Sunday, November 28, 2010

some kind of king


 Christ the King & Advent 1

The cross is an ugly image. A heartrending image. 
The crown of thorns: horrifying.  We’ve made them palatable with oversaturation or profuse glorification, but they are not an easy thing to behold.  And to base your whole religion around it is kind of grotesque, actually.  Especially when Advent starts today and we want to start thinking about a cuddly baby laying in hay, the irony of the last Sunday of the Church year last year - which we missed because of the ice storm - stands starkly before us.  We’re at the beginning of the story now, we don’t want to hear how it ends…

We like happy endings. The finale of the church year should be optimistic, conclusive. But instead of glorious depictions of might and strength, of magnificence and authority, we end the whole church year with talking about our leader hanging foolishly, weakly, dying on the cross.  Then we go immediately into longing for his birth as a helpless baby. 
How are we any better than the soldiers who mocked him with the sign above his bleeding head, “King of the Jews”?  How can we keep this cycle up when we know what’s coming?  Who is our Jesus anyway?

I watched Spiderman with Owen this week. There is a scene where Aunt May gives Peter Parker a little pep talk/lecture about heroes. “We all need heroes,” she says, we need someone powerful in our corner. It give us hope, something to aspire to, something to believe in.  So is Jesus our hero? Like an ace up your sleeve, a get of jail free card, like the immunity idol in your back pocket, He’s got my back and he’s in charge.  Jesus is our protection, our king, our muse, or our mascot? Is that what it means for him to be king?  A hero? Is this who we are longing to come when we sit in our waiting of Advent?  God to sweep in and rescue us?

We don’t have much reference to kingship in our culture; it’s hard to imagine what it means in today’s vernacular and worldview, but one thing I do know is that kings are important and powerful.  So why on earth, would we end our church year talking about him dying? as a common criminal?  And if we really hear it, how can we not stand there along with the bystanders and ask the same thing – if he really is the Son of God, why doesn’t he save himself?  Some King.

The kingdom of God is like… Jesus’ parables often begin. 
It’s like a woman who loses a coin, or a sheep wandering off, it’s like a corrupt employee or treasure buried in a field,
it’s like a vineyard owner putting manure around a tree or seeds being scattered on the ground or a lump of yeast being stirred into batter.
It belongs to little children and is entered less easily than the eye of a needle for those with power and wealth. 
it is a banquet feast that will bring those from every direction, and the last will be first and the first last,
and blessed are the poor, for it is theirs. 
It is here; it is coming,
it is yours’; it is out of reach,
it is preached about, witnessed, heard, seen, it is in your midst; it is promised or threatened, there are signs pointing to it but it remains far off and you’ll never enter it if you are selfish, wealthy gossiping, immoral or slanderous,
You get there by water and the Spirit,
by being poor or vulnerable, or suffering
or by caring for the poor and vulnerable and suffering,
but no, it is received, given, not pursued or grasped…
it is joy and peace in the Holy Spirit,
it cannot be inherited by sinners,
but it is for sinners and not righteous people…

What in the world is the kingdom of God? And what does it have to do with a crucified savior?  Or a baby in a manger, for that matter?

That the greatest image of the reign of Christ that we can think of to lift up on Christ the King Sunday is the image of his crucifixion should offend us and stop us in our tracks. 
Because it means that when searching for a way to describe how Jesus is king we say THIS is how God rules.  
THIS is how the fullness of God’s sovereignty is revealed – by joining the forsaken and forlorn and the guilty, and being killed. But letting the powers and justice system of the people God loves unjustly put him to death. 

God’s reign is love.  It is love.
And as love, it comes vulnerably into a world of violence and power struggles and pain, and where it goes is to the pain, not to the power.
Our sovereign came into this life right alongside of us and said, you want to know how I am your king? This way – you are not alone. You will never be alone.

Also, all these ordinary things all around us and in our lives -  seeds, yeast, manure, managers and employees, banquets, found animals and lost things: these are how you describe the kingdom of God.  That the immortal, invisible God only wise, inaccessible and hid from our eyes made Godself known, flesh-and-blood-and-breath-and-sweat-known, right here in the dust and stuff of every day life.  The kingdom of God is not otherworldly, it is not, actually, glorious.  It is real and earthy and tangible and familiar.

But we do NOT get to remove the other side of the paradox, this mighty juxtaposition we have thrust before us on reign of Christ Sunday.  God is with us.  But hear this, GOD is with us. 
This guy hanging there, killed with the criminals, is the “image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; that in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, and in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” 

And most astonishing of all, “through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”  Even in weakness and the most glaring powerlessness, the God of the whole universe was reconciling ALL THINGS to Godself, all things, in heaven or on earth, in past and future.  Nothing is outside of God’s hand.

About to breathe his last breath as the life is leaving his body Jesus turns to the anguished thief and says, “Today you will be with me in paradise.”
What more preposterous words have ever been spoken by a dying man? What more outrageous thing could a punished and vanquished person utter?
He might as well have leaned over and whispered, “Hey, actually, I am the sovereign ruler over all that is, and all that will be, and over heaven and earth, and even as I hang here dying right next to you, right alongside your own dying, neither this death nor your own is able to stop me from being king of it all.
Not even pause it for a moment. 
You will be with me.  I’ll see to it. This is not the end for you.
This, my friend, is one passing moment within the eternity which I hold in my own hand.”
This is how Christ is king.  Eternity held in nail-scarred hands.

