A meditation

Here is a meditative piece for your consideration:

Singing Bowl

Essentials Red

Well, here we are embarking on Essentials Red with the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies. I’m really excited about where we’re going to go with all this, and like many, a bit apprehensive about how to fit it all into a busy life. I know one thing though, I want to follow this path through. Love the Journey folks.

For sheer joy

Here is a video of Yo Yo Ma and the Assad brothers pouring it out in sonic surrender.  Beautiful.

Worship Worldview

This was something I did up for the Essentials course I’ve been taking with Dan Wilt and others.  It was a great exercise in really trying to put down the basic beliefs and underlying assumptions that inform our worship.  Lately, I’ve become a big fan of understanding why we do what we do.  Maybe there are some things we do that have no connection to the big picture, and maybe there are some things we don’t do that would connect in an explicit way to the big WHY question.  Regardless, here’s the piece, for your consideration:

Restoration Song (for essentials blue Week 5 final project)

For: The Institute Of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt.

Here is my submission for the creative final project for the essentials blue course. Feel free to download and use in your communities. I would be deeply honoured. It is a reflection on God’s restorative purpose for both our lives and the whole world.

As for the inevitable disclaimers… this was recorded entirely using my built-in mic on my iMac, I’m not really a piano player yadda yadda… I really and truly hope you like it and find life with it.

Restoration Song

restoration song chart

Restoration Song by Kris MacQueen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

The “songs” page

So this is a bit of an experiment.  I’m trying to figure out a good way to share music from this blog, so I’ve set up a page here that has a few worship songs.  There is a new one as of today for those who have already visited.  Please feel free to comment, and leave feedback via the polls.

The Primal Questions: Who and Why (Essentials Blue Week 4 Fall ‘08)

For: The Institute Of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt. 

(1)Confluence: 1: a coming or flowing together, meeting, or gathering at one point <a happy confluence of weather and scenery>2 a: the flowing together of two or more streams b: the place of meeting of two streams c: the combined stream formed by conjunction

This week has seen a fair bit of confluence.  There has been the coming together of circumstances, ideas, people and hope.  Frustration may have also joined the fray at a few points along the way.  

In particular, the discussion taking place in the material I have read this week is concerning the joining together of what we believe with what we do.  Dan Wilt talks at length about the many facets of modern worship expression(2).  Having spent the last several weeks talking about the nature of God, and the nature of humanity, this is the natural point where the rubber meets the road, where ideas and abstractions get fleshed out in concrete works and actions.

I think that understanding who God is, and understanding who and why we are, is absolutely crucial to getting the big picture.  The reality is this: many of us are good enough at our what we do that we can disconnect from why we do it, all the while continuing to look good doing it.  For a while.

I have a mental picture running through my mind of Wiley the coyote running off the edge of a cliff.  He keeps running along as though there is solid ground beneath his feet for quite some time.  Suddenly he looks down and, giving a quick wave to the camera, plunges to the ground way, way down there.

I remember an time in my life not unlike that, when I found myself disconnected from why I was doing what I was doing in worship, and I ran along for a while simply doing it… because.  If I had been asked why we worship God, I might have said, “Well, because.”  This was a completely strange and largely empty season.  I was good at leading people in worship.  Others gave me lots of positive feedback.  It’s shocking to me now, but, looking back, I felt like I was just doing a job.  Jumping through hoops.  I was a disillusioned worship leader who had lost the point.  A dangerous and sad state of affairs.

I haven’t explicitly tracked my journey from that time of disillusionment to this time of deliberation.  But I know now that bringing together theology and anthropology, the pursuit of understanding both God and ourselves, leads us into riches I could never have imagined back then.  The “how” questions are helpful, to be sure, but the “who” and “why” questions are absolutely crucial.  That is why these discussions are exactly the right discussions to be having.  Not because they inform us as worship leaders, but because they inform us as worshipers, and that, really and truly, is the point.

