Herbert: An Offering

I read this through the other night and was initially bemused. I suspect most poems seem like verbal noise until read several times. By the third time through I realised this was a profound presentation of uniting the heart in a life of worship to God:

Come, bring thy gift. If blessings were as slow
As men's returns, what would become of fools?
What hast thou there? a heart? but is it pure?
Search well and see; for hearts have many holes.
Yet one pure heart is nothing to bestow:
In Christ two natures met to be thy cure.

O that within us hearts had propagation,
Since many gifts do challenge many hearts!
Yet one, if good, may title to a number;
And single things grow fruitful by deserts.
In public judgements one may be a nation,
And fence a plague, while others sleep and slumber.

But all I fear is lest thy heart displease,
As neither good, nor one: so oft divisions
Thy lusts have made, and not thy lusts alone;
Thy passions also have their set partitions.
These parcel out thy heart: recover these,
And thou mayst offer many gifts in one.

There is a balsam, or indeed a blood,
Dropping from heav’n, which doth both cleanse and close
All sorts of wounds; of such strange force it is.
Seek out this All-heal, and seek no repose,
Until thou find and use it to thy good:
Then bring thy gift, and let thy hymn be this;
 

                         Since my sadness
                         Into gladness
Lord thou dost convert,
                         O accept
                         What thou hast kept,
As thy due desert.

                         Had I many,
                         Had I any,
(For this heart is none)
                         All were thine
                         And none of mine:
Surely thine alone.

                         Yet thy favour
                         May give savour
To this poor oblation;
                         And it raise
                         To be thy praise,
And be my salvation.

Watts: public prayer

A man ought not to be so confined by any premeditated form as to neglect any special infusion, he should so prepare himself as if he expected no assistance, and he should so depend upon divine assistance as if he had made no preparation.

Isaac Watts, A Guide to Prayer

Calvin: creation

...the most perfect way of seeking God...is not for us to attempt with bold curiosity to penetrate to the investigation of His essence, which we ought more to adore than to meticulously search out, but for us to contemplate Him in His works whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us, and in some manner communicates Himself...It is also fitting, therefore, for us to pursue this particular search for God, which may so hold our mental powers suspended in wonderment as at the same time to stir us deeply. And as Augustine teaches elsewhere, because, disheartened by His greatness, we cannot grasp Him, we ought to gaze upon His works, that we may be restored by His goodness.

Institutes 1.5.9 (Battles p 62)

Pleasing people the wrong way

To give the whole store away to match what this year's market says the unchurched want, is to have the people who know least about the Christian faith determine most about its expression.

This writer fears that we are on the verge of seeing happen what happened in the 1950s to mainstream Protestant churches: they retooled for people who were casually attracted and liked big parking lots, spectacle, and low demands; and people left as easily as they came. You can see that I lean toward the search for the dynamisms in the longer-pull worship traditions and against the emerging market orientation. But I am never cocksure abut this and try to listen.

Martin E Marty, quoted in Dawn Reaching Out... p258

Psalms of darkness

The use of theses 'psalms of darkness' may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith, albeit a transformed faith. It is an act of bold faith on the one hand, because it insists that the world must experienced as it really is and not in some pretended way. On the other hand, it is bold because it insists that all such experiences of disorder are a proper subject for discourse with God. There is nothing out of bounds, nothing precluded or inappropriate. Everything properly belongs in this conversation of the heart. To withhold parts of life from that conversation is in fact to withhold part of life from the sovereignty of God. Thus these psalms make the important connection; everything must be brought to speech, and everything brought to speech must be addressed to God, who is the final reference for all life...

Walter Brueggemann, The message of the Psalms, quoted in Dawn p.92

Don't make worship useful

An emphasis on what we "get out" of a worship service - above all, that we feel good about ourselves - displaces the theocentric praise of God with anthropocentric utilitarianism. Since the worship of God is an end in itself, "making worship useful destroys it, because this introduces an ulterior motive for praise. And ulterior motives mean manipulation, taking charge of the relationship, thereby turning the relation between Creator and creature upside down."

Dawn (quoting Keck), p88.

Dawn: Don't dumb down

When we allow our society to force us to "dumb down" the Church, we kill theological training, inhibit the forming of character, prevent appreciation for the rich gifts of the Church's past. Most of all, we miss the infinitely faceted grandeur of God and destroy the awe and wonder that characterized worship before God became only a "buddy" ill-conceived and only subjectively experienced.

Dawn, p55.

Lewis: routine in war

It may seem odd for us to carry on classes, to go about our academic routine in the midst of a great war. What is the use of beginning when there is so little chance of finishing? How can we study Latin, geography, algebra in a time like this? Aren't we just fiddling while Rome burns?

This impending war has taught us some important things. Life is short. The world is fragile. All of us are vulnerable, but we are here because this is our calling. Our lives are rooted not only in time, but also in eternity, and the life of learning, humbly offered to God, is its own reward. It is one of the appointed approaches to the divine reality and the divine beauty, which we shall hereafter enjoy in heaven and which we are called to display even now amidst the brokenness all around us.

Sermon preached at University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, October 22, 1939.

Pick the right songs

Imagine that someone visits your church every Sunday morning for a month and only listens to the songs you sing. They don’t hear any preaching, liturgy, or prayers – just the songs. What would the songs say about your church’s theology and beliefs? How would they reflect the God you worship? It’s quite a scary thought.

Tim Hughes

Worship

"We leave our places of worship, and no deep and inexpressible wonder sits upon our faces. We can sing these lilting melodies, and when we go out into the street our faces are one with the faces of those who have left the theater and the music halls. There is nothing about us to suggest that we have been looking at anything stupendous and overwhelming. Far back in my boyhood I remember an old saint telling me that after some services he liked to make his way home alone, by quiet by-ways, so that the hush of the Almighty might remain on his awed and prostrate soul. That is the element we are losing, and its loss is one of the measure of our poverty, and the primary secret of inefficient life and service."
From the biography of John Henry Jowett