Just Hit the Highlights
We continued out study of the Nazarene Articles of Faith last night. This was our third session and we began the night with where we left off, Article 9. Before we left the house to go to the church, my father, the pastor, asked if I would be finished teaching tonight. I responded by saying, " There is no way we will finish tonight." He responded, "Well, just hit the highlights."
That phrase resounded in my mind for the next few moments. Isn't this what the Church of the Nazarene has done for years? Isn't this the reason I am teaching these classes on the Articles in the first place? In our church, we have just "hit the highlights". What better way to produce ignorance and apathy in our cogregations than to just hit the tip of the iceberg on everything and forget the details. We are a denomination BECAUSE of the details. We are a part of the Protestant Church BECAUSE of the details, so why continue to "hit the highlights"?
I responded to my father by saying what you have just read and he passively agreed. But here is the beauty of the Holy Spirit. We began the service last night with a couple of songs and prayer, then I began to speak. We spoke about justification, regeneration, adoption, entire sanctification, and baptism. In those, I did, more or less, "hit the highlights", and I explained to the congregation that I wished I could dive more into the details, but time would not allow.
What happened next was the glorious work of the Holy Spirit. We moved to the next Article on the Lord's Supper and I began to explain the factors involved in this sacrament. We began to talk about who is allowed to take communion, and what do we as the Church of the Nazarene believe about this debate. I began to see the legalism involved in having an exclusive table, or a closed table, and I mentioned the "means of grace", and the Spirit began to speak. The Spirit of the Lord took over and for a few moments I could not talk. I knew something had to get out, but I physically could not talk. After a while of fighting back my physical muteness, I began to speak, but it is like I have never spoken before. I was not talking. I truly believe that the Holy Spirit was speaking through me.
For the next 20 minutes, the Spirit spoke through me about how the non-Chirstian can walk into this church and sense a love so powerful, it is overwhelming. We went through the order of a typical worship service and explained how the practices of the Church can speak to the one who knows nothing about God. We continued to speak about how much each part of the service can mean to someone. Even the offering means that we are a giving people, who do not have to give, but we give out of love for God and for others. We then spoke about the sermon, and we said whether or not it is a salvation sermon, it doesn't matter for the Word is being pronounced. We spoke about how much worth is found within the hymns, and how much a hymn can speak to someone. We spoke about the Lord's Supper next and it is only by the Grace of God that my voice continued to be audible. "Who are we to say that God cannot work through this practice of the Faith?" "Who is to say that a person who does not know the Lord, cannot be made to know Him at this sacred moment?" "Who is to say that God's Holy Spirit cannot move upon a person partaking of this practice that was instituted by Jesus Christ Himself?" The congregation began to speak up with the same Spirit. We ended the night with prayer, joined hands in a circle as one, the Body of Christ, and we talked to God and thanked Him for coming and speaking.
I believe in the Lord's Supper as a means of Grace. I believe that the Spirit can speak to anyone through this sacred act, and I believe that Salvation can come at the Table, where we meet God Himself.
I thank God for last night. I pray that He will continue to move His Church. Out of a service where we were supposed to "hit the hightlights", Christ came and led us into the details.
Thanks be to God.
Humbled and Open,
Joseph
That phrase resounded in my mind for the next few moments. Isn't this what the Church of the Nazarene has done for years? Isn't this the reason I am teaching these classes on the Articles in the first place? In our church, we have just "hit the highlights". What better way to produce ignorance and apathy in our cogregations than to just hit the tip of the iceberg on everything and forget the details. We are a denomination BECAUSE of the details. We are a part of the Protestant Church BECAUSE of the details, so why continue to "hit the highlights"?
I responded to my father by saying what you have just read and he passively agreed. But here is the beauty of the Holy Spirit. We began the service last night with a couple of songs and prayer, then I began to speak. We spoke about justification, regeneration, adoption, entire sanctification, and baptism. In those, I did, more or less, "hit the highlights", and I explained to the congregation that I wished I could dive more into the details, but time would not allow.
What happened next was the glorious work of the Holy Spirit. We moved to the next Article on the Lord's Supper and I began to explain the factors involved in this sacrament. We began to talk about who is allowed to take communion, and what do we as the Church of the Nazarene believe about this debate. I began to see the legalism involved in having an exclusive table, or a closed table, and I mentioned the "means of grace", and the Spirit began to speak. The Spirit of the Lord took over and for a few moments I could not talk. I knew something had to get out, but I physically could not talk. After a while of fighting back my physical muteness, I began to speak, but it is like I have never spoken before. I was not talking. I truly believe that the Holy Spirit was speaking through me.
