Brethren Love Feast as sacred liturgy

My kinda countryside. Approaching Salem Mennonite, Freeman, S.D.

Last week I had the pleasure of spending Monday through Wednesday in Freeman, South Dakota, teaching and preaching at joint Holy Week evening services between four Mennonite congregations in the area, hosted at Salem Mennonite Church, where my friend Nicholas Detweiler-Stoddard is pastor. He and I worked together over the evenings to try and give an account of how worship works, relying heavily on the work of Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith and his "Cultural Liturgy" series.

To summarize, Smith's work is all about desires and loves, using ancient and contemporary wisdom to argue that we humans are worshipping animals who are what we love, and therefore worship what we love (in the churchy and non-churchy senses). The tasks for Christians, then, is to cultivate our loves toward faithful ends, namely love of God and neighbor (even enemies), and seeking first the peaceable kingdom of God. This happens by the enlistment of our imaginations, which is a whole-bodied enterprise. In volume 2 of his series, Imagining the Kingdom, Smith argues that "the way into the heart [and therefore the imagination] is through the body, and the way into the body is through story" (p. 14). Christian worship is the training ground to allow the "big story" of God's redemption of the world through Christ capture our imaginations, seep into our bones, train our loves/desires, and pull us toward a vision of the good life. Because of our sinful proclivity for self-deception, it's important that Christians also train our vision to see what other stories we've been enlisted into, and what false kingdoms we've been misdirected toward, because not everyone who confesses "Lord, Lord" with their lips and rational beliefs is a full-bodied Christian disciple. True evangelical faith takes practice, and the story-shaped, Spirit-filled practices of the church help cultivate faithfulness.

So on the final night of worship, the night before Maundy Thursday, I gave a narration of the Brethren Love Feast as I experienced it as a youth in Prairie City, Iowa, and made the argument that it is an example of a particularly "weighty" sacred liturgy, especially during Holy Week, and one that the wider church (and Brethren who have been letting it go by the wayside) should take up and appropriate. Rather than celebrate the full Love Feast in that service, we then moved into a time of washing the feet (or hands) of our sisters and brothers in Christ. In this area, these Mennonites have not commonly practiced feet washing, it was a beauty to behold children and parents, spouses, young people and elders, washing each others' feet and hands. Here's hoping a Love Feast might follow in time!

Boring worship makes life always interesting

Okay, so maybe not THAT boring
(Photo by Louisa Billeter/Flickr)

If church-going Christians don't go through their work-a-day lives being surprised and/or offended by the ways of the world, the ways of the world have become the background by which they live those lives. This is a problem.

If church-going Christians come to worship expecting to be entertained (or even "inspired" or "recharged"), the ways of the world have become the background by which they come to worship. This is a problem.

The everyday practices of becoming the people of God are necessarily "boring" in that they must seep so far down into our bones that doing things such as praying, reading scripture, forgiving, making peace, raising children in the faith, loving neighbors and even enemies become second nature. Only when they become second nature can we begin seeing the world aright and stumble into more faithful being in the world as the people of God, hemmed into Christ's body.

Worship in this sense may at first seem "wasteful," as my friend Aaron Kauffman has recently said.

But here's the thing: When Christian worship and discipleship become "boring" in the (good) sense that they become our second nature, then life becomes permanently interesting. Once God's story and your place in it becomes the primary way in which you live and have your being in the world, then the world becomes rightly seen as the site of God's reconciling mission to all of creation. We want to run to the sites of God's healing and participate. We delight in forgiveness. We rush foolishly into loving enemies. We take joy in washing the dirty feet of sinners (including when those feet are our own in the hands of a sister or brother).

Yes, we will screw this up, making worship boring in the bad sense, in that it does not engage our entire body, not grabbing us by the guts, and thus failing to capture our imagination. Church will and often has become soulless drudgery and life-sucking rather than life-giving. But when this happens it signals a failure of imagination-capturing, and the remedy isn't necessarily making things flashy and exciting. (Seriously, click that link and hold on tight.)

Rather, we must be re-oriented, restored and re-storied to the ancient bodily wisdom of the church and capture the sense for why we're going through these "boring" motions and why they orient us by God's Spirit toward life abundant.

After Election Day Communion...

From first I laid eyes on it, the Election Day Communion movement has had my support. And when I saw that my pastor had committed to conducting a service at our congregation, I was in. Despite a few cautions I gave in a post from early September, I've watched with bemusement and pleasure as the largely social media-driven movement has, at last count, enlisted the support of over 700 congregations in all 50 states in the U.S. to celebrate the Eucharist on the night of the presidential election. A few days ago, as I was marveling at the 50/700 mark, it struck me...

