In case you have been reading the daily devotions regularly and are confused at why we’ve abruptly stopped in the middle of 1 Corinthians, here’s a word of explanation. While Pastor Al is on vacation, Vicar Steve is doing devotions for this week. But the good pastor will be back for the final week of June, and then you will be returned to your regularly scheduled programming, er, devotions.
Our devotions this week are drawn from an essay in Stanley Hauerwas' book, A Better Hope, entitled, "Worship, Evangelism, and Ethics-On Eliminating the 'And'." If the title seems intimidating, just know that the central theme is about how the gospel story shapes us and makes us into a new people-and that newness radiates forth in all of our lives. It really is good material (at least Hauerwas' part is!), so I invite you to try it on for size.*
"Worship is evangelism and ethics…worship is about the shaping of affections."
So much of life-as-we-know-it is disjointed and fragmented. Our culture seems intent on splitting up the world around us into compartments and keeping them hermetically sealed off from one another. Think about it-in the political arena, faith is often either kept private and completely out of decent public conversation or gets hijacked to divide the world into us-and-them, with-us-or-against-us teams. We are trained to keep our job "hat" and identity neatly separated from our family "hat"-you can be who you are on your own time, but don't let it get in the way of productivity or closing a sale. What we say on Sundays has no connection to how we think and act on the rest of the days. Even in the church, we often break up the ministry and mission of congregations into separate chunks called committees that may not interact at all-something is the job of the Church-in-Society Committee or the Evangelism Committee or the Worship Committee alone, but they don't work together. And as a result, we are split down the middle-we become fragmented people.
In the midst of all of our disconnected selves and disjointed commitments, the gospel of Jesus Christ brings real oneness. That's what I love about the subtitle of this whole essay by Hauerwas: Eliminating the "And." In a society that would split us up into disconnected fragments-between our Sunday selves and work-week lives, between our inner feelings and the forced smiles that sell, between private and public personas-Jesus offers us a vision of being whole. We are not compartmentalized, but have been claimed completely, wholly, by God. And so all of our lives are liberated for something new-not just our Sundays, and not just our inner thoughts. The Hebrew word for that wholeness of self and community is shalom, and that is precisely what Jesus offers.
Connection: In Christ, there is no longer a "work hat" or a "family hat" or a "private hat" or a "public hat" to wear at the right times-only the "beloved of God" hat, and that is enough.
O God who gives shalom, who else can pick up our many pieces? We long to be one today-come and make us whole and wholly yours.
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