God Bless the Cougher

This morning, I almost said “God bless you” to a young woman coughing. It was an involuntary impulse that was only narrowly averted by voluntary restraint. That got me thinking…

Why do we say “God bless you” to a sneeze but not a cough? A cough is routinely the vocal evidence of an illness. It could be the visible result of an invisible killer, like tuberculosis. It could reveal a person who should be home in bed but is forced to be in public (is this case, serving me coffee) because they can’t afford to miss work lest the baby starve! Disease! Poverty! Outside of the benign tickle in the throat, the tell-tale cough has a sordid story, to be sure. I think we could make an easy case for blessing the cougher.

Now, a sneeze may be a symptom of something sinister as well, but it is often produced by too much pepper. It doesn’t matter, though; the blessings come freely without judgment. That is my point. Like my 6 year-old son who demands a “Bless me!” response after every sneeze, who wouldn’t want to be blessed when they coughed as well as sneezed?

Offering a blessing is a wonderful thing. Given the opportunity, I oblige my son and the stranger in the airport with equal enthusiasm. When else do you offer such positive words to people you’ve never met? That’s why I think we ought to include coughs in our blessing repertoire. Maybe we could say “peace be on you” instead, but it offers the same kind of welcome sacred response.

Why stop at coughs? What about hiccups? Burps are clearly too unsocial (at least in the West) to provide such a holy opportunity with a straight face, but hiccups have potential. We’re already armed with a host of cures to try. Why not offer a blessing instead?

We’ve all heard the etymology of the “God bless you”. Apparently superstitious theologians of the middle ages thought that the sneeze opened the soul’s door for some roaming demon to enter. This naturally warranted the blessing of God for protection. There was no dichotomy of body and spirit in those days. The sneeze threw back the curtain and reminded anyone within earshot that blessings were desperately needed and the words offered by the immediate community were the ordained vehicle. It wasn’t about good health but about the human condition and the chance to participate in another’s salvation, if you will. They were actually protecting the souls of their sneezing comrades.

We don’t buy that anymore, of course. We bless the sneezer to be polite not to fight evil. But even that is rare chance to offer something to a stranger as well as a friend; a welcome opportunity for words that mean to bless, comfort, and connect.

Who wouldn’t want more of that?

Incarnational Stream: Writing

Richard Foster, founder of Renovare
On the “Incarnational Tradition” from his Streams of Living Water.

Here we come to the most fundamental arena of the Incarnational Tradition: the arena of everyday life. It is the place par excellence, in which we make visible and manifest the invisible realm of the spirit. To move into this sacramental way of living, we must take deep into our heart and mind Paul’s words, “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.” (Colossians 3:17)

The most basic place of our sacramental living is in our marriages and homes and families. Here we live together in well-reasoned love for everyone around us. Here we experience “the sacrament of the present moment,” to use the phrase of Jean Pierre de Caussade. C. S. Lews wisely observe, “The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life.”

Work is another everyday place – perhaps the most substantive place – for incarnational living. By “work” I am referring not merely to our job; I am referring to what we do to produce good in our world. I am referring to our vocatio, our vocation or calling. Now, I really must bear down on this point of our work as the place for living sacramentally. While some have a special calling to pastoral or priestly work, the calling for most of us is smack in the midst of the workaday world. This is where people desperately need to see the reality of God made visible and manifest.

The third place that we learn to live sacramentally is in society at large. Here we bring the reality of God to bear upon cultural, political, and institutional life. We work to life our culture, not just through the commonsense moral standards of decency and honesty, but through art an literature and drama, justice and beauty and shalom. We nurture “the good, the true, the beautiful” throughout society – through the person-centered caring of the schools we run, through the beauty of the parks we build, through the entrepreneurial empowerment we offer the poor, through the imaginative and redeeming literature we write, through the ecological sensitivity we bring to land use and development, and so much more.

The Incarnational Tradition underscores the fact that God is truly among us in the warp and woof of our very earthy existence. God is not distant, nor is he disinterested. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” writes Gerard Manley Hopkins. We, you understand, are not alone. God stoops to our needs and allows himself to be glimpsed in the material world.