"What happens after election day?"

Depending on who wins, for instance, will there be Inauguration Day Communion or State of the Union Communion? With all the momentum this movement has built, I'll offer three suggestions for the organizers of EDC...

• Gather reflections from participants - Get pastors and church leaders and other participants to write reflections on social media and see how this thing worked itself out in some of the 700+ congregations. Start a hashtag on Twitter, ask people to post on the Facebook page.
• Turn participants to the sacred-liturgical calendar - "State of the Union Communion" is a bad idea. On the (Western) church calendar, Advent is starting in a few weeks. What would it look like for EDC to shift its focus back into the church calendar? What does Advent - the period of waiting for the remembered birth of the humble king of all creation - do to the national-liturgical calendar? (My answer: subverts it...so let's talk about that.)
• Poll the global body of Christ - EDC is a U.S. thing. How can they help remind U.S. Christians that their participation in the Lord's body crosses borders and time? Have any non-US connections been made through the formation of this movement? Can a sister or brother in Christ from another country "look in" to this movement and offer a word?

What other questions should the EDC organizers be pondering, or what kinds of things can they shift to, when their raison d'être passes in two night's time?

Kaleidoscopic visions of the kingdom

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!’
And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, singing,
‘Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honour
and power and might
be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.’

--Revelation 7:9-12

During my four years in seminary I was fortunate to have overlapped with the first seminary cohort as part of the local Mennonite Hispanic Initiative, which is committed to providing church planting resources, leadership development, and theological education to the Hispanic and Latino community here in Harrisonburg. One of the MDiv students is Byron Pellecer, pastor of the Iglesia Discipular Anabaptista (IDA), which currently meets Saturday evenings in the building of Harrisonburg Mennonite Church. Byron and I had a number of classes together and became good friends and brothers in Christ.

This past Sunday at my congregation, Park View Mennonite Church, Byron preached with his good friend, Marvin Lorenzana, who is an EMS MDiv alum and Director of Multicultural Services at EMU. I had been under the impression that Byron was going to be preaching in Spanish with Marvin translating to English. But then something amazing happened: While preaching, Byron would switch back and forth between the two languages, and Marvin would follow along. Here's the sermon...

Byron Pellecer: A miracle in the midst of scarcity from Park View Mennonite Church on Vimeo.

Easter at Arlington

"He has risen." Easter sunrise at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

First, a confession: Holy Week did not feel very holy last week, at least in terms of how I engaged it. The demands of the final three weeks of grad school are starting to compress, and my participation in local worshiping bodies - seminary and our congregation - has been strained. No Wednesday evening lenten worship with folks at Park View Mennonite, no Love Feast with a Brethren congregation on Maundy Thursday, and no Tenebrae service. As someone fairly convinced by the formative influence of communal worship upon our body, personal and collective, this absenteeism from Holy Week worship practices really ate at me. Then my wife told me what we were going to do for Easter, when we happened to be in Washington, D.C., with her sister's family.

"We're going to the Easter sunrise service at Arlington National Cemetery."

For a Christian pacifist in the Anabaptist tradition, this is no trivial thing. But despite my initial shock at the idea, I quickly said "Ok," thinking to myself, "this will be interesting." For one thing, we were with my sister-in-law's family, and her husband is career military. Indeed, there is a strong military tradition in my wife's family, which is completely absent from my own. So in spite of my deepening Christoligcal pacifist convictions, I have a deep commitment to brothers and sisters in Christ who don't share these, especially Americans and those in my own family.

Much like I can't go a movie theater just to see a movie, I can't do something like go to a cemetery for fallen U.S. soldiers just to worship on Easter. There's no "just." There's too much other stuff going on all around, all of which has just as storied a nature as what's being celebrated on Easter. My wife will be the first to tell you that I think too much, and this is a prime example. So take a deep breath for this looong and somewhat rambling reflection on an Easter morning spent at Arlington...

BL&T: In place of (non-sacraments): Re-enchanting the Brethren

Over at the Brethren Life and Thought blog, I just posted my contribution to a three-part series of posts on James K.A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom. Here's the link and the first bit of the post...

