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when it is a summer of sacramental baking [an ecourse offer]

Preston Yancey — Thu, 16 May 2013 06:35:36 +0000

That's right!

By popular demand, my Sacramental Baking eCourse has returned for the summer, expanded into twelve weeks!

Head over to the new page to check it out!

when there are everlasting meals and moveable feasts [an invitation to guest post]

Preston Yancey — Wed, 15 May 2013 08:29:34 +0000

I leave to return to America in twelve days.

I have my final exam tomorrow, then a bit of dissertation work for the summer, and then, simple as that, I'll have a masters degree. These things seem so loud until they are, and the quietness of them sneaks up on you.

And there's a cake to bake for the shop today. There is sugar work to be done. And something to do with infusing apples with whiskey. Something like that. I'm still toying with that idea.

Where was I?

This summer will prove interesting. I'll travel a bit. I'll go east and see a certain woman; come September, I'll go north and sit face to face with a tangle of friends never before known in that way. Then there's the work to be done. I'll be a part-time intern for the Anglican Dioceses of the Western Gulf Coast---another story for another day---and then, well, as you may know, writing a book.

That last little bit means my time and the measure of it I have must be devoted a bit more specifically in the coming months. In light of that, I'm reopening my guest post queue. While I'll have a new post for you on Mondays, I'm devoting Wednesdays to a beautiful idea my wonderful friend Nish gave me: memories of memorable meals.

If you've been here for any length, you know that this space is a space where good food is respected, where the important things of life happen over poured wine, and where the muddling work of faith is most often known around a table.

Tell me your stories of those table moments. I want to see what you'll share, what little pieces of the true tumble forth. What sticks in your mind as a moment where the true was made known around a table? What were you eating? How did someone hold their fork, look at you, tilt their glass?

Maybe it's but a very ordinary moment.

Maybe it's the moment from which all else came.

There are everlasting meals and moveable feasts in all of us, in the storied places, and I want to hear that story ring out from you.

I already have some wonderful people lined up, like that certain woman, and Nish Weiseth, Alise Wright, and many more people whose writing I love deeply. Count yourself among them?

If you'd like to submit a post for consideration, then please do the following:

Tell me a story in this post. Whatever kind of story it is, it should be a story.
Keep the post between 600-1000 words.
Attach a photo and bio with any links you'd be interested in featuring.
Submit by 5 PM CST on Wednesday, 5 June, to prestonyancey @ gmail.com

I'll notify those selected by 12 June. Please understand that I can only run this series for so long and many may submit, but I'm very eager to read your words and will get back to you as soon as I am able.

Look for my post, next week, the first in the series.

Love from a pile of exam study, and from shredding courgettes for yet another cake,

when i live in the houses of the interpreters

Preston Yancey — Mon, 13 May 2013 17:24:51 +0000

I

For a few years in my undergraduate, I attended a church that I will politely call the Church of the Windowless Resurrection.

It was a church consumed with its own questions and its own frantic belief that doubt was the most virtuous aspect of non-faith.

Each week was a hodgepodge of frantically poor theology and each week my heart burned violent with grief because of it.

I have never felt the need to defend God, but I have seen far too many people trapped in the bondage and burden of bad theology that when I hear it spoken my skin crawls and my hands shake.

I want to tear down all the oppression and nuclear bomb the landmarks of the old order.

And so I would get loud.

Clever by a half.

I spun words white hot and wounded the misguided children of God and in that became one of them myself.

II

God came back last Friday.

He wasn't gone as long this time as the time before. I woke with a feeling in my bones that I knew what I was to do without knowing what it was, the itchy touch of purpose whispered against flesh.

I read 2 and 3 John, emailed my best friend about the NRSV's rendering of the endings, "to speak face to face," asking him if there was something happening there about the Old Testament language of face to face.

I read Wisdom 9 because I missed the lyricism of the deuterocanon.

Then I read the appointed readings for the day.

But you, mortal, hear what I say to you; do not be rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you. I looked, and a hand was stretched out to me, and a written scroll was in it. He spread it before me; it had writing on the front and on the back, and written on it were words of lamentation and mourning and woe. He said to me, O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel. So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. He said to me, Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it. Then I ate it; and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.

Ezekiel.

What can I say that is true of what happened when I read that passage? That I knew and yet did not know, that I felt the sudden prick of awareness of what He was calling me out of and into.

I have been given something specific, I have been given a particular task. That is mine to eat. No other. And I must return to anchoring myself in that.

III

A few weeks ago I wrote a post for Deeper Story about how our stories cannot be our dogma. They cannot be what we use to determine doctrine and best practices. I offered examples of setting up blog posts and scholarship when they were anything but, warned of the dangers of laying claims where we have little room to make them.

I was careful to never once say that I had the right to make pronouncements about dogma.

But.

Though I never once mentioned that I am in divinity school, that I am in a masters programme and entering a PhD in the autumn, it was surprising how many people latched onto those facts as evidentiary of what inspired my words. They discredited my point by parodying my meaning, asserting the tiresome and age-old foible of evangelicals that academics are in ivory towers, privileged, and removed from the real world.

I may be an academic, but that does not define who I am.

Over the past few months there have been increasing instances in which friends in the online community have asked me to weigh-in on a theological question or a translation issue. More often than not I was willing to accommodate, but I am wary to continue.

What I study in divinity school is the interaction between the arts and theology. I do not study Biblical languages. I do not study the Bible. I do not study biblical history, second temple Judaism, or theories of justification in Paul.

All of that has been learned on my nightstand.

My collection of books that I am reading consistently, the dinner table conversations I have, my best friend whom I email more often than not---there is no relation between the 2 and 3 John and the Old Testament wording, by the way---and my rigorous undergraduate training in the Christian tradition. I learned Greek in undergrad and keep up with it now, and am learning Hebrew on my own, reading the Psalms in chicken-fried French to edify my own wayward heart.

While this means I know a thing or two about Scripture, I have no interest in being set up as an authority of the Text.

That's not who I am.

IV

I've been praying about this blog a lot more lately. My posts have felt off, or, at least, the tensions of who I am and what I am doing have felt off.

When I read Ashleigh's wonderful post last week about a return to simple blogging, there was a moment when I thought that maybe this was about me. Maybe this was my answer. Maybe what I was supposed to do was return.

But it didn't quite fit. It's a perfect idea, a beautiful one, but it is not for me.

It was Friday, Ezekiel, when I realised who I am and what my books and my blogs and my daily conversations really are.

I am someone deeply, fully, impossibly indebted to a tradition that is larger than anything I have ever done or could do.

I live in the houses of the interpreters.

In the words of Augustine and Catherine of Siena, in Thomas Aquinas and Simone Weil, in Barth and Tillich and von Balthasar, in Beth Moore and NT Wright and L'Engle, and scores and dozens more that litter my book shelves, line the margins of my soul, have storied my own story.

Do not think me a biblical scholar. That is not who I am. (And pay care, here, that this is a post about me, not about all of us.)

Think me a translator.

What has been written on my scroll, what I have been given to consume, is a habit of translation.

I sit in the houses of the interpreters. I go from place to place and listen. Question. Wonder.

Then I come here or to manuscript pages or to my dinner table and I share in the common language what it is I have seen. That is my return to the simple days of blogging, to share what big ideas I have been leaning on and into and through.

My stories do not determine dogma, but, goodness, you better believe they are influenced heavily by a deep knowledge and love of it.

That is my place. That is my joy. And I must stop fighting against it to wade into conversations that are not for me to speak to. They are for me to read about, ponder, and dwell in.

I am content in that.

V

But how will they know? How will the bad theology ever end?

When the blogs are written and the Hebrew is abused or God made a monster and the people enslaved again to ways that are parody of the true?

Do you still believe in God?

Of course I do.

Then I guess you have to believe that if He found you, then He can find them too.

I admit, some days, my response is, Isn't it pretty to think so?

But then on other days, like today, with the sun cresting the sea, it is Timshel.

when it is mother's day, but not for all

Preston Yancey — Sun, 12 May 2013 09:06:31 +0000

It is Mother's Day in the States today.

I did not plan to write a post. If I had planned it, I would have a post dedicated to my Mother, a woman who is fierce in conviction and beautiful in prayer. However, this past year I have perhaps been more aware than ever the tensions that a day like Mother's Day can bring for those who do not share the story that I have, of being raised in the purging fires of beauty and grace, who only knew the fires of abuse.

So, here, a short, unplanned post, a note to those who come to this space and who know a story that is not my own.

On a day that for many is so dear, but for many such a struggle, to those who have known mothers that neglected, abused, mistreated, who did not stay for long, or perhaps stayed longer than was ever wanted, may this day not be a quickening of old pains, but may you find rest in the maternal images of God, the One who nurses her children, who knows their names forever, is their ever-comfort, who clothes them in splendour, and so in Godself may rest and comfort be found, beyond the circumstances of the darkness of this age, a darkness that should even visit those places we would call our homes. (Numbers 11:12, Isaiah 49:14-15, 66:12-13, Nehemiah 9:21.)

