderfully made.”

Significantly, shame about the human body only enters the picture when the first human beings begin to doubt the goodness of God and the goodness of God’s creation. Prior to questioning such goodness, it is telling that (according to Genesis 2:25) the first human beings were “naked, and they felt no shame.” It is only after they gave in to the doubts sown by the serpent (who represents evil in the story) that they made coverings for themselves. (see Gen. 3:7)

Far from corrupting children, when we help children celebrate the human form appropriately, we are, in effect, cooperating with God in celebrating what God intended for our good.

Let us keep in mind that children do, indeed, reflect upon the mystery of the human body from a very early age. And it is better to help children wonder about the body in the open than to push it into the darkness where fear and shame tend to take over. Of course, the key is to do this appropriately.

You may well ask, then: what is appropriate and what is inappropriate?

Certainly, portrayals that are intended to objectify, degrade, victimize, and oppress human beings are to be rejected. Since the idea of “being made in God’s image” involves the act of exercising real autonomy over one’s own body, I hasten to add that any portrayals which violate the agency of the subject in question constitute one of the gravest evils (if not the greatest evil) in our society today. Here I refer to the preponderance of child pornography. This is a great evil, to be sure, because it preys upon the vulnerability of those who have little or no power to stand up for themselves when their agency has been violated.

This is precisely where the Christian story speaks so powerfully to this question, for Christianity teaches that God became one of us (a human being) in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Theologically speaking, this is referred to as “the incarnation.” Briefly, the incarnation says that God took on human flesh to redeem what God intended for good in the very beginning and to reassert the goodness of it all. For the Christian, the embodiment of the Divine in the incarnation proves to be the decisive moment that dignifies humanity, even as Christ takes upon himself the shame and humiliations we inflict upon ourselves.

In this light, it is noteworthy that the two key events in the Christ story (birth and death) are events in which God’s only Son identifies with us in our stripped form, completely naked, willing to be exposed and vulnerable before the religious powerbrokers (who had developed the habit of objectifying God) and the political overlords (who could degrade and victimize whomever they wished to oppress).

Indeed, it is striking to me that most portrayals of the birth and death of Christ take pains to cover up his nakedness. This is tragic because it is through the very self-exposure of God that we may behold the depth of God’s love for us by identifying with us in our own vulnerable exposures. Far from evil, it is through the nakedness of God in these key salvific moments that we return to the light of grace.

Let us remember that the Gospels affirm this portrait as the writers recorded the fact that the very last piece of Jesus' clothing was a loincloth which the soldiers removed from his body in a degrading game of chance. And it was this very ugliness and humiliation that the apostle Paul celebrated as a kind of subversive victory. Jesus went right to our deepest, darkest places of shame and ushered us into the light of affirming love by the very act of exposure.

For these reasons, I encourage parents and educators to be thoughtful about helping children reflect upon the human body through various art forms, including visual depictions of nudity. Far from being an anti-Christian phenomenon, I suggest such thoughtful engagement can help us more fully embody an intrinsically Christian ethic and mediate an encounter with the Divine through a celebration of all that is good and beautiful in the human form itself.

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why nude art can be good for children
reflections by troy cady
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*Photo: Nude Christ by Melanie Cooper Pennington

