Devotional Books

Each new year I evaluate the devotional books I use as part of morning prayer. I always keep a few and then switch others out. The list below represents the ones I use on an ideal day, in roughly the order I move through them.

For the order of Scripture readings, I use the St. James Daily Devotional Guide for the Christian Year. This guide moves through the New Testament once a year and the Old Testament every two years, with a good balance between reading systematically through books of the Bible and taking into account major feast days such as Easter and Christmas.

Some others I find helpful are:

+ Eugene Peterson's Praying with the Psalms: I love Eugene Peterson's work. Last year I read through Living the Message. Each day there is an invitation to read a Psalm or part of a Psalm and he has brief meditation and a prayer. Often I pair this with the selected Psalm in Reading the Psalms with Luther.

+ I have always enjoyed reading the wisdom of the Desert Fathers. One way to do this, gem by gem, is through Bernard Bangley's By Way of the Desert.

+ Henri Nouwen's Bread for the Journey contains a brief meditation for each day of the year. Nouwen always has perspicuous insights into the "everyday" of living the Christian faith.

+ For a bit meatier fare, I enjoy J.D. Watson's A Hebrew Word for the Day. He also has a companion Greek volume that I read through last year.

I should probably say that it is not everyday that I get through all of these devotional books. At a bare minimum, I pray the Trisagion Prayers and try to read as many of the daily Scripture readings as I can, beginning with the daily appointed Gospel reading.

For shorter snippets of Scripture throughout the day, I subscribe via email to the Moravian Daily Texts. A friend of mine also gave me a copy of Bread for the Day, with a short Scripture reading each day based on the Revised Common Lectionary.

What devotional books / guides do you find most helpful for daily prayer and Scripture reading?

The Future of my Blog?

I have not been posting to this blog as regularly as I would like. Chalk it up to a busy fall, especially on the funeral front.

In any case, I am rethinking its purpose and theme and--on a more fundamental note--whether I will continue it at all.

So what do you say, faithful readers? Feel free to email me directly: pastormusteric [at sign] gmail.com with any suggestions. What have you found most helpful? What would you like to see more of? What is the perfect frequency for posting?

In the off-chance that I get few or not responses, that will help me settle the question as well.

Church Growth: An Idea

Many congregations, especially those of mainline Protestantism, lament the shrinking of the church. "What can we do," I often hear, "to make the church grow again?"

Please see these reflections from a blog entitled Euangelion (Gospel/good news).

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. -Tertullian

Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done: The Intersection of Faith and Politics

Tomorrow we will go to the polls and touch a screen, fill in a bubble or pull a lever to cast our vote. Some Christians will vote for Republicans. Some Christians will vote for Democrats. Still other Christians will vote for one of the other parties.

Since it is the month in which we get to vote as citizens of the United States, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about the tricky and wonderful intersection of faith and politics. And I would like to use the second and third petitions of the Lord’s Prayer as a way of entering into this discussion.

Thy Kingdom come… Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. We pray these words each time we take the Lord’s Prayer on our lips and in our hearts and minds. And I am quite concerned that—at least most of the time—we have no idea the depth and power of these words as we pray them.

When we pray these words, we are asking for God’s Kingdom, to come among us here and now. Put more bluntly: the Christian faith is not only about getting a ticket punched so that you can go to heaven when you die; it also has a deep, profound and lasting impact on our lives—right here and right now.

When we pray these words, we are asking for this Kingdom of God, which began on this earth in the smallest of ways, in Jesus of Nazareth and in his band of followers, to grow to epic proportions. The Scriptures use the image of a mustard seed growing into an enormous tree and a tiny batch of leaven that leavens a whole loaf of bread (Luke 13:18-21).

When we pray these words, we are acknowledging that as Christians, we always carry a dual citizenship: We are first citizens of the Kingdom of God and second, citizens of the United States of America. We live in a monarchy (Christ is King!) as well as a Democracy (the USA). We have duties both as citizens of God’s Kingdom and citizens of the United States.