 

(1)http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/confluence

(2)Dan Wilt, Essentials*Blue Online Studies in Worship Theology and Biblical Worldview Online Course Text, iTunesU

 

A Christian WorldView

The following is a post for The Institute Of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt.  I’ll  post it here for your perusal as well.  Here’s the way I see this world, in a nutshell.

In the beginning, God reached out into the void and His dreams and intentions were given substance as He willed all matter and energy into being – making everything out of nothing. Into His very good creation He left His fingerprints over everything. Beauty was infused with His right order, the physical world was interlocked with heaven and all was balanced and right-related in perfect community.

At the very heart of His creation He fused all these attributes into His good stewards. His reflected beauty graced their faces; into their clay bodies He blew life and wove spirit and flesh together, mingling the stuff of heaven with the stuff of earth in His image-bearers. That they might govern well He wrote His law of Love on their hearts. In reflection of His triune nature, He made them to dwell in communion with one another, two yet one as Man and Wife. He made them to bear His likeness and share His rule, and they dwelt with Him in full submission and self disclosure. Heaven and earth, God and humanity, came together in the garden.

But humankind fell into pride, mistaking their God-likeness for inherent divinity. Deceived and vain, they invoked their God-given creative will and acted upon creation in rebellion to His single decree. They turned their faces from His glory in pursuit of their own. The consequence of the first creative act of humanity was the sundering of God’s creation from God’s intention. Beauty gave way to decay, justice was subverted, community was broken and the spiritual creation was dimmed and hidden from the physical creation.

Into this broken world, Jesus Christ, the Word of God clothed in flesh, came. In Him, the promise of the first Eden was renewed on the earth. Heaven broke into this fallen creation with each word He uttered, each act He performed. Wherever He went, the unlovely were recognized as beautiful, unjust scales were zeroed, love triumphed over hate and the infallibility of heaven triumphed over the decay of the earth.
And Jesus submitted Himself to the cross, forever establishing the breadth of His great love by enduring suffering in equal measure. In Him love triumphed over evil, obedience over rebellion and sacrifice over plunder. He died and was returned to the earth. But He was raised from the dead on the third day. The firstborn of the resurrection, Heaven and Earth are now forever bound up together in equal measure in His resurrected body. The promise of restoration is sealed, the justice of God satisfied completely. Jesus is returned to His Father’s dominion, and has sent His Holy Spirit as a great deposit of the coming age.

We look forward, with the whisperings of the Holy Spirit beckoning us, to the age where Jesus will return as King and all will be restored. As it was in the beginning, so it will be forever and ever. Amen.

Two sides of the hope coin: Love and Suffering (Week Three : Essentials Blue Fall 08)

For: The Institute Of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt

As I was on the bus the other day, tired and exhausted from a long work day, I noticed a man up front.  His eyes were deep set and grave; his grayed hair greasy and tangled.  His face wore a brokenness that was carved out in long, deep creases.  Perhaps he made similar observations of me.  And yet…  and yet it suddenly struck me that he bore resemblance to God.  I looked at the other faces surrounding me and saw the same thing.  Flashes of God-likeness.  The moment was fleeting, and soon I was awash in broken humanity again.  But every human retains traces of God’s intention for them.  What do we see when we see God in another?  What does whole-humanness look like?

So much of the question of humanity is tied up in question of God.  Who we are actually is completely dependent on who God actually is.  Dan Wilt’s teaching on Imago Dei(1)–fashioned in the image of God– bears enormous ramifications for us.  

Vocationally (why we are), Imago Dei means that we are to bring the rule and reign of God into the created order(2).  We were established to be a reminder to all of creation that God is with us.  In Christ, that is more true than ever before as He now resides in us through His Holy Spirit.  And yet I yelled at my wife this morning.  And yet I didn’t break down the barriers and go talk to that broken man on the bus.  Enormous ramifications.