Church > Church Services

Church > Church Services

pastoral reflections on a Sunday morning in January

by troy cady

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The other day I was talking with a neighbor about the word “church.” As we sat at my desk together, I opened up my web browser and Googled the word “church.” I said, “Now, let’s look at the visual images that are associated with this word.”
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And as we looked, I pointed out that almost all of them were a picture of a building and most of those did not even have any people in the picture whatsoever…just a building. A small percentage of the pictures portrayed people in a building…at a church service. And we noted that every single picture that came up in the first round of search results fit into one of these two types of images.
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For the past 40 years, I estimate that I have spent 75 percent of my Sundays either going to church services or playing a role in the leadership of such.
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In light of this, what I want to say on this Sunday morning may come as a surprise to you: I have come to the conclusion that church services often (but not always) get in the way of God’s people being the church. I know that will likely ruffle the feathers of many churchgoers who are reading this but bear with me as I try to explain my rationale.
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In 2002, my family and I moved to Madrid to start a church. To do this, we developed a “launch plan” (that’s what we called it). It was an 18-month business plan that articulated how we would grow the church from 8 people in March 2002 to 150 people in September 2003. (And, yes: the document we developed to share the vision of this was a business plan, I’m embarrassed to say.)
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In any case, September 2003 was identified as the “launch date.” This was the time we would say, “Hooray, we did it! We started a church!” It was the day we would hold our first church service, open to the public.
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After just 9 months into this launch plan, we held some private “test services” before going public. Believe it or not, we were three months ahead of schedule when we began these test services…that’s how much the church had grown in that short time. Because of this, we had considered moving up the public “launch date” from September to Easter that year (which happened to be on April 20).
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At any rate, the test services were an opportunity to gain momentum and build the core of the congregation so that, when the launch day hit, a sense of common vision and shared values would have been nurtured already by a large enough group of people.
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To build up to these test services, however, we simply met in small groups (which we called “community groups”) to build relationships, worship together, grow spiritually, and reach out to others. In other words, all of our energy the first 9 months of “launching” this church went into helping our community group ministry flourish.
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After 9 months of seeing our community groups flourish, we noticed a distinct shift as soon as we started testing out weekly services. From planning to execution, the services themselves took most of our mental and emotional energy, leaving little energy to invest in our community groups. So, it didn’t take long for the community groups to languish…but the real problem came when the weekly services did not flourish as we had expected, either.
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So we began to ask ourselves, “What’s going on here? Why does it seem like the church has just picked up a heavy weight right as we are trying to gear up for takeoff?”
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That’s when we realized that everything that really mattered about what we had in mind when it came to “being the church” had already been happening in our community groups. And thinking we needed to add something more to be a “legitimate” church ultimately seemed to devalue the rich and authentic experiences we had been having already through the community group network we had nurtured. It was as if we were saying, “We can’t really be a church if we don’t meet each weekend for a church service…can we?”
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So, we asked ourselves, “What if we remove the ‘church service’ ingredient from the ‘church’ recipe and see what happens? If we didn’t have ‘church services’ to worry about, how would we go about embodying what it means to be God’s family?”
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And that is what we did. We experimented. You could call it a little ecclesiastical improvisation. We decided that we would gather in a large group format just once a month while still emphasizing the weekly gathering of folks in the community group format. And what we discovered about what it means to be Jesus’ followers has changed my life and the lives of so many others since.
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We found ways to worship that were diverse and fun, personalized and holistic. We learned what it means to truly be a family with one another, to take care of each other and really connect. Because our encounters with Scripture were rooted in interactive ways of engaging, our understanding of God and faith deepened significantly. We learned from one another and each person had regular opportunities to exercise their gifts from week to week. What’s more, our way of reaching out and sharing Jesus’ love with others was humanizing and playful.
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Thus, we discovered first-hand that we were better able to embody the essence of what it means to be the church…without hosting weekly “church services.”
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I wish I could say I stayed the course with this little improvisation since then. However, I didn’t. When my family and I moved back to the States in 2010, we ended up participating again in “church” as we typically think of it: an event-based place. This was not without good reason, to be sure…and, in many ways, the church we were part of was a blessing and a joy. My work with children was enriching and several people in the congregation served with heart-felt devotion and open-minded creativity. I thank God for those people.
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But as time wore on, I began to see once again how “church services” often hindered us from experiencing what God desires for us to experience as a church family.
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During this time, I recall looking across the congregation on many, many Sundays wondering what the point of it all was. As we sang together, it seemed like we were just going through the motions, mouthing the words, pleased mildly by the melodies. Our hearts were not in it. I remember feeling sad for the worship leaders who diligently prepared music for us to lift our hearts to the Lord and who often implored the congregation to really put their all into it…but the response was just, “Meh.”
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And the same was true of the congregation’s response to the pastor’s preaching, despite the thoughtful and creative ways she went about proclaiming the gospel from week to week. To this day, I can easily say that Pastor Mandy is one of the best leaders I have ever had the honor of serving with. So, it makes my blood boil knowing the kind of criticism she faced week-in and week-out from so many people. Time and time again, her calls for deep, good change in the church just met with resistance.
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The grace that could have redeemed all this was the tight-knit community that characterized the church. But, for too many people, that sense of community did not extend to them. I recall on several occasions talking with various long-time members when another person who had been attending for at least a couple of years would come up in the conversation—and the long-time member had no idea who I was talking about. And it wasn’t as though either of these people were only sporadic attenders; both of them were very regular. I wondered to myself, “How is it that two people who have been attending a small church like ours regularly for three years have never even said hi to each other? How is it that two people could literally sit 5 seats away from each other (in their "usual" spot on Sunday morning) week after week for years and not know each other's names?” It's sad: sometimes church services are the loneliest places to be in this world. Why is this, I have to wonder?
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I am convinced it is because the “church-as-churchservice” paradigm makes it very easy for this to happen. The mindset is: “I saw the few people who are important to me, I’ve sung my songs, I’ve heard my nice sermon, I’ve had my cracker and grape juice, it was nice, I feel good now and…I’ll see you next week.” After more than 30 years of ministry in church settings, I am convinced that this is more normal for most churchgoers than many churchgoers care to admit.
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And so, I have to ask myself, “What’s the point? If that is all that ‘church’ really is…why bother?” Is there no sense of reaching out, serving the common good, enfolding the marginalized in love? Where is the passion and creativity? Simply put, it is a failure of imagination.
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On this front, I would like to say, however, that this church did get one thing right: each Saturday they hosted a food pantry to feed the hungry. And it is significant that one of the key leaders of the food pantry testifies to this day that Saturdays at the food pantry felt more like “church” to him than any other thing we did as a church. It is also very telling to me that most of the people who volunteered at the pantry over the years were NOT from the church, but rather from the neighborhood. Why would this be?
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I suggest it is because the folks who served at the food pantry were really being the church. There was a sense of joy and life and family. Though no songs were sung on Saturday mornings, the atmosphere could be truly described as worshipful. And deep conversations often occurred that enriched our understanding of God and faith and life. And it was not uncommon to see one person praying with their arm around another person who was weeping, going through a hard time, in need of a friend. In short, we were being formed in Christlikeness. It is sobering to note on this front that most people who volunteered at the food pantry over the years…never stepped foot in the church building on a Sunday morning.
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And I would say for good reason: they were already experiencing the essence of what it means to be the church without ever attending a church service.
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So, what I first realized 20 years ago has come full circle to me. I am convinced that church services often (but not always, mind you) hinder many Christ-followers from really experiencing what it means to be the church.
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And, so…the last four weeks, I have been practicing and inviting others to practice with me various ways of coming together as God’s family. We’ve feasted together and built relationships with lots of time to have informal conversation over a meal where each person brings something to contribute. We have told stories and listened to stories. We’ve enjoyed children in our midst. We’ve wondered about the presence of God in the stories we’ve heard and in the midst of our everyday life experiences. And we’ve served others together: yesterday, some of us spent a good portion of the day helping at a shelter for people experiencing homelessness.
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One person who participated said afterwards, “That was so much fun, I almost feel guilty!” There was life in it, a sense of God’s goodness, a sense of loving our neighbors as ourselves.
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Later, I was driving home with my “adopted aunt” Judy (as I like to call her). We carpooled together and when we got back to my place, we sat in the car for another hour…just talking and connecting. I shared with her some family challenges I’ve been facing lately and she listened like a good friend, offering words of encouragement and reassurance. It is with deep gratitude that I note our societal roles were reversed yesterday. I—an ordained minister—had the joy of being pastored by “aunt” Judy, a retired nurse.
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And just the day before, I had the honor of spending three hours with a neighbor friend, reading from the Gospel of John, praying, and talking about…
…family trauma,
…how Jesus deconstructs our cherished paradigms of God, life, and others;
…the problem of violence in Scripture,
…the prejudice that seems to plague our society today, and
…the ministry of reconciliation.
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And that was only SOME of what we talked about. My friend has grown accustomed to referring to these times we have together as “church.” And I think he is right: it is church—in our living rooms.
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This is how more of the church should be, I feel. We should be serving together. We should really be in each other’s lives. We should dialogue and share perspectives and learn from one another. We should share food together and just enjoy playing together. We should tell stories and practice listening. We should rest together and be there for each other when we fall on hard times.
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These days, then, my imagination is coming alive again and I am experiencing it as a deep, deep grace. I have hope. In my mind's eye, I can see a whole network of small faith communities like these popping up all over...communities where people from all kinds of different backgrounds can come together to live into the simple rhythms of…
…feasting
…wondering
…listening
…sharing, and
…renewing.
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And I am happy to say that others are joining in this vision already, not just here where I live in Chicago but in other parts of the States, too…from Connecticut to North Carolina, Minnesota to California. We’re calling this network PlayWell Communities. We want it to feel playful, improvisational, personalized, and fluid.
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We’re not calling it a church, by the way, because that word just has so much unhelpful baggage that comes with it. We’re describing it as a network of small “faith communities.” Regardless, we’re passionate about what it looks like to follow Jesus in our time and in the places we live. And we want to strip away anything that would weigh us down from living according to God’s “unforced rhythms of grace.” We want to live freely…free to imagine different ways of being formed as God's dearly beloved people.
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If you’d like to know more about all this, let me know because I’d love to talk with you about it.
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healing the disease of anger

