A Eulogy for Donna King Bohlcke

Saturday, May 11, 2024 | 10 am

Northway Christian Church | Dallas, Texas

This is the second time I’ve been asked to eulogize my friend Donna King Bohlke. The first time was six years ago. I was just about to retire as the pastor of Northway, and Donna was slipping further and further away. Don wanted to celebrate all that Donna was and all that Donna meant to us while she was still aware enough to appreciate it, and so, we had a tribute lunch for Donna here at the church, and I prepared my first Eulogy for Donna. It was a wonderful day.

A “Eulogy” is literally a “good word.” One of my father’s maxims that got deeply engrained in my thinking and being through repetition was, “If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.” Well, a Eulogy is “saying something nice” about someone who has taken their leave of us. In the book of Ecclesiasticus from the Apocrypha we have the classic eulogy in the Biblical tradition –

¹ Let us now sing the praises of famous people,
    our ancestors in their generations.
² The Lord apportioned to them great glory…

⁷  …These were honoured in their generations,
    and were the pride of their times.
⁸ Some of them have left behind a name,
    so that others declare their praise.
⁹ But of others there is no memory;…
¹⁰ But these also were godly people,
    whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten;…
¹⁴  …their name lives on generation after generation.

Last Saturday afternoon as I visited with Don and Donna’s daughters about the “good word” they wanted to hear from me about Donna today, I was given something that one of Donna’s grandchildren wrote, he called it his “eulogical (a new word he just made up) thoughts –

“You could always count on Granny to make a family gathering a true event. The eclectic food spread, the games, and making sure everyone was taken care of. She’s the most technologically savvy grandmother I knew. She had a long fulfilling life, not without heartache, but showed her love for her family and friends in so many ways.”

And we know the truth of those “eulogical” words about Donna, don’t we?

Max Beerbohm (1872–1956), the 20^th century English critic and essayist, famously observed that – “Mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.” “A guest is someone who is invulnerable, who is waited upon and showered with attention.” Bruce Larson explained. “A host is someone who puts her guests at ease and afforms their worth in a thousand different ways and makes herself vulnerable to them, giving up her privacy and providing food and lodging.” And then Bruce Larson added, “It seems to me that Jesus Christ, who is ‘the Host’ in all pf life, is calling those who believe in Him to become hosts in every situation; to become those who can be vulnerable, put other people at ease, love them, listen to them, and affirm them.”

The “eulogical” story Don told me he really needed to hear this morning was about the time when he and Donna were living at Traditions, and she was still lucid. One morning she looked over at Don at the breakfast table and asked – “So, what are we going to do today that will make a difference in somebody’s life?” That’s how “hosts” think. That’s what “hosts” do. And Donna was a “host.”

Donna and I painted icons together. You will see some of her icons on display here today. Icons are sometimes called theology in line and color, and that’s how I came to them. It was my faith seeking understanding that led me into the world of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and you can’t sojourn in that world for very long before you start bumping into icons. I came to icons by way of theology and church history. Donna came to icons by way of creativity, beauty, and generosity. She created a community through our icon painting workshops here at the church. In our icon partnership, I was the head and Donna was the heart. She was a “host.”

It’s said that the first icon an iconographer is supposed to paint is one of the Transfiguration, the way that Christ became light on a mountaintop in Galilee before His Passion. The whole point of icons is to bear witness to the way the Word who was with God, who was God, became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1;14). They are windows into the mystery of how the divine and the human cohere in Christ, and they foreshadow the way that we who bear the image of the earthy shall also bear the image of the heavenly (I Corinthians 15:49).

Iconographers paint an icon of the Transfiguration first because every icon they will ever paint will be an affirmation of the transfiguration, of the way that we are being changed into the likeness of Christ from one degree of glory to another through beholding the glory of God in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:6).

At one of our icon painting workshops here at the church, Peter Pearson, our teacher and friend, made an off-handed comment one day about how Orthodox Christians believe that when they are painting the icon of a saint that what they are really painting is an icon of Christ. It’s Christ being formed in us that you are supposed to see in the icon of a saint. Saints are “the many faces of Christ” we see, and since Biblically anyone who names Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior is a “saint,” we are supposed to be able to see Him in us and through us. As a hymn we sing on Pentecost each year just about this time puts it – “Fill with Thy Spirit till all shall see, Christ only, always living in me.”

In one of his poems, Tagore (1861 -1941), the Bengali author, said of someone in his life – “You brought the harp into my house and you brought the lamp…(and) after you had taken your leave I found God’s footprints on my floor.” In Donna’s welcome I experienced Christ’s welcome. In Donna’s care and concern I experienced Christ’s care and concern. In Donna’s generosity I experienced Christ’s abundance. And in the way Donna walked in beauty she opened my eyes and heart to the beauty of Christ. When I look, everywhere Donna was in my life, I see the footprints of Christ. I painted icons of Christ with Donna, but more important than that was the way that Donna was an icon of Christ for me.

Lord God, we’ve gathered here this morning as Donna’s family and friends to remember her life, to thank-you for the gift that she has been to us, and to comfort and encourage one other in this time of her passing. We rejoice that because Jesus Christ, your Son, our Savior, is the resurrection and the life, that even though Donna has died, yet she lives together with everyone who has ever believed in you. Give us the faith to see in death the gate to eternal life, and the kind of love that can sustain us to the end of our days and that will see us through death to the dawn the new beginning that Donna has now entered, we pray in Christ’s name and according to your promise. Amen.

“How to Get More Out of Communion”

Christian Men’s Fellowship Breakfast | Saturday, May 4, 2024

First Christian Church, Garland, Texas | Dr. Douglas Skinner

This is a Communion Token…

Most denominations begin with a flash of spiritual insight. Something that’s gotten lost or been neglected by the larger church gets discovered by a person or a group of people in the church, and as this rediscovered practice or idea becomes explosively real for them, they turn to the larger church, asking them to make room for it in their life. When these pleas go unheeded, these people separate themselves from the larger church to begin a new expression of the church, one that more prominently features the idea or the practice that they’ve recovered. What they’ve found matters enough for them to say – “We are no longer that — from now on we are this…”

Most denominations can point to the moment of spiritual courage when this happens, when their founders acted on their convictions, even though doing so immediately put them at odds with the church to which they had previously belonged.

• This is the story of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the Cathedral in Wittenberg on the errors of the church in which he himself was a priest.

• This is the story of Menno Simons rebaptizing people upon their public profession of personal faith as an act of spiritual defiance to the State Church which regarded anyone born within its borders to be members.

• This is the story of John Wesley who was excluded from preaching the Gospel from the pulpits of the Church of England of which he was a minister, and going outside to preach the Gospel from the front doorsteps of those same churches, and in the village square, and out in the middle of open fields.

• This is the story of William Seymour, a poor African American preacher, who conducted a meeting at a storefront church in Los Angeles at the turn of the last century, and midwifed the birth of the modern Pentecostal Movement – the most vibrant expression of Christianity in the world today – as the Spirit of God drew people from every race and place, filled them with power, united them with purpose, and sent them out with a message of promise and a personal experience of Christ’s indwelling presence.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) began with one of these flashes of spiritual insight and moments of spiritual courage as well, and it all had to do with this (the Communion Token).

Our Scottish Presbyterian Roots

On the family tree of churches, we are a shoot off the branch of Scottish Presbyterianism. That “X” shaped cross on the red Communion Chalice that is our denominational symbol, that’s a St. Andrew’s Cross. If you hear – “St. Andrews” – and think golf, then you’ve got it! “St. Andrews” is the oldest golf course in the world, and where is it? It’s in Scotland, in the very place where legend says that St. Andrew the Apostle preached the Gospel and planted a Church. This is why St. Andrew is the Patron Saint of Scotland.

Another tradition about St. Andrew is that he didn’t consider himself worthy to die on the same kind of cross that Jesus died on, and so just like his brother Peter who was crucified upside down, when it was time for Andrew to die for his faith, he asked to be crucified on an “X” shaped cross. That “X” shaped cross is on the national flag of Scotland (it’s on the national flag of Great Britan for that matter), and it’s part of our denominational symbol as well because we come out of Scottish Presbyterianism, and communion tokens were part of the settled practice of that church.

Communion Tokens

You see, the only way you could get a seat at the communion table in a Scottish Presbyterian church back in the day was by having one of these (a communion token), and the only way you could get one of these (a communion token) was by convincing somebody like me, an ordained minister, that you were “worthy” of a seat.  Now, as awful as that sounds to our ears, understand, their motive was good. It truly was.

In that same passage we quote every Sunday morning at the Lord’s Table about how on the night when He was betrayed, our Lord took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it, and how after supper He took a cup and said that it was the new covenant in His blood (I Corinthians 11:23-26), well, right after saying all that, Paul went on to warn his readers about eating the bread and drinking the cup in an “unworthy” manner and thereby becoming guilty of “profaning the body and blood of the Lord” (11:27), eating and drinking it to their condemnation (11:29-32).

