While Dean Munday of Nashotah House felt that this was indeed a sacrilege, I am not so sure. Munday wrote

Now, before someone calls me a GRINCH for casting aspersions on this program, let me be clear about my reasoning. The Eucharist is to proclaim the Lord Jesus Christ’s death, whenever we eat the bread and drink the cup, until He comes again. That is its message, and that is the meaning. It needs no other metaphor. Dressing it up in other garb can only obscure—not enhance—its message and its meaning.

I can assure you that I was reading the liturgy very carefully during the service. (I can also assure you that I was not entirely convinced of it nor was I entirely comfortable. But I would likely say the same thing after being at my parent’s church for a service.) What I was very surprised to realize is that the theology of the eucharist was essentially left intact. Consider Eucharistic Prayer B from the Book of Common Prayer (1979):

 On the night before he died for us, our Lord Jesus Christ took
bread; and when he had given thanks to you, he broke it, and
gave it to his disciples, and said, “Take, eat: This is my Body,
which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me.”

After supper he took the cup of wine; and when he had given
thanks, he gave it to them, and said, “Drink this, all of you:
This is my Blood of the new Covenant, which is shed for you
and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink
it, do this for the remembrance of me.”

Some would, of course, argue that this itself is not a very appropriate liturgy either, but I will not go there. Now consider the “Seuss” prayer.¹

On the night before he died
Our Lord lifted some bread
And said with loving pride,

“Dear friends, my body this is
Take it; share it;
For this is part of His biz.²

From now on, whenever you meet
I want you to remember our time
And let this be the thing that you eat.”

When they were done with their sup,
Jesus again spoke with his friends
While lifting the cup

“For the New Covenant, this is my blood
A sign of the Lord’s continuing love.
Let it replace the one from the flood

Whenever you drink this, think of me,
Keeping me close at heart,
So that our friendship may go on endlessly.”

Compare the two. I think that the one developed by the youth actually conveys the theology of the original prayer quite well. In fact, it even adds the reminder that the “New Covenant” is all part of God’s Heilsgeschichte that he has been working out with his people since creation, something that the other prayer simply alludes to. All in all, the content of this liturgy was actually very…orthodox! Believe it or not. (In fact, references to God remain “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” No gender inclusive efforts or real silliness there.)

When we consider that this liturgy was developed by the youth at a youth conference and was part of a youth service I can see its value; I begin to think of this as translation. The children who developed this liturgy clearly had to read, know, and understand the Great Thanksgiving in order to be able to render it into “Seuss” language. For the elementary school children who were there taking part in this service, they were able to hear and see the Eucharist in a way that is more accessible to them while still conveying the message of Christ’s sacrifice for them. They were listening and participating in a way they never do when we are on hard benches dozens of feet away from the action and listening to language that can be odd and stilting even for adults. I was actually struck by the thought that the Seuss language sounds like it could have been a dialect from the 16th century, in other words, the King James version of the Bible. I should also add that the sermon was excellent, speaking of God’s love for us in sending his Son.

So all in all, I do not find this sacrilegious. I was not terribly comfortable and it certainly cannot and should not be on a regular rotation of services, but if our goal is to engage our children, from elementary school through high school, then this service, its creation and participation, accomplished that goal while maintaining the integrity of the theology of the service.

Finally, as a brief aside, My wife and I have often debated how his name is pronounced. Wikipedia tells me this:

Geisel’s pen name is regularly pronounced /ˈsjuːs/ sewss, an anglicized pronunciation inconsistent with his German surname. He himself noted that it rhymed with “voice” (his own pronunciation being /ˈsɔɪs/ soyss) and Alexander Liang (his collaborator on the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern) wrote of him:

You’re wrong as the deuce
And you shouldn’t rejoice
If you’re calling him Seuss.
He pronounces it Soice.

Geisel switched to the anglicized pronunciation because it “evoked a figure advantageous for an author of children’s books to be associated with—Mother Goose“[and because most people used this pronunciation.

 

1. By the way, I have no idea if our diocese, which allowed this liturgy’s development, got approval to use the name and likeness or not.
2. My least favorite part of this prayer, I have to say.

Only slightly less annoying, yet far more accurate.

Our dear friend Jim-A-Mighty would label this a “dilettante alert.” Ms. Diana deRegneir admits to an ad hoc learning of religious matters, including the Lord’s Prayer. You too will be “surprised” by what she has found in “the Lords [sic] Prayer.” (I suppose I could stop there, but no, let’s go on.)