Grace and peace, and love,

when i am listening for a common language

Preston Yancey — Wed, 08 May 2013 19:27:44 +0000

I

I spent yesterday working on a chapter for my book that's about my childhood and growing up Southern Baptist.

Pressing the memories, I was reminded by how much I loved my childhood, loved the tradition of faith that raised me, brought me into my own.

They were a people who prayed.

A people who lifted hands during the upbeat songs and lifted them higher during the mournful. They sang all the best hymns and all the best new songs, and the lyrics of those songs seasoned the way I prayed. If the Baptists do not have a prayer book, they have a hymnal, and that hymnal is its own sort of liturgy, its own sort of teaching a vocabulary of prayer and habit of being.

I will always love them, even now, as I enter into church fellowship with the Anglicans, these people of a prayer book.

They're more similar than they realise, these two families of faith, but I suppose that comes in the standing on the outside long enough, just long enough, to see them both.

II

I am becoming an Anglican because that is where I pray best, but it is not the best place for everyone to pray.

When I first shared that detail, a handful of people let me know it was good that I was coming home.

This always puzzled me. Anglicanism is not home. Jesus is home. The denominations are the houses of the interpreters, in which Jesus is always and ever but the same.

Why does this make us nervous?

Are we so bold to believe that the denomination we are in has God completely and fully and faithfully figured out? Do we truly think that we have settled in the best of all possible beliefs?

I don't understand denominations as being anything more than interpretations of the same Song. I believe in certain boundaries, in the confession of the Scripture and the revelation of God, but what I believe beyond that is that we worship a God who desires intimacy and has no trouble being found.

So the God of the Southern Baptist is the God of the Roman Catholic; and, I may put my theological foot in it with this one, but I'll chance it, in that I believe the presence of the Eucharist in the Southern Baptist church is the same presence as in the Eucharist in the Roman Catholic.

What that is, well, that is for God to know and for us to receive.

But in this I believe all Gods are one God.

So once believed the saint. And I believe the saint.

III

I have been thinking of Eliot.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

What more needs saying than that?

IV

You asked me once about my generation and its leaving the church.

You asked me if we should have more activities to reach the youth.

My generation is leaving the church because of the laser light shows and the fog machines. We are not enticed by your sensitivity to Seekers, and your circus theme or fourteen services on Easter do little more than promise that the church like all businesses is in the trade of commodities.*

You forgot to make disciples.

You taught just enough for the ultimate prize that you forgot how to tell of the journey there.

Maybe this isn't all your fault, but you haven't helped.

Aren't you tired? Don't you want to sit here for a moment and rest? Maybe we'll tell a few stories, about the God who is One, about what He hath done, and maybe then we'll circle back, samsara, to one another and to Him.

V

There are mystics on my bookshelf. Reformation thinkers. Roman Catholics. Eastern Orthodox. Jews.

I am trying to make my heart look like my bookshelf. I am trying to cobble together enough fragments of those who have encountered Him that at the end of all things I may say that though I have not seen in full, I have seen in myriad part.

It's so much bigger than heaven or hell, child.

It's so much bigger than you or I or right.

I am unconvinced that Christ's prayer for unity was about denominations. I think it had something to do with denominations shutting up long enough to listen to each other. To fill their bookshelves. To stitch together the patchwork of saints and know the joy of a God who is always and ever bigger than we ever realise.

But I am so tired of writing that out.

Would that it just be.

For now?

Oh I suppose for now it is the season of stitching. Stitching together the pieces of self.

I am listening for a common language these days. I am listening for anything that rings of Spirit. That is my measuring stick. That is enough. If it speaks of the True, then it is a language that is my own, whatever form it comes.

May it find me; and may I not be too fool, too proud, too certain, to not hear it.

I think there's something of the old stories in that. Of the old and ancient magic. Of the One and only King, who sends out His heralds in whatever manner He wills, in innumerable forms, but with the same Song to sing.

But who's to say? These are the tired days. Maybe all of this is foolishness of a kind.

---

*They have their place; I think you take the overall point.

when this is what i'm into, april 2013

Preston Yancey — Wed, 08 May 2013 09:34:02 +0000

Books I Read

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn --- Just. Just wow. Get this book. Immediately.
Let's Pretend this Never Happened by Jenny Lawson --- Funny, irreverent, and impossible to put down.
Is Everyone Hanging out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling --- I've been on a funny memoir kick during the cruelest month and hearing Mindy's behind the scenes evaluation of the American Office made me appreciate the show that went downhill just a bit more.
What We Talk About When We Talk About God by Rob Bell --- It wasn't brilliant but it wasn't bad. To be honest, I'm pretty unmoved by the take. It's not my style, because I get the same middling feel of God's grandeur from L'Engle and in a language I can access much more. But worth a read, at least.
Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age by Yvonne Sherwood --- A really interesting evaluation of modern art and its relationship to the Bible. Absolutely fascinating and written in a truly engaging, not too academic style.
Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life by William A. Dryness --- Adore. Just adore. A beautiful albeit academic argument for the sacredness of the everyday and living with that intentionality.

Books on My Nightstand

Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination by Susan Ashbrook Harvey
Dead Ever After: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel by Charlaine Harris (I already know the ending and I hate it so much. Yes, these are the books True Blood is based off of. What of it?)
The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity edited by Sarah Coakley and Paul L. Gavrilyuk

On my Computer Screen (TV)

Happy Endings -- Still one of the best shows ever. Ever. Amhazing. And still amhazing. The season finale? Perfect. (Also, is it a thing for them to end every season with a wedding? Am I nuts here or is that happening?)
Game of Thrones -- Can't. Even. Deal. THINGS GOT DARK[ER].
The Americans -- Still in love with this and thrilled for the finale.
Awkward -- Returned for its third season and is shaping up to be one of its more sensitive and serious. Is the show still as funny? Sort of. Is it a lot deeper and more honest, sort of like the first few episodes on season two of Girls? Yes.
The Sopranos -- After finishing Big Love, I'm working my way back through the days of secretly watching HBO in hotel rooms and online and marathoning some of my old favourites. Six Feet Under will happen soon.
Californication -- I tried. Five episodes and quit. Just. Blech.
Justified -- I've watched three episodes. Someone is making me. Can't explain all the reasons here.
Old standards of Grey's Anatomy, Parks & Rec, Modern Family, The Real Housewives of OC, of course.

On my Computer Screen (Film)

To the Wonder -- Stunning. Absolutely stunning.
The Place Beyond the Pines -- Good Lord. Ryan Gosling. Your acting range is ... minimal, or you're typecast, doesn't matter, it always works. This film should be called the unofficial sequel to Drive.

In My Ears

She & Him -- the new album is growing on me, slowly; it's not the same feel as Vol 1 & 2, but I'm deciding that it's an act of maturation. Or something. I want it to work. I really do.
Vampire Weekend -- the new album, all that religious imagery? Can't even deal. CAN'T EVEN.
Dashboard Confessional -- I know, right? Is it high school? Is it 2006 in my car speeding down the highway to make her curfew? Real talk. Maybe I just have recent cause to listen to angst-ridden love songs. It's fine.

In My Head (When This is About What I'm Studying This Month in Class)

defining the demarkation point of sacrament and sacramentals and sacramentality -- is there a tension between the Church's claim to sacrament as singular, noun, object and the study of the sacred which sees movement as sacramental or objects in such motion as participating in sacrament
creativity as agent of critique and critique as the muse of creation
defining space as sacred through sense perception, like scent

Various Happy Making

So a month ago I mentioned that I had sent of my book proposal to a few houses and agents. AND WHAT?! It's a month later and I have a two book deal with Zondervan. Shut up. Read more here.
Maybe there's a girl. Maybe she's stealing my heart all over the dang place. Maybe you have a few guess about whom that is. Maybe we'll revisit that discussion in a month or two. It's cool. Act normal. All casual like. Don't freak out. (Freak out a little.)
There is something ridiculous, to the point of divine intoxication, in being able to feel connected to a tangled mess of friends that could be called your people. Whether in iMessages, HeyTells, email chains, little groups, Skype chats, and on and on, there is something liberating and challenging in knowing that you can call someone up and say, Hey. Let's talk about all the things we want to torch today, then let's talk about the radical goodness of God. Cool? That is all.

So what about you? What’s on your nightstand? What television show has captured your imagination? What are you pinning or cooking or planning?

Linked up with my lovely friend, Leigh for the monthly “What I’m Into” round-up.

when we're doing good for someone good

Preston Yancey — Mon, 06 May 2013 11:43:58 +0000

Shut the door, have a seat, let's real talk.