“This is why many of you are weak and sick,” Paul told the Corinthian Christians, “and (it’s) why some have you have died” (11:30). I think this is a description of their spiritual rather than their physical condition. I think Paul was saying that some of them were spiritually weak, and spiritually sick, and spiritually dying, and the reason why was their inattentiveness to and  carelessness with the things of God, something that was evident in the way that they were approaching the Lord’s Supper. They were trifling with spiritual things. They were taking for granted God’s grace. They were presuming upon His kindness. They were profaning the body and blood of the Lord.  So, the Scottish Presbyterian Church “fenced” the Lord’s Table. They erected barriers and then policed the gates to ensure that only those people who were spiritually prepared could sit at the Table and commune, and they would have argued that it was for people’s own good that they did this.

Thomas Campbell (1763 – 1854)

Thomas Campbell (1763 – 1854) was a Scottish Presbyterian minister who served a congregation in Ireland. He had grown weary of the squabbling in his church over things that he thought were matters of private interpretation, things best left to the freedom of each person’s conscience. He was troubled by having to exclude people from the Lord’s Table because they had convictions that were at slight variance with the official stances of the church, often on matters that the Bible never addresses. Grieved by the divisions in his church, Thomas Campbell resigned his ministry position, and immigrated to America where he hoped that new ways would be more welcomed in the new world.

When he arrived in Philadelphia in 1807, it just so happened that the American version of his Scottish Presbyterian Church was meeting in session, and so he presented himself to them, was immediately endorsed as a minister, and was given a circuit of churches to serve in the Alleghany River Valley just outside of Pittsburgh. His primary job there was to go from church to church to celebrate Communion with them.

Since in Scottish Presbyterianism only an ordained minister could preside at the Lord’s Table, there were lots of Scottish Presbyterians in remote places on the American frontier who rarely got Communion. And so, it was Thomas Campbell’s job to ride into those out-of-the-way villages to preach, and teach, and pray with the church members there for several days to get them ready for a Communion service, all the while taking careful note of who showed up at his meetings, and assessing the state of their souls.

But because ordained ministers were far and few between in those isolated areas, other kinds of Presbyterians would invariably show up at his meetings as well. They were fellow Presbyterians who read the same Bible in the same way that Thomas Campbell did. They recited the same creed and adhered to the same Confessions as Thomas Campbell did, but because they had taken positions on some secondary matters that were at variance with the positions that Thomas Campbell’s branch of Presbyterianism had taken, he was prohibited from sharing Communion with them. “No Communion token for you!”

In one of these remote areas, during one of those Communion weeks, in a moment of real spiritual courage that was the result of, if not a flash of spiritual insight, then at least a slow burning spiritual realization, Thomas Campbell put the Communion tokens away and he opened the Lord’s Supper to any believer there who in their hearts felt spiritually prepared to meet with their Lord at His Table, who had heard Him inwardly say, “Behold I stand at the door and knock, if you open the door I will come into you, and sit with you, and sup with you” (Revelation 3:20). It wasn’t long after this that Thomas Campbell was charged with heresy by his church, tried, convicted, and stripped of his ministerial credentials. But by then, it really didn’t matter to him. He’d moved on to a new place spiritually.

Declaration and Address (1809)

This is a facsimile copy of Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” that was givento the delegates of the Centennial celebration of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) held in Pittsburgh back in 1909. It’s a real treasure. But it’s just for show. This is my working copy of this same document (a tattered book held together with a clip). This (my old, tattered copy) is what got me here. You see, I wasn’t born into this church. Just like that bumper sticker you see that says, “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here just as quickly as I could,” I made my way to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in high school.

At its heart, Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” is a set of principles, which when taken seriously, change the way we think as Christians and operate as a church. Four of them are at the very heart of “why we do what we do the way we do it” –

The church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.

Division among Christians is a horrid evil, fraught with many evils.

It’s the neglect of what the New Testament actually says and the acceptance of human opinions as our authority on matters of faith and practice that has caused every division that has ever plagued the church.

While we are all free to have our own opinions and interpretations, nothing should be made a requirement on the church’s faith and practice that is not as old as the New Testament.

You can’t say things like that, believe them, and still have things like this (Communion Token).

Alexander Campbell (1788 –1866)

It was based on the principles of Thomas Campbell’s “Declaration and Address” that the weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper became the most characteristic feature of our life together as a church. Even people who know nothing else about us can usually tell you that in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) we celebrate the Lord’s Supper every Sunday. Alexander Campbell (1788 –1866), Thomas Campbell’s firstborn son and his successor to the leadership of the Movement that his “Declaration and Address” launched, said that in the future, if we were to be “conspicuous” for anything as a church, that it be for the attention we give to the Bible and to its ordinances. Alexander Campbell called the Lord’s Supper a Gospel ordinance that’s “pregnant” with the grace of God, and he said that it was “silly” to think that somebody could be spiritually vital apart from their personal and habitual participation in the Lord’s Supper.

Not Magic

But this doesn’t just happen.

The Lord’s Supper isn’t magic.

You can’t just show up on a Sunday morning, take a bite of bread, have a sip of wine, and think that it’s going to be of any benefit to you spiritually. In that same passage where we get the words of institution that we say at the Lord’s Table every Sunday morning, Paul told the Corinthians that even though they were going through the motions of a communion service when they got together, that it was “not for the better but for the worse” (I Corinthians 11:17). He told them – “When you meet together, it is not the Lord’s Supper that you eat” (I Corinthians 11:20). This was the concern that our Scottish Presbyterian forebears tried to address with these (the Communion Token), and our Founders were not indifferent to this concern, they just weren’t convinced that this (the Communion Token) was the best way to address that concern, after all, hadn’t Jesus told us to “judge not, lest we be judged,” and that rather than worrying about the speck that’s in your brother’s eye, we should rather be attending to the log that’s in our own (Matthew 7:1-5)? And in Romans 14, hadn’t Paul specifically asked – “Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another?” – explaining, “It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Master is able to make him stand… [so] let us no more pass judgment on one another…” (14:4;10).

The way Paul told the Corinthians to address his concern for their “worthy” participation in the Lord’s Supper was not for them to stand in judgment on one another, but rather for each one of them to carefully examine themselves (I Corinthians 11:28), to “see whether they were holding to our faith, …to see if Christ was (truly) in them” (2 Corinthians 11:5).  This isn’t something that anybody else can do for you. There’s nobody with a Communion token out there somewhere who can truly know what’s going on inside you. This is only something we can do for ourselves, as Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformer, famously said – nobody else can do your believing for you, or your living for you, or your dying for you. So, “Let a man examine himself,” Paul told the Corinthians, “and so eat the bread and drink the cup” (I Corinthians 11:27). But, how do we do this? Where do we begin? How do we start?

Robert Milligan (1814-1875)

Right after Thomas and Alexander Campbell began the spiritual movement on the American frontier that put the Lord’s Supper at the very center of its life and mission, a Lord’s Supper to which everyone was invited and at which everyone would be welcomed, along came another early leader of our Movement, a man named Robert Milligan (1814-1875), who took the big ideas that the Campbells said about things like the Lord’s Supper, and he made them practical. There was a time that every minister in our spiritual tradition was taught from Robert Milligan’s book “The Scheme of Redemption.”  Today it’s hardly known, and in my mind, that’s telling. We’re out of touch with the spiritual discipline that our spiritual tradition said was the key to the Lord’s Supper having the kind of importance and making the sort of impact on us that it promises to.

The Campbells said that the Lord’s Supper really matters, and then Robert Milligan came along right behind them and said that there is something you have to do if you expect the Lord’s Supper to really matter to you the next time you take it.  After explaining that the bread and wine of Communion are “spiritual nourishment” for the soul in the same way that food and drink are physical nourishment to the body, and warning that any outward religious practice can become an empty, meaningless gesture if it is approached without prayer and care, Robert Milligan got specific about we need to do if the Lord’s Supper is to be a means of grace for us, a “koinonia,” a participation, a fellowship, a  sharing in the Body and Blood of Christ rather than just a bite of bread and a sip of juice.

“The means ordained by God to prevent the growth and prevalence of formalism in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, is the practice of self-examination. ‘Let a man examine himself; and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup’ (I Corinthians 11:28).  If this were properly attended to by all who profess to be followers of the Lord Jesus… what an interesting occasion every Communion [service] would be… but how few, alas, how very few, have ever learned the art and mystery of self-examination!”

For the Lord’s Supper to be the kind of spiritual nutrition that our souls require to thrive, Robert Milligan insisted that we come to the Lord’s Table “prepared,” and to do this properly, he gave four specific instructions. These are the “nuts and bolts” of the spiritual discipline of self-examination that make taking Communion such a powerful means of grace.