Evangelical: Writings, Charles Spurgeon

Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) Baptist Preacher, England
Known as the “Prince of Preachers”, Spurgeon helped shape the culture as well as the church of 19th century England. (He also founded a theology school and an international charity that helps families and children.) The sermon excerpt below is based on the familiar evangelical text, John 3:7, where Christ tells a religous leader, You must be born again. Regardless of your own history with that language, take another listen...

Sermon title: “Every Man’s Necessity”

WHEN men are perishing all around you it would be cruel to waste time in attempting to interest their minds or to amuse their fancies. We must do something more practical and give earnest heed to their pressing necessities. Is it famine which slays them? Let us feed them. Is it cold? Let us supply them with covering. Is it disease? Let us administer medicine. When the case is urgent, we confine ourselves to necessities and attend with our whole heart to that which must have our attention. That which may can wait, but that which must demands our immediate care.
Now, the spiritual needs of men are urgent and among them the most pressing is their regeneration—they must be born again or they are lost! Therefore, at this time we will dwell on this topic and give it our whole consideration, letting other interesting matters wait till this most weighty business is happily over. This is a must and we must press it upon you at once with our whole heart! Our earnest desire is for a great ingathering of souls to the garner of salvation, but in order to this they must be born again. We have had many of you hovering round about us like birds around the fowler, but you are not, as yet, taken in the Gospel net. This state of things cannot content us—we need to see you decided for Christ and truly born again.

You have long been hearers, but, alas, you remain hearers, only, and are not “doers of the Word of God.” We do not want the fault to lie with us—if you continue unsaved it shall not be because we have not preached the Gospel and kept to preaching it and preached it as a matter of life and death! Again, then, we aim at the one point, the point of absolute necessity—“You must be born again.” We trust that if one arrow does not reach the mark, another may. At any rate, we will continue driving at the one target—the conversion of your souls. O you who as yet have not been brought to know the Lord, may the Holy Spirit guide the arrow at this hour! And now we will have a little simple talk about the great experience called regeneration, or the new birth, without which no man can see the kingdom of Heaven, much less enter it.

Evangelical: Personal Story

The Evangelical Tradition is a "Word Centered" life. We come to understand ourselves as formed and sustained by God's Sacred Word, The Bible. Below, Bobbie writes of her first encounter with The Word in college. Notice her places of connection and see if the mirror your own.


By Bobbie Jo Morrell

Living across the hall from Drusha brought me into contact with many of her other friends. They were an odd bunch; smiling a lot, carrying big leather bound Bibles around, and when they met me, they really looked at me—and still smiled. They dressed like yuppies (it was 1983), and seemed to call themselves “Navigators.”

I watched them curiously, cautiously, out of the corner of my eye—trying to figure out what made them different. One day it struck me like a blow: they were all Christians! Could that have something to do with it?

Being a scientist by training, I sought out source material to research this Christian thing. It was difficult to look nonchalant ambling through the church library in search of a Bible. Surreptitiously I began to read, beginning—of course—in Genesis.

I believe some of those “navigators” were a bit alarmed at my starting there, but in the Old Testament I found an amazing adventure: The world was created in a glorious symphony of words; the earth flooded, then saved; plagues fell on Egypt; the Red Sea parted and a pillar of fire led the people through; Joshua and company crossed the Jordan dry shod, and the sun stood still for them at his prayer.

Here was a world like JRR Tolkien’s world! Good and evil—danger, courage, and victory—magic: good and bad. The Bible showed me a world like Middle Earth, with a difference: I sensed strongly that this world was real, true—and I could be a part of the story if I wanted to. A beautiful, attractive thought—hadn’t I wished for just such a thing? But I found it also rather alarming.

In the middle of my reading, Drusha (to whom I had confessed my research) suggested reading Matthew together. That way I could learn about this Jesus person, too. I agreed: and the same thing happened here: prophecies were filled, prophecies were spoken; fish and bread multiplied profusely, mysteriously; the hero walked on the boisterous sea as though it were the smoothest highway. This man, this Jesus, really seemed to know who he was and what he was meant to do. Again, a real adventure was being offered to me. Would I join in?

But there was also a difference here. This story was about a bold rescue mission deep in enemy territory. Real danger—torture and death—was necessary to forge the passage out of the prison for those trapped. And I began to see that I was one of the prisoners that Jesus had gone to such lengths to rescue. While somewhat comforting, it was really alarming.