Yesterday, I got to spend the morning with a friend. When we have the chance, we get together to pray, read Scripture and talk about it. I find these times to be refreshing because of their simplicity. We have no agenda beyond the practice of open and free dialogue.

My friend likes to read from the King James version of the Bible because he savors its lyricism. Yesterday, one of the portions we read was from the book of Proverbs. After reading the chapter, I asked my friend to share which proverb felt most important to him today. Because he is a father to three children, he selected the verses in the chapter that talked about parenting.

Then, I shared the proverb that felt important to me. It was this:

“Make no friendship with an angry man;
and with a furious man thou shalt not go:
lest thou learn his ways,
and get a snare to thy soul.” -Pr. 22:24-25

As we reflected on those verses, we talked about how it seems that our entire society has become tainted by incessant hostility and anger. The latter half of the proverb explains how anger has become so rampant: anger is contagious and, before you know it, you are held captive to it.

As we discussed this, I shared with my friend about a study that found that posts on social media that adopt a tone of outrage, anger and disdain tend to get more interactions than other posts. In a podcast I listened to recently called “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill,” host Mike Cosper notes that this is one reason the celebrity pastor Mark Driscoll so regularly unleashed angry rhetoric in his hour-long sermons. The team that managed his online presence discovered that when Driscoll used a hot-tempered style of preaching it garnered more hits on their website. So, it didn’t take long for Driscoll to adopt the "shock and awe" approach as his trademark style.

Rage is highly effective at getting attention, even though it is not very constructive. Though there is a place for righteous anger, when anger only begets more anger, it is an exercise in futility and increasing degradation.

I suppose that most people who are constantly angry feel that their anger is righteous…even when it isn’t. When our emotions are constantly whipped up in a spirit of fury, it is hard to be objective about the true state of our own heart. When confronted with our own anger, we are more prone to defend ourselves than take time to reflect, seek forgiveness for the hurt our anger has caused, and (most importantly) change course.

I do believe it is important to let yourself feel anger, but it is more important to listen to what your anger is trying to tell you. This is why I love the practice of spiritual direction so much. It provides a space for someone to safely listen to their own emotions. And what I have observed as I have sat with various folks in spiritual direction over the past two years is that underneath the anger there is a deep, deep sadness that longs to be acknowledged. Thus, addressing the sadness proves key to healing our woundedness that prompted the anger in the first place. Unless we can heal the wounds, we will never be able to satisfy our anger.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the remedy for anger is gentleness. We need quiet, gentle spaces to be present to our sadness. We need understanding and compassion. We need companionship.

The catch is: it feels counter-cultural to practice gentleness in a world beset by so much anger. It takes faith and courage to be gentle. It requires hope—a belief that the quiet spirit will ultimately be heard underneath the noise of all the shouting—a trust that gentleness will outlast all the outbursts.