The First Instruction | “In the light of God’s word…”

The first instruction was that “the self-examination (before Communion) should be conducted faithfully and honestly in the light of God’s word.” This is an old fashion plumb line. When building a wall and you want it to be vertical, this and gravity will help you know if it is. In Amos 7:7-8 the prophet saw the Lord standing beside a wall with a plumb line in his hand, and the Lord told Amos, “Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people.” The Church, right from the beginning, viewed the Ten Commandments as that plumb line God uses to take our moral and spiritual measure.

I grew up in a church that read the Ten Commandments out loud to us every Sunday morning. It was the first thing we did un worship each week. We would open with a prayer about how we were coming into God’s presence with our hearts open wide, with all of our desires known, with no hidden secrets, and we would ask God cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit so that we might love God perfectly and worship God worthily. Just as soon as we prayed these words each week, our minister would read the Ten Commandments to us, and at the end of each Commandment, we would say, “Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.”

Each commandment took our measure, and we always came up short. That’s what the “have mercy upon us” was about. But we wanted to do better, to be better, and so we also always prayed, “incline our hearts to keep this law.” We were in church each week to tell God that we were sorry for the ways that we had done things that week that He told us not to do, and for the way that we had not always or fully done the things that He had told us to do. But we were also in church each week to tell God that it was our intention to lead a different kind of life in the coming week following His commandments and walking in His ways.

For the Lord’s Supper to be the feast of forgiveness and the means of grace that will nourish our souls to walk in newness of life, we need to come to it each week with the Word of God like a two-edged sword, cutting us to the heart, laying open our thoughts and making our desires known (Hebrews 4:11-13). As Jesus said, it’s the sick who need a doctor (Luke 5:31-32). It’s only when we know that we’re wounded that we seek to be healed. This is why Robert Milligan’s first instruction was to conduct a faithful and honest examination of oneself “in the light of God’s Word” before coming to the Lord’s Table.

The Second Instruction | “Searching our Hearts”

The second instruction that Robert Milligan gave us was that our “self-examination before taking Communion should be conducted with prayer: the prayer that God would himself search our hearts, and that he would help us to search them honestly, faithfully, and thoroughly; that he would purify them. And that he would enable us to forsake every false and wicked way.”

Dan Snow is an artisan who builds walls, terraces and structures out of dry stone.  His books are wonderful reads, not just for their descriptions of his amazing work, but for the spiritual wisdom that he has discovered through the years of eating his bread by the sweat of his brow with his hands in the ground.  For instance, he begins one of his essays about building a series of retaining walls at a farm in Vermont by explaining that, “Construction begins with one stone… until there is one in place, there is nothing to inspire the selection of another… every choice is a response to the choices that have come before it.”  He’s talking about working with stones.  As people of Biblical faith, we work with stories, and the very same truth applies.

The way our Bibles are structured, the stories we read at the very beginning of the book of Genesis “set the table” for everything that follows. We are created in God’s image.  Like reflections in a mirror, we are designed to correspond to Him.  We are built for a relationship with Him. I take the story in Genesis 3 of God coming in the cool of the day to walk and talk with Adam and Eve in the Garden as the Bible’s defining picture of what our relationship with God is supposed to look like.  We are built for that kind of intimacy and immediacy with God. Of course, in Gensis 3, right after their tangle with the serpent, when God showed up for his evening stroll with Adam and Eve, they hid from His presence, prompting Him to ask two questions: “Where are you?” (3:9) and “What have you done?” (3:13).  

We don’t get the tone of words from a printed text. So, some interpreters read these two questions in Genesis 3 as the “mad” words of a deeply offended God. I tend to read them instead as the “sad” words of a brokenhearted God. It’s the two questions that God asks in Ezekiel 18:23 – “Do you think that I take any pleasure in the judgment of sinners?” and “Do you not know that I would prefer sinners to turn from their ways and live?” – that help me hear God’s questions in Genesis 3 as more anguished than angry.

In his little book “Our Faith” (1954), the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner (1889 – 1966) gave voice to the what he thought was the toe of God’s questions – “As children lost in a woods, are fearful of the sinister darkness — and then, suddenly, hearing a sound from the somber blackness, a familiar voice, a loving, seeking, helping voice, their mother’s voice — so prayer is our reply to the voice from the Word of God in Jesus Christ which suddenly cries out to us in the mysterious, dark universe. It is the Father calling us out of the world’s darkness. He calls us, seeks us, wants to bring us to Himself. ‘Where are you, my child?’ Our prayers mean ‘Here I am. Father. I was afraid until you called. Since you have spoken, I am afraid no longer. Come, I am waiting for you, take me, lead me by the hand through the dark terrifying world.’”

When Robert Milligan tells us that our self-examination before Communion should be “conducted with prayer: prayer that God would himself search our hearts,” it makes a big difference whether we think that God is mad at us and is just gathering more evidence to condemn us, or if we think that what we’ve done and who we’ve become makes God very sad, and that by searching our hearts, God is looking for ways to repair what’s gone wrong and to restore what’s gotten lost.

In the healing of memories, they tell you to take the hand of Christ and to go back into your painful past with Him in tow, to show Him just exactly what was said and done that wounded you, so that He can speak peace to the hidden storms that rage inside you and to apply grace to the sources of your life’s deepest hurts, and when we ask God to search our hearts in the process of self-examination before Communion, we are, in the same way, not looking to be further shamed and condemned, but rather to be healed and helped, to be restored and repaired.

The Third Instruction | Fasting

The third instruction that Robert Milligan gave us was that our “self-examination before taking Communion should be accompanied with fasting. We’re more accustomed to feasting aren’t we? Somebody once said that in a thousand years when the archeologists dig up our churches and find the remains of church kitchens with their stainless-steel appliances and steam tables, they will wonder about what kind of strange rituals we Christians were performed there! 

This gathering here this morning was built around a meal. It’s a men’s “breakfast.” I’m not sure that as many of us would be here this morning if it had been promoted as a men’s “fast.” That doesn’t even make sense to us. But it did to Christ. When He was criticized by the Pharisees because His disciples didn’t fast like the disciples of John the Baptist did, Jesus explained – “Can the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast. But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days” (Matthew 9:15; Mark 2:19-20; Luke 5:34-35). Jesus expected us to fast.

Fasting is a way of bringing focus. We choose not to do some things so that we can give our full attention to other things. When our hands are full, we can’t pick something else up. We’ve got to put some things down before we can pick something else up. If you’d stopped by Whataburger for a bag of egg and sausage burritos and eaten them in the car on your way over here this morning, my guess is that you wouldn’t have filled your plates quite as full as you did. William Berault described it well when he wrote –

“A cup must be empty before it can be filled.

If it is already full, it can’t be filled again except emptying it out.

In order to fill anything there must be a hollowed-out space.

Otherwise it can’t receive.

This is especially true of God’s word.

In order to receive it, we must be hollowed out.

We must be capable of receiving it,

emptied of the false self and its endless demands.

When Christ came, there was no room in the inn.

It was full. The inn is a symbol of the heart.

God’s word, Christ, can take root only in a hollow.”

Fasting during times of self-examination before Communion clears the field of distractions so that we can give our full attention to where we are in our relationship with God. It’s a way of saying to God nothing matters more to me than you, and because we don’t live by bread alone, fasting is a way of saying to God, I don’t desire anything more than you.

The Fourth Instruction | The “Sanctification of Time”

The final instruction that Robert Milligan gave us was that our self-examination before taking Communion should be accompanied with what he called the “sanctification of time.” Just as the fourth commandment told our Jewish mothers and fathers to “keep holy the Sabbath day” (Saturday – the last day of the week when God rested at the end of creation), so as Christians we keep holy the Lord’s Day (Sunday – the day when Christ was raised from the dead). In the book of Acts we see the first Christians meeting on the first day of the week to break bread (and bless the cup) in remembrance of Christ (Acts 20:7), and the book of Revelation opens with John “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day” (1:9).

I grew up in Southern California. I knew nothing about “blue laws” growing up. It was when my wife and I got to Texas for seminary in January of 1977 that I had my first encounter with one. We were at a grocery store in Ft. Worth on a Sunday afternoon buying some groceries and a can opener. The clerk told us that we could buy our cans of corn, beans, and soup, but that he couldn’t sell us the can opener! When we looked confused, he told us that it was against the law!

At my student church in Melissa, we were invited home for lunch with some church members one Sunday. I could feel some tension building after the table had been cleared. Finally, after some hemming and hawing, the man of the house cleared his throat and said, “Preacher, I’ve got a question for you.” I braced myself for a question about the Trinity, or maybe the substitutionary theory of the atonement, or about women in church leadership. But no, what he wanted to know was what I thought about playing dominos on Sunday afternoons. I told him that I had never played a game of dominos in my life – a fact which troubled him greatly – but that if I did, then Sunday afternoons would be a fine time for a game. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together as his wife produced a box of dominos, and so began a never phase of my education for ministry.