The kingdom of God is a mystery to me.  And Jesus didn’t make it any easier to understand with his stories and explanations.  It’s almost as though it is the kind of truth that can’t be defined, only described, like “freedom” or “love,” or “hope.”  It's almost as though it’s the kind of thing that needs parables and poems to get at it.

I can’t define this mysterious kingdom of God. But I know when I see it.  It looks like reconciliation, and forgiveness, and kindness.  It looks like weak people being empowered and strong people using their strength for someone else.  It sounds like the tender words of care, or the silence of deep listening.  It feels like true justice, and like deep peace.  It smells exactly like hope.

As the church, we are the people who live in the kingdom of God – who see and hear that God’s kingdom is breaking in all around is, the kind of kingdom that is best revealed in the person of a crucified God.  And so knowing this kingdom unfolds in suffering and in joy, that nothing in life is outside of God’s reign, we seek ways to actively participate in its coming.

And if you look back on that wall you will see in people's words and pictures lots of ways we actively participate in the kingdom of God: caring for each other, reminding each other of truth, helping one another, praying, singing, laughing, hoping, serving.  The church is the community that lives the kingdom of God.  We shared in the kingdom of God on Friday when we celebrated the creations of a few artists a half a world away that we are just getting to know, and raised $500 to support their refugee communities back home.  We shared the kingdom of God when filled this room with neighbors and strangers and we sang, and rejoiced and talked about gratitude and headed into the night on our way to Thanksgiving gatherings.

We belong to the kingdom of God.  Which evidently means we suffer, because our king doesn’t hold back from suffering, just jumps right in alongside us. 
And it means we get involved in the ordinary stuff of life, which seems to be the place where you most often glimpse the king at work,
and it means we always live with the torment of an often mysterious faith, that is a little like déjà vu, just barely within grasp, a moment of aha! here, a glimpse of hope there, a feeling of joy or prayer of yearning that tugs you out of this realm and into another for a second or two.  
The longing for more, the frustration and desire to see it fully realized are part of our faith.  They’re the part that Advent holds up.
Because this kingdom we are part of is an “already but not yet” kingdom, it is in our midst now and yet is not fully here, it has arrived but is coming.  It’s bigger and broader, and smaller and simpler, than our minds or the categories of this world can yet grasp. 

We live the kingdom of God even as we long for it. Our passage from Colossians is an ancient Christian hymn – can you just hear it sung? He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation it rings out.
It’s hard to imagine the early community of faith singing these words had any more grasp on what they really mean than we do.  But by their singing them and by our reading them we are declaring these unfathomable things in kingdom of God language, saying that we are all together committed to the journey of unraveling their meaning and significance in our lives little by little and day by day as we live the kingdom of God.

A beautiful poem by Walter Bruggamen says,
"When we sound these ancient cadences, we know ourselves to be at the threshold with all your creatures in heaven and on earth, everyone from rabbits and parrots to angels and seraphim….
That is how it is when we praise you. We join the angels in praise, and we keep our feet in time and place…awed to heaven, rooted in earth.
We are daily stretched between communion with you and our bodied lives, spent but alive, summoned and cherished but stretched between…"

This is how we live in the kingdom of God.
“Awed to heaven but rooted to earth.” 

Your kingdom come, we will continue to pray, your will be done,
 on earth as it is in heaven.
Amen. Come Lord Jesus.

Thursday, November 25, 2010

Gratitude's Perspective





Our Thanksgiving table will be beautiful, (I know this because I am hosting).  It will be covered with things I love to cook, surrounded with people who love to praise my cooking.  We’ll have all of our favorite holiday foods and the house will be filled with yelling cousins, laughing sisters, football games, parade watching and delicious smells.  
But it wont be perfect.  Even though there are lots of family members in town, there are some who couldn’t make it because of work.  My grandma will be there but my grandpa wont – he passed away earlier this year.  And there are certain topics we can’t discuss, things better left alone, if we want to enjoy our time together.   
Around our table tomorrow there will be broken families and families just beginning; there will be job struggles and health struggles and the struggle to really connect across some generational lines.  And some regrets or longings just seem to surface more when we are with our families than at any other time.

But when we sit down at the table, for a brief moment that past and the future don’t exist. We sit down in a moment of gratitude. For the purpose of gratitude. And I am so grateful.  I am grateful for my family.  I am grateful for the ways I have been loved and shaped by them, for the laughter and the connection.  I am grateful to be at this table with them even if five minutes before or five minutes after, or right in between, someone – sometimes me-  says something asinine, and I can’t stand that person for a moment.  The truth that shines through that moment is that I am so thankful for the chance to be. To be with them. To live. For the opportunity to have lived. To have loved them and been loved by them.  I am so grateful.