For the next 20 minutes, the Spirit spoke through me about how the non-Chirstian can walk into this church and sense a love so powerful, it is overwhelming. We went through the order of a typical worship service and explained how the practices of the Church can speak to the one who knows nothing about God. We continued to speak about how much each part of the service can mean to someone. Even the offering means that we are a giving people, who do not have to give, but we give out of love for God and for others. We then spoke about the sermon, and we said whether or not it is a salvation sermon, it doesn't matter for the Word is being pronounced. We spoke about how much worth is found within the hymns, and how much a hymn can speak to someone. We spoke about the Lord's Supper next and it is only by the Grace of God that my voice continued to be audible. "Who are we to say that God cannot work through this practice of the Faith?" "Who is to say that a person who does not know the Lord, cannot be made to know Him at this sacred moment?" "Who is to say that God's Holy Spirit cannot move upon a person partaking of this practice that was instituted by Jesus Christ Himself?" The congregation began to speak up with the same Spirit. We ended the night with prayer, joined hands in a circle as one, the Body of Christ, and we talked to God and thanked Him for coming and speaking.
I believe in the Lord's Supper as a means of Grace. I believe that the Spirit can speak to anyone through this sacred act, and I believe that Salvation can come at the Table, where we meet God Himself.
I thank God for last night. I pray that He will continue to move His Church. Out of a service where we were supposed to "hit the hightlights", Christ came and led us into the details.
Thanks be to God.
Humbled and Open,
Joseph
posted by Joseph | 9:18 AM
3 Comments:
AMAZING! AMEN!
(I posted the same comment at 'Sanctifying Worship', but wanted to post it here as well.)
Beautiful post, Joseph.
I want to ask a follow-up question about the practice of an open table. I in no way want to deny that God can use the Eucharist as a converting ordinance. One cannot constrain the grace of God. But I don't think that this commits one to a doctrine of an open table. Maybe a parallel will help. I think that God, in His grace, is able to save even the unbaptized (something akin to the doctrine of baptism by desire perhaps). But at the same time I think that the Church should (as it historically has) insist that all Christians are baptized. God can give baptismal grace to someone apart from the water, but this doesn't undermine the historically sanctioned norms associated with the sacrament. So I wonder why we shouldn't think of the table in a parallel way. Does this make sense?
This does make sense, Kevin, at least to me, and I have wrestled (to no conclusion, yet) with this very question.
I think one of the problems with most Protestant praxes, especially those related to the sacraments, is how profoundly and wholly they de-sacralize the means of grace. (In this way, of course, the entire history of Protestantism is a story of secularization, but that is perhaps a topic for another post!) Our break with historically sanctioned norms has led to a shambolic state of sacramental worship for many Protestant Christians today.
I THINK I'm in agreement with you: the exception should not become the rule. No, a church should not feel ashamed for communicating an unbaptized believer, nor should they project shame upon the unbaptized person who is served communion (this is why I like the Lutheran statement). But neither should they encourage this practice: rather, they should encourage that this one who so clearly desires the fellowship of the table be initiated into the eucharistic community via the church's historical rite of baptism, and this as soon as possible.
Of course, the "open-table" discussion is entirely different when we're talking about whether or not Protestants are welcome at a Catholic or Orthodox Eucharist, or vice versa. In this sense, the Orthodox practice of offering blessed bread to all, but only the body and blood to those baptized Orthodox, makes a lot of sense: it's not a "closed table" per se, but all are not able to participate in the same capacity. This is a continuation of the agape meal which would have been characteristic of the earliest Christian leitourgia, the love feast to which all were welcome, which would have preceded the Eucharist, which was reserved for the baptized.
If we're going to maintain, under the rubric of a priesthood of all believers, an open table, adult baptism (mostly), and our norms of church membership as divorced from baptism/confirmation, perhaps what Protestants need is a two-fold Table liturgy, like the Orthodox. Unfortunately, what I suspect is that the solution that most Protestants have come to be quite happy with is, for the most part, just dispensing with the Table altogether. No doubt Communion just complicates and unsettles our worship, and we can do a lot better (we think) just working it out on our own, even at the expense of the means of grace, which is to say, at the expense of grace itself.
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