Devotions, Schmevotions...or Schdevotions...Schevotions?

With respect to devotions, maybe what we should be telling our children today is something about the story that they're a part of. As they grow in the story, they have a responsibility internalize it. Just as the storyteller of a tribe has a responsibility to learn all the stories correctly to pass them on to the next generation, so the members of the Church have a responsibility to learn their story in order to pass it on. Not only is the responsibility to younger members, but also to older members. My generation has a responsibility to learn the story in the language of my generation--to communicate it to other members of my generation, to younger generations, and also to older generations. We all learn about each other by learning each other's vocabulary. But more importantly the story is reiterated again and again, and so we all learn about the story's main character.

Walter Bruggeman in "Always in the Shadow of the Empire" in The Church as Counterculture explains how the Jews kept their unique identity in the face of oppressive empires at every turn: they told and retold their story. He says of the Exodus account, "there is prescribed wording designed to inculcate the young and to socialize them into this perception of reality" (44). Bruggeman says, "Along with litrugical reiteration, this community accepted rigorous disciplines for the sake of alternative ocmmunity. These disciplines we regularly call commandments or even laws...In listening [to God at Mt. Sinai], Israel comes to the startling, dangerous conviction that its life consists not in bricks for the empire, but in acts of neighborliness whereby Israel replicates Exodus for its neighbors" (44, 45). In telling and retelling their story, the Israelites created a radical alternative community within a society that repressed all such insurrections. In our own society, we are similarly called to see a different reality than the one we are presented with daily, and this is done by allowing ourselves to be transformed by the renewing of our minds.

One way that this story is internalized, is by daily repetition--daily discipline. Or, one could even say, "daily devotions." But not in a "I do this for personal betterment" sense. No, rather in a sense of "I do this as a responsibility to the community that is relying on me to continue the story and also for a community that is enriched by my perspective and experiences." So we begin our own quest to know God through our own life, in the context of a teaching, listening, learning, growing community, which suffers without our input. This way of knowing God is not simply the acquisition of words and facts about God; it is knowledge in the Biblical sense. It is intimacy--an intimacy that changes who we are. For in knowing God and being known by God, we are changed.

Waiting to Exhale

This morning in church we learned that trying to keep the Holy Spirit in is like trying to not exhale after smoking. "The church has waited too long to exhale." This brought to my mind all kinds of images of the implications of verses like "Jesus breathed on them." Really, Jesus let out a puff of smoke on then. Maybe sometimes the Holy Spirit comes out in smoke rings. Pretty funny.

There's more of substance, though. 1 Corinthians 12:7 says "to each is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good." In Loyalty to God: The Apostles' Creed in Life and Liturgy,Theodore Jennings says, "It is not in our devotions, nor in our worship that we are promised the presence of Jesus, but rather in the carrying on of his mission."

Our pastor told a story of a Dutch preacher and his family who were taken prisoner during WWII. They were transported on cattle cars to what they assumed would be a Nazi death camp. When the car stopped and the doors were opened, before them was not a death camp, but the mountains of Switzerland. Someone had switched the lines and saved their lives. Their lives had moved from constant fear to certain death and then to freedom. As they stood there, the Dutch preacher asked, "What do you do with such a gift?"

You exhale, I guess. You breathe on everyone around you. Dan Boone writes, "We never receive the Spirit for ourselves alone, to be our private possession. The Holy Spirit is always the Spirit of mission. The Spirit is making all things new, and by the gift of the Spirit we participate in this newness. The Spirit is not for private, interior experience, but for energy to be sent into the world on the mission of God."

So we go, with our manifestation of the Spirit for the common good, and we do. That's where Jesus is present.