However, when I heard the prayer in its original Aramaic I was bitten by curiosity. So here’s what I learned.

The Lord’s Prayer is the accepted universal prayer for all Christians. In the latter part of the second century, Matthew interpreted the instructional passage spoken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:9-13). The Sermon on the Mount is derived largely from the teachings of the Essenes, a Jewish sect in Palestine of which Jesus may have belonged. Thus, the prayer bears a striking resemblance to “The Kadish” found in the Talmud.

Matthew’s translation which most of us were taught in childhood is also admitted by scholars to be inaccurate. The problem of mistranslation arose in part because Matthew was translating into Latin from Greek rather than from Aramaic.

*sigh* It doesn’t get any better folks. I have no energy to deal with this and you all know better, so how about we all just give a wry chuckle, shake our heads, and go have an afternoon cup of tea?  If you really must, you can read it all via American Chronicle | Some Surprises in the Lords Prayer.

 

Now I am dictating a blog post to you via MacSpeech Dictate, which is working like a champ, but has a relatively limited vocabulary when it comes to Biblical and rabbinic literature. The surgery actually well earlier this week and I’m hopeful that I will be out of the cast by the beginning of next week.  In the meantime, I thought I would share a couple of thoughts I’ve had recently while in church.

Cynicism is easy

From John Steven Fernandez on flickr, used under creative commons

Two weeks ago we decided to visit a different church for an evening service that was  “contemporary and contemplative.” I was looking forward to a contemporary service and I knew the pastor was a good preacher. What we had, however, was 50 minutes of a total of three songs and one verse which lasted 25 minutes. Now I recognize that we all worship in different ways and each of us at different times worship in different ways so I sought to take this time to be in prayer and meditation, as intended by the worship leaders. Our 12-year-old daughter and six-year-old son, however, could be forgiven for becoming a bit impatient with the service. As it was, they were not and were very well behaved and our daughter paid quite a bit of attention to the worship and the sermon. The problem is, she has a bit too much of her father’s sarcasm in her.

At one point the worship leader began to improvise on the words singing over and over again “God of breakthroughs.” I had my head bowed and my shoulders began to shake lightly. My wife tapped me on the shoulder and asked if everything was all right. I looked up smiling and said, “God of our grapefruits? Isn’t he God of all citrus?” Needless to say, I was not setting the best example for our children.

I’m sure others of you have the same problem, as scholars of the Bible is not as easy to sit and listen to a sermon or worship service as it is for some. In the time of meditation I reflected on the fact that cynicism is easy.  Or perhaps it is that it is easy for me as a scholar to justify my cynicism as criticism.

It is indeed very easy to find holes in a belief system, to break down the logic of another, to find reasons why one person’s mode of worship is clearly less sincere than our own. There is nothing simpler than to look at another person’s church or denomination and explain how they are, in fact, not really following Scripture as well as we are. And of course, there is nothing simpler to do than to poke holes in religion, market for the fairy tale that it clearly is, and dismiss it in our modern age of enlightenment and reason. It all really is very easy.

What is far more difficult is to set aside our hubris and recognize that there are truths outside of ourselves. Faith is not the belief in things that are irrational or unreasonable.  Faith does, however, require us to be truly open-minded and generous of heart. Yes there are lots of pastors out there who preach horrific sermons and I understand they’re even blogs that catalogue such sins. But that doesn’t mean that truth isn’t contained within their words or even within incredibly sappy song. Sometimes listening is the hardest skill of all.

 

My automatic Google notification for “Aramaic” brought up a curious article from Psychology Today, “It’s in the Bible…Isn’t It?“ This is not a publication I read so I am unfamiliar with Stephen Mason, Ph.D. who is apparently nationally known for his writing and radio show. Nor do I know about his earlier article from last month where he addressed the question of an historical Jesus. In this column, however, he decides to poke again at this question and offers a poorly frame “quiz” of biblical knowledge. Apparently in an attempt to show us that he knows the Bible, having read it once as an undergraduate. Sadly, he begins by showing his own ignorance.

Last month, I wrote a column based on a documentary DVD titled: “The God Who Wasn’t There.” In a nutshell, it questions the existence of a historic Jesus Christ. I don’t know if there ever was such a person but, then again, does it really matter?