This is an appeal to slow down. Take the time to listen. Have enough courage to be gentle. May we trust and hope in a different way. May we reflect on our own anger, asking what it wants to tell us…lest we keep spreading it around carelessly.

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healing the disease of anger
reflections by troy cady
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*Photo by Valeriia Miller via Unsplash. Creative Commons License.

In God we Trust?

As a pastor who served for many years in evangelical settings, I want to say some things to all the Christians who have been offering “thoughts and prayers” today in the aftermath of yet another mass shooting in the United States.

First of all, you cannot say America is a country that trusts in God while failing to work for practical solutions to the obvious gun violence problem we have in our midst. Such work is the very by-product of faith. To trust in God is to work for the common good.

Surely by now you must acknowledge that the problem is more than just personal. There is a dimension to this that is perpetuated by the very systems and structures of our society. There is action we can take, policies we can enact, and care we can offer on a structural level that will at least lessen the incidence of mass shootings like those we have witnessed in the last two weeks alone.

I say this because I notice that evangelical Christians in particular have become very good at explaining away each specific shooting in ways that conveniently allow them to just ignore the problem and do little or nothing to work for systemic change.

At the same time, evangelicals have perfected the art of mobilizing collective action around other causes they believe in such as the abolition of abortion, the prohibition of gay marriage, and the protection of a whole array of religious liberties they enjoy.

To those Christians, I say: you celebrate victories around these causes under the full conviction that you are building a more Christian society with each win. But I have to ask…on the verge of the overturning of Roe v. Wade… is a Christian society the kind of place where the unborn are protected but gun violence runs rampant? Is this really what a Christian society looks like? Should you not do something about this, if you really trust in God?

This is an invitation and a charge: Why not direct your collective energy to acts of compassion for all life, including the protection of lives that are threatened every day by irresponsible policies pertaining to firearms?

Jesus, the one you claim to be your Lord, has told you plainly that you cannot trust in both God and money. The same is true of guns. So, the question is simple: do you trust in God…or guns? You cannot trust in both.

I can’t help but feel that those who would defend their right to bear arms at any cost have failed to trust in God by their support of the political power brokers who block important policies regulating the proliferation of assault weapons in our society. Instead, I see countless Christians bowing to fear in the name of freedom and, as a result, they have given free rein to the senseless violence that has plagued our country for far too long now.

I note that so many political leaders that are backed by evangelical Christians are eager to criminalize abortion but then they turn around and vote against the appropriation of funds to address the shortage of baby formula that is causing immense hardship for countless households today. Do you value life? Then act like it!

In a similar act of hypocrisy, those same leaders claim that our gun violence problem in the United States is really just a mental health crisis…but then they turn around and gut the funding of important mental health programs that are needed to address this problem.

So, to all the Christians offering “thoughts and prayers” today, I have to ask again: just who do you trust? You cannot say you trust in God and then stand by and do nothing but make excuses for the lack of progress we have made in this area.

Remember, faith without deeds is dead. Faith acts. Faith moves. Faith calls for hard choices to be made that will contribute to healing and to our collective wellbeing. Christian: if you say you trust in God, it would be better for us all if you would just act like it and spare us all your half-hearted prayers.

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In God we Trust?

reflections by Rev. Troy B. Cady

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Weeping at the Tomb

I awakened this Easter hours before daybreak. It’s not because I am preparing to attend a “sunrise service.” I’m not. The church I serve will meet today at 10, our normal time for gathering on Sundays.

This is our third Easter since our community went into pandemic mode. On the first Easter, we met on Zoom and there were many tears shed. Last year, we met outdoors in person. We simply hosted a party for the neighborhood. It was a blast but some of the members of our congregation wondered “when church was going to start” and apparently we disappointed them.

This morning, I am ready for another in-person gathering that will look a little more like normal. We’ll gather outdoors for a little while at the beginning but then we’ll head into the sanctuary to sing, hear the story together, reflect upon it, and pray.

As I think about the way our ministry has changed over the past two years, it is heartbreaking to me to acknowledge that we have let so many people down. That’s not the sort of thing you want to hear from a pastor on Easter Sunday, but it’s the truth.

Our church decided to approach the pandemic as an opportunity to experiment with different ways of being. I suppose every church has had to do that to some extent, but the sad news about our little congregation is that, despite our efforts to innovate…the church seems to be dying.

We’re all tired. So tired. Grieving the loss of what we once knew. Confused, frustrated, and sometimes angry. All the feelings you would expect to feel…in grief.

This Easter, I feel like a failure. That’s the God-honest truth.

In Scripture, we are told that some women made their way to the tomb “at dawn on the first day of the week,” not long after they had laid Jesus to rest just before sunset the previous Friday.

In the apostle John’s account, Mary Magdalene remains at the tomb weeping when she sees that the stone has been rolled away from the entrance of the tomb and Jesus’ body has gone missing.

That is what I feel like this Easter.

But as I am wakeful this morning, and the sun has yet to rise, I am cherishing the collective memory of Jesus’ appearance to her in the garden by the tomb. She thinks he’s the gardener at first. Until he asks her why she is weeping and speaks her name.

So, this morning, I am speaking with my Lord in my own inner garden. Asking him to tend the ground of my entire being with care. Asking him to see my tears and open the ears of my heart so I can hear him speak my name.

