You Are What You Love – June 23rd, 2019
Chapter 3 “The Spirit Meets You Where You Are”
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 3 • The story so far. • Everybody has a hungry heart …… • Who’s worship …. • Form and Content • Ancient wisdom for a modern world
You Are What You Love Chapter 3 “The Spirit Meets You Where You Are” “The story so far”
St Augustine: A heart on fire for truth Saint Augustine. (Circa 1645-1650) by Philippe de Champaigne
Learning to love: A compass for life
Learning to love: A dynamic system needing care
Loves & Desires: An example - the love of the mall
The story so far - Learning to Love Rightly • We are not just “thinking beings” we are “desiring beings”. • Therefore, what do you love/desire?
• We think we know our loves but in reality we decide much beneath in the subconscious. • 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.
• Just as the church’s liturgy can embed itself in our consciousness other liturgies of life also find their way into our heart.
St. Augustine The Psalms “Jerusalem had its beginning with Abel, Babylon with Cain …. two loves build these two cities. Love of God builds Jerusalem; love of the world builds Babylon. Let each of us, therefore, ask what he loves, and he will find of which one he is a citizen. And if he finds he is a citizen of Babylon let him root out desire and plant love. But if he finds he is a citizen of Jerusalem, let him endure captivity and hope for freedom”. Augustine, Psalmos, 64.2
You Are What You Love Chapter 3 “The Spirit Meets You Where You Are” “Everybody has a hungry heart”
Isaiah 55 “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.
Our Desiring Self – The Hungry Heart
Everybody Has A Hungry Heart • Another useful (and biblical!) physical metaphor for our desire - we hunger – this is built into our humanness. • But what we hunger for is something that is learned (McD’s knows this – it’s the point of those fast food ads you see ….) • In the American food chain our hungers are trained (for example, Americans eat incredible amounts of sugar). • The food industry “forms” us with, chemistry, advertising, and rituals of consumption (liturgies!).
• Then the diet industry seeks to “re-form” us with more advertising, new rituals, and different chemicals …… • Could it be that, similarly, in our spiritual hunger we have been trained to accept food that will never satisfy …..
James K. A. Smith: You are what you love “If our loves can be disordered by secular liturgies it’s also true that our loves need to be reordered (recalibrated) by counter liturgies – embodied, communal practices that are “loaded” with the gospel and indexed to God and his kingdom. ……. ….. The church – the body of Christ – is the place where God invites us to renew our loves, reorientate our desires, and retrain our appetites. The church is that household where the Spirit feeds us what we need and where, by His grace, we become a people who desire him above all else”. James K. A. Smith
You Are What You Love Chapter 3 “The Spirit Meets You Where You Are” “Who’s worship …. ”
Worship: Who’s Worship? • For St. Augustine humans are creatures who are created to be in relationship to God – as such human beings must worship. • This impulse is ancient and universal – a fact that is obvious to us in every culture. • Christian Worship is more than an impulse to respond to the desire of our heart – it is a specific response to a specific story. • Christian Worship has its own character, form and content. It is a liturgy for life.
Worship: Who’s Worship?
God Transcendent “I am who I am”
• What’s the purpose of order and liturgy in worship? It finds our Christian center.
• Transcendent & Immanent. • Balance the transcendent (wholly other) God with his own commitment to immanence (wholly with us) in Christ.
Adam
Man
Mankind “Common”
Mankind Particular
• Universal & Particular. • Balance the universal (commonness) character of all peoples expressed in a particular space, place, and time.
“This is my body”
God Immanent
Worship: Who’s Worship? • In our reformed understanding of the faith God himself is the primary mover: God calls, we respond, maybe most especially, in worship. • In specifically Christian worship, God is both the subject and the object. He is the object of our worship and he initiates in us our worship. • In response, liturgy is action – our action reflects a God who acts in history and who is accomplishing his purpose for the redemption of creation. • Therefore, in worship we are invited to be a part of something that God is already doing. • In worship the liturgy is there to create forms of response that are “loaded with the gospel”.
James K. A. Smith: You are what you love “The liturgy as a whole …… are to be seen as an interaction between God and the congregation: and the actions are not just human actions and not just divine actions but interactions between God and his people ….. 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
You Are What You Love Chapter 3 “The Spirit Meets You Where You Are” “Form and Content”
Form Matters: The medium is the message
Form Matters: The medium is the message To say form matters is to say that how we express worship (and preaching and teaching – and everything else) comes imbedded with a story ….. …… which raises a question, what is the story that comes imbedded with our forms of worship, teaching, and preaching.
Form Matters: The medium is the message “Lord, I lift Your name on high Lord, I love to sing Your praises I'm so glad You're in my life I'm so glad You came to save us You came from Heaven to earth to show the way From the earth to the cross my debt to pay From the cross to the grave From the grave to the sky Lord, I lift Your name on high”
….. but sometimes the message is the message
You Are What You Love Chapter 3 “The Spirit Meets You Where You Are” “Table Questions”
Table Questions • Read Isaiah 55:2 • “Why do you spend your money on that which is not bread, and your labor on that which does not satisfy?” I can’t ask the question better.
• “Even our expression of gratitude is made possible by the Spirit” (James K A Smith) • Do we recognize God as the primary mover in worship? How? • Vision 2020 • In our current forms of worship at FPCH should we try to be relevant or does “You are what your love” point us in a different direction?
You Are What You Love Chapter 3 “The Spirit Meets You Where You Are” “Takeaways”
You Are What You Love 3: Key Takeaways • Our human need is for spiritual food. But in the culture we have been trained to accept food that will never satisfy our spiritual hunger. • Christian Worship is more than an impulse to respond to the desire of our heart – it is a specific response to a specific Christian story. • The “form” of worship matters: how we express worship (and preaching, teaching, etc.) comes imbedded with a story. • This story is the story of the coming, living, dying, resurrection and ascension of Jesus which makes sense of all worship.
You Are What You Love Chapter 4 “Formative Christian Worship”
Formative Christian Worship Churches ….. “will grow precisely because of their ancient incarnational practice is an answer to the diminishing returns of excarnate spirituality”. …..
….. What Christian communities need to cultivate in our “secular age” is faithful patience, even receiving a secular age as a gift through which to renew and cultivate an incarnational, embodied, robustly orthodox Christianity that alone will look like a genuine alternative to “the spiritual” ”.
James K A Smith