A few years ago, my friend Jason Boyett’s book, The Pocket Guide to the Bible, was left in a publishing hiccup that meant he had over 9,000 copies of his book left unsold that he would have to move himself. This book is thoroughly researched and well-written, an accurate and informative read without being stiff, academic, stodgy, or, well, boring. Jason’s style is entertaining, informative, and refreshing, making this the perfect book for young people, new converts, and anyone interested in learning more about the Christian faith.

So I still don't quite understand why Jason was left with leftover books. All the same, a local church offered space in their facility for a number of years, and over time he has managed to sell almost 8,000 copies on his own. However, last week he lost that space and had to move the remaining 1400 books into his garage.

I believe that books like this belong on bookshelves and in people’s hands, not in boxes in garages (unless they’re car repair manuals, which this one clearly is not). I’m not alone in this, either. I’m part of an online writing and networking group (of which Jason is a member as well). When we heard the sad story of the garage, we all decided that we need to help move these books out of the family garage and into your homes and churches.

But how?

We first considered staging an Italian Job-style heist to remove the books from Jason’s garage. But we rejected that plan since his city isn’t built on water and thus lacks any way to swim under his home, dynamite the floor, and drop the books into a speed boat. Plus, his wife didn’t want a gaping hole in the floor, none of us had anywhere to store the books either, none of us has time to spend time in prison for theft and vandalism, and anyway, the idea is for people to buy them and read them.

So, we decided to throw an online Pocket-Sized Garage Sale.

We’ve Set A Goal To Sell All 1400+ Books In The Next Two Weeks.

This way, we don’t need dynamite and we won’t get in trouble with the law (or with Jason).

But we DO need YOU.

We have one opened box with just fourteen individual copies for sale. (Hurry — these will go FAST.) We’ve discounted these 50% to just $4 each. Order a book for yourself. Order one for the student you know who is graduating (they make excellent gifts). Order one for a friend interested in learning more about what Christians believe and what the Bible says.

But we need to think BIGGER than individual copies.

We have 4 boxes of 75 for just $70 (that’s less than $1 per book!), plus shipping (this is a heavy box, so be ready for a media mail shipping cost of around $15 or a standard mail cost of at least $30). We also have dozens of boxes of 48 copies for $48 plus shipping.

Order a case for your youth group at church, or your Campus/Young Life group.

Order several cases as gifts for the students attending your summer camp.

Give books to the incoming freshmen at your Christian school.

Order a few cases and sell individual copies for $5 each for a youth/school/mission trip fundraiser!

The possibilities are endless. In fact, I’d love for you to brainstorm with me in the comments.

Order here!

when our exceptions cannot be our rules

Preston Yancey — Sun, 05 May 2013 08:55:32 +0000

I

A few weeks ago, a friend called me to talk about a post I had written about the place of Scripture in the life of a believer. Like a handful of the friends I have made over the years, she is coming out of a fundamentalist background with quite a lot of baggage surrounding their experience. Rightly so, she expressed apprehension in making Scripture so central, because her memory was littered with time and again examples of how Scripture was mishandled as a means to control.

It made her fear the Bible, even now.

We talked about this in our kitchens, mine in St. Andrews and hers in Los Angeles. We poured our own Illy coffees and laughed about our common hangups with the blogging community and spirituality in the online forum. By the time we were done chatting, we had talked through the real things: we had talked about this tangle of Scripture and our feelings about it and we had reached a place of understanding.

I told her what I have told many, that the world she came out of is guilty of the greatest evil in making her afraid of God and afraid of Scripture. I affirmed that she may be in a season where reading Scripture is more trigger than help--though we talked about reading the psalms for awhile, since so much of the triggering was found in the epistles of the New Testament--and that perhaps if she was meeting God in other spaces, for the time being, it was a season where Scripture was not to be central.

She is the exception. She is an embodied exception, a person whose story and history I know, whose mug of coffee is like my own, who has seen into my tangles as I have seen hers. So when I speak casually about being in a season of not reading, it is none so casual underneath. It is confession of knowability. It is having seen so having responded.

II

We're a bit confused, I think, about salvation.

Without belabouring the parsing out of salvation and justification, without spending this whole post emphasising the difference between saying that the gospel is about Heaven and Hell versus the gospel is about the good news of the person Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God, without derailing us into a spiral of a sinner's prayer or a confession or a confirmation or whatever else, I want to linger a moment on the concept of individual salvation.

I believe in individual salvation, in individual profession of faith, of professing the desire to be grafted into the Body.

But that last bit confuses us. We are comfortable with the first bit, the individual profession, but we are nervous about the last bit.

Look at the story of our faith, though: God's election of Israel to be a blessing to all nations, which it fails in, so He elects Jesus as the Messiah. In so doing, God beholds our election, either as Jew or Gentile, in that Messiah, we are elect in Christ not only of ourselves, and in that election we are in a sense as Israel was elected as a whole people, now also elect as a whole people, as these grafted-in people into the Body of Christ.

Literally.

Is salvation individual? Yes.

But in a real way is it infinitely more cooperate? Yes.

So much so that it behooves us to question whether individual experience should always be the trump card when assessing best practices, doctrine, what we teach and how.

Note, be careful, read nothing more into this than what is there: this is caution, reason to question.

It is not advocacy of mob rule or majority mentality. It is simply a reflection on the larger implications of salvation and, perhaps, reason to still our activism for but a moment, to ask hard questions, and raise our banners to their appropriate height.

If our cause does not focus on Jesus as the centre by which all things are governed, in whom all things are held together, then is it truly a cause for the Body as a whole? Or is it exception? And if exception, should it become our rule?

III

We say that anywhere can be church, therefore why should we have to go to church.

More than once I have been told that secret Christians in other countries can't even go to church but that God understands; therefore, they, in the West, will be understood by God if they don't join a local body of believers.

I've lived a small time in a country where Christians must be secret and I can tell you first-hand how much they wish they could meet publicly. They wish they could have the option to go to church in the open. So when they hear that some Christians in the West are uncomfortable with church and decide not to go, they look stunned.

But what could be more beautiful?

A friend asks me this once, when we are meeting in a flat with a bathtub, which was rented for the singular purpose that someone who had waited months for access to that much water could be baptised.

I said nothing. I couldn't think of what to say.

There is a sliding scale, I think. We want to call things sin and not-sin when I think there is something beyond that, something about best and better and good. Something about the sacrifice of Abel. Something about James saying that he who knows the good he ought to do. When we able to make the best offering, we should. When we are able to meet together, to read Scripture, to learn and study and minister and feed, we should.

Interpet able as you will.

I do believe God sees our best efforts, but I also believe He holds us accountable to those efforts.

I am not your Holy Spirit; I cannot tell you what is best for you versus what is best for me in offering back to God, but I can tell you it's worth the pause, the lingering, the asking: am I letting exception be my rule? Am I giving good when I could be giving best?

Only you can answer that. Only God can hear.

IV

The problem with the online community of faith is that too often exceptions become normative, become universal, and when I pen a post about the centrality of Scripture, I walk into a inbox of people who want to know why I left their experience out.

They presume I have cast them aside.

But I haven't.

I have spoken something to the larger Christian experience because that is the experience that has convicted me. When someone comes along and says they don't fit, I accept the responsibility of listening to them. How I wish, though, that we could work at how we approach one another. The hermeneutic of suspicion, that every person who writes a post claiming the essentialness of Scripture is particularly trying to control someone else is unfair.

Words mean things. Words like patriarchy and misogyny and privilege and cult and fundamentalism and so on mean things. While I count it a blessing to read and be nurtured by a handful of people who use those words well, I get nervous when they become buzzwords.

That doesn't help the cause. That doesn't help topple the powers and authorities of this present darkness. It makes us sound silly and a parody of ourselves. We should use these words in confidence, but we should use them with respect to the force that they carry.

I'm still weighing this one, but I do believe this: exceptions cannot be our rules. We must listen, love, and respect, but a person's individual experience cannot become the rule for the Christian community as a whole. If so, we discount the place that seasons have in faith, that what can be good for a time is not good always, about the role of the Holy Spirit, about being sensitive to individual and corporate experience in tandem.

The world of faith is bigger than the abusive fundamentalist church.

Let me clear: those stories need telling, need hearing, need healing. They should never be silenced. But we must also remember they are not the only stories. We need telling both, we need hearing both, and maybe healing comes in the middling space of the two.

For salvation doesn't work one way. Salvation, though individual to a point, is communal.

Who I feel responsible to in my work is the Christian community at large. That is the corner out of which I write. That is the place from which I believe I am faithful.

So I have made friends with those in the other corners, so I can keep hearing their stories.

But friendship is give and take. I hear their stories and they hear mine.

There is something fundamental about trust in that.

I wonder if sometimes we expect far, far too much from blog post. A repository of words. A glimpse and only a glimpse into the thought life of a person in a particular time and place.

