New Year's Day
We really enjoyed church this morning. At first we didn't think anyone was going to show up. We started worship around 11:15 and there were only about a dozen of us. By the time the service was over, there were 30 of us, plus a handful of kids.
Evidently someone had forgotten to assign a worship leader, but we improvised well by having Charles' mom (visiting from NJ) play piano and we all gathered around and sang old hymns. It was nice.
Charles preached this morning and what he had to say really touched Mark's and my hearts. I guess you could say that his message was mainly about eternity, but it was also about comfort. At least, Mark and I took it that way.
He spoke about the pressure and guilt so many people feel to have what I guess you'd call a "productive" life. You hear people say things like, "Live your life as if you're going to die tomorrow," supposedly trying to inspire you to live a more "full" life today. But all it does is make you feel burdened and guilty and nonproductive. Mark has been struggling with that lately, feeling like he isn't living the life he's supposed to. (Thanks a lot, John Eldredge. You and your "adventure" talk can go take a flying leap.)
Charles then quoted the scripture from Ephesians, "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." The word "workmanship" in the Greek is "poemia" which is where we get the word "poem" - we are God's poem or work of art. Then he quoted from a letter from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to a young aspiring poet about criticism:
"Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them."
I hope you get the connection. We, as God's poems, are of an "infinite solitude", unapproachable by criticism - our own or others'. Only love can touch, hold, and be fair to us. What a great message of comfort.
Charles then went on to read from JRR Tolkien's story "Tree and Leaf", which basically gave another message of comfort - that what we attempt to do perfectly here on earth - the things we strive so hard towards and feel so incompetent at - will be perfected in eternity.
That part of the message reminds me of something I read in John Eldredge's "Journey of Desire" (or maybe it was "Waking the Dead") - that despite the common saying that "this is no dress rehearsal", life actually IS a dress rehearsal. What we are to be, what life is to be, won't become reality except in eternity. Life now is just a dress rehearsal. The real life is to come. (Okay, so sometimes John Eldredge isn't all that bad.)
C.S. Lewis hints at this also in "The Great Divorce", when all the visitors to heaven are see-through, kind of ghosts, and the "solid" or "real" people are the actual inhabitants of heaven.
Anyway, I probably didn't do Charles' message any justice, but I'm strapped for time as I write this. Hopefully some of what I've written makes sense to you and says something to your heart.
Evidently someone had forgotten to assign a worship leader, but we improvised well by having Charles' mom (visiting from NJ) play piano and we all gathered around and sang old hymns. It was nice.
Charles preached this morning and what he had to say really touched Mark's and my hearts. I guess you could say that his message was mainly about eternity, but it was also about comfort. At least, Mark and I took it that way.
He spoke about the pressure and guilt so many people feel to have what I guess you'd call a "productive" life. You hear people say things like, "Live your life as if you're going to die tomorrow," supposedly trying to inspire you to live a more "full" life today. But all it does is make you feel burdened and guilty and nonproductive. Mark has been struggling with that lately, feeling like he isn't living the life he's supposed to. (Thanks a lot, John Eldredge. You and your "adventure" talk can go take a flying leap.)
Charles then quoted the scripture from Ephesians, "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." The word "workmanship" in the Greek is "poemia" which is where we get the word "poem" - we are God's poem or work of art. Then he quoted from a letter from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to a young aspiring poet about criticism:
"Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them."
I hope you get the connection. We, as God's poems, are of an "infinite solitude", unapproachable by criticism - our own or others'. Only love can touch, hold, and be fair to us. What a great message of comfort.
Charles then went on to read from JRR Tolkien's story "Tree and Leaf", which basically gave another message of comfort - that what we attempt to do perfectly here on earth - the things we strive so hard towards and feel so incompetent at - will be perfected in eternity.
That part of the message reminds me of something I read in John Eldredge's "Journey of Desire" (or maybe it was "Waking the Dead") - that despite the common saying that "this is no dress rehearsal", life actually IS a dress rehearsal. What we are to be, what life is to be, won't become reality except in eternity. Life now is just a dress rehearsal. The real life is to come. (Okay, so sometimes John Eldredge isn't all that bad.)
C.S. Lewis hints at this also in "The Great Divorce", when all the visitors to heaven are see-through, kind of ghosts, and the "solid" or "real" people are the actual inhabitants of heaven.
Anyway, I probably didn't do Charles' message any justice, but I'm strapped for time as I write this. Hopefully some of what I've written makes sense to you and says something to your heart.
posted by Donna-Marie at 1/01/2006 04:44:00 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Donna-Marie. . I loved your comments on the sermon. Your words are encouraging to me, because through you I see that the Spirit makes sense of things in your heart that I wasn't able to do in my words. You pulled things together in a way I was still striving to. The perfect leaf, right?
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