A Map for Navigating Holy Week

As we jump into Holy Week, here are some options to guide your reflection on Scripture, one for using printed Scriptures and another is for listening and reflecting audibly. I'll also note opportunities to participate in prayer and worship with communities of people both in your area and around the globe. Do all of these, or none of them, but especially during this week, do something! Everything I'll list here will be reliable, so choose whatever draws your attention.

Option 1: Reading Through the Week

The first option is to use the passages from the Revised Common Lectionary to guide your reading this week. Normally the lectionary only gives passages for Sundays, but during Holy Week and some other special days of the Christian year, it also provides readings on some weekdays. While most of its readings rotate through a three-year cycle, the readings for Monday - Friday of this week are the same every year.

Monday of Holy Week

  • Isaiah 42:1-9: The first of four "Servant Songs" of Isaiah, all of which are included in the readings during this week. These songs both point forward to an individual (the Messiah), and describe Israel at its best. This passage describes the Messiah as one who "will not shout or cry out... a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out" until he brings forth justice on earth.
  • Psalm 36:5-11: Praise to God for his love, faithfulness, righteousness, and justice.
  • Hebrews 9:11-15: How Christ's blood on the cross was superior to the blood of temple sacrifices, establishing a new covenant, so that we could be set free from sin.
  • John 12:1-11: To begin the week leading up to his crucifixion, Jesus visits the home of his friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus for the final time. At a dinner given in Jesus' honor, Mary enters and pours expensive perfume on Jesus, drying his feet with her hair.

Tuesday of Holy Week

  • Isaiah 49:1-7: Isaiah's second Servant Song, expressing that although the Messiah would be sent to bring Israel back to God, he would also be made a light for the Gentiles, so that he could "bring [God's] salvation to the ends of the earth."
  • Psalm 71:1-14: A plea to God for deliverance from the hands of the wicked. Although others will say, "God has forsaken him," the Psalmist pleads, "Be not far from me, O God; come quickly, O my God, to help me."
  • 1 Corinthians 1:18-31: "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God..."
  • John 12:20-36: Jesus predicts his death, saying that "the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified," and "unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds."

Wednesday of Holy Week

  • Isaiah 50:4-9a: The third Servant Song of Isaiah: "I have offered my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who pulled out my beard... I have set my face like flint... It is the sovereign Lord who helps me."
  • Psalm 70: A plea to God for help when faced with the threats of enemies. Contains the words so often repeated in traditional prayers: "Hasten, O God, to save me; O Lord, come quickly to help me."
  • Hebrews 12:1-3: An admonition to throw off the sin that entangles us so easily and remain focused on Jesus, "who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame..."
  • John 13:21-32: Jesus predicts his betrayal and tells Judas, "What you are about to do, do quickly."

Holy (Maundy) Thursday

  • Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14: God's instructions to Moses on how the Israelites were to celebrate the Passover, which is what Jesus and his disciples were doing on this evening.
  • Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19: A psalm thanking God for deliverance from death. "How can I repay the Lord for all his goodness to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord."
  • 1 Corinthians 11:23-26: Paul recounts what he received from the Lord regarding the Lord's Supper.
  • John 13:1-17, 31b-35: Jesus washes the disciples' feet and gives them his new command: "As I have loved you, so you must love one another."

Good Friday

  • Isaiah 52:13-53:12: Isaiah's fourth, final, and climactic Servant Song. This passage is quoted more frequently in the New Testament than any other Old Testament passage. "He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed."
  • Psalm 22: The psalm quoted by Jesus from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
  • Hebrews 10:16-25: Because of Jesus' faithfulness and sacrifice, God's law can be written in our hearts and minds and our sins remembered no more. Now a new way has been opened for us to draw near to God.
  • John 18:1-19:42: John's full account of Jesus' arrest, trial, crucifixion and death and Peter's denial.

Option 2: Listen and Pray Through the Week

A friend recently introduced me to a podcast I've been enjoying greatly, which is based on the Christian year and features prayer, music, a Scripture passage and reflection for each day. It's produced by a group of British Jesuits, which provides a couple of benefits: it's very helpful in leading us to engage the day's passage of Scripture rather than just hear it and move on, and second, the British accents make the narrators sound much more intelligent and spiritual than I would in my Texas drawl.

