Saunders Personal Topic 1

Sacred Communication with God

          As a person reads the Word of God, there is a form of communication occurring, both through the Word and the Holy Spirit. The Bible itself is a means of communication with God in Christianity. It is a means of which God reveals Himself to His people through His God-breathed Word (2 Timothy 3). 

          The Holy Spirit communicates with us through convicting us of our sin, and leading us to the truth. Jesus tells His disciples it is better that He leaves so the Spirit can come; He says that the Spirit will teach us everything. It is because of what Jesus did, and the Holy Spirit living inside of us that we are able to communicate with God as our Father. Furthermore, in Romans, it is the Spirit who communicates with God the Father interceding on our behalf.

          We also communicate with God through prayer. Prayer is a form of sacred communication because we are able to cry out to our God in an intimate fashion when we are facing trail, and we can praise God and give thanks to Him when in times of rejoicing. Through prayer we are able to speak to God through praise, confession, thanksgiving, petition, and intercession.

         Listening is something that is important in communication as well. It is difficult to learn and listen when you are constantly speaking and pleading. This is why it is important when communicating with God to pray, and go through His Word with an open heart, pleading for Him to speak through His Word to you. The Holy Spirit will use the Word you read to speak to you in a necessary fashion. He is what helps bring you closer to Christ, but we must be willing to listen and allow Him to work. No good relationship lasts without communication, and one with the Divine is no exception.

Ben Pearce: Personal Topic 2 Post 4

Sacred Communication when Prayer is Boring

Student Topic

A Future Prayer Endeavor

            There is not a single Christian who has not felt inadequate during their prayer, both public and private. Believers tend to use the same words and the same style each time. I cannot count how many times I have grown tired of saying things like, “God you are good, please provide for me, please keep me from sin, and please let me be in your will”. While this kind of prayer is not bad to pray, it begins to sound dull, and we start to lose the joy in our prayer lives. We also start feeling irritated at other’s prayers in public because they sound so similar.  Eventually, these words we have once used lose all their meaning, and we recite them in a zombie-like trance. The problem with this is that mindlessly saying the same thing is not prayer; prayer is a conversation between a believer and the Almighty. When it comes to zombifying our prayers, we lose confidence in devotion to Christ. One thing that I believe has helped me is memorizing scripture and then praying it back to God with any passage relevant to your message:

“Have mercy on me, O God,
    according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
    and cleanse me from my sin!”

Psalm 51:1-2

 “[Let me] rejoice in [my] sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put [me] to shame, because God's love has been poured into [my] heart through the Holy Spirit who has been given to [me]”.

Romans 5:3-5

The possibilities are any combination of exactly 31,102 verses. This allows us to read God’s own words to us back to him, and the language allows us to pray to God in a manner similar to how his apostles and prophets prayed to him. This makes the sacred communication of prayer to God more diverse and exciting. 

Landscapes of the Sacred Ch. 1 Ashley Irving

Landscapes of the Sacred Ch. 1

Ashley Irving

In his book, Landscapes of the Sacred, Lane discusses four rules that one may use to guide themselves through American spirituality. These four guidelines are referred to as axioms. The second axiom is stated by Lane as being that the "sacred place is ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary". This can be perceived as saying that any place can be a sacred place. Certain requirements do not have to be met in order for a place to be considered sacred except one: religious experiences must be had in that location. Likewise, while one location may be a sacred place for one individual because of an experience that they have had involving the wholly other, it may not be a sacred space for others, but simply an everyday location.

This axiom hits close to home for me personally because there is a specific place to me that has special meaning, but to those around me it is simply a normal, everyday spot with no important significance. This specific location is the bus loop of my high school. In this parking lot, the marching band practices 4 days a week after school and many Saturdays throughout the football season. It is a very special place to me because when I was a Sophomore in high school, I moved from my childhood home where all of my family is located and went to a new area where I was the new kid for the first time in my life. In this parking lot, I met the first people from my new school on a hot day in August. I was a week late to band camp so not only was I "the new kid", but I was also behind everyone else.