A person who is not a god.

A person who is not a street preacher.

A person who is simply saying, Today, this I believe.

V

We are not all the same. We do not all carry the same experiences.

We know this until we forget it, which is often.

It seems impossible now to write something that won't immediately be met by someone throwing up a hand and saying that because it doesn't apply to them or fit them, the post itself and the author herself is participating in a systemic sin or otherwise out to do harm.

Systemic sin is real. I believe this. I believe that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, violence, greed, exploitation, on and on, that these are real things that demand real gospel action.

But will I let those deter me from saying that there is Scriptural reason to claim that Scripture should be, ideally, meditated on daily? That prayer is important and central and works? That people need hearing about the good news of Jesus because though I dare hope that Hell is empty I still believe that chancing that is foolish?

No. I'll keep on saying that, because Scripture does say so, the Tradition does say so, and the prophets of old and then and now still say so.

I will keep on saying that for the average, everyday believer, these things are likely best.

I will keep my kitchen open to the exceptions, will hear their stories, love them, and weigh between Wisdom and Holy Ghost what sounds to be the truest for them in that season, should they ask my input.

But I will not frame every word with a disclaimer. I trust you more than that. I hope the same can be said of you about me.

We are all in some ways exceptions.

Let us approach one another with some sense of that care, but also with some sense of that respect.

Hear me and let me hear you. Trust that we both just may be hearing the Holy Ghost. Confused and muddying as that may be.

Listen for the common language of Jesus. Listen for the common language of True.

when perhaps it is no longer the season of the firestarters

Preston Yancey — Wed, 01 May 2013 10:33:09 +0000

I

There is a man up there at the front. It's the man who told us to open our Bibles to the middle and throw our fingers down, to start reading out the promise of God from the psalms that the Holy Spirit had just given us.

My Bible opens, my finger falls, and when I look down to read, I'm in Isaiah.

In this moment, I am certain that there are but two possibilities--that God is a liar or this man up there at the front is not a prophet.

Yet the ripple-whisper claims the counsellors had murmured all week, that he was on fire for God and that our little mêlée of pubescent insecurities would do well to follow him into the furnace of God's refinement meant that I was made to trust the would-be-prophet up there at the front.

But even then I had a instilled suspicion, a hermeneutic of God is Bigger, and so I slowly sat myself down in my creaking foldout chair and closed my Bible, wordlessly watching my peers read out their promise hand-delievered, literally, by a god while I drummed fingers against shut Bible and wondered if this was what it meant to be on fire, to be so lost in the demand for God to show up that we miss that He's already here.

II

I wonder sometimes about demons, about old magic.

I have a theory about Satan. I think Satan uses what we have accepted as a norm, because he's clever by a half and isn't interested in having us realise he's on the prowl. I think why we see less explicit forms of possession of scary evil of those ancient powers and those ancient gods is because they're still in our midst, they've just dressed for the context.

Baal draped a crimson tunic around himself and walked over to the north of the world, became the horned god, and was called the Sun. A half millennium later, he paints his face white and mounts the questing ships and sails across to old new world and whispers greed into the ears of the monarch's evangelists and once more the earth did cry out for Abel's blood.

And here he still is, in the shadow places, whispering violence and oppression still. He simply dressed the part. He simply decided to go unnoticed.

But we should not forget Asherah, who in finest silk was the consort of the horned one and became goddess, until she settled into the bones of men as the catalyst for humans exchanged as currency, or how she is with us still, in the centrefold and the dark ally where the trade keeps going.

Evil has seen fit to adapt and adapt well. Not loudly but secretly. Quietly. Seamlessly. (And it is for this reason I believe we hear less of explicit demonic possession in the West than in the wild places where such things are still taken seriously.)

Why is it so hard for us to accept that good could adapt as well?

Or, perhaps not adapt, but transform.

III

In our desperation to find God, we forget to speak aloud that we are desperately searching and that such desperation should be spoken.

For if we do not speak it, we tend to forget. We forget that once we have found Him, there was a time we did not have Him, and so we circle back upon ourselves and think that if there was never a time we did not have him, whatever it is we are doing that has Him shall work in all times and all places and for all people.

But it won't.

The age of the tent revivals are passing. It is perhaps no longer the season of the firestarters.

We must not fear this or think that it is a criticism of what came before. It is anything but. It is the affirmation that what God did in one season through some means He shall do again in another season by different means.

"We need to widen our imagination about where we find the fire of Pentecost." That, from a woman who is wise as blue nights in summer.

IV

What, nephew, said the king, is the wind in that door?

V

I believe we are in the season of tablemaking. We are a people who bend and saw the planks and form the edges. We are a people who sand it down, brush it off, seal it for the weather. We are a people who drape in tablecloth, the miss-matched china, the crystal and the urns, who set out the best of the wine and the fresh figs, who bake bread in the evening and break it in the dawn. We are a people who say, But one more hour or who say, I shall only listen.

And we are a people who light candles on those tables and call that table an altar.

And here is, I think, the point--it all comes back to the fire.

The fire of Pentecost traveled too.

It was the fire that lingered in the cathedral spaces, the fire that pushed Luther out, the fire that billowed in those tent revivals, and it is the same fire that lights those candles on these tables we're making.

It is the fire of the Spirit, the fire that crest on the wind and travels wherever it pleases.

Perhaps it is no longer the season of the firestarters.

But perhaps there is still the flame.

when it is the acceptable time [or, about a book deal]

Preston Yancey — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:00:00 +0000

I

One of my favourite passages in all of Scripture speaks of the acceptable time.

In the acceptable time things come.

In the acceptable time God hears.

Waiting is the middling discipline, the centring discipline.

II

In my senior year at Baylor, in a whirlwind of happenstance, I got a book contract for a still being hammered out book about reading Scripture and the world as enchanted. They were a small publisher. New.

It was happening. The big dream was happening.

And for a year I worked, thought through, processed, but nothing much came out. It was that season in which God was gone. Absent. Removed.

I wrote what I knew--I knew Absence, so I wrote Absence.

Slowly a new book took shape. A book about that Absence, a memoir of God found, lost, and found again.

When you grow up evangelical in the South, you hear God speak all the time.

That was my dream of a book, a book of learning to journey in and through, of what it means to come out on the other side.

And then I suspected my publisher wasn't legitimate and my then-agent got me out of my contract.

And then my once publisher closed its doors and went bankrupt.

And then my once agent and I had creative differences.

And then it was just me, a manuscript chapter, two years of maybes and somedays and what ifs? and a late evening in early March on the Scottish hills.

III

When I found out, I stood in a field for awhile and tried to find my breath again.

If you've been here for any length of time, you know how much I have wanted this. How many times its fallen through. How many times you said to keep going. To trust. That you would want to read the book that someday might be.

And then it was.

That's the way of these things, I think. You become so accustomed to the possibility of it not working out that, when it does, you need a moment before the charitableness of reality can form in the palm of your hand, before you can accept it, before you can offer back thanks.

IV

In March of this year, I had dinner with John and Debby Topliff. Someday, I'll tell you more about them. For now, what you need to know is that they are a people of tables and grace and baking it out and, well, if you've been around here for a few times over, you know exactly what that means.

John used to work in publishing and offered to look at my book proposal.

Then John sent out my book proposal.

Then John was my agent.

Then John was texting me late at night last week asking if I could meet him for breakfast to discuss news.

Then if I could make a mid-day conference call on Wednesday.

Then John and I were shaking hands and laughing and dizzy with the outrageousness of it all. Because it had been March and now it's the end of April and the whole thing took about six weeks.

But God's like that.

(Particularly, I have found God is very good at making sure I never confuse any good thing as being solely of my own doing.)

V

Last wek, I accepted an offer from Zondervan to publish two books over the next few years with John Sloan as my editor. While the second title is to be determined, the first is confirmed as my spiritual memoir, Tables in the Wilderness, which is tentatively due out autumn 2014.

We're negotiating the nitty-gritty now, but I am honoured to be a part of their house, their team of wise and gracious editors and publishers who made me feel like I had a place at their table, and a people who were willing to dream big along with me.

They loved my writing. Not my platform. Not my social media numbers. My writing.

I remain convinced, as I have said before, that platform building is a cheap and fruitless endeavour. I believe in writing well and in doing good, in being generous with our spaces and others, and from that seeing what grows.

And we've grown some pretty neat stuff here, you and I. I look forward to the days ahead.

I made a little teaser introducing some of the concepts of the book below (watch it in HD!), but, for now, pass the champagne? And please, sit down here with me, have a glass yourself! I've made a few pies and there's some fresh cream to dump over the slices. Let's toast us as much as the wildness of God.

I am here, in so many ways, because of you. Don't you forget it. I haven't. Your names are carried in my heart. Your challenges and laughter and grace have storied my thoughts.

Now it's time to write.