The podcast and website are called Pray as You Go, and you can get the recordings through their website or their iTunes feed.

Option 3: Pray With a Worldwide Community on Good Friday

My friends at The Transforming Center, led by Ruth Haley Barton, are offering everyone a resource to guide your time of prayer wherever you are on the afternoon of Good Friday. I know their resources well enough to know that this will be well done, and it will provide us a way to pray together as a community regardless of where we are. Click here to read their blog post and receive their prayer guide.

Option 4: (Please do this one!) Worship and Pray with a Church in Your Community

It's always wonderful to see how many people are in worship on Easter Sunday morning, and our community celebrations of Easter will certainly be richer if we have also joined together to worship and pray on Maundy Thursday and/or Good Friday. Hopefully your church has an option on one or both of these days for you to participate in. If not, feel free to participate as a guest in a church that does. If you are in the Midland/Odessa area, join our church as we gather for a Maundy Thursday and Tenebrae service at 6:30 Thursday evening at First United Methodist Church of Midland. (Feel free to leave what your church is doing as a comment below to let others in your area know.)

Spiritual Formation Recommended Reading List

My friend Jesse recently asked me for a list of books I recommend for helping people become familiar with Spiritual Formation. There's a lot of good stuff out there these days, but I have listed the ones I consider the best of the best (so far). Since they vary in writing style, I've also noted how many pages each has and given each of them a "heaviness rating": pretty heavy, not-so-heavy, or no problem. Click here to see the list. (I've made it a static page on the blog rather than the text of a blog post, since it will always be a list in process.)

Any additions you would make?

Getting to Know John

Theology scholar Paul Chilcote says that he's always believed that if people would read John Wesley's sermons, many lives would be changed, and I'm convinced that he's right. I've been a Methodist my entire life, but it was when I had a theology class where I finally had to John Wesley's sermons that my admiration for him and confidence in the reliability of my faith heritage began to increase dramatically. Therefore, in an effort to continue to get to know Mr. Wesley better myself and hopefully help some other people to do so, I'm beginning a series of posts on his sermons. The problem is that sermons in England in the 18th century don't have much in common with sermons today. There are absolutely no jokes. They're long. And the overwhelming consensus is that they're not very entertaining. (They're seriously boring unless you happen to enjoy reading old boring stuff, then they're great!) But the guidance contained in them is so good that we need to find some ways to get past these obstacles.

Chilcote has done a great job of this in his book, [amazon_link id="0835809501" target="_blank" ]Praying in the Wesleyan Spirit[/amazon_link], which takes each of Wesley's Standard Sermons and turns them into short prayers. This book is a great way to get better acquainted with what he believed and taught.

I also thought I'd throw my own hat in the ring and make my own attempt at making his sermons more accessible to us today. Wesley had many sermons, but 52 of them were designated the Standard Sermons, which served as the doctrinal standards for the early Methodists and continue to provide the basis for United Methodist theology today (well, at least they're supposed to). Since there are 52 of these, it's easy to work with one each week of the year, and because this is the 14th week of the year, I'll begin the series this week in the following post with Sermon 14: The Repentance of Believers.

Wesley's sermons are more like logical arguments than we're used to in sermons today. A positive aspect of that is that it makes them really easy to outline. (He usually says the points he's going to make in an introduction, then writes the rest of the sermon with numbered paragraphs.) So while I find it difficult to just sit and read through one of his sermons, if I can find the point of each numbered paragraph, I can really get into them.

So... here's what I'll do with each sermon:

  • I'll create and post an ePub file of the original sermon, which can be read in iBooks on iPhones, iPads, iPods, and maybe iSomeOtherStuff... and a host of other e-reading devices.
  • Since Wesley's sermons lend themselves so easily to being outlined, I'll post my own outline of the sermon in the blog post. If you're not up for reading the entire thing on the ePub file, the outline will help you get his point.
  • I'll also (hopefully) post a Wesleyan hymn whose text applies to the sermon.

