churchgoing

"I remember, you know, you go to these parties on Saturday night and people would say, about 8:00 on Sunday morning "Whoa, I have to go - I gotta get to church!" People would say, "Why do you want to go to church, all those hypocrites." And I say, "Look, why do I want to stay here with all you hypocrites?"I never knew why going to church made you a hypocrite. They'd say because you go to church and you're all "Holy, Holy, Holy" for two or three hours, and then you go home and sin. I'd say "exactly!" For two or three hours you're doing pretty good! Maybe the problem isn't that you go to church, maybe the problem is that you go home! I never understood why going to church made you a hypocrite either, because nobody goes to church because they're perfect. If you've got it all together, you don't need to go. You can go jogging with all the other perfect people on Sunday morning Every time you go to church, you're confessing again to yourself, to your family, to the people you pass on the way there, to the people who will greet you there, that you don't have it all together. And that you need their support. You need their direction. You need some accountability, you need some help."


:rich (1995)

rich: virtue reality

Virtue Reality.

Virtues are funny things.  They are the fruit of faith and whenever paraded, become parodies of themselves and the worst kind of vanity imaginable.  When they are not the fruit of faith they become its greatest obstacle.  Virtues are most vital when invisible and most sharply imaged when they are not the focus of our attentions.  They are evidence of their Source (and ours) and not the generators of it (or us).

Take, for example, wisdom.  Wisdom has at its source the 'fear of the Lord' - the highest regard and reverence for Him.  The tendency among many of us, though, is to confuse wisdom with omniscience and to think ourselves wise in proportion to how much stuff we know.  God calls us to be wise and provides us with Christ.  We pressure ourselves to be all-knowing and fret over where Cain got his wife and how the earth can be as young as the Scriptures claim when geologists say that it takes millions of years more than that to produce a barrel of oil.  We tend to suspect that wisdom lies in the ability to answer imponderables rather than in Christ.  and we sometimes end in self-contempt and even abandonment of our faith, not because our faith is false, but because we focused on a wisdom that is not a virtue but a vanity.

It is the same way with strength.  God calls us to 'be strong' and we mistake that for a call to omnipotence.  We confuse strength to endure trials with an ability to walk unfrustrated through life.  We convince ourselves that if we were strong we would never fail, never tire, never hurt, never need.  We begin to measure strength in terms of ease of progress, equate power with success, endurability with invincibility, and inevitably, when our illusion of omnipotence is shattered, we condemn ourselves for being weak.

God has called us to be lovers and we frequently think that He meant us to be saviors.  So we 'love' as long as we see 'results.'  We give of ourselves as long as our investments pay off, but if the ones we love do not respond, we tend to despair and blame ourselves and even resent those we pretend to love.  Because we love someone, we want them to be free of addictions, of sin, of self - and that is as it should be.  But it might be that our love for them and our desire for their well-being will nto make them well.  And, if that is the case, their lack of response no more negates the reality of love than their quickness to respond would confirm it.

Love is a virtue and not a feeling.  It is fed and fired by God - not by the favorable response of the beloved.  Even when it doesn't seem to make a dime's worth of difference to the ones on whom it is lavished, it is still the most prized of all virtues because it is at the heart of the very character of God.  By loving we participate in His Life and Essence.  When we stoop to bait and buy good behavior we are no longer loving as God loves.  We are manipulating and cheapening the dignity of the person whom we are called - not to save, not even to change - but to love.  If real salvation is possible (and we know it is) it is because real love is there.  And love that is real, love that is truly a virtue and not just an act - agape love - gushes from God through those who know Him.  It is not strung along by those who don't.

In a world where quantitative values have obscured the reality of qualitative values - where we long to measure progress and chart growth - it is easy to give in to the temptation to judge ourselves and to try to walk by sight.  But into that confused and meaningless effort God speaks with His great, still, and small voice, and His Christ.  He speaks through these invisible virtues with which His people shine and in the light of their lives this desperate, smug world sees not strength, wisdom, or even love, but Him who is the source of these things and the Savior of humankind.  Let us in whom He dwells look also to Him so we can shine more brightly.

(Rich Mullins: Release Magazine: July-August 1994)

dogs and theology

"If I loved my Master like my dog loves his, I would be more saintly than John the Divine . . . more radical than John the Baptizer . . . more deeply devoted than St. John of the Cross."

(Rich Mullins)

"Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in."

(Mark Twain)

"...man interferes with the dog and makes it more loveable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man’s love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on the “goodness” of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog, and admitted, as it were by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests and comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts. It will be noted that the man takes all these pains with the dog, and gives all these pains to the dog, only because it is an animal high in the scale - because it is so nearly loveable that it is worth his while to make it fully loveable. He does not house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes. We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses - that He would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for more Love, but for less."

(C. S. Lewis)

rich on church

"When I go to church . . . I involve myself in something that identifies me with Augustine, that identifies me with Christ, that identifies me with nearly 2000 years of people who have come together once a week and said, 'Let's go to the Lord's table and enjoy the feast that he has prepared for us.' In that week I may have been subjected to a million billboards that try to make me identify with the thinking of contemporary society. But once a week I go back to church, and acknowledge that though the shape of the world is really different now than it used to be, this remains the same: I still come to the Lord's table and say, 'Oh God, if it weren't for your grace, if it weren't for the sacrifice of Christ, my life would have no meaning, no life would have real substance.' And I do that voluntarily."

"When I come into church I am no longer Rich Mullins, a music education student. I am no longer Rich Mullins, a guy who grew up in Indiana. I am no longer Rich Mullins, a guy who has a record contract. All of the sudden I am a member of the kingdom of God."

