Refine Me: Priorities. Destination. Perspective.

A quote I have on a bookmark that someone gave me says:
"Your holy Fire now burns within
And purges every secret sin
My life the bush, Your Life the Flame
That leaves me nevermore the same
A heart like Yours my one desire
Do Your work, Refiner's Fire"
- Jennifer Kennedy Dean [based on Malachi 3:2, The Lord is like a Refiner's Fire]

Vow VI: Service

a generous life

The poet William Wordsworth once wrote,

Small service is true service while it lasts.
Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one:
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.

Small service is true service while it lasts. The smallest effort matters. So I wonder what Christian service looks like.

It looks like generosity. It looks like giving. This God who we are being transformed into the image of so loved the world that he gave. I have time. I have resources. I have gifts and talents. I have been given much. Thus, I have much to give.

In the Abrahamic convenant (Genesis 12), YHWH promises to Abram that will be blessed to be a blessing. As the Red Hot Chili Peppers sang: Give it away, give it away, give it away, now.

One of my favorite illustrations from C.S. Lewis involves a vision about the difference between heaven and hell. He sees a long banquet table filled with the most sumptuous feast. Strangely, none of the guests at the table have elbows. For half of these guests, the situation is tortuous. The most pleasurable foods immaginable are at their fingertips and yet they cannot bring the food to their mouths.

For the other half, the situation is the most joyous party. They have discovered that the secret to enjoying the meal is in serving one another. Each has dismissed the vain attempts of feeding oneself and given themselves completely to feeding each other.

This to me is the picture of Christian community. This is what it means that I am not my own. I, and all that I am and have, is the community's. Even this season in seminary is not for my benefit. Rather it is for the benefit of people of God.

Blessed to be a blessing. We have been given generous gifts beyond measure. We have no excuse to be generous with one another.

Lord, make us a house of service.

Vow V: Work

a productive and creative life

I love the movie Office Space. It makes me laugh. A lot. The tagline for the film is "Work sucks." I've had a number of jobs in my lifetime that make the situations in that movie hit really painfully close to home. I've had close to a dozen jobs, and only one can I look back on and say that I really enjoyed. Most I hated, and a good number I dreaded when I woke up in the morning.

Yet, when I look at my Bible, I get the disturbing feeling that work isn't supposed to be this way.

I look that the creation account and see that we're created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and I wonder what that means. I wonder how many trees have been chopped up to make systematic theology books. Because at this point in the biblical story we don't know any of that stuff about God yet - his trinitarian nature, his loving-kindess, all that "omni" stuff, none of that. All we know about God so far in the story is that he makes stuff and calls it good. So why is that significant?

The second creation account tells us that YHWH put Adam in the garden to work. That tells me that work isn't a result of the fall. Somehow being at work brings me closer to God's original purpose for me. Somehow work draws out the Imago Dei in me. And I see work bleeding over into the way that I worship, and also into the way that I serve my community I live in.

I think this is something bigger than just what I do to pay my bills. Maybe its something to do with the stewardship of my time. I'm still working on this.

What does it look like for us to be a House of Work? How does work fit into our common life together?

Lord make us a house of work.

Learning to dance

Found in my Oden reading this week:

Learning to study God is like learning to dance; it cannot be done merely by reading books. One cannot dance without practice, without allowing the muscles to move and the neural synapses to respond. To learn to dance one must dance, even if badly. Good theology is more than a tome or a string of good sentences. It is a way of dancing, an embodied activity of the human spirit in a community embodying life in Christ (361).

Agree? Disagree? Any thoughts?

Vow IV: Study

a transformed life

Due to our context on the campus of a seminary, this is the easiest of all the vows for me to visualize. Studying for tests, reading books, writing papers - these are all things I associate with study. Yet I find more often than not I don't feel transformed at all by these activities.

How does reading systematic theology transform me? Or memorizing Hebrew flash cards? Or reading about a culture that's been dead for 2,000 years? How does sitting in a lecture for two and a half hours make me more like Jesus? Or locking myself in my room until the paper is finished? Or reading until my eyes lock shut from exhaustion?

Maybe there's something more to study. I'd like to think there is. The author Henry James once wrote, "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!" He was encouraging young novelists to soak up the seemingly mundane details. And I'm left wondering what this might mean to a house full of pastors, teachers and Christian leaders - what it means to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost.

I'd like to think that this Masters of Divinity degree I'm wading through is not just a hoop to jump through - just a formality of education or a religious institutional system. I'd like to think that every paper, every test, every reading assignment is not just an assignment but a challenge to my soul to be more like Jesus.

I'd like to think that I'm studying more than just than what I'm told, and that I'm absorbing all the details around me - that I'm studying my brothers and sisters around me, learning what makes you laugh and cry, what makes you tick, where your story has brought you so far, what YHWH has done for you and how that gives me a more complete of who He is.