For weeks I wandered along this razorback ridge that I’d somehow ended up on. Both sides of the ridge were dark, frightening. Down one side was the darkness I knew: drinking, despair, death. The other was even more impenetrable: the darkness of the hope of the possibility of hope.


Parts of me longed desperately to walk into that dark hope, but most of me was terrified of it. Yet I knew a time would come to choose my darkness.

Social Justice Writing

Offered by Rachel and Lauri


Reading: Read through the following, a prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen.

This prayer emphasizes peace and reconciliation through self-sacrifice. A key word used here – instrument – can have several different meanings. In Romans 6:13, Paul uses the word instrument to refer to a weapon. Using this understanding in the context of prayer means that we are to be “weapons of peace.” This kind of instrument is active, not passive. It is on the offensive, working for peace, for justice, for shalom. It can work only in the power of the Spirit, in concert with the “whole armor of God” (Ephesians 6:10-18). Paradoxically, its strength is made perfect in weakness, in surrender, and in obedience to the will of God.

St. Francis’s whole prayer is a paradox. It shows us how in God’s economy everything is upside down. Jesus set the example for us, and the Little Poor Man of Assisi followed in his footsteps. His prayer illustrates this upside-down life in the kingdom of God. In the world we strive for our rights; in the kingdom we relinquish what we believe we deserve and seek the lowly place. In the world we strive for power; in the kingdom we embrace a life of service. In the world we strive for self-fulfillment; in the kingdom we die to ourselves.

But these are not negative things. Francis himself is known for his joy and most of all as one who overflowed with love – love for God, love for people, and love for every part of God’s creation. These are the things that make for peace.

Read the prayer again. Reflect on how contrary its teaching is to the dominant mood of our day. And yet the words are so true. Think of times in your life when you found it true that giving led to receiving, that pardoning brought you freedom, that dying to self gave you new life. In the light of these great truths, dedicate yourself to live, like St. Francis, against the tide of contemporary culture.

The Prayer of the Heart:

Lord Jesus, the world is so filled with destruction. I despair at it and I condemn it. And yet I too take part in its destructive ways – belittling, defaming, slandering. Have mercy, O Lord! Forgive, O Lord! Make me an instrument of your peace. Amen.


Adapted from Songs for Renewal by Janet Janzen and Richard Foster.

Charismatic Stories: Francis, Paul & Seymour

By Scotty Sawyer

If you had to name one figure from church history who most embodies the charismatic stream of faith, you might be inclined to go with the guy who:

* couldn’t stop dancing from joy, even in meetings with world leaders – and won them over;
* healed a girl of blindness and a man of a foot-long tumor;
* spoke about God so profoundly that all within earshot were enraptured with a palpable
sense of the divine;
* led a church so filled with God’s Spirit it literally glowed, causing a panic among townspeople
who thought it was on fire;
* refused his family’s inheritance in order to rely solely on God to provide every expense for
food and shelter.

Who was this charismatic figure that so embodied the Pentecostal example? You guessed it – Francis of Assisi!

That’s right – the man we think of as a twelfth-century Fogelberg singing to woodland animals was a bona fide – and bold – charismatic by any era’s standard. Francis didn’t just preach to ground squirrels, he supernaturally tamed a renowned killer wolf. He didn’t just quietly take a vow of poverty, but, Jeremiah-like, stripped naked before a bishop to demonstrate his commitment to give up every possession.

Richard Foster does us the favor of contemporizing Francis’ charismatic experiences, in his book Streams of Living Water. In doing so, he connects Francis backward in history to the unequivocally charismatic Apostle Paul, and forward to perhaps the most overlooked charismatic leader of the 20th century, William Seymour. Seymour was the catalyst of the Azusa Street Revival, a spiritual movement that began in Los Angeles in 1906 among poor and working class Christians of many races, and which ran continuously for three years. Indeed, it was the non-stop prayers of Seymour – a humble, poor, African-American pastor – over three days’ time (and years of prayer before that) which ultimately gave birth to the modern Pentecostal church, whose worldwide adherents in 2000 were estimated at 115 million and skyrocketing.