Thank you.

Love,

when i believe in the gospel, not your story -- today at deeper story

Preston Yancey — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:38:41 +0000

I

I’ve nearly given up blogging every day for the past two months.

I cannot hear Jesus over the stories anymore.

What I hear is how STORY is saving the world. How AUTHENTICITY is the most important element of sharing.

I’m over it.

I’m tired of it.

Your story, your authenticity, right now I don’t really care.

I’m going through some serious spiritual silence, some hunger pains of missing Jesus, and what I need to hear is about Him and not so much about you.

Your story is not what has redeemed me.

The world was not saved by your story.

Keep reading this post at Deeper Story?

when God is gone, again (and this is not doubt)

Preston Yancey — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 21:58:58 +0000

I

He packed His suitcases again. He took His books. I think He left an icon and an unrinsed wine glass.

We've done this once before, dramatically, three years ago on a friend's couch when it felt like Jesus was sitting beside me.

But one September morning, when you least expect it, you’re sitting in a friend’s apartment in the middle of September after a belated celebration of your birthday the night before—in which you drank French 75s and read aloud a short story you wrote about lighthouses and champagne, after which your friend tells you you’re sill in love with the girl you broke up with a year ago and you should call her, find out where things stand—and you’re reading the Gospel of Luke when you feel suddenly, keenly, that Christ the Lord is sitting beside you on the couch as you’re reading. It’s a different kind of hearing. It’s almost the tangible kind. Since this is new, you try to make pious small talk, pointing out that you hadn’t noticed before in the Song of Zechariah that Christ is there called the rising sun.
But He doesn’t want to make small talk.
“It’s going to be about trust with you."
Eight words. Ten syllables.
Then He’s gone. And you stop hearing God speak altogether.
It’s just you, the King James, and the Silence, which is really, truly, a feeling of Absence.
And you think it might be the middle of something, or the end. Eventually, nearly a year later, you see it as a beginning. But the seeing takes time. For a little while, it’s just going to be you and the Silence.

That's from the opening of my memoir. I've been here. I've done this before. I've already lived through it and come out of it once.

And He's gone again.

I think it's been a few weeks now. Maybe longer. But there it is. This is me saying it aloud.

Naming it. I have an irrational need to name it.

II

The silence of God. The Silence.

What do we mean when we say this?

I think we're groping for a word that does not exist and Silence is what turns up. It's the feeling that a presence has been taken away, veiled, a hum in the cosmos has lost its buzz. The spiritual practices feel lifeless. Scripture doesn't bring forth anything engaging. All the things that used to tint the world with the revealed glory of God fade and you're left with this sense of distance.

It is not doubt.

You know, fervently, that God exists. It's simply that God no longer seems to exist in your space of knowing.

It's a feeling of empty. You know that something has gone missing. You're sure of it. Then you aren't. And that's when you know you don't know.

III

The problem with living your life publicly, online, is that you're nervous when you go to share things like this.

People mean well, but people also rarely understand. They try to help. They forget what this was like for them, or maybe they don't, maybe they just mean well, but they forget that the greatest gift you can give another person is to listen and not try to immediately have an answer.

I share a bit of this publicly and people knowingly respond by calling me a Doubting Preston in the vein of a Doubting Thomas.

This is not that.

I know that my Redeemer lives, it's merely that I have no sense right now that He does. I intellectually believe it, but the bread and wine do not feel as Body and Blood.

That's it.

I think part of the need to help has something to do with what happens when apparently spiritual people admit they struggle. If we're not put together when it comes to our faith then maybe there isn't hope for anyone else. Or maybe we're hypocrites. Or flawed. Or something.

Well, we are. That's the point. We're slouching toward Bethlehem too.

And there it is, on the table between us, this raw honesty that right now I do not feel like praising the Lord.

But I will.

Because it's the thing you do even when you don't feel it, because at one point in your life you professed belief in that Something that's no longer so near, but nonetheless was professed belief in. So you stick around and praise.

You wait Him out.

Maybe that's heretical sounding. If it is, I'm sort of glad. There needs to be some vulgarity in this for it to be honest.

IV

The nights are thin and getting thinner. There's a time in Scotland when the nights are indigo well near until ten or eleven in the evening. Blue nights.

The world looks different during the blue nights. What is simple in moonlight in the morning never is and this is somehow between that.

I walk into the woods during these late evenings and look out over the hillside. I still myself long enough to try and see something, something that I have missed before.

In the Silence, this is what you do, you look for new ways of seeing.

Sometimes nothing comes. Sometimes, something does. But the point is that in the season of blue nights you keep looking for what the way of seeing different can show you, even if you don't like it, even if all it shows you is the darkness of yourself.

V

Sometime in January, I read an interesting medieval midrash on the Book of Esther from the tenth century.

Midrash is the Hebrew word for homiletic stories told by Jewish rabbis to explain passages in the Bible, to fill in gaps left in the narrative, to flesh out events and personalities only mentioned in passing.

The midrash says that when Esther leaves the king's presence, when she has gone to him without his approval for the first time, she wonders if she has failed God. She feels His Spirit taken from her, His absence in her doings. She prays from the psalter, prays Psalm 22.

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

The rabbis say that Esther was unsure that she had truly obeyed God when she defied the king and went to him when he was not to be disturbed, that the feeling of God's absence seemed the confirmation of that. But in her wisdom, she prayed the psalm of lamenting God's absence, then decided that she would live off the last word she had heard and believed.

Esther believes that God has spoken true once, so she circles back to that. She acknowledges the Absence, but stays within the word last felt, last spoken, and goes on.

The rabbis say she does not feel the return of God's Spirit until the last day of feasting, weeks later, the day Esther must finally and decisively act.

But in the between? The Silence. She must simply go on.

VI

We're celebrating a friend's birthday and I'm draining a martini when he leans over and tells me that what we'll do is get a bottle of whiskey and our laptops and go out somewhere and just sit and maybe we'll talk and maybe we won't. He's read the passing mentions I've made on Twitter about this feeling of Absence and this is his solution. His solution is to listen or to maybe not.

She, who has recently discovered that she is a lesbian, messages me that when she was in the shower she prayed for the feeling of Absence and for me in its season.

We sit facing the sea, watching the waves roll in and I tell him--him, my best friend, my brother--and he asks me if it's like the last time, if when he leaves in two months if there will be people here I can say aloud, He's gone again, to, and I tell him I don't know. Because I don't know if we ever really know that sort of thing, except in spouses and best friends that become like siblings and parents if they have been good to us, that there's a rootedness that transcends the question of the future, that lets us say things like Always. and Surely. and Yes.

An atheist friend known only through Twitter tells me that if I need to talk it out, she'll listen.

I think this highlights more than anything the broken unbrokenness of this life. It is beautiful and terrible all at once. It's hopeful. It's tumbling over with promise.

And tonight my table is rounded with people I love deeply, deep down into the root of self, and this becomes a way of seeing, too, and I catch sight again, for a moment, before I lose it just a bit.

VII

I'm going away for a week.

I'm getting on a train and going down to Durham with my father, who is over for a visit, and I am going to sit in the old cathedral I've loved long and take with me the books and the pens and the notebooks and I'll make a space there in the Silence and wait Him out.

I can't write posts about the Bible or evolution or any of it right now. I just can't. I need to tell a little story here and there and not much else. Not yet. I don't really think I'm a good blogger when I write series on the Bible or evolution. If I'm honest. I'm a good blogger when I write what I know.

For now, what I know is that it's just me and the Silence again.

And I suppose that's all that really needs telling.

Except for one other part. A crumb of something that I'm not really ready to tell the whole of yet, but plan to on my return.

There is a wind in the door. A patch of green peeking up from the soil. A flick of the flame.

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally felt the quiet pull to where I shall make a theological home.

I'm going to become a confirmed Anglican.

And when I said that out loud today, with certainty, with peace, with years worth of wondering and questioning and resisting behind it, I felt the Silence bend just a bit, wrinkle, and I considered Him to have forsaken me not. Not so much. Not yet.

when we're delaying, again

Preston Yancey — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:18:03 +0000

I'm really, really sorry, everyone, but I didn't quite anticipate that essay writing, cake baking, a friend's wedding, and a few other sundry and exciting events would get in the way of posting, but it has.

I'm taking the week off.

Our series on the Bible will resume next week, our conversation about evolution the week after.

So sorry about this! I just need to put a dent in everything else right now.

when i believe in Jesus, then the bible

Preston Yancey — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:00:00 +0000

This week, I'm doing a series on how I approach Scripture. Today, a disjointed rumination to get our feet wet over where my belief points before we get into some of the more tangled topics the rest of the week.

I

I make a radical assumption, one I admit is impossible to argue convincingly: the mediative, prayerful rumination upon the Scripture, the inspired voice of God given unto His people, should be the fundamental, forming influence in the life of a Christian.