I'd like to think that this seminary education teaches me less about what to study but rather how to study once I graduate and move on from this season. If I am here for nothing more than a piece of paper that says I graduated from Asbury Theological Seminary, then I am missing the point. The thing is, I love to study. I love to know stuff and to fill my head with stuff. But if it doesn't change me, if it doesn't make me love God more and make me more like Jesus, than its a waste of my time. If a seminary degree doesn't make me love God more and be more like Jesus, than its a waste of my time.

A life of study is not a life of knowledge, but rather about a life of transformation.

Lord, make us a house of study.

Vow III: Worship

A God-Centered Life

Is there a more talked about word in our pop Christian culture than "worship"?

I have to wonder how much we hamstring the word "worship" in our Christian-ese lexicon with "worship music", "worship leader", "worship service", "worship center", etc. Sadly, at some point our contemporary Christian culture has turned the word "worship" into an adjective, and for some reason it has become equated with music. It's a word that appears exclusively in Christian contexts.

It hasn't always been this way. The word "worship" as translated in our English bibles comes from the Hebrew 'abd. It is a verb, and it means "to work" or "to serve." It is an extremely common word in the Old Testament, occurring in 964 verses. And Yahweh isn't always the object. The noun form of the root means "slave" or "servant".

"Worship ('abd, i.e. serve) YHWH with gladness; come before him with joyful songs." (Psalm 100:2)

"And no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work ('abd) the ground." (Genesis 2:5)

"Even on my servants ('abd, i.e. worshippers), both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days." (Joel 2:29)

"Surely the Sovereign YHWH does nothing without revealing his plan to his servants ('abd, i.e. worshippers) the prophets." (Amos 3:7)

So how does this affect our idea of what worship is?

Certainly, music can be worship. But it very often times isn't, and it definitely is not the only activity in which we worship God. Perhaps I'm idealistic, but I hope that my every breath is worship to God. I hope that I can worship God in all the mundane details of my life - when I brush my teeth, when I say hello to strangers, when I sit down to eat, when I wash dishes, when I'm reading the day's liturgy, when I'm reading a theology textbook, and yes, when I'm sitting among my community of faith on Sunday morning. My so called "quiet time" need not be limited to my nose in my bible.

How can we worship together as one house? I don't think this has to be limited to some song service scheduled for sometime during the week. I think there's something deeper and more meaningful to corporate worship, but I don't have a clear picture of what that might look like.

I just know it has something to do with getting myself out of the center and getting God in that place. I know it has something to do with effort and work and service.

I remember last year visiting a megachurch in Louisville with McAnally and above the doors of the sanctuary as we entered were the huge gold letters "WORSHIP CENTER." And I turned to Jason and said, "If I ever get the say so, I'm putting those words over the doors on the inside so we see those words as we enter the world."

The whole world is my worship center.

Vow II: Community

A shared and stable life.

Man, I wish I could have a nickel for every time I've heard the word "community" since I've been here in Wilmore. That'd take care of my student loans in a hurry. I think I'm getting brainwashed. A couple of weeks ago, my Entertainment Weekly arrived in the SPO with the TV show Lost on the cover. Now, I've never seen the show, but reading about it the first thing to pops into my mind is, "Wow, what a great metaphor for community!"

The same weekend I go to see the film Crash and leave thinking, "Wow, what a great metaphor for community!"

This is what Asbury is doing to me. And I dare not let it become a cliche to me. I spent some time this summer with some friends I knew in college. And I was reminded of that mentality I was exposed to in a different Christian setting that had no concept of community - where it's just about Jesus and me.

One of my favorite movies that impacted me most about the concept of community is About a Boy. In the movie, the character of Will vehemently denies the age-old statement that no man is island. By the end of the story, he still holds that he is an island, but he has also learned that he is an island chain, connected to countless other islands just beneath the surface.

The fact of the matter is we are all connected - all of us on this planet earth, those who profess Jesus as Lord and those who do not yet - in very deep and profound ways, and we have no idea just how deep it goes. I believe it is Jesus who wakes us up to this realization of just how much I need you and we all need each other. We are like Aspen trees that above the surface appear to exist independently of one another, but below the ground are one interconnected, twisted knot of roots. Like the apostle Paul says, "There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all" (Eph 4:4-6).


Living in Christian community is this waking up to see just how enmeshed my life is with yours and yours in mine. And sometimes it may be messy and complicated and inconvenient and a big disruption. But this is the way that God has made us to need one another.

One morning this past week we prayed in the liturgy, Lord, keep us in your love, preserve our community, do not let us become separated from one another.

Lord, let is so be in our house.