In place of (non-)sacraments: Re-enchanting the Brethren

While the Schwarzenau Brethren have long practiced the beautiful biblical-mimetic ritual we call “Love Feast,” there’s been the insistence that such practices – like baptism – are “ordinances” from Jesus. So we do them primarily because Jesus told us to, not because they have some “mystical” or “magical” power. Combined with a free church “priesthood of all believers” ecclesiology and liturgical practices, Vernard Eller could look at high church sacramental traditions in his book, In Place of Sacraments, and pejoratively describe them as “commissaries,” dispensing with mystical goods and services. Better than all that, Eller described the (surprise!) free church model which he called the “caravan” approach to practices like the Lord’s Supper and baptism. 

While honoring the good historical reasons that Anabaptists opted out of sacramental traditions (to their own peril, initially), appreciating much of Eller’s positive work in In Place of Sacraments, and being happy in our contemporary circumstances as a believers church tradition, still I wonder: Should we reconsider our bad attitude about the sacraments? In our desire to avoid magic-thinking, is there a way in which we’ve swung too far the other direction and depleted our social imagination as Anabaptists worshipping and serving a crucified and resurrected, therefore living, God? Have we thrown the genius of narrative-shaped ritual out with the sacramental bathwater? Read the rest...

AMP post: The Sacrement of Mission

"I worship and love, therefore I am."
Photo by Petra via Flickr.

For the past four or five days I've been reading James K.A. Smith's Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. It's about time, too, since I've been reading his blog, watching/listening to his lectures for almost two years now. In some ways I feel like I've already read a lot of it, but I'm still very happy I finally got around to reading it.

It was also my turn on the schedule to contribute to the Anabaptist Missional Project (AMP) blog, so I synthesized as much of Smith's key points into a post about...

The Sacrament of Mission

“I think, therefore I am.” This short dictum from René Descartes may be the best shorthand summary of the entire Enlightenment project. It is a statement about human nature – our “am-ness” – namely that we are primarily rationalanimals. So successful has this view of human nature become – entrenched as it is in our thought and practice patterns of cultural, political, economic, and (yes) religious institutions in the West – it’s nearly impossible to detect, much less argue with. 

But Christian philosopher, James K.A. Smith, has a bone to pick with that view of human nature. In his recent book, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Smith has set about to change our minds about this mind-centric view of human beings. Drawing on contemporary philosophy and other disciplines, Smith wants us to shift the understanding of our being from that of homo sapiens to “homo liturgicus,” that is the human being as worshipper and lover. So the dictum here would go, “I worship (and love), therefore I am.”
(Read the rest of the post...)

Chug a beer for the Solider-Priests of Freedom!

"High life" defined as American consumerism (click image)

Literary critic, William Deresiewicz, offers a biting commentary on America's post-9/11 "cult of the uniform" in a recent New York Times op-ed piece:

An Empty Regard

(via Fors Clavigera)

The author's main contention is that we as a nation have set up this cult of the uniform as a way to immunize the military from critique. This cult is attended to by the secular liturgies entailed by the hero worship of soldiers, who serve as priests of our freedom. The cult is constructed and practiced in such a way as to make criticizing the military analogous to criticizing those who serve in the military. But as Deresiewicz contends...

(W)ho our service members are and the work their images do in our public psyche, our public discourse, and our public policy are not the same. Pieties are ways to settle arguments before they begin. We need to question them, to see what they’re hiding. (Emphasis mine.)

I commend this piece for a host of reasons which I'll explore below. Just briefly, though, this piece is excellent because it voices many of the reasons why I happily and intentionally maintain relationships with American soldiers within my networks of friends of family, while still remaining an ardent Christian pacifist. Criticizing the military-industrial complex and the work it asks of its members by no means diminishes my care for those members, who are real human beings with real challenges and needs.

[Oct '11 update: The Mennonite Weekly Review has since picked up this post in edited form: Hero worship of U.S. soldiers. As usual, thanks to Sheldon C. Good for his editorial hand!]

Another new blogger: Paul Fike Stutzman and the Love Feast Blog

The book...now the blog!

Last fall I dropped a quick post about a new book by EMS alum and fellow Brethren minister, Paul Fike Stutzman (@paulstutzman). Recovering the Love Feast: Broadening Our Eucharistic Celebrations (Wipf & Stock, 2011) explores the Love Feast celebration from the Schwarzenau Brethren tradition (which includes the Church of the Brethren stream). Well, Paul has just started a new blog as "a place to learn about the Love Feast and share stories." Check it out!

