You Are What You Love – June 16th, 2019
Chapter 2 “You Might Not Love What You Think”
You are what you love. 1. To Worship is Human: (June 9th) 2. You Might Not Love What You Think: (June 16th)
3. The Spirit Meets You Where You Are: (June 23rd) 4. What Story Are You In? (June 30th)
5. Guard Your Heart: (July 7th) 6. Teach Your Children Well: (July 14th) 7. You make what you want. (July 21st) 8. Worship changes everything. (July 28th)
You Are What You Love: Chapter 2 • The story so far. • You know what you love, ….. or do you? • Underneath the hood • Drawing back the curtain
• Audit your heart
You Are What You Love Chapter 2 “You might not love what you think” “The story so far”
The story so far: Thinker, Believer, or Lover
The story so far: Our Disordered Loves
God
Citizenship
The story so far: Learning to Love Rightly
Sex
Art
Wealth
God
Family
Citizenship
Education
Politics
Church Health
Work
The story so far - Learning to Love Rightly • We need to understand ourselves as lovers – we are not just “thinking beings” we are “desiring beings”.
• Our desiring being is wired to have a vision of a healthy life which we desire and love. • Therefore, what do you love/desire? • We learn what to love via the practice of others – by reformation not information. • Worship is the process that retunes us – worship (re)forms our loves desires.
The story so far – Learning to Love Rightly A great question was asked last week to which I think I gave a poor answer: • Q: Surely, “what is your vision of the good life?”, is a question better asked of young adults than mature Christians. • A: Yes, its important we ask that question now of our young adult community.
• But “You are what your love” points out we humans learn by watching the practice of others – by reformation not information. • Thus, the practice of our mature Christian lives communicates our loves – the real loves - to those younger in the faith.
You Are What You Love Chapter 2 “You might not love what you think” “What do you love? ….. Or do you?”
Romans Ch. 7 “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”.
We need to love something – what do you love?
Learning to love: Worship a compass for life
Learning to love: A dynamic system needing care
You Are What You Love Chapter 2 “You might not love what you think” “Underneath the hood”
Underneath the Hood – Head or Heart
Underneath the hood – Head or Heart? • Underneath the hood we are lovers – more than “thinking things” – we are driven by our loves. • We think we know our loves – we think we “think first and then act on the basis of evidence and facts”. • But …… in reality a very great deal of what we decide is decided beneath the surface of conscious thought. • This includes our loves which are learned and ingrained through habit (think of our hunter example). • Some habits we can learn subconsciously – we can be formed and shaped by our circumstances without knowing. • The church understands this – it is the point of liturgy – but so do many other competing visions of the good life.
Underneath the hood – Liturgies of Life • The liturgy of our church is the church’s story told in prayers, confession, singing, preaching, and sacraments. • In worship we rehearse this story and imbibe it into ourselves, learning the story beyond the facts of the story. • The church’s story – it’s liturgy - is not the only story we are exposed to. We are exposed to many other liturgies of life. • Just as we know the church’s liturgy can embed itself in our conscious other liturgies also find their way into our heart.
• Other visons of the good life, other accounts of passions and desires enter into our consciousness forming our loves. • Thus ….. We might not love what we think.
James K. A. Smith: You are what you love On the one hand, because our loves are habits, they are mostly operative under the hood, below the surface. So your loves are unconscious even though they are learned. On the other hand you can also learn unconsciously – that is the training and aiming and directing of your loves can be happening without your awareness ….. ….. In short we unconsciously learn to love rival kingdoms because we don’t realize we are participating in rival liturgies”. James K. A. Smith
You Are What You Love Chapter 2 “You might not love what you think” “Drawing back the curtain”
Apocalypse: Drawing back the Curtain • Apocalyptic writing unveils - “draws back the curtain” - showing (or with the aspiration to show) how things really are in the world. • These writings give us a tool or method we can use as a model to interpret the world around us and its practices and liturgies. • Smith uses the word “liturgy” to describe habits and practices that have imbedded in them a rival vision of human flourishing. • So what “cultural liturgies” do we face and even unconsciously participate in?
The love of the hunter – an example
The love of work – an example
The love of the mall – an example
James K. A. Smith: You are what you love “You might not love what you think …… by our immersion in this liturgy of consumption, we are being trained to both overvalue and undervalue things: we are being trained to invest them with a meaning and significance as objects of love and desire in which we place disproportionate hopes (Augustine would say we are hoping to enjoy them when we should only be using them) while at the same time treating them (as well as the labor and raw materials that go into them) as easily discarded”. James K. A. Smith
You Are What You Love Chapter 2 “You might not love what you think” “Table Questions”
Table Questions • Read Romans 7:14-15 • Paul writes of our inability (his own) to keep the law. Talk about how Paul’s loves had been distorted by his previous habits and practices.
• “You can learn to love a telos unconsciously ……. ” (James K A Smith) • When we learn of how much information and habit we are absorbing unconsciously are we challenged, frightened, or is this an opportunity? • Vision 2020 • “Take a liturgical audit of your life”. If you can face this terror(!), take an audit of the big liturgies of your life – what do you think?
You Are What You Love Chapter 2 “You might not love what you think” “Takeaways”
You Are What You Love 2: Key Takeaways • We think we know our loves but in reality a very great deal of what we decide is decided beneath the surface of conscious thought. • Just as we know the church’s liturgy can embed itself in our conscious other liturgies also find their way into our heart. • Smith uses “cultural liturgy” to describe habits and practices that have imbedded in them a rival vision of human flourishing. • Develop an awareness of rival cultural liturgies. Take an audit of the big liturgies of your life – what story they are a part of?
You Are What You Love Chapter 3 “The Spirit Meets You Where You Are”
St. Augustine City of God “The glorious city of God — a city surpassingly glorious, whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting course of time, and sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as it shall dwell in the fixed stability of its eternal seat, which it now patiently waits for, expecting until righteousness shall return unto judgment, and it obtains, by virtue of its excellence, final victory and perfect peace”. Augustine, City of God, Book 1:1
St. Augustine City of God “The glorious city of God — a city surpassingly glorious, whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting course of time, and sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as it shall dwell in the fixed stability of its eternal seat, which it now patiently waits for, expecting until righteousness shall return unto judgment, and it obtains, by virtue of its excellence, final victory and perfect peace”. Augustine, City of God, Book 1:1
Historic Worship for a Postmodern Age “Calvin emphasized that the sacraments “are not strictly works of men but of God. In Baptism and the Lord’s Supper we do nothing; we simply come to God to receive His grace. Baptism, from our side, is a passive work. We bring nothing to it but faith, which has all things laid up in Christ”. ….. ….. The practices of historic Christian worship are not just old “traditional” ways that Christians gathered around the Word and Table. They are rooted in a fundamentally different understanding of what worship is, a fundamentally different paradigm of the primary agent of Christian worship”.
James K A Smith
