Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Eugene Peterson: “Eat This Book”
We were blessed to hear Eugene Peterson’s address to the January Series yesterday (audio is available) and meet with him as a Worship Institute staff this morning, in preparation for his multiple presentations to Symposium in the coming days.
Yesterday, Rev. Peterson began by reading from the introduction to his new book, Eat This Book, where he summarizes his theme:
In order to read the Scriptures adequately and accurately, it is necessary at the same time to live them. Not to live them as a prerequisite to reading them, and not to live them in consequence of reading them, but to live them as we read them, the living and reading reciprocal, body language and spoken words, the back-and-forthness assimilating the reading to the living, the living to the reading. Reading the Scriptures is not an activity discrete from living the gospel but one integral to it. It means letting Another have a say in everything we are saying and doing. It is as easy as that. And as hard.
Later in the book, Peterson writes about “liturgical reading,” in his attempt to “recontextualize our reading of Scripture, our eating of this book, into a huge holy community of others who are also reading it. There is a millennia-deep and globe-encircling community of others who are also at the table eating this book.”
Peterson also writes this about worship:
The liturgical practice of the church presents us with the Holy Scriptures read and listened to and believed in the context of everything that is:
Architecture is a part of it—the use of stone and timber and glass.
Color—purples and greens, reds and whites—is a part of it.
Song is part of it—our hymns and anthems, our organs and guitars, our clarinets and drums.
Ancestors are part of it—the saints and scholars who enrich our preaching and prayers.
Prayer is part of it—prayers individual and corporate, voicing our deeply personal response to God and the call of God to praise and witness and mission.
Neighbors are part of it—these men and women and children with such different tastes and temperaments from us, many of whom we don’t like very much.
And time. Liturgy gathers the holy community as it reads the Holy Scriptures into the sweeping tidal rhythms of the church year in which the story of Jesus and the Christian makes its rounds century after century, the large and easy interior rhythms of a year that moves from birth, life, death, resurrection, on to spirit, obedience, faith, and blessing. Without liturgy we lose the rhythms and end up tangled in the jerky, ill-timed, and insensitive interruptions of public-relations campaigns, school openings and closings, sales days, tax deadlines, inventories, and elections. ... Liturgy keeps us in touch with the story as it defines and shapes our beginnings and ends, our living and dying, our rebirths and blessings in this Holy Spirit, text-formed community, visible and invisible.
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