family of four

next month

preach it

as a part of my internship for my mdiv, i'm required to preach a few times at church and last sunday was my first time. now, it's been a while since i stood in front of a church with a message, bible in hand. i'd never had a good experience preaching and have in the last few years just about deconstructed the need for it in today's church as the central part of a sunday gathering. ambivalent and full of anxiety i took the pulpit last week... and as i opened the text, it seemed to come alive, people's eyes became bright, connection with and around the text was occurring and i was having more fun than i want to admit. it was somewhat redemptive, so now i don't know what to think.
but i still have lots of questions: how does the sermon fit in a post-structural church? is it necessary? should it be the central piece on sunday morning? how can we re-think it if it still needs to be central? what are the theological/community values behind the sermon? is it more than the relaying of information by the "community expert"? How can it be deconstructed to become more relational? can that work in big churches? how have you experienced sermons, what do you like, don't you like about sermons. what are your thoughts?

nugget

Go to the people.
Live among them.
Learn from them.
Love them.
Start with what they know.
Build on what they have.

from an ancient Chinese poem, as quoted in this book.

current soundtrack

logos

last summer i took a philosophy course which explored, among other things, the origins of the word logos which appears in the epic opening of john's gospel. lately it's been on my mind a whole lot. we translate it into "word" yet this option does little to convey the meaning of this loaded word. it was coined in the days of the pre-socratics and developed by plato himself. the logos is the idea- mind, word, pure intellect, reason. when aristotle began to categorize the universe, he unpacked it piece by piece, all the way down to the question of what is the essence of being? the answer was logos- a thing is defined by the pure idea behind it. christ was born in a world that can be described as jewish-hellenism in thinking. the logos was a common concept- so john opens his text by stating that this man jesus is literally the pre-existing idea or reason behind all things. to state simply that christ is the logos is problematic to me because of the extracted, non-contextual and non-holistic nature of "pure reason." but for john to then say that this logos became flesh (interjected into the particular, contextual and holistic realm) was to turn centuries of greek thought completely on its head- for the greek had been concerned with unpacking the universe in search of the logos, john said "here he is, and he carries his greatest meaning when he is non-abstract." for me, this is a call to live in the particular, to venture outside the world of theory, to crash into one another and be with- mud, blood, sweat, tears, laughter, dirt... humanity.