I say that this is impossible to argue for it is a claim that is only justified by the words of the Text itself and by those who experience it.

The Lord speaks to Joshua: “This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success.”

The message of the Scripture about itself is prevalent, either from the poetry of God who says that what He has given as His Truth shall be inscribed on doorposts or upon hearts, or from the psalmists, the epistle writers, praising the light the Text imparts and the delight to live by its guidance. As Christians we often take these remarks for granted. We have a passing, intellectual awareness of obligation to read the Scripture, which may come from the words of the Text itself or in the form of fundamentalist compulsion, fiery sermons, or half-hearted mugs of coffee in which the only prescription for struggle is reading more, as if the pages shall bring forth divine intervention by simply having them employed.

A common rally-cry in the protestant branch of the Church is the availability of the Scripture to the average person. While this was a crucial and blessed desire of the Reformation thinkers, it is prudent to consider that in our modern age our freedom to possess the Scripture in our own hands has not always been met with the joy of actually receiving the gift we have been given.

Surveys in recent years point out that though the prevalence of the Bible in the hands of believers is on the rise, the consistency of readership beyond Sunday morning is in sharp decline.

We have traded the Text for versions of it. Not translations, but transcriptions. Now we read novelizations of the Scripture that leave out places that are identified as either boring or of lesser importance. Or, in hope of reaching the current generation, we replace the perceived difficult language of the Scripture with modern sensibility or perspective, resulting in variations of the Bible such as screenplays or summaries.

While these expressions of modern Christians desiring to engage their congregations and the unreached with the message of Christ are commendable in intent, and in conversation with the full Text can lead to healthy and positive growth, too often the expressions are taken as the Expression, the summary as the Sum.

It is now more easy to read the Bible in one’s own language and within one’s own country than any time previous in history, yet more sermons preached on Sundays are geared toward series-based thematic approaches that use Scripture as a trump card or proof-text to validate a point as opposed to regarding Scripture as the generative field from which all Truth grows unto harvest. The over availability of the Text has, to what should be our shame, made us complacent toward it.

And I contend that the result has been that our theological imaginations are truncated, our vision of the world weakened, and our sensitivity to the mystery of the Faith grown dull.

We know historically that when there is need, there is response, and therefore it is little surprise that words like story and journey have become touchstones popular in the Christian ecumenical exchange--the common desire to reclaim a sense of rootedness and orthodoxy. However, the desire for rootedness rarely returns to a conversation of faithfulness, which is how the prophet Jeremiah described it: “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is the Lord. For he will be like a tree planted by the water, that extends its roots by a stream and will not fear when the heat comes; but its leaves will be green, and it will not be anxious in a year of drought nor cease to yield fruit.” Often, the conversation excludes questions of faithfulness in favor of what sounds to be Gospel application, the essential to-do list of the Faith: love one another, feed the hungry, tend the sick.

While on the surface these are essentially wonderful and good things, it is not often pointed out that they are possible to achieve, at least in part, outside of a faithful relationship with God. One can love, feed, and tend without necessarily needing the presence of the Almighty active within the process. In turn, the need for Scripture becomes unapparent. If our rootedness comes from our performance of certain actions that have Gospel sounds: love, feed, tend, then who is in need of the intervening power, discernment, and transformative work of the Holy Spirit?

Our churches and individual lives are mired in our desire to have a plan of action that looks like good religion while all the while we have lost the original call of the Spirit upon our lives, which is at once staggeringly difficult and remarkably simple: be transformed, ever and always, into the image of Christ our Lord. Indeed, a transformation that is not about having a memory bank of Scriptures to use to patch any situation or a categorical understanding of doctrine and dogma, but a quiet, daily transformation of the whole being in which Scripture is the formative influence of how we live and move within our world.

But we cannot forget, ever, in the midst of all of this, that only Jesus is the means of our salvation.

Scripture is only and ever in the service of Him.

II

The Word of God is not the Bible.

The Word of God is Jesus Christ.

A conflation of the words for Scripture and Word have made us poor exegetes and engagers with the biblical text. When God says that His word does not return void, in the larger context of the passage it means that the action of redemption he has set in motion shall not fail. That action, of course, is Jesus Christ, something that John seemed to be aware of when inking his Gospel.

In the beginning was the Word.

The Bible, like John the Baptiser, testifies to that Light, preaches of that Light, but is not that Light.

How goes the old hymn?

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness.

III

In the Gospel of St. Matthew, after Jesus is baptized He departs for the wilderness by the direction of the Spirit, where He fasts for forty days and forty nights before He grows hungry and the Tempter comes to Him: ‘If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.’

To this, Jesus quotes a portion of Deuteronomy 8:3, ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.’ There is extensive commentary on this passage, brilliant commentary, but I would like to suggest something simple: when Christ is first shown to us as being tempted, His response is not to quote Scripture as proof text but to quote Scripture as an exercise in active engagement with the Text itself. He does not simply know the Text in passing, but He speaks forth the Text with authority and discernment.

This is further revealed to us by what happens next.

Then the devil took Him into the holy city and had Him stand on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, ‘If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will command His angels concerning you’; and ‘On their hands they will bear You up, so that You will not strike Your foot against a stone.’’

Here, Satan quotes Psalm 91:11, 12. He knows the Scripture as well. Instead of his previous temptation based on the physical, immediate needs of Jesus, he now suggests that the Scripture gives permission for what he proposes.

But to this Jesus responds with Deuteronomy 6:16, ‘On the other hand, it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’’

Returning to our simple proposition that Christ’s knowledge of the Scripture is beyond rote knowledge and is active engagement, we see that He puts the Scripture in conversation with itself. A portion of the Text does not exist in isolation, but in direct relation to all other passages. Accordingly, Christ’s dismissal of the Tempter upon his third attempt follows the same momentum.

If we continue in Matthew, this passage leads into the beginning of Jesus’s ministry and the calling of the first disciples. (We’ll return to this later.) But in the Gospel of St. Luke, there is an interlude between the temptation and the calling of the disciples that I think imperative for our discussion of Scripture as central.

We read in Luke:

And He came up to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and found the place where it was written,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach
the gospel to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release
to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind.
To set free those who are oppressed,
To proclaim the favorable year of
the Lord.
And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’

I find it interesting that Luke orders his Gospel with a careful progression: Christ first shows His authority over the Scriptures by revealing His understanding of them against the Prince of this world. He then shows that same authority over the leaders of this world. Therefore, by the time He calls the first disciples, we have been introduced not only to the Messiah as One who heals the sick and raises the dead, but as One who fulfills the Scripture by completely understanding them and interpreting them with perfect clarity.

As modern Christians, we perhaps take this for granted; but, if we are reading or hearing these Gospels as first or second century believers, we are being introduced to this Man—fully human, fully God—and it is telling that emphasis is placed on revealing Him as intimately engaged with the Scripture that speaks of and points to Him.

Familiarity and understanding comprise the habit of being Christ embodies toward the Text. Whereas He could have rebuked Satan through His authority as God, He rebukes Him through His authority anchored in the Scripture. Whereas He could have stood in the synagogue and declared Himself the Messiah, He reveals this exceptional mystery through the authority of the Scripture.

Could it be, then, that when He called us unto Himself, as He would soon after call the disciples, that it was to this same reverence, engagement, and understanding?

Juxtapose this sort of Scriptural thinking with the modern condition and we may see a disconnect. The end goal is not a set of arguments or the weight of proof, but an approach of openness to the Scripture whereby we read it with the expectation that it is alive, inspired, vibrant, and is in the process of reading us as much as we are attempting to read it.

The Scripture is opening us, changing us, causing us to inhabit the world differently, approaching the creation with a heart being molded into that of the Creator.

While the expressions—the summaries and screenplays and novels and films—have been designed to remind us to love, feed, and tend, they have not been designed to adequately replace. We must still affirm the words of Christ: ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.’

Every word.

The first to the last, even the boring bits, even the hard bits, even the things we wish we could ignore or explain away.

IV

There is a church somewhere that begins its services with the congregation raising their Bibles over their heads and reciting a short statement of faith that its contents determines who they are.

They are people of the Book.

They are a people who affirm who they are by the Book.

While I understand the desire, while I understand the sense of rootedness, the love I too have for the Scripture, what is most important is that who I believe in is Jesus Christ.

I am eternally grateful for the Bible. I believe the Bible is true, is gift of God for His people, but the Bible does not determine my salvation.

The Bible does not determine if I'm a Christian.

The Bible does not determine everlasting life.

I am a believer in small things.

That is, I think even tiny changes in history have huge consequences, that the flapping of butterfly wings has everything to do with motion of the seas and the price of gas in south Texas.

In 1646 the Westminster Confession made a theological choice when they began their statement of faith first with an affirmation of Holy Scripture and then with an affirmation of God.

