Oddities

You Call THAT a Love Feast?

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When I was growing up in the Lutheran Church, the Jesus People revolution was beginning to permeate a few more open-minded traditional churches. In my youth group we sang songs by Ray Repp, Larry Norman, Honeytree, and Don Francisco. Everyone sported longer hair and Jesus was “what was happening.” The elements in communionPeople talked about community, and partaking of the bread and wine went from being just “communion” to “The Love Feast.”

Fast forward more years than I care to admit and while some of that 70s hippie Christian mentality has worn off, the idea of communion being “The Love Feast” has never left me. The Book of Hebrews talks about heavenly things having earthly counterparts, and I see the Marriage Supper of the Lamb as being represented here by our time of communion.

Why then is communion within our churches today such an amazingly lackluster event? Why do so many of us eat “bread” that consists of quarter-sized, airy wafers or little wheat tic-tacs? And where did the wine go? Some feast, huh?

No, I’m not trying to be sacrilegious. This is one of my top five pet peeves with the way we practice the Faith. It baffles me that for those who believe that communion is held strictly as a remembrance it’s done in such a forgettable way. As for the more mystical who believe that something special happens when we partake of communion, are we expected to believe that a thimble of Welch’s and a molar-cracking divot of hardtack are components of a transcendent experience? Evangelicals come off the worst here. The farther away you get from the Lutherans and Old Line Presbyterians, the closer you are to grape Kool Aid in a plastic shotglass and stale, crumbled saltines.

I’ll be honest here: I believe we are dishonoring the Lord by not going all out with communion. Frankly, I’d love to see churches completely bag the juice and crackers routine, hold a special communion service at least once a month, and serve a real meal during which the church fellowships and communion is handed out—and with a genuine varietal wine (Cabernet for those used to wine and Beaujolais for those being weaned off Welch’s) in a real glass and a basketful or two of fresh-out-of-the-oven homemade loaves of bread with some genuine heft to them. (Or, if you want do do it eaxctly right, consider making up some unleavened bread. Either way, get one of the best bakers in your church to make it.) Encourage people to rip off more than a dime-sized piece, too. Hold it in the sanctuary if you have no other space. (And if no one in your church can cook, rent out the local Italian restaurant and use church money to pay for everyone’s meal.) Spend several hours praying for each person who needs prayer. Confess your sins to each other. Dance a group dance if need be. But by all means, be a living church of living people and not a dry desert hostel filled with stoics. Go home refreshed for the joy and exuberance of it all.

And you—yes, you in the house church—stop laughing.

MacArthur, MacArthur Everywhere!

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John MacArthurOne of the phenomena I’ve encountered in the portion of the blogosphere I regularly visit is an absolute mania for all things John MacArthur. In my post about Jack Hayford, I noticed that I, too, uttered the name that crops up everywhere I turn.

Now John MacArthur seems to be a nice man who honestly loves the Lord, a solid preacher, and a prolific author with some good books, but I have to wonder, What is the obsession with him that I see on blog after blog after blog? Is it just that so much of the message we are getting today from other sources is so ridiculously poor that MacArthur’s receives adulation for merely being good?

Here’s my dirty, little secret: I’ve heard him speak on his “Grace to You” radio program and read a few of his books, yet I’m left curiously unmoved. Never once has his radio program or his writing driven me to my knees or made me want to lift my hands in spontaneous worship. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never been happy with his cessationist views or the fact that he took on the fringes of the charismania out there and painted it as the rational middle, gutting the whole of it in the process. Nor do I support his dispensationalist eschat0logy. Still, there are preachers I disagree with far more whom I resonate with more than I do MacArthur.

So I don’t get it. I’m glad we have him out there, but he barely registers in my library or in my listening. As for me, I’ll stick with Tozer, Ravenhill, Lloyd-Jones and their like. In fact, just the other day I saw a Ravenhill video that has still got me all scrambled up inside trying to work through the depth of it. I’m not sure the entire collected works of MacArthur could do the same for me.