In this bus loop, I progressed from being a scared new kid who didn't know anyone, to someone who was section leader for the band for two of my three years there and who played a critical role in the band receiving their fifteenth straight Superior rating at the state assessment, VBODA. In this parking lot I met some of the best friends that I will have for the rest of my life as well as my boyfriend who has been a major player in my life for the past two years. Not only did I make relationships and memories that have helped shaped me into who I am today, but I have also learned key lessons that I will carry with my throughout the rest of my life such as how to work with others, how to be an effective leader and role model, but also to appreciate the small things in life whether they be having impromptu jam sessions between runs or the feeling of pride as the crowd applauds after our performance.

While this particular location has a very special meaning to me personally, for everyone else who attended my school or even someone simply driving past it, it's just a bus loop. It isn't a scared place for them as it is for me. If I had not joined the marching band and had the experiences that I had in that bus loop ritually for the past three years of my life, it would just be a parking lot to me as it is to others. It only became a sacred space because of the continuous events that made it extraordinary, such as the second axiom states. This boring, old parking lot, made me who I am today. 

Ben Pearce: Personal Topic 1 Post 3

Sacred Communication when Witnessing to the Gospel

Student Topic

Reflection on Self-Experience

            The Gospel is the central message of the Christian Faith. In this blog, I will talk about the sacred communication of the Biblical Gospel and how it is commonly shared. The Gospel is a set of historical and religious events that took place, and they tell us how to have peace with God. Before the Gospel (which means good news) can be communicated with someone, bad news must first be given. The bad news is about our character, but the good news is about God’s character.

The Bad News

            Love is inseparable from and is the center of the Christian Faith. Noting this, it is impossible to declare the message of God’s love and forgiveness without first proclaiming His divine justice and moral standard. The Bible begins with the story of how Mankind was created in perfect and good nature, but everything changes when we chose to sin. It corrupted our very being and dug an unpassable trench between Man and God. “The wages of sin is death… (Romans 6:23)”, and “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)”. When we lie, hate someone, feel lust towards someone, or cheat, we commit a sin towards God. This breaks His divine law which has been in existence from eternity onward. This tainted nature in us causes us to crave sin and the momentary joys it can bring us.

Once we die, we go before God and give an account of our deeds on earth. It is commonly thought that if we do enough good things that God likes, it will weigh out the bad, and we will get to enter the joys of His presence forever. This is not how it works. It is like an earthly court: when we go before a judge, if he is being just, he does not take into consideration the good deeds we have done. He only determines if we are guilty of the bad, and if we are, then he sentences us to be punished for our crimes. Since God is just, he behaves the same way. Unfortunately, all of us are guilty before God, and we all deserve punishment for our crimes against him. This punishment is an eternity of God’s justice being given to us. Man’s fate does not have to be this way though. God has provided a way to reconcile his lost children to him, who are scattered around the world amidst the people of all nations.

The Good News

            The Gospel (good news) is a demonstration of God’s love and forgiveness through the work of His Son, Jesus Christ. Christ was prophesied in Jewish Scriptures thousands of years before His birth. It was said that he would come and provide the forgiveness of sins for all of God’s people. Jesus Christ is God who was born on earth in the form of a human. He grew up and lived a life in complete obedience to God’s law and never sinned once (1 Peter 2:22). Because of His goodness and righteousness, God demands justice for the sins that have been committed. Jesus Christ, because he was perfect, was willing and able to be a fitting sacrifice on the behalf of fallen people.

Jesus lived for 33 years, and during that time, He displayed countless miracles and good works. In His final three years, Christ began a ministry and travelled Israel to teach about the coming of the Kingdom of God. He preached, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near” (Matthew 4:17). He continuously preached love and mercy, and He stayed true to the will of the Father. Eventually, Christ allowed Himself to be given over to the Roman authorities (Who ruled Israel at that time) after he claimed to be God in front of the Jewish Leaders (Mark 14: 61-62). Jesus was then crucified. At that time, God the Father poured out all of His wrath and justice upon his Son, Jesus. Every sin, that we have committed, every law of God’s that we have broken was paid for on the cross. Jesus suffered every ounce of punishment that we deserve for our sins. After He died, Jesus was raised from the grave by God three days later. This proved that all of His claims about the forgiveness of sins were true! He, then, sent out all of His followers, filled with the Holy Spirit, to preach what had happened and how to find peace with God (Romans 5:1).