Though they were well-meaning, they may have thumbed their noses at the whole of the Tradition that came before them. For all the ills of the historic creeds of the Church, at least the variations all had the good-sense to put God first.

We believe in one God, begins Nicene.

I believe in God, begins the Apostle's.

But Westminster confesses the Scripture before it confesses the Saviour and if we draw out the lines, Westminster became the confessional position of the puritans, became the internal logic of those who boarded ships in search of religious freedom, who settled in America, and these people of the Book became the same people, generations later, who thought the Bible was synonymous with the Word because their confession, if taken at face-value, meant that the Bible was where there faith came from.

I'll point out that Scripture itself doesn't stumble into this problem.

In the beginning, God.

V

You said live out loud, and die you said lightly,
and over and over again you said be.

Rilke.

I have gestured toward a proposal here, that Scripture is the crucial, transformative instrument of the Holy Spirit to change us from glory to glory into the image of our God, to journey beyond the start of life and tread careful toward our hour of death, to inhabit this space between with the active purpose of being, of living in the midst, in the context, in the imagination the Scripture imparts to us.

But I have also said that faith is rooted first and foremost in Christ Jesus.

This is the tension, to be people of the Book without being people without a Saviour.

To read the Scripture is to pray the Scripture, for the apostle writes the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Surely, the Spirit turns within us when we enter into the words of the Text, surely it quickens us, even if we should not know it. Those groanings, those things we cannot see in present time that are journeying us forward into relationship with the extraordinary God in our ordinary lives, the wonder of the Incarnation made known to us day by day, again and again.

We are on the path of this being, as Rilke called it. This abiding.

But, again, rooted first in Christ.

As Jesus said to the disciples, I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.

VI

Faith is not dependent on the Bible alone.

If it were just me, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit for the rest of my life, I am absolutely certain I'd be a heretic.

Lauren Winner.

It's too easy to read the Gospel of Luke and think that Jesus isn't divine, just sent by God. It's too easy to read the Apocalypse and presume that those flying men with the scorpion tails are helicopters.

And when I say Bible, what do I mean?

Do I mean an English translation? A combination of Hebrew and Greek?

If I say the Old Testament, do I mean the Septuagint or the Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Bible did not save me.

Jesus Christ saved me. Jesus Christ is the Messiah. And for all the Bible is, it is not the Source of my election in Christ, it is not the means by which I have been grafted into the family of God.

Not by works of righteousness--nor by a handful of texts--but according to His mercy.

VII

I believe in Jesus Christ.

I broaden, refine, explore, nurture that belief through faithful study and engagement with the Scripture that attests to, testifies to, and witnesses to that once crucified, eternally risen Jesus.

But were all the Scripture to be lost, were we like a sojourning people under a Josiah rule vagabond seekers without a Law, God would be no less God, His Messiah no less His Messiah, His Spirit no less His Spirit.

I love the Scripture, but I love Jesus more. I love the God that Scripture proclaims more than the Scripture itself.

I heard tell once of a commandment: Love the Lord your God ...

Not a Text. Never first a Text.

Delight in the Text. Love by the Text. But the commandment is first a love of God.

Were I never to see a word of the inspired again, He would still be near.

He would still be not far from me.

when this is a week about the bible

Preston Yancey — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:23:56 +0000

I had tentatively planned to begin my series on reading Peter Enns' wonderful book The Evolution of Adam this Monday, but in planning the first post I realised that before I could get into how I read Genesis and science together in discussion with Enns, I need to do a bit of groundwork in explaining how I approach Scripture to begin with.

If you've been around this blog for a little while, you likely know that I put a high priority on the biblical text. I believe Scripture is the fundamental tool by which our imaginations are shaped to encounter God in our world, that it is inspired and living, and that it continues to be the anchoring of the Church in and across time.

However, I also deviate from more evangelical norms when it comes to approaching Scripture. I don't believe in inerrancy the way it's usually defined; I don't believe Moses wrote any portion of the first five books of the Old Testament; I don't believe that Genesis 1-11 should be read the same way as Genesis 12, nor should Esther be read the same as Luke, or Exodus the same as Job; but, I also have very conservative beliefs about how early the Gospels were written; and that just lists a handful.

Since I am asked often what it is I do believe about Scripture, I'll spend this week putting down some parameters for how I read and approach the biblical text, how I reconcile its inspiration with its historicity, how I see the context surrounding it playing into my engagement, and what I believe this means, ultimately, for the Church.

You'll notice, importantly, that I am introducing this as how I read and approach Scripture. True to who I am, I am going to try and write these posts poetically and through story, using my good 'ole Roman numeral breaks to go through it.

(And, because some of you will want to know this, yes, there will be a suggested readings list. Look for that on Thursday.)

UPDATE: Because of some circumstances beyond my control, I need to push this discussion forward a day, so the following schedule has been updated accordingly.

The Week's Schedule

Tuesday -- when i believe in Jesus, then the bible -- Scripture, authority, and faith

Wednesday -- when the bible is not perfectly factual, but perfectly true -- dating Scripture, Scriptural discrepancies, and reconciling fact and truth

Thursday -- when the bible is not just the bible -- the apocrypha, midrash, canonisation, and the culture around the Text in and across time

Friday -- when the bible is not basic instructions before leaving earth -- discipleship, belief, and Scripture in daily life

I'm looking forward to sharing this part of me and my faith with you, as well as wading into the comments, because I recognise these are sensitive subjects.

Feel free to pitch some questions that you already have below, and if I didn't already plan to answer them in the posts, I'll see about incorporating them!

See you Monday!

when this is about my parents -- today at alise's

Preston Yancey — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:28:00 +0000

Today, I have the honour of sharing with my bubbly, witty, brilliant friend Alise.

“When you cross yourself, it grieves me.”

My Father tells me this a few years after I begin crossing myself. He says it slow, gentle. We’re driving around after his own father has died and we’re at the light where his father used to sit at with patience older than maybe the three of us, collectively, would be able to remember. This comes after I have, for the fourth time in two days, said something about the Catholic church.

Keep reading this, over at Alise's space?

when this was holy week, in retrospect

Preston Yancey — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 11:06:19 +0000

I

Today, I walked into town with a golden chocolate fruitcake tucked under my arm to deliver to the bakery in town I now work with. There is sun, just enough chill. It is Eastertide, resurrection time, and the world knows it as my bones know it, in quiet and quick and whisper.

I took the long way back, through the woods, and stopped on the bench by the waterfall and read the daily readings, prayed the daily prayers.

I fed ducks with a bit of day old bread I had left over. The ducks a sort of icon, a reminder that we are fed. Hope is buried in a deep down somewhere in those creatures, and, today, I needed to know that. I needed to know Eastertide hope was buried in something, in someone.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

II

There are six of us in my flat on Maundy Thursday, working on an essay none of us can stand to write that's due the next day. Around seven in the evening I point out that we won't make a church service in town and suggest that if everyone would be comfortable with it, I have some flatbread and some wine and we could have a service together.

They agree.

I don't know why I have the flatbread. That morning I made a small bit of it on a whim before everyone came over, because it was the night in which He was betrayed and it felt like the thing you do, to do, on that night that is so different from all the other nights.

I tell them that theologically I thought we were all priests to one another.

(I suppose this is what still keeps me fixedly baptist.)

A few hours later, using an iPhone for church bells, we gather around my kitchen table, the table where I do most of my theology, most of my being, and using The Book of Common Prayer, a combination of paper and electronic Bibles, and a Catholic hymn from my iTunes library, we have Maundy Thursday.

Our comfort levels vary here. Some abstain from receiving, some do not want to be responsible for blessing the bread, the wine. We make it work. We decide from the onset that it will be disjointed, will be out of place, will feel pieced together. And, deciding that, it goes ridiculously smoothly, seamlessly, like there was nothing more natural than this.

There is the icon candle I had been lighting for Holy Week in the midst of us. Before we began the service, I drop a note to those friends that the candle has been for, tell them there is about to be Eucharist on their behalf, in a way, in whatever way a non-Catholic can say when they say that, and that all else failing, there is a corner of the world that is keeping watch for them.

So the table is not just six but thirty, but not just thirty, perhaps more. Perhaps this is the circle larger than could be fathomed, the circle that must be with God.

A man and a woman take their turn blessing the elements. Some cross themselves. Some do not. Some say A-men and some a-MEN. Some walk away. Some linger.

When the candle is blown out, wine is poured.

We are laughing on the night He was betrayed.

This is grace, this act of chasing away the dark.

III

I wish there was a gap year for faith.

A year where you were allowed to do nothing but just explore what it is you believe.

But I suppose that's the point. The cosmic point.

We don't get gap years to just focus on faith because faith is a relational thing, even in isolation. Faith lives in the cracks of the self, in the places we forget to clean and rearrange to make ourselves seem better to others. Faith is there when the ivory towers of our theology crumble and we're lying on the flour of our kitchens making circles with our fingers thinking about that poem we read in high school that ends with the circle is without God and how that line has haunted us for years.