Readers, please tell me why so many can’t stop talking about MacArthur because I feel like I must be failing to understand something that everyone else knows intrinsically.

Boomerang Prayer?

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I’m not a “personal journal” blogger, but occasionally I talk about my own life. Though readers may get the impression from my posts that I have all the answers—because I tend to write like I do—there are still many things in life I struggle with. This post is about one of those things. It’s also a call out to readers of Cerulean Sanctum to help me grow as a Christian by understanding something about prayer and life I just don’t get.

In the last few years, my family has been through a lot. We’ve perservered amid some incredibly tough times and I think my wife and I are stronger people for it. We truly learned how to trust God to provide for every need and realized how much we need the community of faith.

We have a comfortably-sized home on thirteen acres of rural Ohio land. Due to some of the struggles we’ve had since we moved in here, we haven’t done a lot of decorating or making it ours. In many ways it is the exact house that the previous owners left behind.

Given that we seem to be past some of the hardships, in the last few months we’ve done some fixing up of our kitchen, probably the one part of the house most in need of updating. The folks who lived here before us left behind major kitchen appliances that were older than the house; when we bought it, I knew the refrigerator, range, and dishwasher had to go.

After being here four years next month, we finally replaced all three with very nice Kenmore units. As the cook and stay-at-home parent, I’ve been ecstatic about these new appliances and extremely grateful that we were able to buy them. We gave the old appliances—they still worked—to a family in our church who could put them to good use.Missing puzzle piece

Here’s where it gets odd for me.

When the new appliances showed up, I thanked God for them and prayed that, given their cost, we would not have any expenses come up that would hurt as a result of their purchase. Specifically, I prayed that we would be spared from two major expenses: hospital visits and emergency car servicing.

Well, within two weeks of this prayer, my son had to go to the hospital (and despite our insurance, we will still pay a lot for the visit) and my wife’s car starting stalling. Then came the check engine light. Yesterday, we forked over $1000 to have the fuel injectors replaced on what is only a five-year old Corolla. The coincidence of this—with a son who hasn’t seen the inside of a hospital since he was born and a car that’s run pretty much flawlessly—is just too much.

What troubles me is that I have a history of this kind of thing in my life. In fact, it occurs so regularly that I am tempted not to pray for (or against) certain things simply because I know that if I do, those very things are going to boomerang in a bad way. Prayers like, “Lord, keep me healthy so we can enjoy this weekend out of town,” (I get sick the day we leave), or “Please God, don’t let this client push up their due date right now because I’m slammed” (the two week due date suddenly becomes two days), or “Lord, I just managed to tighten our belts in such a way that I saved $100 off our monthly budget, thank you!” (and the next day we’re informed our insurance is going up—you guessed it—a $100 a month), seem to work against me far more often than not.

Now before someone tells me I should trust God and not give in to “fearful” prayers, I give you this:

…do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
(Philippians 4:6-7 ESV)

That’s pretty much my operating verse here. That’s how I do it. I lay all those things before the Lord and move on.

So why so many outcomes like this?

I’ve been a Christian for almost thirty years, so I’ve got a pretty holistic perspective in general, but this kind of “prayer that goes awry” is one I’m not sure I get. Everything seems to be a bit too coincidental.

You could:

  • Chalk it up to Satan, but then that seems to make him more powerful than God.
  • Say it has to do something with sin in my own life, but if you know me, you’ll know I confess things so as not to be burdened by them.
  • Say it’s just coincidence and that’s life, but it’s too coincidental for my liking.
  • Claim I’m not praying in faith, but honestly, I certainly don’t want those things to happen—and isn’t the Philippians passage the cover here? If we start purposefully holding back requests, where does it end?

Am I the only one who experiences this sort of thing routinely? It’s weird to me and bothers my wife, too. Anyone out there with more wisdom is certainly welcome to shed some light on this for me. After this latest incident, I’m a bit cowed to even open my mouth for requests like this.