For the past few weeks, I have been catching up on the story of Emma, a nine year old girl with autism.  For the first eight and a half years of her life, Emma was completely nonverbal with a mental retardation diagnosis. But about six months ago, they had an amazing breakthrough, and Emma began to share her thoughts with her mom Sabra through a slow and deliberate method that involved pointing to letters on a paper keyboard. 

For the first time in their life together, Emma and her mom were communicating with each other.  Sabra discovered that Emma’s favorite color was yellow, her favorite food was pizza, and that if Emma could have a pet, it would be an Orangutan. Sabra discovered that her daughter was a poet, that her vocabulary was immense and precise; she learned that Emma saw and experienced the world deeply, and was sometimes sharply and bluntly insightful. 
They’ve been blogging together about their journey; in Emma’s slow and careful words, “I am trying to teach other kids to hope.”

On Tuesday they posted what will be their last blog entry.  Emma asked that they be finished blogging because, as she says, “I am trying to be part of this world.” 
Sabra shares, as she writes their final post: I never could have imagined six months ago that I would know Emma as I do now.  My God!  How could I ever have conceived it?  In all my entries, I don’t know that I’ve been able to fully express the joy it has brought me.  
Words themselves have taken on a whole new meaning for me.  I see them pour out through Emma’s fingertips and every single time it feels a little like the first time.  These words have filled up my life and left behind only all that is possible.  After all these years of her silence, it is my desire above all else to just listen to her.  And what she says could never fail my heart, not even if it might be hard to hear.
John Milton says, “Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.”  For me, Sabra is a witness of gratitude.  The power of gratitude.  Gratitude is not trite.  It is not shallow.  It comes out of suffering and survival.  And it demands honesty.  Gratitude recognizes that life is filled with tragedy or at the very least anxiety, and it acknowledges our finitude, and at the same time it notices that our very existence is a gift from God; it opens us to see the gift that life is.

When we gather around our tables on Thanksgiving day, we are gathering for the purpose of gratitude, a celebration of gratitude.  Gratitude is a moment of joy that is a break from time itself.  It is a time out from all the struggles, from the pain behind us and the unknown ahead, because the power of gratitude is that it holds us in a moment, a moment that doesn’t anticipate the future or regret the past.  It takes us for a short time outside of our existence, while also holding the truth of our existence with it. 

For Sabra and Emma I imagine that every other day is filled with anxiety – progress is slow, connection is poignant but ever so limited. I imagine that every other moment in their lives is filled with questions, breakthroughs and setbacks, what does her future hold? What lies ahead for her? But gratitude says, right here and now, the chance to be this child’s mom is a gift – to love each other in this life is a gift, even in the tragedy, it is a gift.  And life itself – with all its tragedy-  is a gift.

We are usually pretty unable to live in the present much at all. We are always remembering or regretting the past, or dreading or anticipating the future. 
We are always looking forward with our calendars and our schedules and our plans and our worries and our dreams, and we are looking backwards at the things we wish we’d done differently or the things we wish we could go back and live again and never leave, the people we miss or the mistakes we’ve made that can never be corrected.  
The better days, or the real days, seem always to be behind us or before us.  And those two places are where we live most of the time.

But gratitude happens only in the very moment we are in, not allowing regretting the past or anticipating future to corrupt the moment, or move us away from the present.  “Life is a gift,” gratitude points out, “and this moment is a gift.”  And we can look across the table at those who we love and wish we could love better, and sit around that table with our joblessness and our cancer, our autism and our anger, our stupid mistakes and unfulfilled goals and every other weak and sad part of who we are: they can’t say anything to that moment, can’t break it at all, because the moment is suspended and held in gratitude - thankfulness for the very gift of life.

When we choose to pause in gratitude, we give ourselves the chance live in a moment out of time. A sample-sized taste, a foreshadowing of a future altogether different, not a future like the ones we live in: filled with the consequences of past choices or impossibilities of human limitations.  Not a future that comes from the present - from the pasts we’ve lived and the future we are creating -but a future that comes from the promise.  The future outside of time.
Because someday time will be wiped away, and what we will have is the eternal moment of gratitude.  We will have the suspended joy of being alive, of being with God face to face, of being wholly, truly, fully alive.  Gratitude lets us see the kingdom of God.

 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
 ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
 ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
 ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
 ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are we, whoever we are and whatever we bear, because the kingdom of God is breaking into our world. The kingdom of God, where the hungry are fed and the mourning are comforted and the meek inherit the earth.  We don’t see the kingdom of God a lot of the time, but it’s here. We don’t feel it every moment, but it’s real.  It is leaking into our world through the splits in the seams, the pain and the hope, the grief and the gratitude.  And when we allow ourselves to stop in the moment of gratitude, for that moment, the kingdom of God is tangible.

In Jesus Christ the eternal has entered time; God has come near, and shares our very lives with us, every moment - and God is always, ceaselessly working to redeem, and restore, and renew us, our minds and hearts, our relationships and world, our pasts and futures. 
There is no pain that Christ does not hold, no suffering he is not sharing.  And one day, when time is no more, and the kingdom of God will come in all its fullness, there will be no more pain and no more suffering at all, no more inability to connect, fears or worries, sickness or sadness,
only wholeness, abundance and peace, life, wrapped in Eternal gratitude. 