The “sanctification of time” – keeping “holy” a day for God – is a way of taking God seriously. In practice, its restrictions can be silly, petty, and oppressive, but its intent is good.  You can tell me that Jesus Christ is the Lord of your life, and that church is a high priority, for you. But it’s by looking at your checkbook and day planner that I will see if you really mean it. When something matters to us, we give it our undivided attention.  That’s all that the “sanctification of time” is about. It’s about creating space and clearing the decks for God. Thomas Merton said that he became a monk not because he wanted to find God, but rather because he wanted God to find him, and he knew that his life was so cluttered and crowded, that it would only by stepping into the silence and solitude of a monastery that he would find the stillness where he could be found.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine who does youth ministry sent me a picture of a youth gathering at his church. At his feet on the platform from which he spoke were the cell phones of all the students who were there. He told me that when he told them that they were going to become still to know God, he said that they spontaneously came forward one by one and laid their cell phones at the altar as their way of telling God that they were serious about what was going on there, that they were there to listen for what God wanted to say to them, and that no text or phone call was going to get in the way of that. My friend told me that this was the turning point of his ministry with them. This was when they finally got serious about knowing God and making God known. He couldn’t legislate it. No sign on the wall would about turning off their cell phones would have accomplished it. He couldn’t scold or shame them into doing it. It had to be a response of the hunger and thirst for God they felt in their hearts, and this is what Robert Milligan was talking about in his call for the “sanctification of time” as part of the way that we prepare ourselves for the encounter with God in Christ that the Lord’s Supper promises.

Conclusion

The whole point of the spiritual discipline of self-examination before Communion is not to establish our righteousness, but to diagnose our need. The Lord’s Table is not like a ride at Six Flags with a sign out front that says you must be this tall to get on. If our process of self-examination before Communion leaves like the Pharisee Jesus talked about who went up to the Temple to pray and who “stood and prayed this with himself – ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector, I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all I get’” – then we are doing it all wrong! Where it’s supposed to bring us is to our knees where just like the Publican in the story Jesus told would not even “lift his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner’” (Luke 18:9-14). It’s the stanza of an old Gospel hymn that best describes where our self-examination before Communion is supposed to bring us –

“Nothing in my hand I bring,
Simply to Thy cross I cling;
Naked, come to Thee for dress;
Helpless, look to Thee for grace;
Foul, I to the fountain fly;
Wash me, Savior, or I die.”

John Hunter, a 19^th century English Congregational minister, wrote one of the most widely used worship books for the churches of his day. Among its resources is an invitation to the Lord’s Table that I believe strikes exactly the “right” in tone and content –

“Come to this sacred Table,

not because you must,

but because you may:

come to testify not that you are righteous,

but that you sincerely love our Lord Jesus Christ,

and desire to be His true disciples.

Come, not because you’re strong,

but because you’re weak;

Not because you have any claim on Heaven’s rewards,

but because in your frailty and sin you stand

in constant need of Heaven’s mercy and help.”

The right inward disposition to have for a “worthy” participation in the Lord’s Supper is to come –

“Out of our bondage, sorrow and night…
Into Christ’s freedom, gladness, and light…
Out of our sickness, into His health,
Out of our want and into His wealth,
Out of our sin and into Christ’s self…                                                                                                           

Out of our shameful failure and loss…
Jesus, I come to Thee.”

I can’t do this for you, and you can’t do this for me. There’s nowhere to go for a Communion Token that will guarantee you an encounter with the living Christ or automatically provide you with an experience of saving grace. In that story Jesus told about the two men who went up to the Temple to be with God, only one of them went home in right relation with God, and that was the one who prayed: “Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

Our weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper as a church is the Gospel moment when –

“Upon the cross of Jesus our eyes at times can see
The very dying form of One Who suffered there for us…”

And where –

“…from our stricken hearts with tears two wonders we confess;
The wonders of redeeming love and our unworthiness.”

“Dawdling Beside an Empty Tomb” | Acts 1:8-14

It was 1966. I was an acolyte – an “altar boy” – at my family’s Episcopal Church in Southern California. It was Holy Week. There were lots of services, and we’d just finished the biggest one of them all, Easter Sunday morning worship with all the smells and bells. It was a grand production, even for a small church like ours. We were back in the Sacristy – the room where we robed and kept all the things that worship in a church like that like requires – and as our priest struggled to get himself out of his vestments, I heard him mutter under his breath – “Thank God that’s over!”

Having run the gauntlet of Holy Week services myself as a local church minister for some 50 years (4 of them right here with you), I understand what he meant. He was tired. He just wanted to go home. Eat some chocolate. Have a martini. Get a good night’s sleep. The Church Year is a marathon that ministers run from Advent at the end of November to Easter Sunday in the Spring, and if they are doing their jobs right, then they will stagger across the finish line come Easter Sunday, and collapse exhausted. They’re done, I get it, I really do. But here’s the problem – Biblically, Easter isn’t the finish line. The Gospel story wasn’t over when Jesus got up on the third day. There was still more to come!  He still had things to do!

2 weeks from today it will be Pentecost Sunday, and in the Gospel scheme of things, Pentecost is what Jesus did next. Spiritually, Pentecost is a high holy day on par with Christmas and Easter. In fact, it’s Pentecost that makes Christmas and Easter more than just a recital of ancient history. As an Eastern Orthodox Bishop told a meeting of the World Council of Churches back in 1968 – “Without the Holy Spirit: God is far away, Christ stays in the past, the Gospel is a dead letter, and the Church is just (another human) organization… But with the Holy Spirit: God is with us, in us, the Risen Christ is present, the Gospel is the power of life, and the Church is a fellowship with the Living God.”

At the beginning of the Gospel of John we’re told that Jesus Christ came to do two things. He came as the Lamb of God to “take away the sins of the world” (John 1:29). That’s what we remember and celebrate in the worship of Holy Week. But we’re also told at the beginning of John that Jesus Christ came “to baptize us with the Holy Spirit” (John 1:33), and this is what the church will remember and celebrate on Pentecost Sunday.

It’s “inconceivable,” E. Stanley Jones once said, that God would “lay before us the amazing charter of a new life” in Jesus Christ, and then fail to give us the one thing that makes it all possible, namely the indwelling and empowering presence of the Holy Spirit. But this is exactly what happens when we act as if Easter is the end of the story. When we dawdle beside the empty tomb and don’t follow the Risen Christ to where He goes next, or pay attention to what He does next, then our Christianity is going to be unnecessarily and unfortunately truncated.

H. Wheeler Robinson (1872 – 1945), an English Baptist preacher who taught Old Testament at Oxford University throughout the first half of the 20^th century. In 1913, during a very serious illness, Dr. Robinson’s faith failed him. The truths of Christianity that he had preached to others failed to provide him with the peace, strength, and hope  he so desperately needed in his hour of greatest need. Lying in his sickbed, Dr. Robinson said that his faith was like a great big balloon that was hovering above him just beyond his reach, and while a cord trailed down from that balloon, he didn’t have the strength to grab hold of it.

Well, Dr. Robinson eventually got better, and when he was finally back on his feet, he devoted himself to figuring out what had gone wrong. Why had his faith failed him when he desperately needed what faith promises, and his 1928 book – “The Christian Experience of the Holy Spirit” – was his answer. From careful research and prayerful soul searching, Dr. Robinson concluded that while he’d held to the form of religion, he’d had no real experience of its power, and the reason why was because he’d neglected what the New Testament says about the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

This is what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit takes what God in Jesus Christ did for us 2000 years ago and applies it to our hearts now. But when we get to Easter and think that’s all there is, we wind up in the same troubling place where Dr. Robinson found himself, with a faith that while true enough, isn’t real in our lived experience. It’s theoretical. Oh, we “believe” in the Holy Spirit, but we don’t “know” the Holy Spirit. It’s been my experience that we feel this absence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and in the life of the church, in three ways. First, we feel it in our poor sense of assurance. Second, we feel it in the slow pace of our personal transformation. And third, we feel it in our lack of urgency to get on with the work that the Risen Christ has left for us to do.

Assurance is that inner sense that we truly belong to God. The New Testament tells us that when we first believe, the Holy Spirit indwells us and begins to bear an inner witness that we really do belong to Him (Galatians 4:6; Romans 8:15-17). This is not “head knowledge,” a matter of having some information, but “heart knowledge,” a matter of knowing that something is true in the depths of our being.

Thomas Goodwin, an English Puritan theologian and preacher from the 17^th century, described it as a father and his son walking down a country road together. As they walk, that boy knows that his father loves him. This is not in doubt. But then, out of nowhere, that father drops to his knees, gathers his boy up into his arms, smothers him with kisses, and tells him that he loves him. Then, that father stands up and continues to walk down the road beside his son. Now, that boy knew that his father loved him before this display of affection, but now he feels it in his bones. That’s what assurance is, and that’s what the Holy Spirit does. The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and when we don’t have it, it usually means that we’re neglecting the Holy Spirit. The slow pace of our moral and spiritual transformation is another sign of a neglect of the Holy Spirit.

