Christ, Calendars, and Coronavirus

“Come Thou Fount” is a hymn that asks God to “tune our hearts to sing thy praise.” What if he used our calendars to do it?

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Announcement
In an effort to discuss churchwide strategies for community building and spiritual growth during this strange time, we are going to gather online for a zoom video conference at 5 pm on Sunday. To join the meeting, click here from your computer or phone (you will need to download an application, but it is so simple). We would love to get 100% participation, so please digitally attend. We only have 40 minutes of free meeting time, so begin the login process at 445 on Sunday. I'll send out another invitation email on Sunday if you misplace this one. Thanks, and looking forward to speaking with you!

Devotional
When did it home for you that this was real? What was the moment that you recognized, regardless of your opinions on the virus or our social response to it, that this would be a major disruption to your life? When did it first make you angry?

For me, it was when I went to espn.com as a part of my daily morning ritual, and I read these fateful words: "March Madness is Cancelled."
What? March Madness? What am I going to do in March? And thats when it hit me- we do not cancel sports in America. The rhythms of sport are the rhythms of our life, from football on Saturdays (you're welcome UGA fans) and Sundays in the fall, to baseball in the spring, to basketball on a weeknights (the music elicits a visceral response), to all the practices and games that we play ourselves or put our children through. The sporting calendar is life. And thats when I realized how disruptive this virus would be- when we cancelled life. And thats also when I wondered, "What sort of people has our calendar made us into?"

Psalm 90:12 asks that God would "teach us to number our days rightly, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." The people of God have always celebrated certain times of the year to "number their days" in such a way that they remembered God, and his love for them. From the Passover feast in the Old Testament, to the Easter feast in the New Testament age, our calendar has helped us remember who we are.

Now that we have been stripped of our American calendars and schedules in so many ways, what if now is a great time to reclaim a Christian rhythm of living in our day-to-day. We will each have tons of time over the next couple weeks; that time will be shaping and changing you. What would it look like to impose a structure on your time so that, when this is all over, we would have actually grown spiritually, physically, mentally, and emotionally into the image of God we were made to be? Here is an article from the Gospel Coalition that would help you create a rule of life just like this. It may be a more productive (but less hilarious) usage of your time than this. Don't worry if it isnt perfect. Lets start taking small steps towards Christian maturity as has been modeled by saints down the ages.

A quote:
"A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week." Gen. George Patton.

For discussion:
1. Describe your spiritual, emotional, relational, mental, and physical condition before social distancing. What role do you think your daily schedule played in creating this sort of person?
2. What are three practices you could commit to that, if kept diligently, would help you love God, love neighbor, and love yourself better during this time?
3. Have a conversation with your roommates or family. How can you come to this decision together, instead of by fiat?

A prayer for discipline to love God, from Psalm 90:12-17:

    [12] So teach us to number our days
        that we may get a heart of wisdom.
    [13] Return, O LORD! How long?
        Have pity on your servants!
    [14] Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
        that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
    [15] Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
        and for as many years as we have seen evil.
    [16] Let your work be shown to your servants,
        and your glorious power to their children.
    [17] Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
        and establish the work of our hands upon us;
        yes, establish the work of our hands! (ESV)

Christianity in a Secular World

I don’t know anything about France, but this article seems like it accurately describes our cultural moment:

”In Café Flores where Sartre and Camus discussed the absurdity of life, people scan their phones safely cocooned from such disturbing ideas. Trains, lifts, even waiting at traffic lights are all opportunities to rehearse our secular liturgy: look down, pull out, flip open, here and now, here and now.”

And what we at CTK hope to be:

"Christians carrying within them the reign of heaven will need to let their weirdness shine; their time-consuming religious habits, their inconvenient commitment and love of others, their solidly unspectacular contentedness, and their embrace of weakness that allows the power and grace of their servant Lord to glow. The front line of secularism is here, but the resistance has begun."

The Wandering Human

Why do we always leave, whether physically, spiritually, emotionally, or geographically? James KA Smith summarizes the problem:

“It might be youth. It might be the reptilian impulses of a species with migration encoded in its DNA. It might be your inferiority complex or the boredom of small-town claustrophobia or the exhibitionist streak you’ve never told anyone about.

It might be the hungers of ancestors whose aspirations have sunk into your bones, pushing you to go. It might be loneliness. It might be your inexplicable attraction to “bad boys” or the still unknown thrill of transgression and the hope of feeling something. It might be the self- loathing that has always been so weirdly bound up with a spiritual yearning. It might be the search for a mother, or a father, or yourself. It might be greed or curiosity. It might be liberation or escape. “

The author thinks an Augustinian spirituality holds the answer to our wanderlust. Read the rest of the post here.

Why Worship?

“What’s my name, what’s my station, oh just tell me what I should do… but I don’t know who to believe”

— Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues

Once upon a time, the practice of attending worship on a Sunday morning in Savannah was woven into the fabric of the city. Everybody did it. Thats not to say that everybody did it for the same reasons, or believed the same things, or was changed in the same way. But there was no avoiding Sunday morning worship in the South. As a member of the community, it was just what you did. It was an unquestioned part of the culture.

Times have changed. There is no longer such a thing as an unquestioned need for worship- even to those who call themselves Christians. This isn’t because some new evidence has emerged disproving the truth of the Christian Story. And we still long for what we do to fit into something bigger than ourselves, something communal. But our city has changed, grown, become more culturally diverse, reflecting the changes in Western Culture at large. And we as individuals have changed- the same technologies which help connect us with those who share our interests in other places has pulled us out of this place, this community, and from the common cultural practices which connected us to those nearest us. And this has made God seem farther from us.

“There is a God, who is Lord and King over all, who is good and does good to all, and is therefore to be praised and served with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might. ”

— Westminster Confession of Faith 20.1

In response to this disconnect between God and the practices of our community, the church has tended to respond in one of two ways. Rightly recognizing that, if God is who He says He is, we ought to worship him, we shout that worship is a good end in and of itself, so we as a community ought to pick up worshipping where we left off. Just do it, just because. Or, on the other hand, rightly recognizing that God rules over all of life, we say that worship was never that important after all, that it matters more what you do with the rest of your week.

Both sides are right. And both sides are wrong. At Christ the King, we believe that worship is both an end and a means. It is right and good to worship the God who made heaven and earth, to come into his presence with thanksgiving and songs of praise, as an end in and of itself. AND, worship is the means to meaning- it helps us remember why we are here, who we are, and whose we are. So that Monday-Saturday isn’t despair, and Sunday worship an emotional catharsis, but instead that Sunday worship empowers our worship the rest of the week.

There’s no going back to some supposed golden age of worship in Savannah, and I’m not sure we would want to if we could. But what if our worship at least helped put back together what has been torn apart?  Heaven and earth, God and man, Love of God and Love of Neighbor, Sunday night and Monday morning?

“Its hard, but at least I know why I am here.”

— Michael Houellebecq, Submission