So when the moments come, the small moments of gratitude,
when Thanksgiving comes –whenever and every time it comes,
whether it creeps up on you in complete surprise as it did to me last night when I kissed the forehead of my tussled-hair, flushed-faced sleeping son,
 or whether it is a deliberate decision as you sit around the table with family for tomorrow’s holiday – Those little moments of gratitude say to us:
Don’t worry about tomorrow or dwell on yesterday.  God’s love holds it all – past, present and future.
Just eat this meal, be with these people; recognize that you are alive, and give thanks. 
Let yourself be held in the timeless gift, the eternal promise, of gratitude.
And Rejoice.
Amen.




Prayers of the People


We thank you for those we’ve loved who are no longer with us.  We think of them tonight, and we grieve their absence at tomorrow’s meal. 
For all the ways they’ve shaped us, for the memories they’ve left us, and for the gift of having shared life with them, we thank you God, and we lift up our prayers…
(silence)
Congregational Refrain

We pray for those we come from and those we’ve had a hand in creating, for the lives we’re tangled up in, for better or worse. 
For the moments with family that give us great joy and belonging and connection, we thank you God.  And for the places of longing and sadness, we lift up our prayers…
(silence)
Congregational Refrain

We pray for those separated from family and friends: soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and other parts of the world, families divided by divorce, young people away at school. 
For separation from our loved ones in all ways we experience it, and for those whose work or distance keeps them from celebrating with their family or friends on Thanksgiving, we lift up our prayers…
(silence)
Congregational Refrain

 We pray for those who are sick and suffering, for those in pain mentally, physically or spiritually, for those fighting with disease or despair. 
For those struggling with things that seem bigger than they can bear, for the overwhelmed and the frightened, and for all who love them and worry for them, we lift our prayers… 
(silence)
Congregational Refrain

We pray for those who are in need tonight, those whose have not found work, those who are faced with foreclosure, overwhelmed with debt, drowning in medical bills or wondering where their next meal will come from. 
For those of us here tonight, for others we love, and for so many we’ve never met who struggle in fear of the unknown, we lift our prayers…
(silence)
Congregational Refrain

We give you thanks for this world that you’ve created. For the forests and oceans, for the mountains and rivers, for the animals, fish and birds, and for all the peoples and rich cultures filled with story and song, we thank you. 
For the delicate balance that feels often precarious, with wars and division, destruction and disasters – for the world you love and have called us to care for in all that we do, we lift our prayers…
(silence)
Congregational Refrain
                              
For all these we pray, Gracious God. 
We know that when we gather around the table all these also come with us to the meal:
(gesturing to each of the lit candles at each seat)
The memory of those we’ve loved and lost,
Our families, in love and complexity,
The people we feel divided from,
Those we love who are sick,
Those struggling to make ends meet,
And the burdens of this great world you love.

But you are here as well. Your Spirit moves in and through each of these relationships and situations.  Thank you, God.
May we find ourselves held in your holy and timeless moment of Gratitude, when we recognize our fragile humanity, and celebrate the promise outside of time that guides us even today.

For tastes of life and love and wholeness, we thank you. 
For experiences of health and the promise of healing that awaits us all, we thank you. 
For the glimpses of your kingdom on earth,
when we have what we need, no more and no less,
when peace wins out over conflict,
when people are there for each other
and share your blessings with others, we thank you, God.

Into your hands we commend our lives, this world, and all for whom we pray.
Trusting in your mercy, through Jesus Christ our Lord,
we pray the gift of prayer he gave to us…

(Congregation joins in unison Lord’s Prayer)

(Thanksgiving Prayer, Kara Root, 2010)

Monday, November 15, 2010

Eschatological Imagination


There was a big hoopla this week in preparation for the presbytery meeting.  It was over the new vision statement for the presbytery.  Ready to hear the controversial statement? “We fearlessly follow the Holy Spirit into a changing world.”  Guess which word caused so much anxiety for people on every end of every conceivable spectrum?  Fearlessly.

We sometimes act as though anxiety equals faith; that if we are worried and fretting over situations that is somehow faithful.  Or we think faith needs some humility attached to it, some good, old fashioned fear mixed in, in order to keep us in check.  Whatever the reason, fearlessly made some people fearful. 

Part of it is the audacity of the word. It is a reckless word, daring and caution-throwing. Fearlessly. Shamelessly. Brazenly. Take your pick.  Also, it’s a word that holds our feet to the fire. It’s no half-way word. It’s an all-out, no holes barred word. Fearless.

But the visioning team chose the word deliberately.  It is a future word.  It is a word spoken by messengers of God from creation to revelation and everywhere in between: fear not, do not be afraid. I come from a different reality, I come from the new, where hope is real and God’s promises are fulfilled, and I speak to you from God – do not be afraid. For God is doing something new. For God is with you. For God is leading you. For all these things around you that seem so big and scary and overwhelming, these things do not have the ultimate power to say anything over you.  God does.  Fearlessly follow. 

