The Internet Monk Archives

From Fullness to Emptiness

RookeStoryofruth2 — Story of Ruth 2, Rooke

By Chaplain Mike

Ordinary Time Bible Study
The Book of Ruth (4)

The Book of Ruth was written to show how an unlikely woman, who proved herself to be a woman of wisdom and love, became a “founding mother” in Israel. In the tradition of Israel’s honored ancestors, God providentially worked for her and through her to fulfill his promise that kingly descendants would be born in Abraham’s family. This happened as she and others practiced extraordinary love (Heb: hesed) toward their families and neighbors.

The author of Ruth shaped this story to remind readers of the patriarchal stories. The very atmosphere of this book partakes of the family accounts in Genesis. Like them, this narrative focuses on ordinary human events as the context for God’s action. Common life elements of food and material provision, family and marital relationships and children, provide the stage upon which God works.

However, his actions are “hidden”—God’s name appears only in conversations and blessings shared between the human characters. The story stresses human activity, especially acts of lovingkindness, as the portal through which God’s will is accomplished on earth as it is in heaven.

The Book of Ruth thus provides for God’s people a delightful tale of wisdom and salvation. Our Promised King came to us through God’s merciful and surprising acts in the lives of ordinary, even unlikely people, to the praise of the glory of his grace. It encourages us to believe that we too can experience God’s blessing in the ordinary course of our lives and become important contributors to God’s story as we live among our neighbors with extraordinary love.

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A Musical Primer on the Ancient-Future Path

By Chaplain Mike

If I were to design a course to teach about spiritual formation from an ancient-future perspective, my soundtrack would be the new album by John Michael Talbot, called, Worship and Bow Down.

Remarkably, this is Talbot’s 53rd (!) record, but it is different than most of his previous releases. In light of the publication of a new Roman Missal (the Catholic book of liturgy), Talbot has put together an album that combines new pieces for the Mass with settings of great texts used in other services and yet more songs that speak of spiritual disciplines and practices.

Together, this song set forms an excellent primer on the ancient-future path of following Jesus and living in the Gospel.

The album begins with a traditional call to worship from Psalm 95, “Worship and Bow Down” and is followed by a new song for communion, “In Remembrance of Me.” Then comes the exuberant “Hinds Feet on High Places,” which speaks of the place of suffering in the life of those who follow Jesus. This may be one of the most profoundly celebratory songs I have heard from JMT. I love that it speaks of God’s victory, not in a triumphalist way but realistically, as God meets us in the very midst of life’s hurts.

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Joe the Plumber Gives a Brief Post-Mortem

First of all, let me say how thankful I am for all of you in our Internet Monk community. You have patiently hung with us as we’ve gone through an absurd number of site problems over the past couple of weeks. I have received emails and messages on Facebook expressing concern, promising prayer, and even offering financial support to help us overcome our difficulties. Thank you all for your loyal love. Please know that we continue to work hard to resolve all issues and put the site on a platform that will enable us to be more secure and stable.

Second, I can’t say enough about the work of our tech guru, Joe Stallard. Joe has generously and kindly given his time and efforts to work with our hosting company to deal with volume issues and hacker attacks. It has at times been frustrating trying to fix complex problems while patiently persevering with online and telephone tech support. Having recently spent over two hours trying to set up a piece of equipment with such tech guidance, I know how irritating and discouraging that can be. I have promised Joe many indulgences for his good works on our behalf.

Now I’ll let him tell you more about what’s been going on.

Joe the Plumber Gives a Brief Post-Mortem
In an effort not to bore you with too much geek gibberish, I’ll try to keep this short.

Following the previous hack of the iMonk website, I had gone through the files located on the server and deleted out several old programs (old forums, old WordPress, etc.) that had just been “stored” on the server.

When our web host restored the site, the backup that they used included those deleted files – which made us vulnerable once again.

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Worship: Robert Webber’s Proposals

By Chaplain Mike

As we’ve been talking about worship music over the past few weeks, I’ve been encouraged to go back and review some of the sources that first caught my attention and made the study and practice of Christian worship such a major part of my thinking and ministry.

