What sort of guest are you?

The holidays are upon us, which means food, travel, and family. Some of us are hosts, and some of us are guests. And there is nothing worse than a terrible houseguest: they smoke in your rooms, they threaten to spank your children, and they never leave.

The book of 1 Peter is written to encourage Christians to be a different sort of guest. To be the sort of people who are self-controlled, and seek the good of their hosts- even when the hosts are malicious gossips. The motivation for being this type of guest? That one day we are going home. Or to be more precise, home is coming to us. Sort of like this:

Becoming the People of God

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)?

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?

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“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.”
— Wendell Berry

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”
— Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues

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. ”
— Westminster Confession of Faith 20.1

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.”
— Michael Houellebecq, Submission