But we’re not very good at fearlessly, (or following, for that matter). We’re not very good at living out of the future.  We’d rather use the knowledge of the past to manage the risks of the present and behavior-modify ourselves into God’s kingdom. We can be good boys and girls. We can love our neighbor- or at least strive to- if that’s what makes God happy.  We can feed the hungry, at least when they’re on our radar screen, because we know it’s the right thing to do.
But what kind of dangerous, wild and unruly territory are you suggesting we enter when you say that we’ll fearlessly follow the Holy Spirit into a changing world? We’re quite comfortable with timidly inviting the Holy Spirit into our dormant church, and even that feels a tad risky.

So what is church? We ask again.

Last week we talked about church as the place – the people – where God resides. That we live and move in the world as people who have known God’s faithfulness in the past and continue to tell and to live into those stories as God moves in the present.

The church is also the place- the people – with eschatological imagination.  We live from the future that is coming, we dream of it and speak of it and sing about it and sometimes sound ridiculous as we talk about peace or justice or fearlessness in the midst of a violent, unjust and fearful world.  We live it out with our lives in the face of, in contrast to, that utter void of such things that the world seems like much of the time.  Fearlessly.

 The writer of our scripture today had an eschatological imagination. He or she indwelled their vision of the future. It wasn’t vague; it was very concrete.  Babies wont die too young, people will live a long, long time. You get to keep the things you grow and it won’t get pillaged. The things you build you will get to enjoy yourselves.  God will hear you – in fact, before you even finish speaking God will listen to your need.  There wont be violence of any kind tolerated in this future of God’s; the people and place will be a joy and delight to the whole earth, in fact, they will be a joy and delight to God too. 
You can almost taste in this vision, what kind of situation they were coming from – even the specifics, and what good news this must have sounded like.

A few weeks ago, Owen was having trouble with someone teasing him.  The boy was relentless, and Owen was getting more and more frustrated and filled with despair.
He would have to talk to the boy.
In the end, what empowered him to talk to the boy, when he really wanted to punish him, what helped him to reach out and respectfully engage the boy, was not some idea that he “should” do that.  That good kids, or Christian kids, or whatever, are nice and not mean.  Believe it or not, what empowered Owen was his eschatological imagination.  He was able to envision a reality where everybody could be strong without making other people weak, to imagine it so fully that he could live from it without even seeing it in front of him. 

What he had been experiencing was a kid finding strength by making him weak.  And what his wounded and justice-seeking self wanted was to be bigger and make that boy tiny enough to squash him!  He imagined that storyline for a while. But when he wrestled through the pain of the experience and with help began to see how that feeling of weakness made him long for strength the same way this little boy might be doing too, it fired up his eschatological imagination and the child could not go back to sleep.  For over two hours, he called me in his room every time had a new idea, something he would say to the kid, some way he would reach out.

He got so grounded in this reality, in this identity that he began to say that he was someone with kindness inside, someone who could be strong and help others feel strong.  He owned that identity, stepped into it and tried it on until it felt comfortable.  He went to school – utterly undaunted by the smart-ass kid we passed on our way in who made a comment to him – and it was all I could do to keep from grabbing the kid’s cheeks in my hands, and giving him a good come-to-Jesus right then and there. 
But Owen, unfazed, was living from a new reality, a future reality that was not yet realized, where people didn’t have to make others feel weak in order to be strong. He didn’t have to make others feel weak, and that identity made it strong.  Somehow, he got up the nerve to ask the child to please stop doing what he had been doing to Owen.  And a few days later, he reported with a huge smile, that the boy had asked Owen if he could be friends with him.

This is kindergarten conflict we’re talking about here. But I hid the tears in my eyes when his teacher said in the conference yesterday, “Owen treats his classmates with respect and kindness. He solves conflicts in peaceful ways.” Because I had seen the struggle it had taken him to get in touch with his eschatological imagination and live from that place.  And because watching him do it gave me hope.

We don’t treat others with respect and kindness because that is what we’re supposed to do.  We don’t do it because we really truly believe that kindness will spread and one day wipe out all disrespect. We don’t stand up for justice because we think we can end injustice, or because the bible says so.  We do these things because as people of faith we bend our lives towards the reality that is not yet fully here, we live into the coming of God – when there will be no injustice, or unkindness, when all people’s dignity and humanity will be upheld. 

The church is not the place where people go to be good or learn how to be good or to ease their guilt for not being good.  And it’s not meant to be where we timidly sing our hymns and anxiously pray our prayers and strive to please God without asking too many hard questions or getting down by life’s difficulty.  No. The church is the place where we audaciously live out now what is coming, where we fearlessly practice it even if we don’t yet see it on a day-to-day basis.

We give to the poor not because we think we can eliminate poverty, or because we are obligated to do so by our religion. We give to the poor because we have the eschatological imagination to envision the day when there will be no more rich or poor and everyone will have enough. So we witness to that day by living it out now.

We worship because the day is coming when God will be so close to us that we will delight in God’s presence and God will delight in us, when we’ll barely open our mouths and God will hear our needs and respond, when there will be no more weeping or despair or sadness, only closeness and belonging and fulfillment.

We sing the perfect future into view.  We live it into view, and pray it into view. This is called hope.  Faith is hope in the activity of God, it is trust in the God that is bringing God’s future and bending our lives, our wills, our imaginations, towards that future.  It is letting the possibility of it fill us so completely that it guides us more than the problems we see around us.