And here are the sermons that are posted so far:

Book Review: A Pocket Guide to Prayer by Steve Harper

 

A very meaningful practice for me over the past year and a half has been fixed-hour prayer (which is called by different names in different traditions, such as the daily office or praying the hours). I had been part of communities who practiced fixed-hour prayer together in the past, and really enjoyed it even though I didn't have any idea what we were doing. My real introduction to the practice came as part of my participation in the Transforming Community with Ruth Haley Barton.

For thousands of years, seekers of God have shared in the practice of praying at particular times of the day, as described in Psalm 55:17: "Evening, morning, and noon I cry out in distress, and he hears my voice." (Also see other passages such as Psalm 119:164, Daniel 6:10, Acts 3:1, and Acts 10:9). This rhythm of prayer was central in the practice of ancient Judaism, which means it is almost certainly a way of praying practiced by Jesus and his earliest disciples.

Although many evangelical Christians today are as unfamiliar with the practice as I was for so long, thankfully there are very helpful resources available to help us rediscover it today, so that we too can share together in the sacred rhythm and words of prayer with an innumerable community of God's people through the centuries, even including Christ himself.

A recent addition to these resources, and perhaps one of the most accessible, is A Pocket Guide to Prayer by Steve Harper.

In a very small volume, Harper provides a guide to prayer for five times of the day: upon awakening, morning, noontime, evening, and at bedtime, and the guide provides readings for one month. As is universal in these Christian guides to fixed-hour prayer, the person praying will be led through praying the Psalms, the Lord's Prayer, times of silence, and a reflective reading of the scriptures. This manual also includes the texts of hymns and readings of classic Christian literature for each day of the month.

The book's organization is simple and very usable, but the most helpful thing about it is its size. I'll admit that I have larger than average hands, but this should help you get an understanding of how very "totable" the book is:

Perhaps the most widely used contemporary guide to fixed-hour prayer is the excellent Divine Hours series by Phyllis Tickle. I used these for my first year of this practice, before settling into the Book of Common Prayer this year. As great as the Divine Hours manuals are, their disadvantage is their size. I've put Harper's Pocket Guide next to one of the three volumes of Divine Hours required to get through a year:

It can be a powerful thing for us to incorporate this way of regular praying into our lives, particularly when we realize the community of folks around the world in our own day and through centuries past who have prayed the same words, at the same times, in the same ways. If you are interested in exploring fixed-hour prayer for the first time, or if you have practiced it for years but could use a more mobile guide, this little book is a great resource for us.

(And if you would like to learn more of the history and context of this way of praying, read Praying With the Church by Scot McKnight, which was part of our reading in the Transforming Community. The TC introduced me to the practice; McKnight's book led me to love it and make it a central part of how I seek to grow my friendship with God.)

Book Review: Fasting by Scot McKnight

For most of my Christian life, I have tried to avoid fasting as if it were sin itself. (And, if the truth needs to be told, I’m not always very successful at avoiding sin, but I do have a very consistent record of avoiding this ancient discipline which so many good people- like Jesus- have said to be helpful.) In this brief book, Scot McKnight has thoroughly reframed my understanding of fasting and led me to form a solid intention of incorporating it into my life.

My aversion to fasting has come from two sources: First, it’s uncomfortable, and unfortunately I’ve come to be quite fond of comfort whenever I can get it. There’s nothing admirable about that. The second reason, though, is that much of what I have seen and heard about fasting in recent Christian teaching and writing focuses on the practice as a way of twisting God’s arm into giving us something that, by our fasting, we are showing him that we want very badly. It seems to be not much more advanced than a spiritualized adult version of a toddler’s attempts at manipulating their parents by throwing a temper tantrum. I’ve always sensed that something about the teaching was a bit off, and Scot McKnight has provided the much needed corrective.

From the book’s introduction to conclusion, he directly addresses this misconception of fasting and continually reiterates that in the Scriptures, “Fasting is the natural, inevitable response of a person to a grievous sacred moment in life,” not “a manipulative tool that guarantees results.”

McKnight’s understanding of fasting hinges on his readers regaining the ancient Hebrew understanding of a human being as being whole (what he calls "Biblical body image"), meaning that we reject the dualistic distinction between body and spirit and recognize that our complete response before God will include all aspects of who we are, obviously including our bodies.