:rich

imago

"Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He is incomprehensible to our Western minds - as he was to Eastern ones. He came from beyond where no human mind has visited. When we try to squeeze him into our systems of thought, he vanishes - he slips through our grasp and then reappears and (in so many words) says, 'No man takes my life from me. No man forces his will on me. I am not yours to handle and cheapen. You are mine to love and make holy.' In him the fullness of the Godhead dwells. In him all things are held together. In him we see what love is - that it originates in God and is energized by him. And so, we thank God for all we see. For beauty and for the miracle of sight, for music and the wonder of hearing, for warmth and the sense of touch. But we thank him more for Christ, without whom we would be deaf, insensitive and blind."

~Rich Mullins, "Invisible Things" in Release magazine, Nov/Dec 1994.

driving without headlights

"He chose to give you your life, don't despair of it."

revered and reverend

Artist and theologian Rich Mullins once commented on what it means to be reverent before God . . .

It started out with this guy who was yelling at this kid for running in the 'House of God,' because he was running through a church building, and I thought that was funny because I think the Bible was fairly explicit that earth is God's footstool and heaven is his throne: "What kind of house can you build for me?"

I think it's pretty explicit that the Body of Christ is also the House of God - that we are the temple, that it has to do with people, not with buildings.  I've often thought, you know, people worry with the Catholic thing of revering Mary, and I've often thought: "Well, maybe it's not that they revere Mary too much.  Maybe it's that all of us revere each other too little."

And so I was thinking about this old man going to a meeting and realizing on his way that he'd already been in a meeting.  It's just he hadn't been in a corporate meeting.  He'd already been surrounded by the presence of God.  And he looks out, and of course he's a farmer and has an appreciate for seasons - has an appreciation for that kind of thing.  And all of the sudden he realizes that God invented green.

There is a certain eloquence in the earthy nature of Rich's words, a very poetry that captures the inner workings of the soul.  I think that is one reason why he was so captivating - for those who stop to listen.  He draws our attention here to the reverence which surrounds us, and how we've lost our ability to grasp it.  Scot McKnight playfully points to a serious truth in showing how Mary declares in her Spirit-inspired song of praise (Magnificat) that "all generations (except for Protestants) will call me blessed . . ."  Our fear of deeper spirituality (and all things Roman Catholic) has stripped away our sense of wonder and mystery . . . and reverence.

On Sunday evening I was ordained an elder in my particular church denomination.  This means that in some circles I will be referred to as reverend.  Certainly we all know of someone who carries this title proudly and boldly without consideration for the weight of it all.  Personally, I found the service to be powerfully humbling - even more than I expected it to be.  There is a real charge given in Scripture to those who choose to participate in the faith, especially those who lead.

But I could not help but wonder if we now find ourselves in the same position as Rich describes . . . Have we fallen into a trap of segmenting our community into those who are reverend and those who are not?  Not by title alone, there is certainly a sense in which 'these few' are doing the Lord's business (a sacred calling) and the rest of us are here to receive.  But why then did the early believers think in terms of the priesthood of all believers?  Perhaps it is not that we we are revering some of our leaders too much but that we are revering each other too little; we have lost the weight of the calling which is upon us.

Everyone is trying to find healthy churches and ministries, leaderships and outreaches.  Perhaps the reverence due to each one about our Father's business, combined with the perception of the imago Dei upon all humanity, will lead us closer to this reality.

'the communion of the saints'

In one of those especially poignant passages that so frequently and powerfully mark the Gospels and charge them with the character of Christ, we encounter Jesus and his twelve in a moment of deep sorrow followed by a great flash of glory. (And does glory ever come except on the heels of sorrow?)

Jesus has just alienated many of his disciples by telling them that they must 'eat body' and 'drink blood.' This directive must have been even more startling to its original audience than to us. They did not hear it through the filter of some 1900 years of systematizing theology contrived to intellectualize and cushion us against the blow of his outrageous command. They met it head-on and felt the full force of it and they were repulsed.

Here Jesus, who was habitually pushing the margin of reason into the realms of faith, crossed the line. Here, he ventured too deeply into the uncharted territory of the kingdom of God, articulated too clearly the good, yet distrubing news of that kingdom, and called for an obedience too radically opposite for the reasonable sensibilities of many disciples at that time. He called them to follow too far outside their well-defined comfort lines. . .and they ran away in disgust or stood paralyzed in terror as Jesus walked on - walked on into the binding light of the liberation truth he had just spoken.

The twelve stayed with him - maybe reluctantly, maybe for reasons that they didn't know. But when Jesus asked that heart-breaking question, 'Will you also leave me?' it is Peter - the impetuous apostle - who gives us the secret to the hidden heart of discipleship: 'Where else can we go? You have the words of life!'

Peter may very well have been as perplexed over the point of Jesus' teaching as those who abandoned him, but he was not confused about the person Jesus. Peter might have misunderstood his methods and mission, but he was certain that Jesus was Messiah. He may have been in the dark about where he was going, but he knew that in Jesus there was light. He may have been scared nearly to death by the demands of discipleship, but he knew that in Jesus there was life. Just before this confession of his dependency on and the sufficiency of Jesus, he had sunk in the storm of intimidating waves and been rescued by the hand of a Master who knew his weakness and the shallowness of his faith.

There is much that we are intimidated by in our walk: doctrines that run counter to our cultures and egos, tasks that seem nearly insurmountable, the weakness of our wills and the seeming severity of Christianity and sink in the despondency of our powerlessness to grasp the mystery of grace, but in the midst of that, we must do what the writer of Hebrews advised and what Peter did, 'Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith' (Hebrews 12:2). It is he who calls us and he who enables. His body is our bread; his blood, our drink. He has the words of life.

-Rich Mullins, "The Communion of the Saints" in The World as I Remember It: Through the Eyes of a Ragamuffin (Sisters: Multnomah, 2004), 129-131.