Look at Buddhism. Like Christianity, it has now split into numerous sects though no one can be sure about its titular head – Buddha. Was he a real person? Supposedly his friends called him Siddhartha and he died from either a mesenteric infarction or a bad truffle. But maybe he never lived. This was, after all, a couple of thousand years ago. Anyway, while Buddhists are happy enough with the message, Christians seem to need a body. Why this should be so, I don’t know.

"The Body of Christ" Used under Creative Commons license.

Assuming he is truthful in saying that he doesn’t know why a “body” is so necessary to Christianity (and I have no reason to think he is lying), he clearly does not remember much of the Bible he read so long ago nor bothered to learn even the most rudimentary facts about Christianity.

Why should Christians need a body? Because unlike Buddhism where the emphasis is upon the teachings and practices of the founding teacher, Christianity is that and more. As an aside and to make this point, when Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ¹ came out a rabbi friend of mine complaining about the violence said he did not understand why the movie had to be about the crucifixion, why not the Sermon on the Mount. “After all,” he said, “it is not like the crucifixion is central to Christianity.” Except it is.

It is true that the teachings and life example of Jesus are vitally important to Christianity, but the reason a real, bodily Jesus is necessary for Christianity is because his death was an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world.² This fundamental teaching is clear in all of the New Testament, particularly Paul’s letters and the letter to the Hebrews. If there was no Jesus/no body then there was no sacrifice and thus no atonement of sins. So while the doc may not know why Christians insist on a real, historical Jesus. This is what makes “Good Friday,” otherwise a brutal and bloody affair, good.

So perhaps Dr. Mason will read this post and learn why it is that Christians need a body.

 

1. We showed this movie Tuesday night as the final film in our Reel Jesus film festival. I may blog on it later, but Man! what an exhausting film. I have such mixed feelings about it, but one thing is clear it is a powerful film.
2. Notice that I am not even addressing the question of whether or not he really existed, but why Christians “seem to need a body.”

Each comic is followed by a little “afterward:”

 

Anglican Collider Breaks Down

The Anglican Collider will be out of action for months or even years, according to The European Cern (TEC).

A large magnet, located at Pittsburgh, USA, has malfunctioned. Apparently it has slipped away, and may only now be useful for attaching to a different, lesser collider. The fault seems to be in a nut, essentially characterising a bishop, and bishops are notorious for having a screw loose.

This blog recently recorded how Anglican particles are sent spinning round the collider in opposite directions, causing huge outbursts of energy that generate more heat than light.
…

The problems emerged on Friday. The magnets, also called bishops, have to be super cool in order that the particles stay within the collider. It seems that a number of magnets have been heating up. A critical point was passed when the Presiding Bishop particle was set off, causing ruptures in a number of places and an immediate dislodging of that one magnet at Pittsburgh. …

However, the whole TEC needs warming up slowly and then cooling down again, and this takes considerable time. The Archbishop of Canterbury provides the model for this slow operation. He is known to be in deep freeze most of the time, is slowly warmed up, makes an ambiguous statement and then cools down again back to freezing point. His one utterance when warm is said to keep the Anglican Collider going for months.

 

Andy Crouch, a savvy culture watcher and commentator who runs the Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today, has a pretty brilliant idea that’s rooted, in some ways, in Shelley’s idea of poet as unacknowledged legislator.

Speaking at the Catalyst Conference, a gathering of more than 12,000 young evangelical Christian leaders who run the gamut from very liberal to uber-conservative, outside Atlanta last weekend, Crouch urged the religiously minded among us to start thinking about culture making rather than culture battling.

It’s the theme of Crouch’s new book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, where he traces the pattern of his community’s (i.e. evangelical Christian) engagement with culture (to use the term broadly) over the last 100 or so years.

Crouch, who for 10 years served as a campus minister at Harvard University, says Christians first engaged culture by critiquing it, sometimes viciously. Then they began copying culture, which explains the emergence of profoundly bad “Christian” pop music from the mid-’70s until the mid-’90s.

Of late, many religious folks, Crouch argues, have become blind consumers of culture. And none of these approaches — critiquing, copying or consuming — will do anything toward changing the culture for the better.

People of faith need to start earnestly cultivating culture. If you want to see something good, create it. Or support those who do.

