A Church Full of Lucifers and Crucifers

At the church I serve, each Sunday during worship young people carry lit candles down the sanctuary aisles. They carry their candles and use them to light candles on the communion table. We commonly call these young people "acolytes". Perhaps that is a better name than the earlier name of this role -- lucifers. 

Lucifer means "light bearer," which is exactly what we are called to be in the world. Christians are not the Light, but only bearers of the Light. Of course the problem with calling Christians lucifers is that through non-Biblical literature, that title has been given as a proper name to the Devil. While we may be called to be lucifers, we don't use that name. 

Another title that Christians have is one of "crucifer". If we look to the procession in the Church, there are those who carry in the light and there is the one who carries in the cross. The one who carries the cross is called the "crucifer". Oddly enough this title has not been appropriated to the Devil or anything else. Frankly, the language of crucifer is lost in the Protestant tradition and very limited in the Catholic tradition. 

It is a shame that we as Christians are hesitant to take on the titles of lucifer and crucifer, because we are called to carry the light and to carry the cross into the world.

Dysfluency: A case for making the Bible difficult to understand

There is a lot of work these days to try to make things easier to understand. Preachers are not immune to this trend. Pastors are encouraged to make the Bible easy for people to understand. Making the Gospel message more accessible to more people is a worthy effort. However, I wonder if in our efforts to make things easy to understand could unintentionally make them easy to forget? 

When I was in college, my university gave laptops to all incoming students. In part this effort was to make note-taking easier. Years later, studies have shown that taking notes by hand rather than typing them is better if you want to retain the information. Likewise, using slightly difficult to read fonts promote better recall. Sometimes when things are easier to do, they are easier to forget. 

There is a push in some areas of the world to promote something called Dysfluency. This is the process of making something slightly difficult in order to promote greater recall, retention and integration. (Clarification: dysfluency is not the same as disfluency).

I wonder what it would look like for us preachers to embrace dysfluency when it comes to preaching and teaching the scriptures. 

Pink Used to Be Yellow

Recently I read that the color that I call pink (light red), was not long ago not labeled as "pink" but as yellow. You can read some of the history as to how it became that pink and yellow are related here. The leading theory is that Queen Elizabeth loved carnations (which were originally only in light red/pink color). Carnations were commonly called "pinks" and thus associating the label "pink" with the reddish hue we know today. Fancy people might know the color "Dutch Pink" is yellow.

This silly example is just to point out the need to be suspect with any claim that assumes the current statement has always been interpreted the way it is currently being interpreted. 

If we have changed our minds on what we interpret to be pink, then rest assured we have changed our minds on what we interpret the scriptures to mean. Just as there has never been an unchanging understanding of the color pink, so too there has never been an unchanging understanding of Scriptures.