I'm Back, But What Have I Been Doing?

I returned to work today after my four-week leave of absence. For the last month I have been reading, thinking, and writing. I had fun with my family, read more books, watched some movies, set up this blog, went to the Van Halen concert, hung out with friends, visited the first church I served (and three others), got organized, and slept in a lot. Oh, I celebrated a birthday too.

Did I get done with my dissertation? No. My hope was to write the first three chapters of the dissertation. I did not meet that goal but I did accomplish much. As I said, I have done quite a lot of reading and taking notes and writing out thoughts. I have the three chapters outlined and formatted appropriately. (That might sound silly, but the dissertation layout has to be in a very specific format). The writing now is somewhat like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. I take what I know and have learned and put it into the specific format.

So I’m a little sad to be done with the four-week leave. It was great! I will keep working on my dissertation during evenings and weekends until I have the three chapters completed (perhaps this spring?). After that I will have a proposal hearing in Kentucky in order to give my dissertation project the thumbs up. At that point I will need to do the project (what the dissertation is about). Then I’ll need to finish writing (at least two more chapters), defend the dissertation, and graduate (perhaps in May 2009). There are about a hundred other things I will have to do too, but they’re just details!

So do you want to know what my dissertation is about? If you do keep reading. Otherwise, you can pretty much leave now. Check out zap2it.com and see if your favorite TV shows will be back this spring after the writers' strike.

The problem my research examines is how we choose to read scripture in the church today compared to the ancient church. I am especially thinking about the "emergent" church today as it wants to be, what Robert Webber coined, "ancient-future." That is, there is a desire to return more fully to our roots, to reflect the ancient church. The emergent church does a good job of being "ancient" in terms of mission but a terrible job of being grounded in the ancient worship of the church. (By the way, a lot of traditional and contemporary congregations are not doing a very good job either.)

Today, many congregations and preachers read very little scripture. I’ve been to so-called worship services where hardly any scripture was read (or none!). For many, the focus of the worship service is the sermon or the series of sermons the preacher creates, rather than the scriptures that form us as God’s people. Furthermore, many preachers today are not preaching on our scriptures. Whereas scripture texts are to be the substance of preaching/worship, many preachers are giving talks based on themes or topics such as marriage, parenthood, evangelism, mission. These are all good things, but they aren’t the same thing as reading a scripture text and preaching on what the text says. Worse, many of these "sermons" crumble into talks about self-help or morality.

A scripture text is not simply a motto or a springboard into the preacher’s mind where his or her own world of thought is master. The text itself must always be the master. Karl Barth, the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, says in his little book Homiletics, "We cannot view an address on a theme as having the same rank as a sermon on a text (a homily)" (p. 95).

So how did the ancient church read scripture? About the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr wrote in his First Apology a description of the normal Sunday worship. It’s our earliest and best look at the worship practices of the ancient church. He wrote:

And on the day called Sunday there is a meeting in one place of those who live in cities or the country, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits. When the reader has finished, the president in a discourse urges and invites [us] to the imitation of these noble things. Then we all stand up together and offer prayers. And, as said before, when we have finished the prayer, bread is brought, and wine and water (Cyril Richardson, ed., Early Christian Fathers, p. 287)

The central act was reading scripture. The early church read scripture "as long as time permits." In fact for the first three centuries, Christian worship was comprised mainly of getting together, greeting those gathered, reading from the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament), the New Testament letters, the Gospels, and then hearing a sermon. There was some singing added later as a psalm might be sung between the scripture readings and/or at the beginning of the gathering. As an aside, it’s interesting to note that after the sermon, anyone not yet baptized was dismissed. Then the congregation prayed together and shared in holy communion before dispersing.

Of course, the practice of the ancient church was carried over from the synagogue where the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) was read in a continuous fashion. Wherever the reader stopped reading one week, that’s where the reader picked it up the next week. This practice is known as lectio continua or continuous reading.

Another practice that arose in the early church is lectio selecta or selective readings. This is the practice of the Revised Common Lectionary which we follow at First Church. It selects scripture readings based on the Christian year that tell the story of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ.

The point is, scripture must always be the master. We begin by looking at scripture, not by considering what the preacher thinks the congregation needs to hear. That is, God speaks first. Our scriptures are the substance of preaching/worship. Therefore, my dissertation is a call (a cry?!) for the Church to return to the priority of reading (and preaching) our scripture texts. My hope is this will be timely for the emerging church.