Talk about “the scandal of the gospel” – these three figures lived it. And they shared these common characteristics, among others: familiarity with poverty, accusations of lunacy, a dedication to holy living, gospel messages that were direct and (apart from Paul) unstudied. Most amazingly, the movements they led cut sharply, consistently, and genuinely across lines of race, gender and class, humbly recognizing the Holy Spirit as the sole giver of true power.
Long considered the backwoods cousin of mainstream Christianity, the charismatic reach is visible today not only in Pentecostal churches but also in pockets within virtually every mainline and evangelical denomination, including Catholicism, and theological scholarship abounds. How has something long seen as essentially irrational now moved to the center of a “reasonable faith”?

According to Richard Foster, we might well ask of ourselves: when has our rationality and reasonableness ever fully defined God? He advises, “The ecstatic gifts are given to show us that God is present where we assume he is not…. [At Azusa Street,] God freely chose the insignificant, the unimpressive, the foolish to show forth his glory…. (It) was a supernatural work, a Spirit-empowered work, a charismatic work.”

Foster posits the following four strengths of the charismatic tradition:
“It offers an ongoing correction to our impulse to domesticate God. Jesus reminds us, ‘The Spirit blows where it wills’ (John 3:8)….
“It offers a constant rebuke to our anemic practice. How easily we become satisfied with religious talk….
“It offers a continuing challenge toward spiritual growth and development. It is ‘by the Spirit that we defeat the works of the flesh’ and develop holy habits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control….
“It offers a life of gifting and empowering for witness and service. Supernatural gifts are all part of our walk in the Spirit, offering (1) a witness to nonbelievers and (2) an affirmation of hope to believers….”

Inevitably questions continue regarding the long-term value of the charismatic tradition: What about the value of unity, and the divisive nature of charismatic groups, leading to church splits? (Invariably, in the early days of the Pentecostal movement, it was the established church that gave charismatics the boot.) What good are the demonstrative gifts? Doesn’t Paul say we should “covet the better gifts”? (Seymour and other humble leaders at Azusa coveted the charismatic gifts, for power to witness, evangelize and lead holy lives.)

Ultimately, Foster offers a suggestion for all who would reflect on the “Spirit-empowered life” of the charismatic stream:
“Regularly test your leadings and experiences in the Spirit with those you trust. Allow their spiritual discernment to encourage, correct, and refine you. And you them. In this way we will fulfill the words of the great Apostle of the Spirit: ‘Since you are eager for spiritual gifts, strive to excel in them for building up the church’ (1 Corinthians 14:12).”

Sources:
Richard Foster, Streams of Living Water.
Richard M. Riss, A Survey of 20th Century Revival Movements in North America.
Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity.
Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language.

Charismatic Writings

Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751)
French Jesuit scholar and preacher
Excerpt from "The Sacrament of the Present Moment"

God’s order, his pleasure, his will, his action and grace; all these are one and the same. The purpose on earth of this divine power is perfection. It is formed, grows, and is accomplished secretly in souls without their knowledge. Theology is full of theories and arguments expounding the miracles it works in each soul. We may be able to understand all these speculations, cogently discuss, write, teach, and instruct souls through them. But with only this in mind in relation to those in whom that divine purpose exists, I suggest we are like sick doctors trying to cure patients in perfect health.

God’s order and his divine will, humbly obeyed by the faithful, accomplishes this divine purpose in them without their knowledge in the same way as medicine obediently swallowed cures invalids who neither know nor care how. Just as it is fire and not the philosophy of science of that element and its effects that heats, so it is God’s order and his will which sanctify and not curious speculations about its origin or purpose.

To quench thirst it is necessary to drink. Reading books about it only makes it worse. Thus, when we long for sanctity, speculation only drives it further from our grasp. We must humbly accept all that God’s order requires for us each moment is what is most holy, best, and most divine for us.

All we need to know is how to recognize his will in the present moment. Grace is the will of God and his order acting in the center of our hearts when we read or are occupied in other ways; theories and studies, without regard for the refreshing virtue of God’s order, are merely dead letters, emptying the heart by filling the mind. This divine will flowing through the soul of a simple uneducated girl, through her suffering or some exceptionally noble act in adversity, carries out in her heart God’s mysterious purpose without thought entering her head. Whereas the sophisticated man, who studies spiritual books out of mere curiosity, whose reading is not inspired by God, takes into his mind only dead letter and grows even more arid and obtuse.

God’s order and his divine will is the life of all souls who either seek or obey it. In whatever way this divine will may benefit the mind, it nourishes the soul. These blessed results are not produced by any particular circumstance but by what God ordains for the present moment.