God loves us just the way we are, but God loves us way too much to leave us like that. Once we’ve become Christians, there begins a lifelong process of being a Christian. The decision of faith we ask people to make as a church involves a double commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. When we say that “Jesus Christ is our Savior,” what we’re saying is that we have given Him our sins. We’re looking to Christ for forgiveness and for some peace of heart and mind. And when we say that “Jesus Christ is our Lord,” what we’re saying is that we are giving Him our lives. We’re inviting Him in to begin that lifelong work of transforming us into His image and changing us bit by bit and step by step into His likeness. The failure to grow, or for this process of moral and spiritual transformation to slow or even stall, is a result of our neglect of the Holy Spirit, and so is the reluctance of a church to get on with her mission.

One of the first things that Pope Francis said right after he became the leader of the Catholic Church back in 2013 was that when the Holy Spirit shows up the church is going to be pushed outward and onward, and that the church wasn’t going to like it one little bit! “The Holy Spirit annoys us,” the Pope said, and that’s because the Holy Spirit is just so “pushy.” We tend to associate the Holy Spirit with warm fuzzy feelings, but the Holy Spirit agitates us too.

In our Scripture reading this morning from the first chapter of the book of Acts, the Risen Christ told His disciples right before the day of Pentecost that they would receive “power” when the Holy Spirit came upon them, and that they would then become His witnesses, beginning in Jerusalem, expanding outwards to Judea, to Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). These ever-widening circles of influence and impact are the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit pushes the church past its current walls to those who are standing just outside them so that they too might be included. The Holy Spirit makes mission happen, and when it isn’t happening, well, you can be pretty sure that it’s because the Holy Spirit is being resisted, grieved, or even quenched by the church.

It’s the awareness of “something missing” felt in our lack of assurance, in the slow pace of our moral and spiritual transformation, and in the inertia of the church in her mission, that prepares us for the “something more” that the experience of the fullness of the Holy Spirit brings into our lives. It’s when we hunger and thirst for the reality of the things that we say we believe are true that we start to ask, and knock, and seek, and that’s when Jesus said that the fullness of the Holy Spirit will be given to us (Luke 11:13). In our Scripture reading this morning, right before taking His leave of the disciples, the Risen Christ sent them to their knees. “They returned to Jerusalem,” Luke tells us, “went to the upper room, …and with one accord they devoted themselves to prayer” (Acts 1:12-14).

Just as the Church uses the four weeks before Christmas to get Christians ready for their annual remembrance of Christ’s birth, and the 40 days before Easter to get Christians ready for their annual remembrance of Christ’s resurrection, so the church has traditionally used the nine days before Pentecost to get Christians ready for their annual remembrance of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. There are some things God does for us whether we ask Him or not. I’ve never asked God for gravity. I’ve never gotten up in the morning worried about whether or not gravity was going to be in effect that day! Gravity is one of those “creation gifts” that God gives whether we’re aware of it or not. But the gift of the fullness of the Holy Spirit is different.  It’s one of the “salvation gifts” that the Bible says we’ve got to ask for specifically, and even repeatedly. This is why Jesus sent His disciples back to the Upper Room to ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit’s fullness for the nine days before Pentecost, and why they with one accord they devoted themselves to prayer.

Jeffrey Simmons was an Episcopal Priest who got irritated when some of his church members kept pestering him to go on this retreat where he could “get the Holy Spirit.” He finally agreed to go, not to get the Holy Spirit mind you, but to get those church members off his back. Long before he got to the retreat center, Jeffrey had already decided that he wasn’t going to get cornered, he wasn’t going to let anybody there pray for him. So, Jeffrey found a quiet out-of-the-way garden at the retreat center where he could hide, and that’s where he spent his retreat – hiding!  Still, the Holy Spirit found him.

“Sitting with my back against the trunk of a tree,” Jeffrey wrote later, “I tried to sort out my feelings. I felt trapped, pressured, manipulated… but as the sunlight sparkling through the cool green leaves started to calm me, I became aware of the fact that I (also) felt a little curious, and maybe even a little bit ashamed of myself for not being more (spiritually) adventurous. The whole message of the retreat was – ‘God wants to have a closer and more productive relationship with you, and you can have it if you will just open yourself to receive it.’ I couldn’t argue with that… so I sat under that tree, and I prayed the hardest I had ever prayed in my life, ‘Dear God,’ I prayed, ‘if you have something more for me that I don’t have right now, I’ll take it.’”

Jesus Christ never intended for us to live the Christian life or to do the work of the Church all by ourselves. “You will receive power,” the Risen Christ told His disciples, “when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,” and the coming of that promised Holy Spirit is what the day of Pentecost is all about. But we’ll miss the it if we approach Pentecost as just another one of those days when the church asks us to remember something that happened a long time ago. You see, more than just an historical event, Pentecost is an experience that’s supposed to be repeated in the heart of every believer and in the life of every church – but we’ve got to want it.

Jesus said that our Heavenly Father gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask, and then He sent His disciples back to the Upper Room to pray for the Holy Spirit to come and “clothe them with power from on high.”  In fact, the Rosen Christ told His disciples not to budge until they had been filled with the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit in their hearts. Easter is not the end of the story, there’s something more, and if you sense that “something more” as “something missing” in your life, then it’s time to pray – “Dear God, ‘if you have something more for me that I don’t have right now, I’ll take it.’” Amen.

When the World comes Apart

Death is an intruder, an uninvited guest who crashes the party. We don’t choose the times when death comes, or the places where death comes, or the way that death comes, or the people for whom death comes. Death just comes. It stalks us our whole lives long, and then one day it reaches out and grabs hold of us, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Two of my son’s classmates from high school died this week. He’s shattered. Thirty-somethings are not supposed to be grieving the deaths of the people they grew up with. Grandparents – yes. Aunts and uncles – yes. Even parents – yes. But not the people you went through school with as a kid, people who have finally figured out who they are and what they want from life, and who are just beginning to make some meaningful strides in the direction of that future they have claimed for themselves. To be taken then is especially cruel. There is a special anguish to the death of someone who has just begun to live. The death of a thirty-something underscores the sinister nature of death, why it’s called our “enemy” (I Corinthians 15:26).

The author of Hebrews said that we live our entire lives as human beings in the bondage of our fear of dying (2:15). Vitezslav Gardavsky (1923 – 1978), the Czech poet, playwright, and philosopher, traced the outlines of this familiar fear when he hauntingly wrote – “That I die means that I cannot complete my work. I will no longer see those I have loved, and I will no longer experience beauty or sorrow. The unrepeatable music of this world will no longer ring in my senses; never again will I anywhere or in any way move out beyond myself.” Death destroys and denies. It strikes at the very heart of what we say we believe is true and value as good. Death, especially an early death, is a psychic fruit basket upset. It jumbles things.

When our worlds fly apart, the very first thing we need to do is to find the eye of the storm, the still point at the center around which things spin, and where we can be held secure. In the Eastern Church, praying the “Trisagion” is a reliable way of getting there. The “Trisagion” (The “Thrice Holy”) is a prayer that says –

“Holy God,

Holy Mighty,

Holy Immortal,

have mercy on me/us.”

The Eastern Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov explained the meaning of this three-fold invocation of the name of God –

“Holy God –

The Father, the source of holiness is the Holy;

Holy Mighty (and strong) –

The Son, who triumphs over death, is the Strong;

Holy (and) Immortal –

The Holy Spirit, the breath of life, is the Life-Giver.”

The Eastern Church prays this prayer at the moment of catastrophes. It is prayed in the burial service when the body is interred. It’s a prayer that expresses the Church’s faith in the resurrection, the re-establishment of what is normal, what they describe as its “ontological healing.”

According to the “Shepherd of Hermas,” an early Christian text, it is “the name of God that sustains the world.” As the Christ hymn of Colossians 1 explains, “In Him all things hold together” (verse 17). It is through prayer that we seek the experience of this equilibrium, and the “Trisagion” prayer is a specific way of seeking this healing of our woundedness. It’s a way of restoring order to the disarray. It’s a way of asking for peace in the storm by naming the God who stills the wind and calms the sea.

When our days “collapse into chaos” and we are left feeling helpless and hopeless, praying the “Trisagion” it is a way of deliberately placing ourselves and the world back into the hands of the God who made us, who loves us, and who is saving us. This act clears a space big enough for hope to sprout and for ways of helping to break forth.

