Each morning, I make a cup of coffee and sit down with my Book of Common Prayer, journal and Note-taking Bible.

I have to do it first thing.

Avoid the temptation to get an early AM dopamine hit and see what interesting things happened in my social feeds while I was asleep. Stress over the anxieties of the day. Those items aren't going away, they are still coming, but not yet.

I do the same thing.

Pray the Daily Office. Read the scriptures. Take notes. Hit up the journal and deal with prayer, sin, and thankfulness.

But sometimes the Daily Office hits.

It did a couple of days ago.

This Tuesday, our readings were Ps 26 + 28, Isaiah 44:9-20, Ephesians 4:17-32, and Mark 3:19-35. While I don’t pretend to know the history of the readings in the 1979 BCP, it is days like this I swear an intentional pathway got carved out. And not only intentional, but speaking straight to my own personal theological fascination.

Come enter my rabbit trail on thinking, knowledge, and having the mind of Christ.

(ps. This will be a bit long. I want to give you a heads up.)

Most of my reading is fairly inductive.

Dr. Joe Dongell at Asbury Theological Seminary drilled it into my brain. I've spent nearly 20 years in devotional reading, fueled by curiosity and a love of biblical theology. I love to make connections.

One of the theological trails I’ve been trying to clear out over the last few years is this idea of the Mind of Christ. The role of what I call in my journal “Dreamland”.

It’s a state where our mind fights with sanctification. We try to live in the Kingdom and some odd fugue state where we have unsatisfied things to which we still stay attached.

Besides that, a few other favorite trails got fired that morning.

• Idolatry
• Discernment
• The worldbuilding of the Kingdom
• The gospel as a controlling dynamic

The Isaiah passage came in hot. It is one of my favorite sections. The worthlessness of idolatry gets defined using the language of a craftsman cutting down a tree. He then uses part of the wood to make an idol, and the rest to stoke the cooking fire. John Oswalt does a great job explaining the idea of worthless. If the gods are part of the universe, then they cannot tame chaos.(1)

So those participating in idolatry aren’t calming the chaos, but participating in its creation.

That chaos is the battle over dreamland.

I doubt many of us have ever fashioned an idol of wood, but idolatry manifests in many forms today. We live in a world of rugged individualism. Internally generating our own flourishing. The only problem is that many essays have been written across the internet about the fact that culture is now at a moment of flux. Suddenly realizing we cannot create goodness.

Alan Roxburgh and Mark Lau Branson (2) call this conundrum modernities wager — this bet, in which we take, of thriving without the living God among us.

Is the model we seek to live uniquely Christian, or are we as Christians simply designing and doing inside a vague religious framework we choose to operate from?

Fast forward. Vs. 18-20

They do not know, nor do they comprehend; for their eyes are shut, so that they cannot see, and their minds as well, so that they cannot understand. No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, “Half of it I burned in the fire; I also baked bread on its coals, I roasted meat and have eaten. Now shall I make the rest of it an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood?” He feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud? (NRSV)

This “deluded mind." This realization that all our internal striving, our own worldbuilding, hasn’t worked. Our devotion to self, to ideologies, to all the things our mind has told us matter… doesn't actually work. The NIV says “Their eyes are plastered over”, unable to have eyes to see.

Deluded.

Plastered over eyes.

This is where these New Testament writings come into play. Both deal with us understanding our thinking.

The mind of Christ isn’t natural. We have to build it through both acceptance (justification) and sanctification. It takes work. We have to have new motivations. We realize our brokenness has deceived us. Accepting this might be how we get a line in it. We have to have an experience of trust.

Ephesians 4:17 and 18 talk about those plastered over eyes. “in the futility of our thinking” and the “darkened in our understanding” we get lost in the delusion. But Paul wrangles all our metaphysical cats together when he offers us the answer.

You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires. (v22)

We hear deceitful desires and immediately rush to the blushful carnal.

But what if this is also about those things in our minds we have convinced ourselves of? The turning over to shameful things Paul talks about in Romans 1.

"but their thinking became futile and their foolish heard were darkened." (Rom 1:21

To pick back up a line from Isaiah and the repeating message of “shame” in IS 44:9-11. Shame is yet another realization that we followed the wrong thing. Disgraced because what we thought we had figured out didn’t work.

Deluded.

Plastered over eyes.

Idolatry.

Modernities Wager.

We go to Mark's gospel now.

A passage where people kept wondering if Jesus was in his right mind. Why?

Because what he was saying seemed to be outside the bounds of the world. Jesus saying he isn’t in any cooperation with any form of brokenness or evil.

He must be possessed with something impure. That's what others were accusing him of.

It’s so bad His family is outside, waiting to take him home.

They need to put adult Jesus in the corner to get back into his right mind.

Jesus' mind isn’t of this world.

He is doing something different. He is exercising true faith. Showing us what this looks like and inviting us to enter into a different controlling dynamic. Total transformation, not of our motivations of thought, but the boundaries of what we see as possible.

What happens if we stay here? Living in the idea of modernities wager? Trying to be vaguely Christian in a way we can control and still make these 21st-century wooden idols?

At best, we will be spiritually underpowered and apathetic. At worst, the Holy Spirit might cast us out (look at the way both Paul and Mark deal with the Spirit).

In his Confessions, St. Augustine said this.(3)

Seek what you seek, but it is not where you seek it. You seek a blessed life in the land of death; it is not there.

Those desires we have. The dreams. The actual things we are looking for are only found in God. Every good thing is in Him. We desire good things and find ourselves abusing those good things and then heading deeper into delusion. We wonder where they go when it all destructs.

Our mind was never in the right place.

When I read the office, I always start with the Psalms reading. Sometimes, especially on days like this day, I realize I need to circle back at the end to re-perspective what the Spirit started priming before I get to the OT, NT, and Gospel reading.

I lead a blameless life; deliver me and be merciful to me. My feet stand on level ground; in the great congregation I will praise the Lord. 26:12

To you, Lord, I call; you are my Rock, do not turn a deaf ear to me.

For if you remain silent, I will be like those who go down to the pit. Hear my cry for mercy as I call to you for help, as I lift up my hands toward your Most Holy Place. 28:1-2

I love these passages because they are both challenging (the whole blameless thing). They also show a sincere trust in this new, spiritual, and faithful world we are invited into. I picture this gradual release of our own attempts at worldbuilding in favor of what we know God to be doing.

So how do we talk about this practically?

1. How have we taken good things and been reckless in them? Assume it was 100% us who got to it and it will 100% take us to make it happen.
2. How are we not practicing gratitude and thankfulness in life?
3. Where can we realize those ideas created by “plastered-covered eyes”?

Brennan Manning, in The Ragamuffin Gospel, writes this;

Honesty requires the truthfulness to admit the attachment and addictions that control our attention, dominate our consciousness, and function as false gods. (4)

The state I call "dreamland" is the working out of our mind and these entrapments. Personal honesty requires us to sort out the bad from the good and the good from the right. Even...perhaps the right from the holy. It's understanding that the mind of Christ will always be directing us to holiness. To the presence of God, that place in the throne room we read about in Hebrews.

To be absolutely and fully with God, even in our current world.

Thanks for following the rabbit trail of a morning in the daily office.

Chad

1. Isaiah, Vol 2. John Oswalt | https://amzn.to/4azCUsV​
2. Leadership, God’s Agency, and Disruption. Alan Roxburgh and Mark Lau Branson | https://amzn.to/42vDfea​
3. Confessions. Augustine | https://amzn.to/4ggVU0B​
4. The Ragamuffin Gospel. Brennan Manning | https://amzn.to/3CrHsoB​