If we have this understanding of ourselves in place, then fasting becomes a natural response when life’s “grievous sacred moments” come our way. These moments, as McKnight describes them, come often in our lives, and he organizes the majority of the book around these different kind of grievous sacred moments, respectively: the need for repentance (“Body Turning”), intercession (“Body Plea”), responding to loss (“Body Grief”), gaining awareness of our need to overcome sinful habits (“Body Discipline”), regularly observing days when a particular response to God is appropriate- such as Good Friday (“Body Calendar”), sympathizing with those suffering from poverty or injustice (“Body Poverty”), our longing for greater intimacy with God (“Body Contact”) or for the coming of God’s kingdom on earth (“Body Hope”). The book concludes with practical warnings and admonitions about fasting with chapters on problems and benefits of fasting and its effects on the body.

Anyone desiring to respond to God with more of their whole selves will gain tremendously valuable insight from McKnight on how we can do so in a way that millennia of our predecessors in the faith have done, including Christ himself, by joining them in the practice of fasting.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

The Best Thing I do in Ministry

Being in ministry in a situation like mine requires doing a wide variety of things (often with opportunities to dabble in new areas of my incompetence), but among the things that I do, there is one that stands out to me above the rest as

  • being the most enjoyable,
  • helping me become more the kind of person I want to be,
  • making the biggest difference in others' lives,
  • developing good and needed personal friendships with others,
  • and responding the best way that I can to the invitation from God that I've sensed for a long time to help others mature in their love for God and for others.
I remember writing in my journal years ago that I wanted to shape my life around two simple things: being a disciple of Jesus, and helping others to do so. This opportunity in ministry has helped me to do both of those things more effectively than anything else in the decade that I've been doing this kind of thing full-time, and it's nothing unique to me or my situation. Whether you're in ministry or not, you can easily be involved in the same thing I'm talking about: being part of a group of people going through The Apprentice Series by James Bryan Smith.
Because of the nature of the roles that I have had in ministry, I usually stay pretty familiar with a good deal of the curriculum available to churches. There is a multitude of good stuff out there, but I have never used or seen anything else like Apprentice. It is the only material I am aware of that does such an effective job at helping us to think about God in a way that is consistent with the scriptures, arrange our lives in a way that gives God room to work in us, and connect with others in the relationships that we must have for Jesus' kind of life to keep growing in us. Or, as one of my heroes, Dallas Willard, describes it, it is "the best practice of Christian spiritual formation that [he has] seen."
Apprentice isn't exactly a book study, but it is based around three books, all by James Bryan Smith: The Good and Beautiful God, The Good and Beautiful Life, and The Good and Beautiful Community. A leaders' guide and other very helpful resources are available for free at www.apprenticeofjesus.org.
We've greatly enjoyed going through the first two books with a group of friends at our church, and will begin the third book in a couple of weeks. One of the things we have enjoyed most is the mix of people in our group: from people who were very new to church and Christianity to others who have probably averaged being in church 3.5 times per week for their entire lives. It has made a difference for all of us. We love the relationships with one another, and those friendships have been an important part of how Apprentice teaches us overall to shape our lives in a way that we are Jesus' apprentices in how to live life in the kingdom of God.
I remember a specific time as a teenager, after I had committed my life to Christ. I wanted to learn to live my life as God wanted me to, but was having trouble figuring out how to do so. I was in church, I prayed and read my Bible, but I still wanted to know, "what's my life supposed to be like from now on?" I went to a Christian bookstore, hoping to find something with a title like, How to Live as a Christian, but I didn't have any such luck. That was almost 20 years ago, and I have kept looking hard for that answer, with some very good help along the way. If that is a question you have in your life now, the Apprentice series is the first place that I would point you. Find out if anyone in your church is going through this, and if not, get a group of friends together (who can be very committed to it) and start.
If you're someone who goes to First Methodist of Midland with us (or if you're anyone else locally), and this sounds interesting, there will be two chances to jump in during the coming months: one group will start in September on Wednesday nights, and another will start in January on Tuesday nights. Email me for more details.