And because it is eschatological, Faith is never complete, it is always becoming.  Like the Father in Mark who says, “I believe, help my unbelief!” the only way faith is real is up against our doubts, hope only exists up against despair.  We name the places of unbelief even as we believe; we share the places of despair out of our yearning for the hope that is promised.  Our eschatological vision fuels the way we live our lives - it alerts us deep in our core to the places in the world where the things of God's promised future are lacking, and when it does, we live from their fulfillment, even when we can't yet see it completely.

So fire up your eschatological imagination.  What’s your eschatological vision?  What places of godforsakenness, grief or yearning do you bear?  How does God’s future meet you in those places? Flesh it out, what does it look like?

I have my own eschatological vision of God’s future.  
It goes like this:
In that day there will be no more fear or judgment in close relationships and families, but love will be unconditional and people all feel known and understood. 
There will never again be a single miscarriage, or a barren womb. 
Children will be born strong and healthy, and will grow up without parents ever worrying about ADHD or IQs or SATs or STDs or the million other accidents, injuries, injustices, disabilities and disorders that threaten our children. 
One day there will be no poverty.  At all.  Everybody will have just what they need. So there’s no gluttony either.  Or greed.   People will look for chances to share and feel free doing so, and when they do nobody takes it for granted or disrespects their things.

Nobody will be lonely.  They can be alone in sweet solitude without being lonely, because everyone will belong somewhere, to someone.  Everyone will have a place where their soul is at home – a  place and people that holds their history and their dreams, a place where they can be fully themselves. In fact, everyone will always be fully themselves.
Every single person will get the chance to be productive in ways that stimulate them creatively and intellectually. And they'll get to know that what they do contributes to the well-being of others.
No hunger. No AIDS. No cancer.  No disparity that makes people judge and hate and breeds jealousy and contempt.  All cultures and peoples living in rich expression and mutual appreciation for each other.  This is my eschatological vision. 

What’s yours?

The church is a people of faith, a people of hope, who don’t bring the new reality, but who join the trajectory of God who is bringing the new reality.  We live like it's true because we are witnesses to God’s kingdom that is coming.  
So, may we be people of rich eschatological imagination. And then may we fearlessly follow the Holy Spirit into a changing world. 

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Where God resides

King Solomon's Temple



Our memories and imaginations mix up some powerful cocktails.  Reality pales next to an experience percolated in the flavorful bath of nostalgia, amnesia and hindsight.  Kodak photo paper costs more than the generic brand, because it produces brighter, clearer pictures, “brilliant true color” they say.  But in development Kodak tapped into research that indicated that people don’t remember things as they really were.  The idea of rose-colored glasses is real - our memories store things brighter, more colorful than things really are. So a photograph on Kodak paper does not show the scene as your eyes see it, as they saw it when you snapped the photo, instead it saturates the paper with deeper color, makes the lines crisper and the colors brighter.  Ahh, we think to ourselves, now that is what it was really like!

And once the memories simmer into the lore and sink into storyline of a people, once some prophesy is thrown into the pot and the people’s hunger is sprinkled with suffering and loss and stoked by injustice, we are in dangerous territory. 
We’re at the place where disillusionment and apathy breed. We’re at the place where hope dies.

What is church? is our question of the season. What does it mean that we see ourselves connected somehow to God and each other?  That we are part of this thing we are part of?  What is this thing anyway?  This is not a new question, it’s been asked many times before.

 Our question comes up in the words today of a prophet named Haggai, who speaks up at a time when a small remnant of of exiles return to Jerusalem after being driven out nearly 70 years before by the Babylonians, who destroyed their temple, decimated their kingdom, and ended their way of life, scattering them to the winds. Twenty years earlier small groups had begun coming home to the place where their promises died, where their history collapsed, and began reconstructing life there. They trickle back not as a mighty nation, but as a crushed people still ruled by outside forces.
 
In this place Haggai speaks up, and his ministry lasts exactly four months, but his message was so important that it is included in the scriptures that ended up in our hands, as part of our story, so today with our own stories and questions we listen to his.

The exiles had settled, grown families, worked jobs and built lives in their new homes, and what compelled them to leave all of this to go back to Jerusalem was the words of other prophets and beliefs long held, that God would once again make of them a great nation, and that the Davidic line would continue, and that all the nations would again honor them.
And so, hope rekindled, they left their new lives and returned. Most of them had been young or not even born yet when they left, so they returned with expectation and filled to the brim with stories, images of the glory days, of God and grandeur, of Solomon’s temple in all its splendor and Israel as a strong nation, in hope that all that would be restored.  They returned with brighter than real pictures in their minds, their hope shaped by images colorful and stirring.

But when the precious few who returned got back they found nothing left of the temple or the days gone before, and encountered hostility from surrounding people and those who’d never left. The money promised by the Persians to rebuild the temple didn’t materialize, and life back in Jerusalem was nothing at all like they’d been told it would be, let alone what they had hoped or expected.  
So after a feeble start to rebuilding the temple with the first wave of returnees, they’d given up on it: it would never be – could never be – what it was, so why bother?  They settled down, built homes for themselves, and began to eek out a “good enough” life in this new place, promises of the prophets be damned.