The Love Feast Blog
Also, check out this story from EMU News:  Seminary Grad Book Champions Love Feast

I've become increasingly convinced that the Brethren Love Feast is a liturgical "diamond in the rough" from a tradition which typically describes itself as "non-sacramental." It is a practice that incorporates peacemaking into biblical, participatory worship. Like Paul, I am concerned that this practice has fallen by the wayside in many Brethren congregations and would like to see that trend reversed and the practice renewed, re-envisioned, and re-narrated for contemporary contexts. But I'd also love to see the Love Feast (yuk, yuk) be offered to other traditions as a gift for the whole church. Paul's book is a great contribution toward that end.

Easter in grad school

He's not here...and neither am I?
(Photo by Kodi Tanner)

Just over a month ago I wrote a post about the rhythm and rule of Christian life, aka spiritual disciplines. That post then got picked up and put on my seminary's blog. Looking back on it now, the post seems a little too confident on my part. Like I have my life together enough to be able to speak authoritatively about spiritual discipline.

Holy Week fell at an interesting time this year: right before finals. And if there's anything that the past month has shown me, it is how deeply bound I am to academic disciplines and how they enforce the rhythm and rule of my life. So Lent and Easter this year seemed as if they were playing second fiddle to grad school's bombastic tune.

The rhythm and rule of Christian life

Photo by Ferran Jordà (CC lic.)

A bittersweet season of university life is drawing near: Graduation. Last year was the first time I felt this sting at EMU, as I watched my friends in the class of 2010 graduate from the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding with their MA's in Conflict Transformation, a two-year program which we'd started together in 2008. This year, many of my friends in the Seminary are graduating with their Mdiv's, a three-year program. Meanwhile, I'll be hanging around for another full year to complete my work for both degrees.

One of my fellow seminarians, Adam, was conducting a short-answer survey for his senior capstone project on the "rhythm and rule" of Christian life, a cute seminary phrase for "spiritual disciplines" or the virtuous, worshipful habits that shape our faith.  "Rhythm and rule" always makes me think of drum circles, which seems like a decent metaphor. A drum circle group that's really keyed into the rhythm is transcendant while an arhythmic circle sounds like a car crash. What do we want our lives to sound like?

Anyway, my answers to Adam's questions seemed like good material to adapt and post here, so read on for a bit of my reflections on the spiritual disciplines that have developed for this busy grad student...

Icons: "They looked at me."

St. Maximilian; iconographer: Jerry Holsopple

Last fall I had a series of posts that doubled as homework for a class called "The Religious Imagination in Contemporary Culture." The professor, Jerry Holsopple, had spent the previous year on sabbatical in Lithuania, teaching college courses and being trained to write icons in the Orthodox tradition.

Near the end of the our class last fall, his iconography exhibit opened on the EMU campus. In addition to the exhibit, Jerry did a University Colloquium lecture in which he challenged the Anabaptist tradition (and other word/text-heavy Protestant traditions with iconoclastic skeletons in the closet) to consider the significance of Orthodox tradition of iconography, one that doesn't treat artistic expressions as the property of the artist but rather as an article for the worshiping life of the church. And not only the piece itself but the process - start to finish, idea to reality, studio to cathedral - is a theological act within the context of the community of faith, the church. Given the traditionally strong ecclesiology of Anabaptism, this seems to be a challenge worth taking seriously.

The series of videos after the break was done by EMU undergrads in a film class taught by another one of my instructors, Paulette Moore. They are very well-done, consisting of interviews with Jerry as well as simulations of the process of writing an icon. Awesome stuff that certainly captivated my religious imagination...

Recovering the Love Feast

The seminary careers of Paul Stutzman and myself overlapped for one year at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. He was finishing up his last year of an MAR degree while I was starting my dual degree project at the seminary and Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. So now two years later, his master's thesis work has been picked up and published by Wipf and Stock, and it has profound relevance for Brethren!  Check it out...

Recovering the Love Feast: Broadening Our Eucharistic Celebrations
by Paul Fike Stutzman

The foreword is by Eleanor Kreider, who has done considerable work on worship practices at the London Mennonite Center and is now - with her husband, Alan - at the "other" (to me, I say that lovingly) Mennonite seminary, AMBS. The endorsements include a word from Bethany president, Ruthann Knechel Johansen; Brethren sociologist, Carl Bowman; and Brethren historian (and my mentor and former pastor), Jeff Bach!

Paul said it should be available directly off the Wipf and Stock website linked above, and on Amazon within a few weeks. Definitely on my list...

[Note: Cross-posted on the FWFS blog.]