And I’m asking him to heal this world. And I’m asking him to help me be even a small part of that healing work, to share his resurrected life and his renewing love with others. I’m asking him for faith. I’m asking him for fresh hope. I’m asking him for rest not only for myself on this day after the Sabbath but the rest of his peace for our entire society and for creation herself. Start with me, Lord, but let the rest of your resurrection usher in a new dawn, a new day, the reign of grace and joy and all things bright and beautiful.

Lord, make it so. Deliver us from the clutches of death, even if it means something needs to die for your love to rise.

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Weeping at the Tomb

reflections by troy cady

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*Photo by Orkhan Farmanli via Unsplash. Creative Commons License.

 

 

What is Worship?

At our church here in Chicago, we have been talking about the nature and purpose of worship. I was asked to respond to the question that is the focus of this essay: "What is worship?" Here are my thoughts. I hope they are helpful to someone! -Troy

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What is Worship?

reflections by Rev. Troy B. Cady

 

           

Intro & Thesis

 

What is worship? There is no easy answer to this question; however, we could start by acknowledging that to worship God is to glorify God.

 

But that begs the question: what does it mean to glorify God and how do we glorify God?

           

I suggest that, at its core, worship is devotion; whatever captivates your greatest devotion is what you worship. To worship is to love; a life lived in love for God and others is what brings God glory. To live in love is to worship God.

 

In this essay, I look at what the prophets, Jesus, and the apostles of the New Testament have to say about worship as I describe various forms of false and pseudo-worship in hopes of helping us understand worship in terms of devotion to God, love for God and love for others. 

 

The nature and forms of idolatry

To see how worship and devotion go hand-in-hand, let’s take a step back from the question of God-worship. It is possible to worship something that is not God or someone other than God. The Bible identifies this as idolatry.

            Whatever you are devoted to the most in life…that is what you worship. The fact is: many Christians in America today are more devoted to their political philosophy than they are to God. It is easy to make an idol of politics.

            Still others are most devoted to upholding a certain vision of family life. Though God desires us to be nurtured in the context of loving community, when we insist that such a community must look a certain way, we have made our ideal of family into an idol.

            In a similar way, if you devote your life to the accumulation of wealth, you worship riches. If you are most devoted to achieving society’s standards of success or popularity, you are really worshipping some arbitrary ideal of accomplishment or the ever-elusive high of gaining fame and human esteem. The sobering truth about worship in our society today is that humans have perfected the art of finding almost anything else to worship if it means they can avoid devoting their entire selves to God. 

 

Some common Christian idols

Ironically, a common object of worship for many Christians is the Bible. Let’s face it: when we would rather just talk about what the Bible says than to devote ourselves to God and practice God’s way of love for others, we are really worshipping the Bible…not God.

            In the same vein, Christians are even capable of worshipping the idea of worship. We do this most commonly by defining worship in reduced terms, equating it to the act of singing “worship” songs with other believers once a week (typically on a Sunday morning for about an hour). Many Christians have come to worship worship by insisting their worship be offered in a certain way and with a certain style. If it is not in our preferred form (usually singing) and style (usually a particular genre of music), it doesn’t feel very worshipful to us. This is not to diminish the value of singing our devotion to God; it is simply to remind us that worship is so much more than singing.

            I think one of the saddest expressions I have ever heard in my life is when Christians talk about the “worship wars” that take place in the church today, as if worship is something to fight about. When we start fighting about worship, we could well wonder whether we have, in fact, stopped worshipping God. 

 

What Jesus says about true worship

In John 4, Jesus addressed our propensity to substitute God-worship with the worship of the trappings of religion itself. In this text, a Samaritan woman asks Jesus where (and, consequently, how) the true God-worshipper should worship. Jesus’ reply is telling. He says that true worship is not about where you go to worship (“neither on this mountain [in Samaria] nor in Jerusalem”), but true worship is about the spirit.

            In other words, the real place of worship is in your heart. Worship is simply the act of devoting our hearts (the entirety of our being) to God. 

 

To worship is to love God

This picture of true worship coincides with what is perhaps the greatest confession of all time. Significantly, it is a confession that has been used for millennia in communal worship settings: 

“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

                                                                                                            (Dt. 6:4-5)

 

            Perhaps the best way to define worship, then, is to define it in terms of loving God. After all, to love God is to cultivate our devotion to God. As such, this confession to love God with all of our everything represents the height and depth, the breadth and length of our worship to God. To the extent that we love God in everything and with everything—to that extent—we worship God. 

 

Where and when to worship

It is no mere accident that the text in Deuteronomy 6 goes on to describe where we are to practice loving God with our everything. Not surprisingly, the location of this kind of devotion is…everywhere. And the time is…all the time: “…when you sit at home…when you walk along the road…when you lie down…and when you get up.” More than the tabernacle, the temple, the synagogue, or the church building, the text tells us that the true place of worship is in “your hearts.” In other words, every place and every time is a place and time to worship. As the poet Wendell Berry says, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

 

How (not) to worship

But how do we show our love for God? There are many ways to do this but the Bible is clear that one can do many religious things to express one’s devotion to God while still missing the very heart of worship.

            God addressed this with these words spoken by the prophet Isaiah: 

“These people come near to me with their mouth

    and honor me with their lips,

    but their hearts are far from me.

Their worship of me

    is based on merely human rules they have been taught.” (Is. 29:13)

 

            In light of God’s never-failing love from one generation to the next, it stands to reason that really all God ever wants from us is to show our worship of him by simply loving him in return. More than our songs, more than our tithes, and more than our study of the Bible…God just wants us to love him in return. If those religious activities help us to love God, great; but church history has shown that Christians can be very good at practicing their religion while at the same time failing to love. While it is true that love for God is often expressed through musical praise, generous giving, and listening for God’s voice by meditating on Scripture, it does not follow that these activities are inherently acts of true worship. True worship is a matter of the heart, not a matter of mere ritual performance.

