How does one pray on election day? I get this question a lot and as of late I find myself always encouraging people to pray the psalter. The general protest is usually revealing: “the psalms are just words of encouragement… election day needs something political.” This is just factually inaccurate. There are encouraging Psalms, of course. But the whole book is a deeply political series of songs and prayers. They have offered and do offer God’s people his words to pray over circumstances which are beyond our immediate control (e.g. I alone cannot determine the election… that is precisely what an election is). I can cast a vote. I can do a myriad of advocacy things. But the election itself is an event which exceeds my vote and my activism. The Psalter offers us a liturgical remedy: eternal prayers, sung and prayed before the living God, songs which are both the Christ’s songs and Church’s songs, which lift my election anxiety from the ballot to the throne room of heaven.
Read moreA wedding in Seattle
On Thursday night my family dropped me off at the airport on our way home the west-side priory group. I flew through the night to Seattle, WA for the wedding of Todd (a good friend of several of us AllSaintsees) and Dhayoung.
Arriving early in the morning I grabbed a coffee at a little-known mom-and-pop-shop Seattle coffeehouse called “Starbucks” and began working on my essay contribution to the current Theopolis Conversation on church-planting, answering emails, and drafting sermon notes for this past Sunday.
After an hour Fr. Joe McCulley picked me up [...]
Read morePreaching the Psalter
This summer we’re preaching through the Psalter. At the outset of the series, I sent our preaching team a brief set of notes laying-out some general rules for how to preach the Psalms.
The problem is this, ours is not a widely poetically literate culture. Poetry has become, in the past century, so abstract and so experimental that it has left us with very little in the way of ability to follow things like rhythm, meter, poetic structure, etc. The irony is that these are not at all hard or complex things to follow —they are actually very simply and, as Dana Gioia once reminded us, we are designed by God to follow them (the same way that bees are designed to follow ‘dance patterns’ to follow the trail to nectar). We ‘get’ poetry when it comes to us in the form of hip-hop, rap, or country music, but we get all clammy and confused when the Bible speaks in a poetic form.
Read moreSing the Psalter
This past week we had a network-wide clergy retreat for Diocesan clergy and aspirants (people in the discernment process towards ordination). The guest teacher was my good friend Fr. Ben Jefferies. He taught on the importance of the inner life, using the rule of St. Romuald as the syllabus and the Psalter as the application. I want briefly only to reflect on one point of his instruction, namely the dictum of Romuald that “in the Psalter there is one way only…”
Read more