“Keep your soul diligently.”
That thought struck me as unusual.
How does Moses say we are to do that?
We are to remember what we have seen so that we don’t forget the Lord’s
goodness to us. We aren’t just to sit in
a rocking chair and recollect it though, we are to tell it, specifically to our
children, those who either were too small to remember or those yet unborn,
which is exactly what the liturgy of the Passover meal is designed to do. It is what our own liturgy is designed to do
as well. In order to help them, Moses
tells the story of Sinai. The Lord told
me to have you gather and you did. When you
gathered at the foot of that mountain, do you remember the sights and sounds, while
it burned with fire “to the heart of heaven” and there was darkness and thick
gloom and then the Lord spoke out of the midst of the fire and there was no
body, just that voice. The role of
liturgy is to put us back into the original setting, make us, born out of time,
a part of the original that we might experience it in such a way that we never
forget. Keeping our souls diligently
requires good liturgy for remembering.
Jesus calls for complete renunciation of everything, even
our families, if we are to follow and be His disciples. The first disciples did exactly that, they
walked away from their nets, their custom tables, whatever they were doing
before. The very first men, the
fishermen, walked away from the family businesses they were engaged in to
follow Jesus. He must be first but He
showed the way, as Paul says to the Philippians, “Have this mind among
yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of
God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped…” He walked away from the unbroken fellowship
and the presence of God to be with us and to make it possible for us to
experience that fellowship and presence.
The taking up of the cross imagery was unthinkable at the time Jesus
spoke these words but later became clear and the disciples themselves could
never have thought of this day, these words, without thinking of Jesus’
cross. Life becomes the liturgy of
taking it up every day.
Paul knows that good leaders are in the battle with their
soldiers. He knows that it is important
that those to whom he writes are aware of his own struggles and suffering for
the sake of the Gospel. He can’t invite
others to risk themselves for the Gospel if he isn’t willing to do it
himself. He says that our sufferings are
for your comfort and any comfort we receive is also for your comfort. He is willing to suffer for one simple
reason, that Jesus suffered and died as one of us. He is willing to follow no matter the cost
because He knows the resurrection from the dead is certain. He is following because of the resurrection
of Jesus, he knows that suffering and death lead to life if He follows
Jesus. That is life as liturgy, it has a
story, a past, but it also has a present, taking up the cross in imitation of
Jesus, and it has a future, resurrection.
Remembering, right remembering, takes us through past, present and
future.
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