            This is why Jesus echoed the refrain from Isaiah 29 when he addressed the Pharisees of his day. His words to them were bold because the Pharisees were the ones who were regarded as the most devoted to God, the true God-worshippers. But Jesus exposed their hypocrisy by appealing to the heart of worship in their own tradition. In short, Jesus wanted them to see how they were very good at doing all kinds of religious things for love of God, but had, in fact, neglected love for their neighbor.

            In Matthew 15, Jesus identifies how the Pharisees even used their own devout religious observance as an excuse to mistreat their own parents in old age. In Matthew 23, he describes how the Pharisees faithfully tithed as an act of worship but “neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness.” He admonishes them: “You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”    

            Jesus’ critique, then, gives us a clear answer as to the best way to show your love for God: it is to love your neighbor. 

 

How the apostles describe worship as love

The apostle Paul describes this very dynamic when he says that the entire law is summed up in one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Galatians 5:14)

            That is quite a striking statement. In essence, he is telling us that if we can only keep that one command, we will also be keeping the command to love God. But…how could this be? Could it really be that simple? All we need to do to love God is to love our neighbor?

            The apostle John explains (in refreshingly simple terms) how this could be so: 

“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. We love because God first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.” (I John 4:16, 19-21; italics added)

 

            For this reason, any act of service you render to your neighbor is an act of service to God himself. To put it another way: to serve another is to render worship to God. That means…when we share food with the hungry, we are really worshipping God; when we companion the lonely, we are really worshipping God; and when we help heal the infirm, we are really worshipping God. Anything you do to love your neighbor…you are doing as an act of love for God.

  

Worship: living for God’s glory and neighbor’s good

In the local church where I serve, we often like to say that the church exists “for God’s glory and neighbor’s good.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but Jesus, and Paul, and John take this idea a step further. They tell us that when we live for neighbor’s good, we are really living for God’s glory.

            Again, the prophet Isaiah speaks to this: 

“‘Why have we fasted,’ they say,

    ‘and you have not seen it?

Why have we humbled ourselves,

    and you have not noticed?’

 

“Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please

    and exploit all your workers.

Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife…

    Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,

    only a day for people to humble themselves?

Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed

    and for lying in sackcloth and ashes?

Is that what you call a fast,

    a day acceptable to the Lord?

 

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:

to loose the chains of injustice

    and untie the cords of the yoke,

to set the oppressed free

    and break every yoke?

Is it not to share your food with the hungry

    and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—

when you see the naked, to clothe them,

    and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Then your light will break forth like the dawn,

    and your healing will quickly appear;

then your righteousness will go before you,

    and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.”

                          (Isaiah 58:3-8; italics added)

 

            It is important to notice that this text about the true worship that happens when we love our neighbor concludes with an image of God’s glory breaking forth like the dawn. If worshipping God means glorifying God, this text helps us make the connection that the glory of God breaks forth when (and only when) we worship God truly by loving our neighbor.

            I was saddened the other day when a friend told me an experience she had one Sunday at a church she attended. After the service, all kinds of people were trying to get out of the parking lot when a man in a large luxury car became upset at her for getting in his way. He was so upset he told her to f*** off with his middle finger raised at her. And this is just one example. As a pastor, I have seen firsthand how church people can enjoy a lovely worship service one hour and the next treat their fellow congregants or pastoral leaders like dirt without so much as an apology ever being offered. What a sham we have made of the idea of worship! How we have cheapened it. When churches have lovely worship services but church members do not even share God’s love with each other, what is happening in the church service cannot really be called worship. Our true worship is displayed in learning to love one another and extending that love to all. 

 

In conclusion: God’s glory and the common good

In contrast, I want to conclude now by sharing with you a story that illustrates just one of many ways God’s glory breaks forth when we simply serve the common good. It was a conversation I had just this week with a small group of people I know. One of the group members happens to be a teenage girl who wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times, advocating for sane measures in school policies in hopes of protecting the vulnerable in the midst of the pandemic.

            As we shared our elation with her on being published in such a prestigious newspaper, we returned to the theme of worship that we have been learning about for some weeks now. And I mentioned to her that advocating as she did for the sake of others was really an act of devotion to God, a way of worshipping God. She said that hadn’t occurred to her but, as she thought about it more, she became animated and excited. I wish you could have seen the glow on her face as she took in the good news of that truth—that anything we do can be done as worship unto the Lord.

            This young woman really knows what it means to worship. She knows firsthand that we really can worship God with our everything at all times and in all places and in all kinds of ways. All we need to do…is love.

            Since God himself is love, may we always remember that the very glory of God is the life lived in love. Let us worship God, then, in spirit and in truth. Let us live in love. 

Joy, the Poustinik and their Poustinia

This month my prayer book includes small excerpts from a non-fiction work called ‘Poustinia’ by Catherine de Hueck Doherty.

‘Poustinia’ is a Russian word meaning ‘desert,’ but the book is about the value of seeking solitude and silence for one’s own spiritual wellbeing, in the spirit of the great Desert Mothers and Fathers of old. In those days, a hermit would establish residency in a far-off place…like a desert place or deep in a secluded spot in the forest. They did this to practice being alone with God and keeping silence, so they could listen more intently for God’s voice.

