Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Here's some more from Stanley Hawerwas' "Worship, Evangelism, and Ethics."

"It is not any God that Christians worship, but the God whose justice is to be found in Jesus' cross and resurrection. To learn to worship God truthfully requires that our bodies be formed by truthful habits of speech and gesture. [It is] to acquire a character befitting lives capable of worshiping God."

In the Torah, the people of Israel are told to rehearse the story of God's deliverance constantly. They are to recite the words when they rise and when they lie down. They are to write them on their doorposts and wear them on their bodies. And why all the constant reminders? The people need to be reminded of who and whose they are. The practice of rehearsing the story in all those forms ingrains in them God's saving love for them and the vision of how they are to live in response. By hearing the story again and again, they become who God has declared them to be. By embodying that story in their worship, the cadences and character of God are to become their own as they reflect God's goodness, mercy, and justice.

That is at least one thing that has not changed over the millennia. As the people of God in Christ, we still have to learn who we are. We may think we know exactly who we are-our likes and dislikes, our preferences, and our commitments. Or we may have bought into one of countless other stories offered to us. But the claim of God on us, marked in baptism, reminds us that we must be always re-oriented to the character and grace of God in Jesus. We belong to a new community, we are given a new identity, and we have been drawn into a new story of cross and resurrection. God has done all of that for us. Yet once we are living within that new community and identity, we need to hear, embody, and enact that story again and again to let it sink in and take a hold of us. And that is exactly what we do in the church-in the liturgy, in the Word spoken and sung, and at the Table, we "practice" being who we are. We let the transforming story of God's deliverance in Jesus have its way with us, and as that happens, we learn who we are.

Connection: When voices around us would tell us who and what we are, we are always led back to the ancient-and-yet-new story of God's love for us in Jesus that tells us we belong to God. That story, the gospel story, is simply more real for us than anything else.

Lord, you are forever saving a forgetful people. Speak again amidst all the surrounding noise to remind us who are, and let your story of love open our eyes, mold our hands, and build our lives to be your people.