What the Church wants you to know when there is an unexpected death…

First, stop kidding yourself, and start expecting your death. Every year on Ash Wednesday we get smudged with ashes, a sign of penance and mortality, and we are told straight-up that we are going to die. We are numbered among the things that are passing away as the liturgy says, and spiritual wisdom comes from numbering our days (Psalm 90:12). Every unexpected death is a chance for us to wake up (Luke 13:4). [P.S. – There are no unexpected deaths…]

Second, come to terms with what it is that Christianity is about. The way our Bibles are put together helps us see how underneath and behind all its different stories, characters, ideas. and instructions, there’s a unifying theme, an organizing principle. It’s said that what’s in the Bible solves a problem and answers a question, and it is unmistakably clear to me that the question that the Bible answers, the problem that it solves is death, physical death, certainly, but especially spiritual death. The Bible opens with a warning about what causes death (Genesis 2:17). It closes with the death of death (Revelation 19:14-15), and the promise of a time when death will be no more (Revelation 21:4). And in between that opening and closing, it tells a story that climaxes with Christ dying on a cross and being raised from the dead on the third day. The center of gravity for the Christianity that I know is John 11:25 about how Christ is the resurrection and the life and how that means that we will never die, and Romans 8:31-39 about how because Christ died and was raised that nothing, not even death, will have the power to separate us from the love of God. Because of this, we can trust ourselves and our loved ones when death comes, God made us. God loves us. God holds us. God can be trusted. Christ proves it.

Third, use the fact that you are going to die to rightly order your priorities and values right now. It’s been pointed out that, “No one on his deathbed has ever said, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at work!” This popular proverb underscores the counsel of Ephesians 5:16 to “make the most of the time.” When we know that we aren’t going to be here forever, or even for very long in the grand scheme of things, it can “concentrate the mind wonderfully,” as Samuel Johnson put it. This is why Jesus talked about laying up treasures in heaven (Matthew 6:19-21), and why Paul spelled out what it is that “endures” when everything else passes away – faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love” (I Corinthians 13:13). Cultivating the eternal perspective will invest us in the things that last. Stop thinking that you’ll get to it in time. Time is not guaranteed.

Fourth, keep your bags packed. That’s how good Pope John XXIII put it in his spiritual journal. He said that he tried to live every day knowing that it could be his last, and that he would have to give “a strict account of his thoughts, words, and actions” to the One who sets the standards for what’s good, true, and beautiful. Knowing this is why the last request in the Order for Evening Prayer that I have most often prayed is that we might be given the grace “always to live in such a state that we may never be afraid to die; so that, living and dying, we might be thine.” And this is why in the spiritual tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy, the faithful are taught to pray daily “for the completion of our lives in peace and repentance,” and “for a good account before the awesome judgment seat of Christ.”

In his little book “On the Theology of Death” (Herder and Herder, 1961), the giant 20th century Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904 – 1984), pointing to the way that the two thieves on the crosses beside Jesus died, noted that death can be extinction or fulfillment. We all run the course of our lives toward the same finish line of death, but we don’t all run towards it in the same way. Some run “protestingly,” while others run “lovingly and trustingly.” We can experience the end of life as a matter of “falling into the emptiness and the powerlessness of death as remoteness from God,” or as “a falling into the hands of the living God, who is called Father.” And what it will be for us, he said, is fixed by our free choices for or against God now. Not to think about death because it is an unsettling thought to us, is not to take “this earthly life with radical seriousness,” and that would be a terrible waste, and such a shame.

“Befriending Death”

Peter Kreeft, the very fine Christian Philosopher who teaches at Boston College, says that death wears five faces – that of an enemy, a stranger, a friend, a mother, and finally, a lover (“Love is Stronger than Death” – Ignatius Press – 1992). This continuum moves from negative and alienating perceptions of death – “enemy” and “stranger” – to more positive and intimate perceptions – “friend,” “mother” and “lover.” This book with its development of these fives “faces” of death is more than worth the effort it takes to read, but the big idea I’m interested in is the journey by which this change occurs, how death ceases to be the enemy we avoid at all costs to the friend that we welcome and perhaps even embrace.

This is what the spiritual author Henri Nouwen described as the process of “befriending death.” In his 1994 book”” (Harper Collins), Henri Nouwen asked –

“Is death something so terrible and absurd that we are better off not thinking or talking about it? Is death such an undesirable part of our existence that we are better off acting as if it were not real? Is death such an absolute end of all our thoughts and actions that we simply cannot face it? Or is it possible to befriend our dying gradually and live open to it, trusting that we have nothing to fear? Is it possible to prepare for our death with the same attentiveness that our parents had preparing for our birth? Can we wait for our death as for a friend who wants to welcome us home? “

Gilgamesh and Me

Late last year, with the literary and spiritual encouragement of the late Fr. John S. Dunne (1929 –2013), a beloved Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, I read the myth of Gilgamesh. I’d read about Gilgamesh ever since my freshman year in an Old Testament survey class at Christian College, but it wasn’t until last year that I actually sat down and read Gilgamesh.

Fr. Dunne explained that Gilgamesh is the “earliest epic of adventure that is known, a tale of the first age of human history,” and what it’s about is the universal human quest for everlasting life.

“The story of Gilgamesh begins in a city where he is king. He is hardly conscious of his mortality in the beginning and his spirit is untempered… [But] when he sees a friend die, it is like seeing himself die. He realizes at last that he is mortal, that death awaits him [too]… [And so] he sets out on a quest for everlasting life. He has heard that there is a man who knows the secret of everlasting life, a man who has survived the great flood and who lives in the place where the sun rises. [So] Gilgamesh sets out eastward to find this man and to learn from him, if he can, the secret. [After many adventures] Gilgamesh finally meets the man who …possesses the secret of everlasting life. He tells Gilgamesh that everlasting life is a gift of the gods, not something a man can achieve for himself. So, in the end Gilgamesh has to come home without everlasting life, with nothing to show for his quest but the wisdom he has gained… He knows that he is mortal now and that there is no way of escaping death. The knowledge he acquires from the quest of life is a consciousness of mortality, a tempering of the spirit…. [and] perhaps that is what we should expect too, from our own quest of life and knowledge, an encounter with death, a tempering of the spirit.”

After comparing life to the grass which sprouts in the morning, flourishes in the midday sun, and then fades and withers as evening comes (90:5-6), the Psalmist acknowledged the transitory nature of our existence as human beings. “All our days pass away,” he noted, “our years come to an end with a sigh” (90:9). “The years of our lives are threescore and ten,” he observed, “fourscore” if we are especially “strong,” but either way, “they are soon gone” (90:10). And so, just like Gilgamesh, the Psalmist urged people to use this knowledge to temper their spirits. “Teach us to number our days,” the Psalmist prayed to the God who is from everlasting to everlasting, “that we might get a heart of wisdom” (90:12). I take this to mean that life is best lived against the backdrop of death.

It’s when we know that we are not going to be here forever, that we begin to fill our days with purpose and urgency. As Ken Burns pointed out in his “Civil War” PBS series, every consequential General in that epic struggle for the American soul was either sick or dying. It was because they knew their lives were fleeting that they were able to give themselves so completely to the moment in history that they were living. They wanted their lives to have counted for something consequential.

We become better stewards of life when we understand that time is a nonrenewable resource. As Paul told the Colossians, we have a spiritual obligation to “redeem the days,” to “make the most of our time” (4:5), and this means consciously and conscientiously giving ourselves to the things that “abide” – to “faith, hope and love, and the greatest of these is love” (I Corinthians 13:13). This is part of what an early death teaches us. The other thing it teaches us is how God has put “eternity into our hearts” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

We do not “go gentle into that goodnight.” We “rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas). I believe that we are born with an instinct for eternity. It’s our soul’s true north. I suspect it’s part of the package of what comes with being created in the image of God and being made in God’s likeness. As E. Stanley Jones wrote near the end of his life – “If at the end when I get out there and find there is no heaven. I will say, ‘Well universe, you let me down. You had the feeling of the eternal…” We feel this in our bones.

It was this “feeling of the eternal” that launched Gilgamesh on his quest. What he learned from the man who survived death was that eternal life is not a human achievement but a divine gift. Fr. Dunne in his reflections on Gilgamesh explained, “My own quest for eternal life… a quest like that of Gilgamesh… began when I saw my youth passing, around the age of 30. I went on a Gilgamesh quest through history, testing all the historic responses to death such as having posterity, doing memorable deeds, running the gamut of experience, and accepting death and becoming free. But the only adequate answer I found was in ‘the words of eternal life’ in the Gospel… ‘Lord to whom shall we go?’ Peter says to Jesus in the Gospel of John. ‘You have the words of eternal life’” (6:68)… It was only in ‘the words of eternal life in the Gospel that I found the hope of eternal life that I was looking for. All other answers seemed to fail… The question of my heart’s desire, as I saw it then, was ‘If I must die someday, what can I do to satisfy my desire to live?’ I tried each of these answers on the question – posterity, memory, experience, simple acceptance, but none of them could stand up to ‘the words of eternal life.’”