In Russia, a person who does this is called a ‘poustinik’ and their dwelling place is called a ‘poustinia.’ Of course, one needn’t physically retreat to a place like this if one wants to commune with God (though it helps), so Catherine de Hueck Doherty wrote her book in hopes of helping everyday people like me and you practice the spirit of ‘desert spirituality’ right where we are from one day to the next.

Often, we think of the practice of silence and solitude as abhorrent, unnecessarily severe, and undesirably ascetic. In much of North American culture, there is a value for popularity and for those who have a way with words. Our airwaves and television programs are filled with constant chatter and talking. Rarely do we stop to practice being fully and simply present to ourselves, the world, and God just through sitting in silence for any significant amount of time. It is as if the moment there is a bit of silence, we quickly and eagerly feel the need to fill it with something else.

We have become so accustomed to the noise that even when we begin to practice silence, our mind instantly fills with thoughts…words, words, and more words…and our heart cannot be at rest, at peace with stillness. Our body may be stilled, but inside we are racing…going, going, and going all the time.

But this way of living robs us of joy. It keeps us from cultivating the kind of peace that penetrates deep to the core of our very being. It blocks us from truly knowing our own profound beloved-ness and the intrinsic beloved-ness of others. In the end, it hinders us from being loved and loving.

Far from making someone stern…cold and stand-offish…the practice of silence-in-solitude opens us up to the world and fills us with the joy of knowing love in the very depths of our being. This is why Catherine de Hueck Doherty writes these words in her book about the way of the ‘poustinia’:

“If you ever see a sad hermit or poustinik, then he is no hermit at all. The most joyous persons in Russia are the ones who have the eyes of a child at 70 and who are filled with the joy of the Lord, for they who have entered the silence of God are filled with God’s joy….You cannot fool people as to such things as the presence of love and joy in a human being.”

My invitation to you this holiday season is to take some time…out of the normal hustle and bustle…to just sit in silence and savor it, rather than filling the silence with something else. Just breathe. Just be. Cultivate joy and peace deep within just by knowing that God is present and loves you, just by being present to the time you have and the space you inhabit.

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Joy, the Poustinik and their Poustinia
reflections by troy cady

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*Photo by Brett Jordan via Unsplash. Creative Commons License.

The Prince of Piece

This morning I read about this family Christmas photo that was shared on Twitter recently by a United States congressman. Thus far, the commentary I have read on it notes how inappropriate it was for him to share this photo at this time, given the school shooting that took place in Michigan last week.

I have another concern about the photo, however. It should be self-evident to any Christian who is motivated to “put Christ back in Christmas” that this image is contrary to the core message of Christmas.

In the birth of Jesus, we see that God did not respond to the world’s violence with more violence, even in self-defense. Jesus was born into a regime of heartless brutality, terror, and oppression. Yet, the Son of God did not enter this world armed to the teeth; nor was he born into a family who had stockpiled a great arsenal to defend their rights against the might of their Roman oppressors.

Instead, the Son of God took on human flesh, laying aside his heavenly power and prerogatives to identify with us as powerless and weak. His real power was simply in his solidarity with the oppressed, in his becoming one of them. In becoming human, God became vulnerable and approachable—gentle, not forceful.

This was (and is) God’s way to peace on earth—and the Christmas story is our yearly reminder of God’s heart. Now is not a time to celebrate our capacity for violence, whether personally or nationally. In fact, if we were to really embrace the spirit of the season, we would sense the invitation of God’s Spirit crying out to us to mourn our violent response to God’s offensive of love.

The world will always have a “Yes, but…” to this initiative of God’s—but that will not cause God to give up on his program for peace. On the contrary, the one who would follow Christ sees the connection from the cradle to the cross of Jesus. He died as he was born…caught up in the swirl of violence, but relentless in refusing to take up arms. In both his birth and death, Jesus showed us the full extent of God’s love for us and he exposed the utter absurdity of our unjust brutalities.

Let us not desecrate the light of the nativity of the Christ by treating our capacity for violence so flippantly. Instead, may we mourn our tendency to perpetuate the violence that plagues our world and may we learn to identify with the One whose only weapon to counter the hatred was love and love alone. Then we will really experience God’s good will for all; then and only then will we have true peace on earth.

………………….

The Prince of Piece

reflections by Troy Cady

St. Adamnan's Day

 

St. Adamnan’s Day

reflections by Troy Cady

In my prayer book this morning, I learned that today is the feast day of St. Adamnan among the Northumbria community.

Adamnan was the ninth abbot of Iona. In the late 7th century, church leaders in Rome were putting pressure on the Celtic church to adopt Roman customs. Because Adamnan was a peace-loving person and did not wish division with his brothers and sisters in other sectors of Christendom, he tried to persuade the community in Iona to go along with the new Roman customs.

He met with no small measure of opposition. For many years, a contingent of the community in Iona insisted on celebrating Easter twice each year: once on the new Roman date and once on the traditional Celtic date.

Though the matter seems trivial to us now, I imagine it was incredibly difficult for Adamnan to hold the community together in the midst of it all. In fact, I imagine the community felt like it was bitterly divided for quite a long time.

Viewing the situation from Adamnan’s perspective, he had an impossible decision to make. If he decided to hold fast to the Celtic customs, he would risk division with his brothers and sisters in other places. If he decided to embrace the new Roman way, he risked resentment with many of the members of the community right in his midst.

As someone who serves on the staff of a local church and as someone who is deeply concerned about the state of the broader church in America, I can relate to Adamnan.

