Annie Dillard and Worship

Thanks to Jim Barr for this quote from Annie Dillard on worship in his call to worship last Sunday:

The higher Christian churches - where if anywhere I belong- come at God with an air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.
(p.59 Holy the Firm)

For the sermon that day - a really good sermon - see the Canberra Baptist website, 15 March The Discerning Worshippers Guide
http://www.canbap.org/sermons/sermons2009.html
Click to get the MP3.

Link on starting from the place where we are wrong

As promised previously link to the sermon by Jim Barr - MP3 format - The Place where we are wrong - starting engagment with others from a place of confession of where we as a faith community have failed.

Doug

http://www.canbap.org/sermons/sermons2008.html

Interfaith engagement

Interfaith engagement has tended to take one of three major patterns in Christian history. We're right and you are wrong, a black and white view of the world which fails to do justice to kalidescopic colours of life. A successionist view of religions, which sees one succeeding the other - problematic for Christians engaging with Islam or a relativism which says that we are all heading for the some goal and it doesn't matter which way we go. This is an approach that evades the question of truth and similarly overlooks the fact that different religious traditions have very different views about the goal of life and the character of what virtues we need to develop on our way to the goal.

Jim Barr in his sermon on Romans 11 at Canberra Baptist Church this morning argues that the way to interfaith engagement begins with "the place where we are wrong". For Christians this means an engagement that begins with confession of our implication as a community of faith with the state use of violence through the Christendom era and into the period of colonialism.

Following from Jim's suggestion it would seem that we do not so much need a theory about other "schools of faith" whether liberal or fundamentalist, but rather a communal practice of confession and opening our hands to receive the grace of God's mercy and forgiveness - even from hands of those who have suffered at the hands of our fellow members of Christ's body.