Faith is why run-on sentences are possible.

Faith is what makes me stop being logical, however disappointed some may be to hear me say that.

Faith makes me love. Makes me bake it out. Makes me buy irrational icon candles to light when the prayers just don't come.

By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.

By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.

By faith, Preston baked a round of flat bread on Maundy Thursday, 2013, and it was counted unto him as ...

I guess someday we'll find out.

IV

I don't go to church on Good Friday this year. I don't go on Easter Sunday. I don't go to vigil on Holy Saturday.

There are a half-dozen reasons for this: not feeling connected yet to any one church; the time it takes to get into town when there are things that need doing, like cookery for Easter day; the fear of unfeeling; the feeling of the emotional dam bursting--

I'll focus on that. The feeling of the emotional dam bursting. (I have typed it damn every time so far and have had to go back and edit it. I think that's something you need to know.)

I am blessed (thing we're supposed to say; again, I think you need to know this) to have many friends. Many in real life, many online. Holy Week marked a particularly rough time for those friends. Aching times. Candle burning prayer times.

I flit my eyes into a roll when people say online friendships aren't real. They are real enough that I know electric bills have been anonymously paid when times are tough. They are real enough that I know when a mama cries out mercy for a sick child, there's a half dozen candle around the world that set to lighting. They are real enough that I know I have carried the weight of a fraction of their pain with me on the days they cannot.

I know their stories. I know their hearts. However fragmented those strands are, they are my people.

This is supposed to be about why I skip out on church.

I won't do it next year. I won't do it ever again. This is the first year in my life that I don't go to church during Easter.

I learn that I need it. I learn that I take my rootedness from it.

I learn that it was easier for me to be a Christian in Texas, with the Episcopalians, the liturgical friends, the people who check-in.

I learn that I worry about my faith so much that it could be ridiculous if it wasn't for the fact that it's true.

I learn that people assume you're fine because you don't tell them you aren't but you don't tell them you aren't because you don't know what it's like to be fine.

I don't go to church because for one year I need to know what it's like to be like my friends who still can't bring themselves to go and, for better or worse, it makes me pray for them differently.

It makes me bend low in the fields of my heart.

I don't know if that's right, exactly, but what can I say is these days?

V

This is the part of the post where I quote Scripture, where I say something profound. I provide some little fragment scrap that is the key to everything else I have said here.

[intentionally left blank]

VI

I meet someone for coffee who tells me they are a gay Christian. They are uncertain what that means or should mean, but that the hardest part is there is no one in the Bible to model their story after. They say that whether it's sin or not, there's no example of someone who struggled with it, pushed at it, wrestled with God with it. No one in the Bible seems to have their story. Who is the archetype?

I was prepared for a lot, but not for this. I drain my coffee and am about to say, Jesus, when I realise that's like handing molded bread and vinegar wine to the starving.

So I say nothing. Then I say a few things. Then I still say Jesus. Then I wonder if there are truly places in time that are circles without God.

VII

The part about the ducks isn't true.

I did, yes, walk to town with a fruitcake and deliver it to the bakery. I did walk back along the forest path and sit on the bench by the waterfall and read through the Psalm, Ezekiel, Acts, the Gospel of John. I did feel words circle up and back around and I felt it was time to write once more.

All of that is fact, but is much of it true?

Truth would be to say that I felt much of nothing, that what I felt was the bench beneath me and the drum of the falls. Truth would be to say that I don't quite remember what the psalm said and I only recall Ezekiel because it feels the most relevant: the valley of dry bones.

Truth would be to say that I wrote this part of the post first, because it felt important to confess the lie before I typed it, to confess that the ducks occurred to me on the walk back, illustrative of some point that I am sure at the time I thought could masquerade as profound but is now just one more reminder that I have so very little of who I am figured out, though there are plenty of people willing to tell me.

Truth would be to say that on my walk back, two fighter jets overflew running training and I thought of North Korea and how however credible or incredible the threat, it highlights perfectly that the world is broken still, that on beautiful days when I should have been feeding ducks some madman on a tiny island on the other side of the world is making loud promises of vengeance, that my inbox is pinging with friends from China saying they doubt but worry, that I'm still carrying around this bit of Good Friday that I'm not certain I'm supposed to carry, but I am, and that I don't know what to do most days anymore and that is the truth I have right now.

So it's Eastertide, I've been told.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

when this is what i'm into, march 2013

Preston Yancey — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 22:47:48 +0000

Books I Read

The Evolution of Adam by Peter Enns -- I loved this book. Enns does an excellent job explaining how scientific engagement and Scripture fit together, not pull apart. Starting next Monday, I'll be re-reading the book and blogging through each chapter. If you want to follow along, pick up a copy before next week if you can!
Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns -- This was a less revolutionary read for me, as opposed to Adam, but nonetheless a good one. Enns does a great job of explaining the problems most lay Evangelicals in America have in approaching Scripture, the Old Testament particularly, and what it means in contextual theological engagement.
The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights by Joan Didion -- Sometimes, I just need to re-read Didion. March saw me sitting through her memoirs of death for the third time in my life. I journeyed with her loosing her husband, then her daughter. Each time, I feel like I've learned something new about who I am.
Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition by Christine D. Pohl -- Of course I loved this. Particularly, I loved that Pohl stresses the idea of selflessness in ways I don't think we always realise, like high-cost fundraisers where you pay so much per plate actually subverts the intentions of Christian charity. Love it.
Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture by Miri Rubin -- I've loved Rubin's work for some time and am returning to this excellent text as I prepare to write my master's thesis this summer. For those interested, Rubin evaluates the fragmentation of identify in late medieval Europe and the divergent practices of Eucharistic devotion that it developed.
The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns by John Green -- John Green can do no wrong. Simple as that.

Books on My Nightstand

Remembering by Wendell Berry
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn --- OH MY GOSH. I'M A FEW CHAPTERS IN AND OH. MY. GOSH.
What We Talk About When We Talk About God by Rob Bell
Secrets in the Dark by Frederick Buechner
Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age by Yvonne Sherwood
Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life by William A. Dryness

On my Computer Screen (TV)

Happy Endings -- Still one of the best shows ever. Ever. Amhazing.
Girls -- This season ended in a way that left me with serious, serious doubts about season three. We'll see.
Game of Thrones -- Is back, finally! Winter has come!
The Americans -- This is the perfect slow-burn drama that I have been waiting for. Just enough intrigue each episode without spiraling into sensationalism.
Awkward -- Not since Daria would I say that MTV could make a decent TV show, but Awkward is completely brilliant. Every traditional plot twist it subverts. I think it's a quiet game-changer for high school dramedy and it's one of the funniest shows I've watched in a long time.
Big Love -- I watched Big Love when it first aired. I cried when Barb was excommunicated. I will never forget that scene. When a friend mentioned the other day how good a show it was, I decided to return to the beginning and rewatch. Yes, it's still one of the best shows ever aired, easily one of the best on HBO.
Old standards of Grey's Anatomy, Parks & Rec, Modern Family, The Real Housewives of Atlanta and Beverly Hills, of course.

On my Computer Screen (Film)

Butter -- Kitschy, funny in the first half, doesn't quite land the end.
Cloud Atlas -- I was barely functioning the day after I watched this. It's beautiful. Painfully beautiful. Impossibly beautiful.

In My Ears

Heartthrob, Tegan & Sara's new sound. How am I even typing while I'm listening to it? It's amazing. AMAZING.
Page CXVI released all their hymn collections for free and I curled up in contentment on the floor for an hour and just stayed there.

In My Head (When This is About What I'm Studying This Month in Class)

nineteenth century neo-gothic church architecture and the advantage or disadvantage for use by a modern church congregation, the place of Eucharistic devotion, and liturgical practice
Greek drama, medieval plays, and the problem of evil
liturgical formation in secular practice
neo-sexual ethics in response to the failed sexual revolution contra Platonic dualism

Various Happy Making

I've sent my book proposal off to a few publishers and a few agents. We'll see. That's all I'll say for now.
My flat is now, in the eyes of Scotland and Scottish law, officially a private bakery. I'll be cooking up cakes for the Our Story cafe in St. Andrews. I have a chocolate fruit cake in the oven right now, actually.

So what about you? What’s on your nightstand? What television show has captured your imagination? What are you pinning or cooking or planning?

Linked up with my lovely friend, Leigh for the monthly “What I’m Into” round-up.

when i'm not ready just yet

Preston Yancey — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:08:27 +0000

Not just yet, to come back.

Not just yet, to share.

Next Monday we'll begin again sharing life and love in this space. But, for now. I need just a bit more time.

when it is good friday

Preston Yancey — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 11:25:23 +0000