The language 1 Peter uses to describe his readers is fraught with tension- sojourners and priests, exiles and royals, not a people and yet now a people. How do this radical transformation occur? How do we see ourselves as the home in which God lives, while we don’t have a home ourselves? How can we proclaim his excellencies as his priests when we long and wait for him? It is only as we see his love for us, the love of him who saw our need and saved us, that we can ever express our praise (1 Peter 2:10). Sorta like this epic story:
Become a Better You
To become the best version of yourself, go on an archaeological dig deep within yourself. Excavate your desires, and express them to the world. This last bit will be the hard part- the world will try to keep you down. Here’s a helpful guide on your way:
But what if this doesn’t work? What if “Excavate and Express” depends on a false set of assumptions? What if we aren’t stable, coherent, calm, individuals? What if we our desires are unstable and paradoxical? What if pretending like they aren’t makes us freaked out and anxious?
What if we need other people? What if pretending we are individuals instead makes us slaves?
If that’s the case, then becoming the best version of yourself is going to be an entirely different process. We will need our identity to be conferred- given to us- confirmed- by somebody who loves us- and conformed to- worked at.
What if worshipping Jesus is the only way to become the best version of yourself (1 Peter 1:13-21)?
Love the Bomb?
Life in exile is full of trials. That’s 1 Peter’s point- though you don’t have to be a Christian to connect with the themes of that letter. In this article in Rolling Stone, Stephen Colbert says that to be human is to learn to love the thing you most wish hadn’t happened. Get the Kleenex ready. (Warning: saucy language.)
A Frictionless Life?
Farming and Philosophy
In an excellent interview in the New York Times, Wendell Berry poses the question: What if our modern desire to live with total freedom, without limits, is the thing that is destroying our culture economically, agriculturally, and environmentally?
A deeper question: what if that desire isn’t just modern?
What if the incarnation of God (and his body throughout time) into a particular place is the only hope?
“We will have to go back to tradition. I am unsure when we began to think of, for instance, the 15th Psalm and Jesus’s law of neighborly love as optional. They are not optional, as I think the Amish example proves, and as proved by present failure.”
What We Sing This Week
All Creatures of Our God and King
Take Us O Lord
Who is Our Problem?
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
New Meeting Space!
We are so grateful to the Whitefield Center (on the corner of Drayton and 37th Street in Midtown) for hosting our meetings as a group for the foreseeable future. Come join us for worship at 5 pm on September 30th, and enjoy a feast in the garden. Childcare provided!
Why Worship?
“What’s my name, what’s my station, oh just tell me what I should do… but I don’t know who to believe”
Once upon a time, the practice of attending worship on a Sunday morning in Savannah was woven into the fabric of the city. Everybody did it. Thats not to say that everybody did it for the same reasons, or believed the same things, or was changed in the same way. But there was no avoiding Sunday morning worship in the South. As a member of the community, it was just what you did. It was an unquestioned part of the culture.
Times have changed. There is no longer such a thing as an unquestioned need for worship- even to those who call themselves Christians. This isn’t because some new evidence has emerged disproving the truth of the Christian Story. And we still long for what we do to fit into something bigger than ourselves, something communal. But our city has changed, grown, become more culturally diverse, reflecting the changes in Western Culture at large. And we as individuals have changed- the same technologies which help connect us with those who share our interests in other places has pulled us out of this place, this community, and from the common cultural practices which connected us to those nearest us. And this has made God seem farther from us.
“There is a God, who is Lord and King over all, who is good and does good to all, and is therefore to be praised and served with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might. ”
In response to this disconnect between God and the practices of our community, the church has tended to respond in one of two ways. Rightly recognizing that, if God is who He says He is, we ought to worship him, we shout that worship is a good end in and of itself, so we as a community ought to pick up worshipping where we left off. Just do it, just because. Or, on the other hand, rightly recognizing that God rules over all of life, we say that worship was never that important after all, that it matters more what you do with the rest of your week.
Both sides are right. And both sides are wrong. At Christ the King, we believe that worship is both an end and a means. It is right and good to worship the God who made heaven and earth, to come into his presence with thanksgiving and songs of praise, as an end in and of itself. AND, worship is the means to meaning- it helps us remember why we are here, who we are, and whose we are. So that Monday-Saturday isn’t despair, and Sunday worship an emotional catharsis, but instead that Sunday worship empowers our worship the rest of the week.
There’s no going back to some supposed golden age of worship in Savannah, and I’m not sure we would want to if we could. But what if our worship at least helped put back together what has been torn apart? Heaven and earth, God and man, Love of God and Love of Neighbor, Sunday night and Monday morning?
“Its hard, but at least I know why I am here.”
More Spiritual than God
““There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.””