In short, my heart aches over the issues that are dividing the American church right now, both locally and nationally.

On the one hand, my heart grieves the broader church in America. Like the Roman authorities in Adamnan’s day, it seems to me that the American church of today is intent on powering up, laying huge burdens upon people, and pressuring diverse sectors of society to conform to a particular worldview. I can’t help but feel that what really motivates the church in America is a desire to consolidate and preserve a sense of cultural supremacy. The ideological hubris is oppressive and it is absolutely astounding when I consider that it comes from those who tout “salvation by grace through faith.”

If we are to be a people who reflect the grace of Jesus, our way of engaging the world must become more gentle, understanding, and humble. We should be known not as coercive but as compassionate. Let us listen more than we speak. Let us lay aside anger. While arguing may win a temporary victory, it is only by love that anyone is transformed through and through.

The irony of all of this is that, like the Roman church of Adamnan’s day, the American church wants to cast itself as an agent of change—but underneath the desire to effect change is a deeper desire to arrange life in a way that is most comfortable for us. In other words, it’s possible that the desire to change the world around us springs from a deeper desire to secure our standard of living…without having to change ourselves.

In other words, we like life the way we like it. We want our homes and neighborhoods to be just the way we like it. We want our schools and our cities…our friends, our holidays, and our entertainment…to be just the way we like it. We even want our church to be just the way we like it.

This is what Adamnan faced from both sides…pressure from those who wanted things to be just the way they liked it. The power struggle here is exhausting in part because it is simply inescapable.

I have been saying this since long before the pandemic hit, but I revisited it in March 2020 and again in the summer of 2020 and again in the fall of 2020 and again and again and again since then:

The church in America desperately needs to reimagine what it really means to be the church. We can no longer continue arranging “church” in ways that merely suit our own liking. The invitation ultimately is to let go of power, to relinquish the need to control, to stop trying to rearrange the world in whatever way we happen to like best. Once we can really do that, we are really free to love, just love…to see others for who they are, made in God’s image, beloved through and through.

I believe the church in America is facing a crisis that is deeper than anything we have ever had to face. The question is not whether the crisis is upon us. The question is: “How will we respond to the crisis?”

Will we be willing to ask the hard questions of what it means to be the church? Are we willing to do what it takes to be a community of those who have been called by God to love others extravagantly? Will we be open to different ways of being formed? Will we hold on to what we have always known? Will we choose to be heavy-handed when God would make us soft-hearted?

On this feast day of St. Adamnan, I imagine these were some of the difficult questions he must have had so many centuries ago, though I admit I may be reading into his story a bit. All I know is I can sure relate to the no-win situation he found himself in.

That said, I am inspired by his patient, gentle, peace-loving way of holding gracious space in the midst of the tension and I want to follow his example. I want to be the kind of person who can hold the space open so we can just come together in our differences…to help each and every person experience deep within the freedom and joy of being beloved through and through. May it be so.

The Church of the Word-made-flesh

Most Christians today speak of attendance at a Sunday gathering as “going to church.” I suggest the phrase is misguided and its common use is indicative of a gross misunderstanding of the nature of the church as Jesus imagined it.

For starters, the word “church” (ekklesia) in Jesus’ day was not specifically a “Christian” or even solely a “religious” phenomenon. It could be used in reference to the synagogue as well as in reference to gatherings of various civil societies. The word, generally speaking, had to do simply with “assembling” a group of people together for a specific purpose. In that sense, any kind of  “assembly” could be called a “church.”

But the church of Jesus departed even from the first-century way of understanding the word. In the “church” that Jesus created, he was (as usual) being phenomenologically expansive with the idea compared to the way most people defined it.

Whereas each synagogue gathered people together around Scripture and the teaching of a rabbi, Jesus was a different sort of rabbi in that he claimed to be the Word-made-flesh. Thus, the synagogue he led was always on the move. It was literally embodied but, paradoxically, there was no routine physical location you could meet at during a certain day of the week at a certain time of day. It was a synagogue he could convene in any place at any time on any day of the week. Jesus’ “church” gathered wherever he happened to be at the time. Sometimes large crowds would gather by the lakeshore to hear rabbi Jesus teach and other times he’d reserve his teaching for just a few of his closest followers on a hillside or in a garden.

Thus, Jesus’ church did not extract people from the everyday stuff of life like today’s “church” does. Rather, the real world served as the context for the church Jesus established. The church that Jesus led was more like a living, holistic organism than a segregated, hierarchical organization with a special event once per week.

In that vein, Jesus’ commission to his disciples to make more disciples was intended to follow the same trajectory. Christians today translate the famous commission in Matthew 28 as “Go and make disciples” but what Jesus actually said was more like: “As you go, make disciples…” The phrasing implies that the church (those who are assembled to center themselves on Jesus) will make disciples in the course of everyday life.

Though Jesus’ followers do “gather," an indispensable aspect of Jesus’ teaching involves his “sending” of the church to be fully present to the world-as-it-is. Consequently, church in the Jesus-way is a phenomenon that is "gathered to be scattered." It’s a mystery: Jesus’ ekklesia is created through diaspora.

My prayer is that the church of today would recover the full sense of that great commission and live according to what it really means to be the church in the spirit of Jesus. My prayer is that the church of today would be and act more like Jesus, the Word-made-flesh.

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The Church of the Word-made-flesh

reflections by Troy Cady

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*Photo by Cassie Boca via Unsplash. Creative Commons License.