The Decision

            God loves his people (Romans 5:8)! Still today, He sends his followers out all across the world, preaching the turn from sin and the forgiveness of sins. God knew every human before the foundations of the universe were constructed (Psalm 139:16). This offer to be forgiven of sins is given freely can be accepted freely. We are told to turn our minds from sin and to believe the good news of Jesus Christ (Mark 1:15)! No one has committed too many sins to be forgiven and given the grace of God. God is more powerful, more loving, and more forgiving than any of us are wicked.

As soon as we believe, God sends his Holy Spirit to live inside of us for all the days of our lives. As we grow, we begin to conform more to the goodness of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. By faith in this Gospel, we have peace with God through Jesus Christ. It is now up to you who read this. You can have the forgiveness of sins and a life full of God’s grace!

Ben Pearce: Landscapes of the Sacred 1 Post 2

Commentary on Axioms

(Landscapes of the Sacred)

A Post on Chapter 1: Axioms for the Study of Sacred Place

            This post will examine and give an opinion on the four axioms given on page 19 of Landscapes of the Sacred by Belden C. Lane.

Axiom 1: A sacred place is not chosen, it chooses

            This first axiom is right on a few levels but wrong on wording. A sacred place cannot become sacred without something sacred first happening there. It would be like a memorial signifying no event. I would suggest that the required sacred event would have to be of an act of God. He would have to reach down and mark this place with a seal, like the telling of a prophecy, the site of a miracle, or a place he leads his chosen people. The author later clarifies that this is the meaning when he says, “God chooses to reveal himself only where he wills”. Therefore, a better phrasing of the axiom is, a sacred place is not chosen by man, God chooses it himself.

Axiom 2: A sacred place is an ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary

            This second axiom is correct and builds off of the previous axiom. Any place that has been marked by God as holy is only a normal space of creation that God has chosen to sanctify. Any location that can be thought of as holy, like Jerusalem, Golgotha, or Tel Megiddo, was once a normal place with equal value to every other part of creation. God refers to specific places being holy only a few times in the Scripture (Exodus 3:5; Joshua 5:15; Acts 7:33). Each time, the land was claimed holy by God because his presence was there. We can assume from these few times that this is the qualification for a space to be sacred. Golgotha is where God was crucified, and Tel Megiddo is where he will come back to do the Will of the Father.

Axiom 3: A sacred place can be tred upon without being entered
            There is a certain spiritual enhancement to visiting sacred places. I agree to a point with this axiom. While visiting a sacred place, we may not realize the significance of the ground we are standing on. We could be standing upon the very ground that Christ Jesus was crucified on, and we may not even realize it. I feel like this is true in a general historical sense, however. We may be on the site of a great battle but not realize what happened there. If that is what the axiom is saying, then I agree. I do reject that there is a special outpouring of grace for anyone who visits a religious site. If we believe this, then the Gospel of Jesus Christ of justification by faith has been overtaken in our minds with a False Gospel that says that our journeys and deeds give us favor with God. The Scriptures say the very opposite, in fact (Romans 5:1). 

Axiom 4: The impulse of a sacred place is both centripetal and centrifugal, local and universal
            This axiom sums up all the others rather nicely. A sacred place has a special significance to us because we put value in something that has served as God's stage in the world. While this is interesting, it is important to keep in mind what I said in Axiom 3's commentary. We are drawn into these places, but we are also drawn out because we begin to realize that God's presence is not only here but everywhere. God exists at all times in all areas. When we are born again into the Holy Spirit of God, we are given a priest-like function. We have direct access to God without a need for someone else to talk to him for us besides Jesus Christ who, being fully God and fully man, intercedes on our behalf. 

Mitchell Saunders: Phenomenology of Prayer, Essay One

September 12, 2016

Essay One: Prayer as the Posture of the Decentered Self

               Merold Westphal begins his essay by discussing the five elements of prayer: praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition, and intercession. Of the five elements, the one that most people find themselves uncomfortable doing is praise. He goes on to explicitly state his thesis: "Prayer is a deep, quite possibly the deepest decentering of the self, deep enough to begin dismantling or, if you like, deconstructing that burning preoccupation with myself". This is why he puts praise as the first element of prayer -- it is to focus our minds on something other than the self, or the "I". Especially with Christianity in America, we are so consumed with the self and certain wants of life that we tend to forget about the Other. Westphal's thesis offers that prayer begins in a very immature state which is self-serving and self-promoting rather than self-decentering and God-desiring. Westphal relates it to a 3-year old praying for gelato while kneeling in a church. Now, our prayers may not be that immature, but they definitely lack a "dying to self" in most cases. They tend to begin with, "Lord, give me. Lord help me", as Westphal states on p. 15. Or, when we intercede, it tends to be focused on an individual that we deeply care about.

