peace . love . joy

It's been a while since the last post, hasn't it?

Having been back in my own church (that which I grew up in since I first attended back when I was 9 years old) for about three months since my return, I've been quite down. I look at the familiar congregation, the dear ministries which I serve in and serve alongside in and I am sad.

What has happened in those six months that I was gone?
The passion and excitement in those young eyes I remember has died down. The lust for a holy life, filled with ever so frequent uncontrollable urges and convulsions to commune with an awesome God, the pining to tear away and sit at the Savior's feet, lapping up every word as though it were a precious and delicious morsel... All that has vanished. And in its place, distracted joking, vacant expressions, sloth, fiddling on iphones (and what not).

Have they forgotten the reason why we gather and read and pray and sing and serve?

Recorded in Philippians 2 is a morning hymn that early Christians sang. Some of us may know it today as the Carmen Christi. Then, it was not a passage around which theological debates now rage angrily around, it was simply given a melody and sung; difficult and complicated Truths about the Incarnation were just accepted as such and celebrated as such. No digging nor clarifying nor qualifying. None. Just belief in the unbelievable, an adoption and a profound understanding.

Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
who, being in the very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human lifeness.
And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death --even death on a cross!

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

to the glory of God the Father.

~ Philippians 2: 5-11

Just reading these black words on the white pages of my Bible makes me quiver in excitement!

I hear proud and majestic trumpets and horns, coupled with the pristine singing of strings accented by the delicate plucking of harps, crashing cymbols and the bells of the tambourine, all set against, not a formal and structured choir, but a noisy and rowdy crowd jostling and yelling and shouting and praising in what can only be described as a "joyful noise"!

Life is given to two otherwise lifeless concepts of humble servitude to exalted lordship, joined by an interesting word "therefore" that points to a strange and radical reversal of traits and status.

Do you not also hear this intense magnitude of sound waves?

Can you not feel the a strange excitement well up within you, knowing you belong to a God who turns tables in His wake, who began His most glorious miracle in a minor key of a servant bending his knee to a painful death, but then resolves the minor by a clever and rousing sequence of chords to a elated major key, taking His place as God of the cosmos!

We sing because we know the Truth,
because the Truth is alive,
because we live in the Truth.

Don't get caught up in the studying and the rationalising and the theory,
at least not so much that you forget that what you are reading is not words, but Life.

Those early Christians didn't, but then maybe it's also because many were not literate, or that in those days, close studying of the Scriptures wasn't their culture. In any case, their faith was alive. And it gave them such joy and pleasure to be keepers of of the Truth that they could not help but "make a joyful noise" (Psalm 95, 100) to the Lord, the Rock of their salvation.

They made a רוּע, a noise, an ear-splitting, triumphant cry. No coherent words could unify their many loud voices, no one could control their many varied outbursts. But an onlooker could not but describe it as a "joyful" noise.

What does your noise sound like?