I just came back from our Maundy Thursday service at church and read this on facebook.
Now I finally know what “maundy” means……

“Amid the bustle of Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter, Maundy Thursday is easy to overlook. Few calendars label it, and some churches don’t observe it at all, though it may be the oldest of the Holy Week observances. It’s worth asking why, and how, generations of Christians have revered this day.

‘Maundy’ comes, possibly by way of one or more European languages, from the Latin ‘mandatum,’ meaning ‘command.’ The reference is John 13:34: ‘A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.’ Jesus spoke those words at the Last Supper, which took place the Thursday before Easter.”

The Other Holy Day
In the rush toward Good Friday and Easter, don’t forget Maundy Thursday
by Elesha Coffman

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ch/news/2002/mar22.html

The past 5 years at seminary have been full of pain and tears, yet I’ve also learned much about grace and thanksgiving. It made my life much more colorful. This song really captures that feeling. So I dedicate this to myself and to all my classmates who have endured till the end.

Song: Epilogue ~Color of Life~ by Haruhata Michiya (春畑道哉)

Now here’s finally scientific evidence showing that what you behold, you become.

In one way, that’s why many long-married couples do look somewhat alike.

In another way, that’s also why fans dress like their idols, mimic their behaviors, and continue to lose who they really are and become exact replicas of their idols. As the Psalmist said in Psalm 115:4-8:

“But their idols are silver and gold,
made by human hands.

They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.

They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.

They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.

Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.”

The Scriptures tell us that when we behold idols, we become like them–dehumanized and lifeless. But when we behold Jesus, the archetype of the new humanity, we will become increasingly like Him (2 Cor 3:18) and more and more “truly human”. Beholding Jesus restores our humanity. Beholding anything else takes away our humanity.

In The Lord of the Rings, Gollum’s obsession with the Ring actually caused changes in his physical appearances, uglified him, and drove him to insanity.

What are you currently beholding in your life? Take a good look at the mirror and you’ll probably know.

1. Begin your day by spending 5 minutes planning and setting your priorities for the rest of the day,
2. Pause 1 minute every hour (for 8 hours) to check your progress and refocus,
3. At the end your day spend another 5 minutes reviewing what had happened and learn from your mistakes.

He says: “The power of rituals is their predictability. You do the same thing in the same way over and over again. And so the outcome of a ritual is predictable too. If you choose your focus deliberately and wisely and consistently remind yourself of that focus, you will stay focused. It’s simple.”

Many people have a distaste for liturgy, thinking it is dull and suffocating to the spirit, but few realize the formative potential of an ordered ritual. Gordon Smith (former associate professor of spiritual theology at Regent College) once said that liturgy can make sure our worship is rightly offered to God and not self-indulgence or worshipping our own contructs. It is important because it is in worship that our theology is formed. Ritual is not a problem. Empty ritual is.

Related Books:
David F. Ford, The Shape of Living: Spiritual Directions for Everyday Life (Zondervan, 2002)
Simon Chan, Liturgical Theology: The Church As Worshiping Community (InterVarsity, 2006)
Kendra G. Hotz, Shaping the Christian Life: Worship and the Religious Affections (Westminster John Knox, 2006)

Related posts:

1. Low Church Liturgy
2. 120 Years of Good Shepherd
3. Technology in Worship

“I was converted within a Low Church tradition, where the building’s walls are stark, the music simple, the prayers clumsy and direct, made up as you pray them. I have only ever belonged to that tradition. And so early on I picked up the tradition’s historic suspicion of High Church, where God is approached through a sometimes elaborate system of symbol and ritual–robes and candles and prayer books and lectionaries–and almost everything is scripted.

That scripting is liturgy.

Yet overtime I began to realize that the Low Church is just as bound by liturgy as any church, and maybe more so because we think we’re not. The Low Church enshrines–makes a liturgy of–austerity, spontaneity, informality. And we have our unwritten but nonetheless rigorously observed codes and protocols. We love our traditions, even our rigmarole, every bit as much as the next guy, only ours is earthy, rustic, folksy.