So whether you go to the polls and vote “Republican” or “Democrat” or “Libertarian” or “Green Party,” be sure that before, during and after you vote, you pray with every fiber of your being, Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done, on Earth as it is in heaven.

Perhaps the dear Pastor Martin Luther said it best, “The kingdom of God comes indeed without our prayer, of itself. But we pray in this petition that it may come to us also.” (Small Catechism, explanation of the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer)

May the Lord our God, whose Kingdom is indeed coming into this world in Jesus the Messiah, plant that Kingdom firmly in our lives, that we may be his faithful citizens, now and into eternity.

Note: For the main points of this article, I am indebted to N.T. Wright, a noted New Testament scholar, at the lectures he gave at a conference I attended at Duke University in October. You can listen to the full lectures online here.

Christians and Halloween

I had been meaning to post something on the celebration of Halloween from the perspective of a Christian pastor. But then I came upon this post and, well, I couldn't have said it better myself.

McChurch, McPastor, McChristianity

The world of religion generates a huge market for meeting all the needs that didn’t get met in the shopping mall. Pastors are conspicuous in this religious marketplace and are expected to come up with the products that give customer satisfaction.
-Eugene Peterson, Living the Message, HarperCollins, 1996, p. 261

Consumerism is the drug that is lulling the church in North America into a deep and dangerous sleep. We encounter it in our own patterns of “church shopping” for a congregation that is a “better fit.” We see it on billboards, slick brochures and Facebook ads. We begin to be troubled by it when we see portrayals of a Jesus dressed up to look, talk and act, well, just like us.

Or maybe we don’t notice it at all. Perhaps we’re so used to Consumer Christianity, so steeped in it, that we barely notice it at all. Slowly and seductively congregations become “audiences” and worship leaders “performers” and the next thing you know the church has to “sell something” to “attract” new members.

Consumer Christianity is a false Christianity and it is literally killing the church.

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So what shall we as followers of Jesus and members of His Body the Church do? Eugene Peterson concludes his reflections: But then who is there who will say the name of God in such a way that the community can see him for who he is, our towering Lord and Savior, and not the packaged and priced version that meets our consumer needs?

How do we begin to seek God—and God’s will for his church—and not something packaged as “church the way I like it” and “a god who makes me comfortable”?

First, we pray. And we do so with deep and critical questions: Is this of You, Lord, or is this of the evil one? We reclaim Holy-Spirit-soaked prayer as our first language of faith.

Second, we repent. Literally naming our sins is a crucial step in the journey of repentance, which is our whole life’s journey. The confession of those in AA guides us: “Hi, I’m Matt, and I’m a consumer-holic.” We examine our lives deeply and critically. How does my own participation in the consumer culture shape my views of God and Church?

Third, we seek God not according to our own whims and desires, but in the places that God has promised to reveal himself to us: in the Word (preached, studied, read, prayed) and in the Sacraments (taken regularly, seriously, joyfully).

Fourth, in our actions and words, we speak the truth that our true identity is not as consumers, but as Baptized children of God. We are not demographic groups or income cohorts or even “free” shoppers, but are instead priests by Baptism and servants of Jesus.

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May the Lord our God, who cannot be bought or sold, refresh us with the gift of life, that we might be his faithful people and true witnesses in the world.

The Work of Worship

"The work of worship gathers everything in our common lives that has been dispersed by sin and brings it to attention before God; at the same time it gathers everything in God's revelation that has been forgotten in our distracted hurrying and puts it before us so that we can offer it up in praise and obedience. All of this does not take place merely in a single hour of worship. But, faithfully repeated, week after week, year after year, there is an accumulation to wholeness."

This brief reflection is taken from a devotional book I have been using with my morning Scripture readings: Eugene Peterson's Living the Message, p. 240 (August 30).