Inherent Likeness (who we are) means that we contain, in a reflective sense, the attributes of God(3).  He has a will that He has exercised through creativity.  We have that same impulse.  He is relational, we are also.  He has authority, and we’ve been given authority.  Contrary to the “worm theology” I’ve encountered in some circles, this understanding gives us a sense of why God cares so much.  Yes, scripture tells us that we were formed from the dust and will return to it also as a reminder of one of the most crucial points in this discussion: There is a God and we are not Him(4).  But at the same time, we’ve been entrusted with an enormous gift, and responsibility in bearing His likeness.  And so, as scripture soars with the pronounced love of God, it also sinks into the guttural utterances of His suffering over our fallenness.  The truth, as demonstrated by the enormous lengths Jesus underwent to set the story back on track, is that the Lord of the cosmos is deeply invested in the human story.  Enormous ramifications.

And so we are in a state of hopeful expectation.  Our failures are justified in myriad ways by the acts of Jesus Christ(5).  The future intentions of God are magnified for us by the indwelling of His Spirit.  Yet we must be spurred on to allow the New Creation within us to make its way out into the broken world around us.  And so we must allow ourselves to feel the counterpoint to hope.  

One of the major attributes of God that we haven’t meditated on explicitly is His great capacity for love.  Again, we share this attribute, and it is the greatest attribute we share with Him.   But there is an underbelly to love, which is that our capacity to love is commensurate with our capacity to suffer.  Christ went to the lengths He did because of Love.  He allowed Himself to suffer and didn’t sunder the source of His pain… us.  Do we have the courage to accept both love and suffering, hope and the possibility of despair?  Because to the extent that we cap our capacity to suffer with our fellow man, we limit how far our love can soar.

 

(1)Dan Wilt, Essentials*Blue Online Studies in Worship Theology and Biblical Worldview Online Course Text, iTunesU

(2)ibid

(3)ibid

(4)ibid

(5)ibid

But… Oh! (Essentials Blue Fall ‘08)

For: The Institute Of Contemporary And Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Blue Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt

 

If the one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit from all eternity, then to worship Him in spirit and in truth, we must worship Him in the fullness of His self-revelation.(1)

This week as we’ve been diving into the nature of God, it has been so invigorating to be continually reintroduced to Him.  It is so easy to become comfortable with God.  Our familiar routines and prayers can reinforce to us the illusion that God is as we think of Him.  Then, one moment of God self-revealing leaves us stunned.  Again.

A friend of mine was lamenting to me a couple of weeks ago about how he can NEVER surprise his wife for her birthday.  No matter how sneaky he is about it, she simply knows him too well.  God does not share my friend’s dilemma.  He can surprise us whenever He wants to.  He doesn’t even need to be sneaky about it.  He just needs to Be as He Is.

Dan Wilt’s teaching(2) on God as “Creator, King & Saviour” all work for me on really practical levels.  I would never pretend to be an expert on any of these natures of God, but I could look at the archetypes presented to me in history and get the general idea of how each could apply to God.  With God the Creator, we’re invited to praise Him for life and beauty.  God as King causes us to submit to Him and surrender our will for His.  God as Saviour invites us out of depravity, death and darkness and into His light, life and hope.  But the Triune God?  A single “We” in endless community?  God the Trinity serves to blow out the walls of my God-box.  

Looking to God through this lens provided my stunned moment this week.  The Trinity makes quick work of our assumptions and reminds us that while all the wonder of the created order resides in Him, it doesn’t begin to contain His mystery.  He invites us to plumb the depths of His nature, not in search of a bottom, but simply out of sheer delight in discovering the God of endless self-disclosure.

And so I’m left feeling grateful that the God we worship is so surprising.  It’s been said that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes.  Let’s add to that the certainty of our response when God fully self-reveals Himself at the end of the age: “But… Oh!”

      (1)Don Williams & Benton Brown, Who Is the God We Worship (Inside Worship Vol. 6, Vineyard Music USA, 2007),8-9

      (2)Dan Wilt, Essential Worship Theology: God As Creator, King, Trinity and Savior (iTunesU e*b Video)