 

notes from the GLOBAL CHURCH
Philip Jenkins.
The Christian Century.
Chicago: Sep 9, 2008. Vol. 125, Iss. 18; pg. 60, 1 pgs

Not long ago I was taking a cab from O’Hare Airport to downtown Chicago, and my friendly driver proved to be a Nigerian from the Yoruba people. As the traffic gave us lots of time to talk, I soon found that this man was a pastor of a Nigerian-based congregation about which I had written at some length, one of the so-called
Aladura churches. Indeed, he was the nephew of the church’s founding prophet, and whenever the prophet visited the U.S. he normally stayed
in his nephew’s apartment. The image startled me: drawing from the Old Testament, I had always imagined prophets laying their weary heads in caves or under trees, and not in a comfortable Chicago apartment. Yet another biblical stereotype bit the dust.

This encounter stirred other thoughts about the presence of churches from the global South in North America and Europe. For decades now, ministers and missionaries from Africa, Asia and Latin America have been active in the global North, and such churches are easy enough to find in most major cities: just look at the Yellow Pages. But these bodies have not registered much in popular consciousness. When local news media discover their existence, as they do every couple of years, they normally report the story as a curiosity, an ironic reversal of the once-familiar pattern of missionaries heading from the U.S. to Africa or China. And when media report in those terms, they miss one of the most important stories in the modern history of Christianity, namely the prolific emergence of new independent an prophetic churches and, no less important, their projection onto a global stage.

Stories of that kind can be told of many parts of the world-but just to pursue the present example, let’s look at the Aladura tradition. Among North American Christians, the name Aladura is all but unknown to nonspecialists, but a case can be made that this dynamic movement cries out for coverage in any account of 20th-century church history. Few religious groups exemplify globalization better than the Nigerian congregations.

A hundred years ago, the Anglican Church was making some converts in the land that we today call Nigeria, especially among the Yoruba people. In fact, the church became too successful. It spread such a passionate thirst for immediate spiritual experience, for prophecy, for healings and visions, that fervent believers broke away to form societies for prayer and healing. These Christians attracted the name Aladura, “owners of prayer.” With their strict focus on healing, the believers received an enormous boost during the great epidemics that swept West Africa during and after World War I.

Soon several new churches existed. Scholars normally list four main groupings-Christ Apostolic Church, the Church of the Lord (Aladura), the Celestial Church of Christ, and the Cherubim and Seraphim-although these were as prone to splits as Baptists have been in U.S. history. The Cherubim and Seraphim alone may have 200 breakaways. One veteran of that church went on to form the Redeemed Christian Church of God, one of the most rapidly expanding branches of the family. Like other groups, the RCCG has come to look ever more Pentecostal in its worship style.

Estimates of total numbers vary-no surprise there-but the different churches combined probably have 14,000 parishes in Nigeria alone, where they claim some 12 million followers. They also boast a stunning global reach, with a fiery sense of mission. Their greatest successes have been among the sizable African communities within Europe, where they provide a major and little noticed religious counterweight to the much better publicized Islamic immigration.

By far the most successful missionary group is the RCCG, which operates in a dozen African countries as well as Europe and the U.S. and dreams of converting Islamic North Africa. Apart from its open presence in England, France and Germany, it has planted many ministries under other names. One of its foundations, London’s Jesus House, is one of England’s largest megachurches. The RCCG has also grown fast in the U.S., building from its original base among Houston’s flourishing Nigerian community. Today it claims 200 American parishes, as well as a national headquarters in East Texas. What we seem to have here is the opening phase of an influential new global denomination.

The fact that most of us have never heard of these churches tells us a great deal about how we filter and interpret information. However active they may be, however ambitious in their scope, they just seem so irrelevant to Northern-world debates and concerns that we scarcely notice them. In contrast, we pay enormous attention to-for instance-the conservative Africans who play a role in sexuality debates within mainline Northern denominations. So these independent congregations don’t feature on our mental maps until suddenly, almost with shock, we realize just how much they are among us.

[Author Affiliation]
The author is Philip Jenkins, who teaches at Perm State University.
–
Philip Jenkins
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities
Department of History and Religious Studies

 

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God,[1] and to enjoy him forever.[2]

I am sure that you all are aware of Charles Schultz’s (1922-2000) personal Christian convictions and that it seeped into his Peanuts strip from time to time. This week’s reruns have CB addressing just this question, but his answer is hardly catechetical.

It seems to me that Lucy and Linus’ responses are rather profound, given CB’s view that our purpose is “to make others happy.” If that is our sole or primary purpose then indeed somebody (everyone) isn’t doing their job. Now on the other hand, I suppose we could say that this is just “the second great command” put in new terms and I would accept that, but it is given primacy in this account. I think the order (love God first then we are able to love our neighbors, and even ourselves, properly) is rather important.