Then, twenty years later, with another wave of stragglers returning, Haggai comes along, and his primary message is: rebuild the temple.  

Now, as exaggerated as their memories and lore of the first temple might have been, they were also right. The temple would NEVER again be what it had been.  Built with “borrowed” labor, from wealth accumulated by exhaustively taxing others, Solomon’s temple was an unrivaled masterpiece. 180,000 artisans were said to have worked on it; the magnificence of it was legendary.
And as the house of God, Solomon’s temple in all its splendor, was filled with symbols of God’s might and power, God’s faithfulness:  irreplaceable identity markers of God and the people who belonged to God:

-        -The Ark of the Covenant with its mercy seat and the golden angels with outspread wings that had been carried through the wilderness and reminded them of God’s covenant with them
-       - The Ten Commandments stone tablets
-       - A pot of manna, probably petrified, reminding them of God’s provision for them in the wilderness
-       - Aaron’s rod, used in so many of God’s miracles of deliverance
-      -  urim and thummin, symbols used to hear God’s voice
-      -  the eternal fire of God burning on the alter[1]

But these are gone; it’s all gone.  The symbols of God’s supremacy, rule and power, God’s enduring care for them -  had long ago been taken away, destroyed or pillaged by an invading army… The symbols of who they were as God’s people – gone. How could the temple ever be the same? How could God, or their faith or world, ever be the same? Who are they, without these symbols, without this history, this fulfillment of promises?

And Haggai, dear little Haggai, pipes up. Rebuild the temple, he says.  Keep going - Is this work you are doing on it nothing?

We human beings are people of symbols. We are meaning-makers; we need concrete and tangible things with which to capture and keep meaning. If it isn’t scrapbooks, photographs and keepsakes, it’s rituals and traditions, it’s thanksgiving dinner and Christmas stockings and baptismal vows and advent candles and wedding rings. 
We use symbols to make sense of our experiences, and even to allow us to truly experience life, God and meaning. 

So it is no small thing that their symbols are gone. It is not insignificant that the temple itself  - where God’s spirit had filled the space in a dramatic cloud when the doors opened for the first time – it’s not irrelevant that this is no more. They were the people of this God, brought to this place, made into a nation, a people ruled by God who was worshiped in this place.
They had the answer to the question, and any one of them back then could have told you without skipping a beat.  They could stand in the temple and point to the symbols and say right then and there who they were and how they were connected to God, what their place was in the world and why they lived like they did. They knew what it meant to worship and what their faith was all about. 
Now it is all gone, long gone. So who are they?

When Haggai speaks up, he uses language of old, promises of old, words about the God who delivered them out of Egypt, the God who claimed them as God’s very own beloved people.  He uses the old language of covenant and promises.  His words place even the confusing unfolding events of the present into a new light – suggesting that despite all evidence to the contrary, God is doing a new thing in the world, renewing the covenant relationship with Israel, helping them remember and reclaim God’s promises.  That even this pathetic little temple you’re building out of leftover rubble is part of God’s bigger picture.

Rebuild. Haggai says. Put the symbol of God’s presence with you back in your midst. Because God has chosen to be with you, you are God’s people. Whatever the external circumstances may say to the contrary, the truth is, you are God’s people. You have a responsibility to act like it.

And so, to a people teetering on the brink of extinction, held together by the tenacious zeal of a handful of priests and the fading faith in the promises of the past, nearly devoid of hope, a task is given: Put before you once again a visible symbol of what God has done, is doing, among you.  God’s grace has allowed you to survive, and God is still making God’s presence known, even here and now. Something new and living.

The temple was not important in and of itself; the symbols were nothing more than symbols. What was real all along was the presence of God; God who has never left them and will always be with them.  The rebuilt temple is not the point.  It is the building, the moving and living in faith and trust in the God who exists beyond nations and kings, outside time and space – who has claimed this people and promised to be with them no matter what. That is the point.

I will give prosperity, better translated, I will give shalom, peace, abundance. I am God beyond this moment and cannot be contained within the walls of your temple, or expelled when the walls fall down.  I am God of all the nations, of the whole world. I am the God of the past and of the future.

Hope is not about the present circumstances, it’s about the future and past telling a story to the present, mingling their flavors so that the present tastes like what is coming with a reminder of what has been. 

Their hope is not in what they can see before them, their hope can only be in the One who has claimed them through everything and continues to.  Who are we anyway? We are God’s people.  Same as we’ve always been and always will be.  So let’s act like it.

In a world that is always changing – the old is always passing away and the new is always coming, and life is never ever stagnant, even when we pause for a brief moment in a phase it doesn’t last, In a world where things are being built up and torn down constantly, where we feel uprooted half the time and dig our heels in the other half – nothing seems constant, nothing is sure.  But God remains. God remains God.  Even in the dust of broken dreams God’s promise sustains.

We are not people who merely recount, in larger than life images, the stories of the past.  Comparing what is to the rosy picture of what was.  We don’t just eek out a good enough life or hope for the best in the future.  As the Church, we are the temple of the Holy Spirit, the Body of Christ, we are the living, breathing place God resides – the people in which God’s Spirit dwells.  Our actions and words, our worship and praise, our fears and doubts, our love for one another and our care for creation, our connection to strangers and community, and to the world beyond our daily life – we are the place God resides.

