Embodied Faith
March 1, 2009
When I was working on my doctoral dissertation many years ago, my advisor made an observation on an early draft saying, “David, you write beautifully; and sometimes you substitute the turn of a phrase for an argument.” While I was in seminary, my homiletics or preaching professor said to me, “David, you love your words – sometimes maybe too much.”
So, for Lent this year, I am giving them up.
We say here often that we “preach together,” that we share rich conversation about the way the Spirit is moving in our midst, speaking to us through ancient text and contemporary issue.
It’s time to put that to the test together.
So, for these March Sundays, I have selected a series of texts under the broad heading “embodied faith” and I want to talk together about how our Christian faith is an embodied one. I will follow up our conversations with some Monday morning reflections on my blog, but I am going to let go, for Lent, of the writerly voice that sometimes closes my own heart to the voice of the Spirit.
Scripture is an earthy text. People walked the faith. They drank it in. They were invited to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Somewhere along the line, we lost much of that. We fell for the more philosophical separation of mind and body, of spirit and flesh, that would have felt foreign to Jewish thought that framed Jesus’ worldview. But if God breathed spirit into dust to create life – and, yes, I understand that metaphorically – if God breathed spirit into dust, then from the beginning there is divine concern for the material world, for the stuff of the earth is the stuff of life and of spirit.
So throughout Lent, we will focus on that as we preach together.
When I was working on my doctoral dissertation many years ago, my advisor made an observation on an early draft saying, “David, you write beautifully; and sometimes you substitute the turn of a phrase for an argument.” While I was in seminary, my homiletics or preaching professor said to me, “David, you love your words – sometimes maybe too much.”
So, for Lent this year, I am giving them up.
We say here often that we “preach together,” that we share rich conversation about the way the Spirit is moving in our midst, speaking to us through ancient text and contemporary issue.
It’s time to put that to the test together.
So, for these March Sundays, I have selected a series of texts under the broad heading “embodied faith” and I want to talk together about how our Christian faith is an embodied one. I will follow up our conversations with some Monday morning reflections on my blog, but I am going to let go, for Lent, of the writerly voice that sometimes closes my own heart to the voice of the Spirit.
Scripture is an earthy text. People walked the faith. They drank it in. They were invited to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Somewhere along the line, we lost much of that. We fell for the more philosophical separation of mind and body, of spirit and flesh, that would have felt foreign to Jewish thought that framed Jesus’ worldview. But if God breathed spirit into dust to create life – and, yes, I understand that metaphorically – if God breathed spirit into dust, then from the beginning there is divine concern for the material world, for the stuff of the earth is the stuff of life and of spirit.
So throughout Lent, we will focus on that as we preach together.
posted by David Ensign at
4:37 PM
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