Most evangelicals who have learned anything about Biblical, theological, and historical perspectives have been touched by the late Robert Webber. Last year, I called him “The Father of the Ancient-Future Path” because he helped low church evangelicals like me appreciate the tradition of the church’s liturgy. However, Webber himself was hard to categorize. He studied, participated in, and learned to appreciate a wide variety of Christian worship expressions. One of his goals was to encourage the church to come to some fundamental understandings about worship and then let the Holy Spirit build upon those within each tradition.

His seminal book, Worship Old and New, remains required reading for anyone who is concerned about worship renewal in today’s church. The copy I have was published in 1982 (the year before I entered seminary and began studying worship in earnest), and his words and proposals are as pertinent today as they were then.

Today, I would like to discuss his “Nine Proposals” in the book. These came out of discussions with students in his classes at Wheaton College. He asked them to suggest how the material he was presenting might be useful in the church. The result was this list of nine recommendations for evangelical churches and worshipers.

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Sigh…

What a week. We were hacked yet again. Our host site could not figure out how to restore our pages. Joe Stallard, our noble web master, spent the better part of three straight days trying to get us back up and running. There will be extra jewels in his crown in heaven for this.

Saturday Ramblings went by the wayside—there was no way for me to post it, and even if I had, you wouldn’t have been able to read it.

But we are back, thanks to Joe’s persistence.

Thanks to each of you who wrote to me personally to let me know we were down. If I didn’t respond, it was because I was busy relaying messages from the host site to Joe Stallard. And repenting for using language unbecoming a monk.

Keep praying for us. We need God’s help more than ever.

A Hymn for Ordinary Time (3): Two Hymns of Comfort

By Chaplain Mike

We here in the iMonk community have been sharing with each other many words about trials and spiritual disorientation lately. This might be a good time to include some hymns of comfort and encouragement in our weekly “Hymns for Ordinary Time” series. One of the lessons to be learned in Ordinary Time is that the hard passages are part and parcel of our daily journey, and it is something we should find a way to sing about.

Today we feature two hymns by a woman who has been called, “the Fanny Crosby of Sweden.” Her full name is Karolina Wilhelmina Sandell-Berg, but she is known as Lina Sandell. She lived from 1832 to 1903 in Sweden, where she grew up as the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. In her lifetime she wrote more than 650 hymns. Many of these were put to melody and carried across Scandanavia by guitarist, composer, and arranger Oscar Ahnfelt, of whom Lina said, “He has sung my songs into the hearts of the people.”

As a teenager, Sandell wrote the beautiful and tender, “Children of the Heavenly Father.” This is a favorite of my wife’s extended family, and we sing it when we gather at reunions for worship. Lina wrote it having already experienced severe trials in her own childhood. At age twelve she was paralyzed, confined to bed, and given no hope of walking again. Yet somehow she experienced healing just like the people in the Gospel stories she read and prayed over. This led her to testify to God’s care in this beautiful, lullaby-like hymn of comfort. Whether you are in the disorienting circumstances of pain and sorrow, or have found peace or even a surprising deliverance of some kind, this is a song God’s people can sing together to encourage one another to trust our Father’s loving presence throughout the journey.

Children of the heav’nly Father
Safely in His bosom gather;
Nestling bird nor star in Heaven
Such a refuge e’er was given.

God His own doth tend and nourish;
In His holy courts they flourish;
From all evil things He spares them;
In His mighty arms He bears them.

Neither life nor death shall ever
From the Lord His children sever;
Unto them His grace He showeth,
And their sorrows all He knoweth.

Though He giveth or He taketh,
God His children ne’er forsaketh;
His the loving purpose solely
To preserve them pure and holy.

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iMonk Classic: Singing in the Evangelical Liturgy

Classic iMonk Post
by Michael Spencer
September 8, 2009

NOTE from CM: In 2009, Michael did a series called The Evangelical Liturgy, in which he walked through the different parts of a traditional Protestant worship service, discussing the value of recovering our own liturgical tradition.