And we have our symbols and signs too.  In this broken bread and poured wine before us today we share the symbols of God’s love – of God’s unrelenting and tenacious love, clinging to us, claiming us, even sharing our humanity itself, even unto death and beyond.  In the symbols, and and words, and songs of this place and time, in the rhythm and ritual of this gathering we are describing the past and what God has done, meeting God in the here and now, and remembering the future to which God is calling us, and to which all this is headed. 
We are noticing and recounting God’s faithfulness and reclaiming our identity as God’s own, as people who join God’s hope in the world.  

Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; his greatness is unsearchable. says the Psalmist.
One generation shall laud your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.
On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.
so here I go…
The LORD is just in all his ways, and kind in all his doings.  The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.  He fulfills the desire of all who fear him; he also hears their cry, and saves them. 

Thanks be to God.  Amen.


[1] I an indebted to Andrew Woff for this list.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

It's (not) about money

(A letter to my congregation)


The Big Question

A friend of mine realized that she only had one friend who went to church. As someone who cares deeply about the church, she wondered why it was. And so she began to ask them, “Why don’t you go to church?”  The answers startled her. It wasn’t what she was expecting at all. The number one answer that she received was, “I can’t afford it.”
Carol Howard Merritt, pastor and author of Tribal Church shared this in a recent blogpost.  As we enter again into “stewardship season,” where we take time to reflect on what we will pledge to the church in the coming year, I am reminded of her words.
She goes on to say that young people, with student loan debt and most of their money going to rent and taxes, don’t have much to spare, and many see church as something that requires money.  A pastor friend of mine heard a similar sentiment coming from her confirmation class. A couple of kids said they didn’t want to join the church because it would cost them too much money.
This intrigued me, because it says something about what they believe church is.  And it begs the question of all of us, What is church?  Is it a social club with membership dues and a building to maintain?  Is it a mission organization? For what?  To get people to believe the same way as “us”?  Is it a charity?  Or a middle-man who decides which charities your money should support?  If it is these things, no wonder people think they can’t afford it.  


In a difficult economic time, when money is tight, why would you want to join a social club with pressure to give money?  People have their own utilities to pay and homes to take care of, why would they want to be responsible for a church building, too?  And I suspect that if they are going to give money away, most people would choose a charity that supports something specific they believe in, and it wouldn’t be one that uses a large portion if its budget sustaining itself.
So here we go into another budget planning year, considering again the meaning of stewardship, and we are faced with some questions.  If the church is merely a social club, or a relic from the past to maintain for sentimental reasons, if it is a charity that only gives a small percentage of its money away, then I, for one, don’t want anything to do with it.  I want my money to make a difference and I want the things I give my time and energy to, to matter.  And frankly, there are better social clubs with more exciting benefits and relaxing activities.  There are charities out there with much more efficient and targeted ways of helping people.  And there are much less risky investments to be made.
But I write this as a pastor of a small congregation that perpetually and knowingly spends more than it takes in, sustained in part by the gifts of those gone before.  I write this as someone who personally strives to give generously, and sometimes does so nervously because it feels like more than I can “afford.”  I write this as someone participating, investing, committing, with my time, energy, prayer, family and money, to church.  And you are too.  Why?
So, I want to ask us a question.  I want to ask you a question. The question is not, Why do you go to church?  Because that means church is something we go to.  Church is not something we go to.  It is something that we are.  The question is not Why should do you give money to church?  Because if it is about where to give money, there are lots of other places to give it and even compelling reasons not to give it to a church, (and “should” questions rarely have life in them anyway). The question is bigger than these.
The question I want us to ponder gets at why we go to church, why we give money to church, and why we are part of this mysterious and strange thing called “church” that seems to defy cultural categories and logic.  I want us to think about why we are involved in this thing at all.  Why are we part of this collection of people committed to this thing that has something to do with God’s love, something to do with loving each other, something to do with loving the world? What is church to you?
It probably includes charitable giving, and I’m sure it involves socializing.  It likely has something to do with what the people and place have meant to you in the past, and wanting to care well for that which is entrusted to you.  But I suspect that for you to be here, willing to share your energy, intelligence, love, and your money, it is also much more than these things. 
I have deep convictions and faith about what God is doing and how we are participating.  I even happen to think God has this little congregation in this time and place for a reason – that we are right where God wants us to be.  I know that the Church goes far beyond our little expression of it in our little corner of the world.  And being the church with each other for the world goes far deeper than socializing or charity. I think we’re part of something gripping, life-changing and world-shaping, something sacred and beautiful in its ordinariness.  I’m committed. I’m in.  And most likely, if you’re reading this, you’re in, too.  I want to know why.
Over the next few weeks, I want you to consider, What is church to me?  We’ll be sharing our thoughts with one another in a few different ways as we celebrate and commit to another year of life and ministry together as the part of the Body of Christ called Lake Nokomis Presbyterian Church.
~ Kara

How to Repent (It's not how you think)

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