It is the One who died and is now alive forevermore, the first and the last, the Living One who holds the keys of Death and Hades (Revelation 1:17-18), who says, “I am the Resurrection and the Life; whoever believes in me, though they die, yet shall they live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die” (John 11:26-26). These are the words of eternal life upon which our hope finally, fully rests, and they are the reason why St. Augustine could say from the depths of his own heart touched with grief – “The only one who never loses his loved ones is the person who loves them in Him whose love we never lose.”

The Gospel Shape of Worship

In his essay on “The Gospel in the Prayer Book” (1966), J.I. Packer (1926 – 2020), the English, Evangelical, Low-church, Anglican Theologian, wrote that “a good (worship) service is not a set of unconnected bits and pieces,” but is rather “an integrated unit, having an overall ‘shape’ and a clear, planned ‘route’ along which worshippers are led.”

Reflecting on the “journey” that his own Anglican tradition of worship takes its worshippers, Dr. Packer observed that it has “an inner structure consisting of a sequence of three themes: sin, detected and confessed; grace, proclaimed and celebrated; and faith, focused and expressed.” He explained that “in the proclaiming of grace, Jesus Christ, the Mediator, must be central, so we may formulate the sequence as, first, facing our utter need of Christ; second, acknowledging God’s merciful provision of Christ; and third, expressing our trustful, thankful response to Christ.” He saw this as the “Gospel Shape” of Christian worship.

First it makes us face “our present badness. “Second, it tells us of “the new life of grace.” And third, it leads us into “the right response,” which he said was “multiple,” including “prayer and praise for pardon; a joyful trust in God’s promises of mercy; learning of God from his Word; asking for help both for ourselves and for others; professing our own faith; and giving ourselves directly to God out of gratitude for all he has given to us.”

Growing up in this Prayer Book tradition and adding back into my spiritual repertoire now in retirement, not as a replacement for but as an addition to my Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) identity, vocation, and practice (spiritually, you can go home again), I find that I am greatly mindful of and deeply grateful for the way this “Prayer Book Path” has shaped me, and continues to move me.

Baron Friedrich von Hügel guided the people who came to him for spiritual direction into personal participation in the sacramental worship of the Church. He believed that such worship exerted “a crucial, inexorable force in the gradual spiritual formation of believers.” He said he’d seen some trees as a child on a family holiday in Brussels that had been permanently bent in the direction the wind blew, and those trees shaped by the wind became for him a picture of how the sacramental worship of the Church shapes and forms the souls of believers.

I make my home, spiritually, in churches where architecturally the Lord’s Table is front and center, and where liturgically I am led to and sent from the Lord’s Supper every time we gather. The Quaker Theologian Thomas Kelley wrote about how the two beats of Biblical religion are God pulling us into His heart where He tells us that we are His beloved daughters and sons, and then God hurtling us out of His heart and into the world where He asks us to carry its hurts and hopes with Him in “infinitely tender love.”

The liturgy of my Anglican practice with it “Prayer Book Path” insures that I am caught up into the two beats of the Biblical rhythm every time I worship with them, just as the hymnody of my Disciples practice with the richness of its “Lord’s Supper” selection (#384 – #430 in the Chalice Hymnal – That’s 46 Communion Hymns and Readings!) insures that I am caught up into the two beats of the rhythm of Biblical religion as well.

In my Anglican practice, it is the “Prayer of Humble Access” that gathers everything that I am thinking and feeling inside when it’s time to go forward for Communion, and gives it voice –

“We do not presume to come

to this your table, O merciful Lord,
trusting in our own righteousness,
but in your abundant and great mercies.
We are not worthy so much as to gather up
the crumbs under your table;
but you are the same Lord
whose character is always to have mercy.
Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord,
so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ,
and to drink his blood,
that our sinful bodies

may be made clean by his body,
and our souls washed

through his most precious blood,
and that we may evermore

dwell in him, and he in us.  Amen.

And in my Disciple practice, it’s hymns like Elizabeth Cecilia Clephane’s standard “Beneath the Cross of Jesus” (#197 in the Chalice Hymnal) that does the very same thing for me –

“Upon that cross of Jesus
mine eye at times can see
the very dying form of one
who suffered there for me;
and from my stricken heart with tears
two wonders I confess:
the wonders of redeeming love
and my unworthiness.”

David Naugle, a Professor at Dallas Baptist University, writes about the “bits and pieces” problem that we have in the church today.  Things don’t touch from one Sunday to the next. In fact, quite often things don’t even touch on the same Sunday morning!  Worship is just a series of separate acts, each one with its own content and concern. We don’t see how things fit together. They’re like a bunch of pearls in a great big bowl. We reach in, pick one out, and hold it up all by itself. It has nothing to do with what came before. It has no connection with what comes next. It’s just one pearl at a time, and one pearl after another.

I don’t think this is how Christian worship is supposed to be.  

I think there’s supposed to be a logic, a progression, a unity to the things we do in worship. When we reach into that big bowl of pearls to pull one out, all the other pearls in the bowl come out with it because they’re all connected. They’re all strung together on the same string. There’s something that holds all its different “bits and pieces” together, and what I think that “something” is that holds together everything we do in worship is the Gospel. I think there is supposed to be a Gospel “shape” to Christian worship, an underlying skeletal structure that gets fleshed out in different ways from week to week, but that gives every worship service its basic shape and sequence.

William Sperry, (1882-1954), a Congregational Minister (the Pilgrims’ Church) and the President of Harvard Divinity School (1822-1953), wrote his book “Reality in Worship” in 1925. In it he suggested that ministers take a moment to review the order of the worship service of their churches to see if any “operative principle which determines the logical sequence of ideas and interests” is discernable, something that makes the service “a religious and artistic unity.” He observed that “the average minister, beyond picking a scripture lesson and hymn to anticipate the sermon and another hymn to follow the sermon, probably does not give five minutes thought a week to the rest of the service, and has no definite theory as to what is supposed to be happening or what a minister is theoretically doing.” Dr. Sperry said that the result is that our worship is “chaotic,” a “potpourri” of texts and gestures ransacked from diverse sources devoid of “a single guiding principle” which shapes and sustains the whole service, “flowing beneath the surface” in all of its acts.

To remedy this, Dr. Sperry turned to the narrative of the Prophet Isaiah’s encounter with the Living God (6:1-8). He saw this text as the Bible’s “formal transcript of the spiritual life,” the “simple, inevitable pattern” of the divine/human encounter.” He framed it as a dialectical sequence of two ideas colliding and then combining to create a brand new situation/condition –

Thesis: A Vision and Adoration of God – “I saw the Lord high and lifted up” (v. 1)

Antithesis: A Confession of Creaturehood – “Woe is me. I am lost” (v. 5)

Synthesis A: A Perception of a Redeeming/Reconciling Energy – “This (live coal) has touched your lips” (v. 7)

Synthesis B: A Reaffirmation of God’s Glory and a Rededication of the Self – “Here I am, send me” (v. 8)

“Why should not a religious service definitely follow this order?” Dr. Sperry asked. “What other order can it follow?” And because our worship services don’t, he concluded, more often than not, they fail to deliver the encounter with the living God that informs, forms, and transforms our lives as human beings, and we settle for entertainment, stimulation, and/or provocation instead.

The Eclipse: A Spiritual Rorschach Test

The eclipse today is proving to be something of a spiritual Rorschach Test. In a Rorschach Test a person is shown an ambiguous inkblot and is then asked to describe what they see. What a person says they see is then taken as an indication of their inner psychological and emotional state. Today’s eclipse has had this same effect on some people spiritually. Some are taking it as a sign of some impending apocalyptic upheaval.

“The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken” Jesus said in his end times discourse on the Mount of Olives in Matthew 24:29-31. This imagery of cosmic shifts in the heavens and the disruption of familiar patterns here on earth were stock images in the Biblical worldview and vocabulary for a Theophany – a God appearance in time and space. Go back and read the accounts in the book of Exodus of the plagues in Egypt or Moses’ contact with the Living God on Sinai during the giving of the Law. Cosmic portends were vivid ways of talking about spiritual realities and Divine encounters. When God shows up, scary stuff happens.

This is the language Peter borrowed from the book of the Old Testament Prophet Joel to explain the events of the day of Pentecost – “And I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth beneath, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke; the sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood, before the day of the Lord comes, the great and manifest day” (Acts 2:19-20/Joel 2:30-31). Peter painted with these colors again in his second letter when he turned his attention to delay of the Second Coming of Christ that had unsettled some people in his churches (2 Peter 2:8-13). Peter assured them that the promise of “new heavens and a new earth” was sure, and that its arrival would be signaled by that same sort of cosmic disturbance. And you don’t have to read very far into the book of Revelation before the mayhem in the heavens begins as the end draws nigh.

The folks who are taking today’s eclipse as a sign of the end of the world (something human beings have almost always done with eclipses, comets, and all other strange astronomical happenings) are taking their lead from this part of the Biblical witness. It’s part of the story, and to just write them off as crackpots is not going to foster the kind of faithful conversation that ought to be characteristic of a community that names Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior. Rather than scolding or shaming those who see the eclipse as a signal of doom, I’d like to talk with them instead about how there’s another faithful way to think about it. I see something else in this cosmic inkblot.