Click HERE to read the series’ introduction
Go to the Search Box and enter “Evangelical Liturgy” (with quotation marks) to see all posts

We have been talking about music in worship lately, and in this post, Michael approaches the subject in a personal and pastoral way, encouraging us to appreciate the proper place of music in our worship so that we will sing as congregations thoughtfully and well.

Singing. Oh yes….singing. I love to sing. I learned to sing before I was a Christian, first at school and then at church. I miss singing more than I can say. Our students don’t sing. Most of the adults I work with don’t sing much. I loved choirs and hymn-sings as a young Christian. It’s one of the worst things about the evangelical wilderness. Nothing is as wonderful to me as singing in church.

Congregational singing. One of evangelicalism’s great legacies, thanks to Isaac Watts, the Wesleys and some great music in the midst of the not-so-great flood of music out of revivalism, the Jesus movement, CCM, etc.

Not somebody or a group singing to the audience….uh…congregation, but congregational singing. Worship by singing. Proclamation by singing.

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Augustine’s Inner Conflict about Music

By Chaplain Mike

Music has always been a matter of contention in the church. We’ve been talking about that with regard to current “worship wars” and “revolutions” in church music. That is NOT what this post is about.

No, I want us to think about another conflict with regard to music in the church, one about which I hear little. It is the conflict within the individual about what music does to him or her and whether or not it is leading a person toward or away from God. Somehow this discussion has gotten lost as we’ve been preoccupied with the other battles.

Oh sure, there are those voices out there that rail against certain styles of music, warning Christians that we are opening the door to the devil if we listen to music with a backbeat. But rarely do we hear people ask the question, “Is my relationship with music itself good for me?”

What does music do to us? for us? Is there any way in which it acts against our best interests when it comes to our spiritual formation and relationship with God?

Music was not always as ubiquitous as it is now. Music is with us today from morning until night, a constant soundtrack, either in the background or accessed by us through a plethora of media devices. It is all music all the time, and this is made possible by our technology. Many have commented on the loss of silence in our modern lives. There is a steady background noise even when we don’t facilitate it and beyond that, a seeming commitment to constant sonic stimulation that has even infiltrated and taken over our approach to Christian devotion and worship.

St. Augustine (AD 354-430) long ago, in a much quieter age, pondered the place of music in his life. In his classic Confessions, he meditates on “the delights of the ear” as he considers the various “lusts of the flesh” and how he deals with them. I would like us to read this passage today and discuss our responses to it.

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Worship Music: Today’s Catholic Principles

By Chaplain Mike

Since the Second Vatican Council (1965-present), the Roman Catholic Church has experienced a great deal of change and development with regard to liturgical practice. Along with these changes, the Church has thought and written much about her worship, including the role of music in it. The liturgy was one of the first subjects taken up by the council with the aim of providing for more lay participation. That, of course, involves music and singing.

The document which came out of Vatican II in 1963, Sacrosanctum Concilium, expresses the Church’s view on music with these words:

112. The musical tradition of the universal Church is a treasure of inestimable value, greater even than that of any other art. The main reason for this pre-eminence is that, as sacred song united to the words, it forms a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy.

Holy Scripture, indeed, has bestowed praise upon sacred song [Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16], and the same may be said of the fathers of the Church and of the Roman pontiffs who in recent times, led by St. Pius X, have explained more precisely the ministerial function supplied by sacred music in the service of the Lord.

Therefore sacred music is to be considered the more holy in proportion as it is more closely connected with the liturgical action, whether it adds delight to prayer, fosters unity of minds, or confers greater solemnity upon the sacred rites. But the Church approves of all forms of true art having the needed qualities, and admits them into divine worship.

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Difficult Scriptures: 1 Peter 5:8

Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8, NASB).

The devil? The devil made me do it. Between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Just how does the devil devour one? Where does he go to prowl? Does Satan still bargain with God as he did over Job? Just what is the role of the devil in this world, and—more specifically—in the lives of believers today?

Ok, iMonks. Your turn. Wrestle through this. I am not looking for a full dissertation on evil. Stick to this verse from 1 Peter. What is Peter saying? Consider his audience and what they were going through at the time.

How do we become of sober spirit? And what do we do when we meet this prowling lion face-to-face?