So I changed my mind about liturgy. It certainly can become dull and rote, but so can anything–water polo, rose gardening, kite flying, even lovemaking. Even fly-fishing. Just as often, though, maybe more so, liturgy can enrich these things. At its best, liturgy comprises the gestures by which we honor transcendent reality. It helps us give concrete expression to deepest convictions. It gives us choreography for things unseen and allows us to brush heaven among the shades of earth.

Our most significant relationships and events have a liturgical shape to them. They have rites of passage. Birthdays and homecomings, graduations and good-byes, Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, birth and death and marriage: all are marked by words and actions, songs and symbols, customs and traditions that enact them and complete them. And all these things also provide us with a means of entering them. What is a birthday without a cake, at least one candle burning on it, and a huddle of well-wishers, wearing clownish hats, singing in their ragged, hoary voices?

What is a birthday without liturgy?

What liturgy accomplishes is nothing short of astonishing: It breaks open the transcendent within the ordinary and the everyday. It lets us glimpse the deeper reality–the timeless things, the universal ones, the things above–within this particular instance of it.”

Mark Buchanan, The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul by Restoring Sabbath (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006), 8-9. (my emphasis added)

Of course, having a birthday cake is not absolutely necessary to celebrate a person’s birthday. Neither do sparkling candles, nicely wrapped presents, switching off the lights, a crowd singing “Happy Birthday to you”, the blowing of the candle, the making of a wish, the symbolic act of cutting the first slice of the cake, and hugs and greetings that follow. Perhaps someone would emphasize that the most important thing on a birthday is to be grateful. Just let that person give a long thanksgiving speech and eliminate everything else unnecessary. Well, that will do, but I wouldn’t want that kind of birthday parties. Would you?

I think non-liturgical worship services having an excruciatingly long sermon and overly descriptive announcements that take longer than corporate prayer time…… are just as dull as that.

“Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God.
It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness,
nourishment of mind by His truth,
purifying of imagination by His beauty,
opening of the heart to His love,
and submission of will to His purpose.
And all this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of human expressions of which we are capable.”

– William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1942–44)

Related posts:

1. Time Management, Ritual, and Liturgy
2. 120 Years of Good Shepherd

Freedom and security have always been uneasy together; the things that secure us tend to bind us down, and those that free us often feel like risks. We are meant to be free enough to really love God and one another, but true freedom can happen only if we completely trust in God’s ultimate care for us. And to really trust God, we must begin to relax our grip and ease our concern about all the lesser sources of security to which we have become attached. This can feel risky indeed.

Little in our normal life supports really trusting God. All around us we see bad things happening to people, and, at least on our terms, God may not seem trustworthy at all. Our culture communicates that truly putting oneself in God’s hands is superstitious, irresponsible, even psychotic. “In God We Trust” may be inscribed on American money, but the money itself usually feels more trustworthy. In this world of daily experience, Jesus’ words about the lilies of the field can sound naive, even dangerous. Few if any of us are able to follow Jesus’ call for trust completely.

Instead, we assume that trust in God should be only a spiritual ideal, wistfully and distantly respected, but impossible to apply in the down-to-earth conduct of our daily lives. True spiritual freedom, we maintain, is something that we can consider after we have established our physical and relational security in the world. In our culture, the three gods we do trust for security are possessions, power, and human relationships. To a greater or lesser extent, all of us worship this false trinity.

Gerald G. May, M.D., Addiction & Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 32.

Let us be candid with ourselves. Yes, we are all idolaters. No one is exempt.

Further Reading: Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters by Timothy Keller (www.counterfeitgods.com)

Related posts:

1. Commitment and Freedom

We should watch this every Sunday before our church services begin so that we can have our perspectives properly adjusted in order to appreciate the kind of God we are worshiping. Not to mention God is not just as big as the universe, but utterly beyond all of space-time.

“What are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (Ps. 8:4)