The Biblical portends in the heavens of the Consummation are all signs of cosmic disorder, disruption, and destruction. But an eclipse is a sign of the exact opposite of this. NASA keeps a precise record and has an accurate schedule of them. We’ve known for years now the exact moment of the exact day of the exact path of this total eclipse. And we already know this about the next total eclipse, and about the one after that, and about the one after that. An eclipse is a sign of cosmic order and of God’s continuing providential care, not of disorder, disruption, and destruction.

The Christ Hymn of Colossians 1 celebrates the way that “in Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth,” and how “in Him all things hold together” (1:15-20). An eclipse is a better sign of this than of the Bible’s standard description of the chaos that the final dissolution of creation causes. Peace not panic is the right response to an eclipse. The moon crashing into the sun like a pool ball careening into another pool ball on a pool table – that would be a cause for some concern. That would prompt some appropriate doom and gloom. It would be hard to live in a universe where planets moved in unpredictable and unexpected ways. But an eclipse is not evidence of this.

An eclipse is instead good evidence that God has “set the planets in their courses above” as both Scripture and our beloved hymnody proclaims, and we should probably see in the predictable patterns of the natural world the common grace of a God who has ordered the universe and sustains it in such a way that human thriving is possible. This common grace is what Paul talked to the people of Lystra about in Acts 14:15-17 when he established the reality and goodness of God by pointing to how God as the Creator “made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them,” and how God as the Sustainer “does good and gives us from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, satisfying our hearts with food and gladness.”

Richard Mouw says that the first and most important theological decision we all must make is whether we think God loves us and wants to bless us both temporally and eternally, or whether we think God is mad at us and wants to make us just as miserable as He possibly can both temporally and eternally. A long time ago I concluded that God is good and generous based on what I knew about the person and work of Jesus Christ. Because of Christ I know that God is not reluctant to save us. Sure, our freedom leaves open the possibility for us to turn away, but God’s grace – what I see so clearly in the face of Christ – means that this isn’t what God wants. As Eugene Peterson whispered into his son’s ear each night as he tucked him into bed when he was just a little boy – “God loves you. He’s on your side. He’s coming after you. He’s relentless.” And I hear this same whispered message from our heavenly Father in today’s eclipse –

“The heavens are telling the glory of God;

and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours forth speech,

and night to night declares knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words;

their voice is not heard;

yet their voice goes out through all the earth,

and their words to the end of the world.” (Psalm 19:1-4)

Gratitude and not fear is what I will feel as I sit in my backyard this afternoon wearing those special glasses from Walmart watching the sun darken as the moon passes between it and me. This eclipse is not a sign of God’s displeasure with us. We’re not on the eve of destruction. I take it as a sign of God’s care instead, and of His eternal desire to bless us all.

That’s what I see in the inkblot.

The “Eclipse of Heaven”

On Monday we witnessed an eclipse in the heavens. Today, deep into Eastertide, I’m thinking about the “eclipse of heaven.”

That’s the name the late A.J. Conyers gave to his 1992 book published by InterVarsity Press. In “The Eclipse of Heaven” he told the story of his family’s visit to a historical park in South Carolina called “Old Dorchester,” a Colonial era village and fort. Among the ruins are the bell tower of the village church and the cemetery surrounding it. Standing next to the flat headstone of one of Old Dorchester’s first citizens, Dr. Conyers said that the tour guide read part of the Burial Service from the 1768 Book of Common Prayer, words that would have been spoken over that grave 250 years ago.

With feigned seriousness and sanctity, he intoned the liturgy with a preacher’s voice –“Man that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live… In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O LORD, who for our sins art justly displeased? …Thou knowest, LORD, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us …suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”

And then Dr. Conyers said that the tour guide looked up at them and winked. “Why did he wink?” Professor Conyers asked, and answered – “It was because he knew very well that he shared a secret with us – with all of us, whether from Ohio or the Carolinas, or Timbuktu. …The secret we share is simply that we no longer take ‘otherworldly’ sentiments seriously. Ideas about the brevity of life, the last judgment of present sinful life, in short, all that devalues this life and prefers the next world, all that fears lest we jeopardize an eternal state in the enjoyment of a temporal existence – all these topics are simply not part of common polite, serious conversation.”

Heaven is in eclipse. In 1982 Morton Kelsey began his book on the “Afterlife” with the observation that the very first Christians “outlived” and “outdied” their spiritual competitors “because of a conviction that their lives went on into greater meaning.” He said that they “even believed that they had tasted something of the reality of the future kingdom of heaven in their experience of their risen Lord.” But Morton Kelsey lamented the fact that more recent Christians have “not shared very deeply in this hope.”

He wrote about a conversation he’d had with a Lutheran pastor who told him that in ten years he’d never preached a sermon on life after death, and he talked a discussion he’d had with two Catholic priests who told him that it would be hypocritical for them to talk about life after death since they didn’t believe that there was “anything in store for human beings after this present life.”

Morton Kelsey said that this was something that had developed in the church over a long period of time. “Christians do not often speak with confidence today about life after death.” He said that there is precious little conversation in the average congregation about what becomes of human beings when we die. “Only at funerals is the topic mentioned,” Morton Kelsey observed, and then only in “a half-hearted way.” More recently, the Roman Catholic Theologian John Thiel has described this as the refusal of the preachers and teachers of the Christian Faith “to speak flourishingly about the ‘last things,’” leaving people who live on “the cusp of the afterlife” without the hope, courage, and peace generating resources that so many Christians before us found so helpful. Today’s Christianity is “thin” at precisely the place where the challenge to life is often the “thickest,” at the “boundary” of death and dying.

The eclipse of heaven was forcefully driven home to me by a blog written in 2021 by Frederick Schmidt, the Professor of Spiritual Formation at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, on the campus of Northwestern University.

He began by quoting things he said he’d heard his students say –

“I need to talk.  I’ve been asked to preach at my father’s funeral, and I don’t believe in the Resurrection anymore.”

“I don’t know what to say at a person’s funeral.  After all, they don’t have anything to look forward to.”

Dr. Schmidt wrote – “Statements like this are the kind of thing that one expects to hear at any funeral, when the death of a loved one cuts through the families and friendships of anyone who dies.  But they are both examples of things that I have heard seminary students say, deep into the course of their theological studies.” He says there are a number of reasons why a seminarian might say something like this –

“They may be working though their faith with seriousness for the first time.  That process can unearth questions.  It may test the degree to which a student has explored his or her faith.

Seminarians usually arrive with some kind of commitment to the church and its message.  (There is little good reason to pursue a theological education if you don’t.)  But the church itself may have done a poor job at catechesis.

The baseline materialism of contemporary America may further exacerbate a seminarian’s faith.  And it is often when confronted directly with the doctrine of the Resurrection that students discover just how deeply that materialist understanding of reality has invaded their thinking.

Then, again, seminarians are also taught not to believe in the Resurrection, or they are offered a version of it that is cast exclusively in terms that are metaphorical, symbolic or political.”

And then Dr. Schmidt concluded – “Almost every reason a seminarian might struggle that I have listed above makes sense to me.  To struggle with your own beliefs, to confront them and think through them, to realize that the culture around you has sabotaged your faith – this is the stuff of serious formation.  And clergy who have done their work and won-through to a robust Christian faith can be powerful defenders of the faith and skilled pastors to those who seek their help. The last reason, however, does not. …To be taught that the Resurrection didn’t happen or to be taught that it is a metaphor or symbol of something social, political, or personal, flies in the face of the church’s teaching. If seminarians are decisively shaped by that instruction, they will be seminarians to ‘cross their fingers’ when they take their ordination vows or – if they are at all honest – abandon their work for other endeavors.”

Sitting in church these past few weeks of Easteride, I’ve found myself deeply stirred when the Great Thanksgiving of the Liturgy that’s being prayed says – “It is right, our duty and our joy, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. But chiefly are we bound to praise you for the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; for he is the true Paschal Lamb, who was offered for us, and has taken away the sin of the world; who by his death has destroyed death, and by his rising to life again has won for us everlasting life.”

Pastor Ben Haden said that “the world has a gurgle in its throat when it comes to death, but the Christian can speak with total confidence.” I hear that confidence in the liturgy, and it moves me. But when it’s a church that has “a gurgle in its throat when it comes to death,” then I know that heaven is in eclipse there. Their “bugle gives an uncertain sound” (I Corinthians 14:8) creating confusion and sowing the seeds of distrust and despair.  “By his death Christ has destroyed death, and by his rising to life again Christ has won for us everlasting life.” Preachers and churches are free to reject this, but I will not entrust the care of my soul, or the souls of those I love to them.

I need more than a gurgle.