Passing on Grace

Easter has come and gone, and it was a blast to experience for me even though it was so hard to get everything done and prepared on time with school and baby. I can’t say everything went smoothly, but what happened was very meaningful, at least for me. We had a mock Ash Wednesday service (mock because it’s the right service on the wrong day), a Good Friday service, a baptismal service Sunday, and then Easter itself. Partway through the week, as I was meeting with the people about to be baptized and planning Sunday I really realized something.

I am not worthy of what I have been given. Not only has grace been given to me for forgiveness of sins, but even my position is grace. I was baptizing people who I had not led to Jesus. But I was still given the honor of ushering them into the faith. Somehow I have been allowed to give communion and pass out God’s grace to people who barely even know me. I watched people’s sins literally burned to ash and then placed that same ash on their foreheads, telling them that all that’s left of their past is the cross marking their lives. I don’t deserve that. I am not worthy of administering grace like that. But as I assure people of God’s grace in their lives I am experiencing it myself.

It is so powerful to administer the sacraments, to make the cross on someone’s forehead with their ashen sins, knowing they are seeking forgiveness and knowing that they take this sign as evidence that God forgives and as proof that they are Christian. It is amazing to be able to mark a believer as a Christian in a physical way and have them accept it. It is powerful to dip someone under, knowing that your arms are God’s arms to them as you bring them out of the water and into their new life. I am so humbled by what I am called to do, so thankful.

I have never before experienced so fully how amazing grace is, how awesome faith is, as I did this Holy Week. In a very real sense we experience grace most when we give it to others, and we can sense our own faith when we are sharing in the ancient symbols with others. I know this is usually a pastoral duty, but I really want to share this feeling with others. I want to create experiences where all Christians can take the grace we have all been given, and pass it on to another, while at the same thing receiving it from someone else as well.

When everyone was administering the ashes to another, and receiving them as well, I could see how each person was passing on the assurance of God’s forgiveness to another, and was bowing expectantly as another assures then that their sins are gone as well. I was very moved as I watched the ashes pass through the crowd. But that is such a rare experience for Christian laypeople. It is so rare for us to be able to assure each other of grace in practical, physical ways. None of us are worthy to do that, none of us. But someone has to, and it is one of the most powerful and humbling experiences any of us can ever have. That is what I want to do with all believers in my church, make grace real, make faith physical and universal. .

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Britain and the Death of Christianity

I am a student of history, and the more I study the more I realize that situations in the past can shine a very bright light on what is going on today, and even on what will happen in the future. Take Christianity in Britain for example.

The Roman Empire became Christian, and everyone who was Roman was assumed to be Christian. Fairly soon, it infiltrated the culture on every level. That included the culture of Britain. As the Roman Empire took over Britain, the people naturally assumed that being Christian and being Roman were the same thing.

When the Roman Empire was doing great, people in Britain flocked to the Christian banner, and Christianity reigned in southern England for several hundred years (200 CE at it was already there). It looked like it had really taken hold and would last. But as soon as the Roman Empire started to crumble, so did Christianity. The locals saw the two as identical and so as Roman culture crumbled, so did Christianity. Within a terribly small space of time Christianity was gone from almost all of Britain (post 400 CE with the legions leaving), and would remain missing for about hundreds of years. People had not accepted Christianity, they had accepted Roman culture, and without the Roman culture there was no reason for anyone to be a Christian. Some pockets remained, but the majority was gone.

I think we see the same thing happening in America today. American ideals have been founded on Puritan work practices and Christian ethical systems. It has been expected for 200 years that if you are American you are Christian. To be one is to be the other. Christian leaders have encouraged this by trying to bring about legislative change in the name of Christianity. We also celebrate secular holiday’s more than religious ones (how many times have you celebrated the fourth of July in church, and when was the last time you remembered Pentecost, or ascension Sunday?) and rely on people’s patriotism to bring them into church. We have made Christianity and American culture synonymous.

But now the culture is changing. It is no longer based on the same ethical, political, or economic system as it once was. Postmodernism has changed the very definition of truth in our culture. So what should be the Christian response? Some believers have been trying to reclaim the old culture in order to reclaim the prestige and the power that Christianity had in years past. But if we look at Britain I think we see that is a bad idea.

Christianity is more than a political idea. It is more than an ethical system, and it is more than any one country or culture. That includes America. We do not need to reclaim the lost “glory years” of American Christianity. What we need to do is to make sure that people know Christianity is not American and vice versa. Only if we can show that our God is real no matter what is going on in the world do we have a chance of surviving the cultural storms.

Unfortunately, many Christians are living like the Romans in Britain, and cannot see that there is a difference between their culture, their nation, and their faith. But the more we try and make those two different things the same the more likely it is that Christianity in America will go the way of Christianity in Britain so long ago, and die out as the culture and politics change. And that is not something I am willing to see happen.

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My Daughter and My Finger

Sorry about not posting now, but I became a father last week, a very odd, wonderful, tiring, frustrating, exhilarating feeling. Some of what my little girl does I was told to expect, and some of it completely catches me off guard. Her first day in the world I was holding her on my lap and just went to stroke her face. Instead of rubbing against my finger, or moving away, she rolled into it, grabbed my finger tip in her little mouth and started sucking like mad. I was so surprised I didn’t do anything for a little bit, I just sat there.

I knew babies breast fed, of course, but I had no idea how instinctive their latching and sucking instincts were. I was completely caught off guard. In a moment I got my bearings and tried to pull my finger out of her mouth. It was actually hard to do. She had such a grip on my finger that I was a little worried about hurting her to be honest. I couldn’t easily remove that finger, it really took a bit of effort. I thought that once she understood she wasn’t getting anything from my finger she would let go, but no luck. She didn’t care if she was getting anything from it, she just knew she needed to be sucking on something and was hoping that if she sucked on everything coming her way she would get something from it. I just sat and marveled at how naïve my daughter is. But then I started thinking about my job as pastor and realized that the Church often does the exact same thing. We grab at whatever fad is coming our way, whatever idea has the label “Christian” on it, and hope that it fills our needs.

But most of the time those things don’t really help at all. Or they help for a time, but they don’t feed us in the long haul. But do we get rid of them? Of course not. We just suck harder, trying to get some food from something that simply does not feed us. And so we are sometimes left with service ideas, songs, rituals, and entire ministries in the Church that do not feed us at all, but we’re like my little daughter, still sucking away at my finger, not even knowing if it gives us food or not.

Unlike my daughter, though, we should be able to know what feeds us and what doesn’t, at least after we try it for a while. We need to take a long look at what we do, both as individuals, and as churches, and think about what actually feeds us and what does nothing more than fill our mouths without giving us any spiritual food in return. I can pull out my finger from my baby daughter, but no one except us will stop part of the church that doesn’t feed us. We have to release the fingers in our lives and try and find where God is really giving us food, emphasize that, spend time with those things.

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