                Westphal then goes into discussing surrendering one's self by looking at Samuel's prayer in 1 Samuel 3. Samuel prays to God, "Here am I, for you called me", and later on with the help from Eli, says, "Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening." It is here where Samuel is submitting to God and dying to self. He is acknowledging his servitude, which can be translated to slavery, to the Lord. He then touches on four things that we learn about prayer through Samuel. First, that God calls, and then we respond to that calling by being ready to hear God speak again. Secondly, we learn that prayer is a task of a lifetime. Prayer is never going to be something that we as Christians are able to completely grasp. However, we can present ourselves as listeners with hopes that God will guide us further. Third, we learn that silence is an important aspect to prayer. The Word of God can be heard within our prayer when we are silent, says Johannes Tauler. Lastly, we learn that Scripture and prayer are so "integrally intertwined", as Westphal says on p. 20. For it is the God who speaks in Scripture that we listen to in the silence. He goes on to say that, "before prayer is a fivefold speech act on our part, it is listening to the word of God as found in Scripture." 

                 This essay was interesting to me because having a sort of Calvinistic background theologically, Westphal produces a very good conversation as to how to properly listen to God through reading Scripture and prayer, which ultimately leads to the decentering of the self. This is intriguing for me because his discussion is how to properly die to self while seeking to serve God while still remaining firm in Scripture -- leaning on God to keep you in the Word. American Christianity is not solely self-centered, but much of it is tended to the self, which strays from what the Word of God is saying to do. Instead of praying for the will of God to be done in one's life, a person tends to pray for advancement for him or herself, contradicting his or her true beliefs. Much of this is done unknowingly, simply because of culture, but it is something that needs change.

Divina Rutherford Blog #2 Outside Reading : WWII Memorial

The World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. is considered to many, including myself, a sacred place. I've visited it a few times being from the area and it was always one of my favorite memorials to visit. I also went there for a field trip in the 8th grade when it was correlating to what we were learning in our history class. When I used to visit as a young child I didn't fully realize its' spiritual and religious value. As I grew older I came to the realization that to many, especially those families of the soldiers who've lost their lives, it means a lot more than just a place of remembrance.

Courtney Botkin: Outside Source Blog #1: Etheria's Pilgrimage

For my first blog entry, I will be focusing on the existing account of Etheria’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem and how she shared it with others. This information was acquired from an outside source book called Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. In the late fourth century, Christian pilgrimages to Jerusalem to visit the holy places where Jesus had begun to be immensely popular. Particularly I will talk about one account of a pilgrimage that a Spanish abbess recorded. Etheria was a Spanish abbess, which meant she was the head of an abbey of nuns. In her account, she tells of the charm of these holy places to many people traveling. Christians would travel from among the Roman world to go on these pilgrimages to the holy sites. Etheria visited Edessa, Tarsus, and Constantinople among many other cities while on her pilgrimage. She wrote many letters back to her sisters in which she would try to cultivate and capture what it felt like to be there and experience those close connections to a sacred place. She focused especially on shrines, monasteries, and churches around the East coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Her account is written in first person, making it easier for those who read the recovered articles to feel a personal connection with the sacred journey or site itself. When Etheria returned, she told everyone of her journey for she believed everyone should experience something that connected so spiritually to them as it did for her.

Ben Pearce: Phenomenology of Prayer 1 Post 1

On Prayer and Meditations to the Lord

(Phenomenology of Prayer)

A Post on Essay One: Merold Westphal

By our very nature, humanity is focused on έγώ. The “I” of life is έγώ, which is Greek for “I” and where we derive the English word “ego” from. In the very center of our hearts, we treat the “I” as the most important figure in our reality. We are always the main character in our production of the theater play, Life.

I AM the most important character. I AM the focus of attention. I AM deserving of the richest life. The problem is, we have taken the very essence of God, I AM, and tried to make it our own. Even in what is supposed to be the most humble of activities, prayer, we have thought of ourselves rather than the glory of the Lord our God.

On Humility

Merold Westphal recalls learning about five elements of prayer life: praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition (for ourselves), and intercession (for others). He felt he did well enough on the last four, but he could never seem to get the first one right. Praising God seems so simple, yet we only seem to pray “Let me be…”, “Let me have…”, “Thank you for…”, “Please do this…”; we never seem to bask in the glory of Christ our Savior. We are so preoccupied with the things of this life, the things we need, the things we want, and the things we want taken from us. The all-satisfying beauty of God in his infinity is so captivating that it transcends all of man’s other needs. His very essence breathes life into our souls and removes our desire for anything but him. Through this, all else we want him to do begins to vanish inside the oblivion of our minds.

This does not detract from physical necessity, but, in truth, actually strengthens our resolve for it. It bolsters our confidence in the glory of the Lord to hear the prayers of believers and to know that his ear listens even when the request is not granted.  Praise to him not only gives him glory, but also serves as a reminder of his character to us; even when food is scarce or health flees from us, the goodness of the Lord prevails.

Westphal offers this thesis as a solution to our lack of humility in prayer: “Prayer is a deep, quite possibly the deepest decentering of the self, deep enough to begin dismantling or, if you like, deconstructing that preoccupation with myself”. He understands that as we move deeper into a personal time of burning for Christ, we begin to lose the interest in the things we ask for, and we, instead, gain interest in the beauty of his majesty. We become Isaiah, huddled on the ground and unable to handle the fullness of God’s glory: his robes which stretch out from his throne, his angels which sing can only sing “Holy, Holy, Holy”, and the mercy of the coal touching Isaiah’s lips for the ease of conscience.

On Surrender

In his essay on decentralized prayer, Westphal discusses several prayers of Biblical servants who pray in surrender to God. The first is Samuel, friend to Eli and a priest. When God calls upon him, Samuel responds, “Here am I, for you called me. Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening”. Samuel immediately uses his words to bow in submission. The word he uses for servant is rendered as δουλόσ in the Septuagint (The Greek translating of the Tanakh from before Christ). This word can be translated as slave in English. Samuel shows here a complete surrender of himself to God and his will.

Mary is the second Biblical figure whom Westphal mentions. Her prayer is extraordinarily similar to Samuels. She says, “Here am I, the servant of the LORD; let it be with me according to your word”. Here, Mary uses the same language to acknowledge that she is in complete surrender to what God and his Word have planned for her. Mary’s posture is of one who desires nothing but splendor and delight in the Lord.

It is admirable that these people were so humble before the Lord. Before thought of their own need, they kneel before God in full submission to him. As their fellow servants of God, we can learn many things from these two about our readiness to follow God.

Final Thoughts

First, I am in no way saying that we should not ask for things. The Lord’s Prayer, said by Jesus, asks for daily bread, the forgiveness of sins, and safety from the intent of the world. This post isn’t trying to say it is evil or wicked to request things from God (For if our God and Savior, himself, does it then how could it ever be considered wicked), but we ought to remember to praise the worthiness of the God we live for and submit to, for he is above all, beside all, and within all that we love.

Lastly, as Westphal says, “Prayer needs silence, not only external but also internal silence; for our minds and hearts can be and usually are very noisy places even when we emit no audible sound”.

Divina Rutherford Blog #1 Phenomenology of Prayer

There are five elements of prayer; praise, thanksgiving, confession, petition, and intercession. To me this means that we give praise to God and worship His holiness. Thanksgiving is about giving thanks to God for what we have and all that He has blessed us with. Confession can be done in Church to a priest but even something simple and private as part of a silent prayer, or our own personal prayers to God asking forgiveness for what we have done wrong. The petition element of prayer is like supplication, or asking God for what we need or want. "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you." (Matthew 7:7). Intercession is also like supplication but instead of asking for what we went or need we ask on behalf of others like a sick family member for example. Growing up in a religious family and school, these five elements of prayer have been taught to me in the past years, especially my senior year theology class so this chapter ties in with what I have been learning.