Joy

I think you would agree that the sun plays an important role in our lives, yes?  So important that if it ceased to exist, so would we!  If our closest star was the size of a tennis ball, the earth would be the size of a grain of sand – 1.3 million Earths could fit inside of it!  The external temperature of the sun is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, generated by a fusion reaction at its core where the temperature sores to roughly 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.  The resulting life-giving rays take eight minutes and 20 seconds to travel the approximately 93 million miles to reach us, traveling at close to 671M miles per hour.  Our Sun is big, hot, and delivers scorching rays very fast.  Sounds kind of threatening to me.

     Some preachers now and in the past used the idea of the threat of fire to terrify people toward repentance.  “Change your life and faith or you can expect the eternally burning fires of hell to somehow torment you forever!” If we fell into such fire, wouldn’t we just immediately be turned to ash?  Never mind such questions – it ruins to flow of the appeal!  John the Baptist who preceded Jesus on the Chosen People Revival Tour that ran from 27-30 CE, apparently used such rhetoric:

     Then John said to the crowds who came to be baptized by him, “You children of snakes! Who warned you to escape from the angry judgment that is coming soon? Produce fruit that shows you have changed your hearts and lives. And don’t even think about saying to yourselves, Abraham is our father. I tell you that God is able to raise up Abraham’s children from these stones. The ax is already at the root of the trees. Therefore, every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit will be chopped down and tossed into the fire.”

     The crowds asked him, “What then should we do?”

     He answered, “Whoever has two shirts must share with the one who has none, and whoever has food must do the same.”

     Even tax collectors came to be baptized. They said to him, “Teacher, what should we do?”

     He replied, “Collect no more than you are authorized to collect.”

     Soldiers asked, “What about us? What should we do?”

     He answered, “Don’t cheat or harass anyone, and be satisfied with your pay.”

     The people were filled with expectation, and everyone wondered whether John might be the Christ. John replied to them all, “I baptize you with water, but the one who is more powerful than me is coming. I’m not worthy to loosen the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. The shovel he uses to sift the wheat from the husks is in his hands. He will clean out his threshing area and bring the wheat into his barn. But he will burn the husks with a fire that can’t be put out.” With many other words John appealed to them, proclaiming good news to the people. – Luke 3:7-18 (CEB)

     Merry Christmas, to you, too, John!  Good grief!  Ever take a seminar on how to win friends and influence people?  Of course, we just experienced a national election where we were reminded of just how much fearful rhetoric is used and why: it works.  Our lizard brains, upon sensing threat, hijack everything else and cause us to react like the frightened animals we sometimes resemble.  Somehow this text ended up on the third week during Advent when we are supposed to be considering Joy.  How did John’s rhetoric get overlooked? Did some old school Baptist preacher sneak this in after the final edit?

     Believe it or not, while some of John’s language and imagined tone sound every bit like Jonathon Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (give it a read – super full of Christmas cheer!), there is within his words and passion truly good news of great joy.  Yes, he does begin with a horrible introduction, calling his growing audience “children of snakes”.  They were probably Dodger fans, and John, being from the Bay Area, simply slipped.  It happens to all of us, right?  Note, however, that he doesn’t send them packing.  Instead, he invites them to rethink their theological position based on spiritual pedigree alone.  You think being a genetic Jew is the point? You think simply saying you were baptized into the faith as an infant (or adult, for that matter) is what God is really wanting? Could a simple confession of the correct words be a big enough agenda for God?  And, by extension, do you think God really is like some judge in the heavens just waiting to exact justice?

     This does not require deep thought.  Yes, our theological convictions matter, largely because they shape our worldview which then directs our every thought and action.  Yet to suggest that all God is interested in is the right answer to a question to which you may have only been fed the right answer just before being asked?  Who in their right mind would think God so shallow, so cheap, as to believe such an exchange qualifies as salvation?  This does not challenge the notion of grace – it actually affirms it.  To the Baptizers deeper point – grace genuinely received results in the fruit of grace expressed in John’s instruction.  This is why John gives instruction to his audience to choose (or produce) such fruit. 

     For regular folx who can spare some of their own surplus so that others’ basic needs are met, share the spare!  For tax collectors who had the power to rip off their brothers and sisters with the full authority of the Empire behind them, choose to treat them with justice in mind instead of greed.  This may result in less income at the end of the year, but is more income really okay if only gained inappropriately on the backs of one’s siblings?  Where is the line for such a thought-required ethic? 

     For soldiers who had the authority to push Israelites around (likely beyond the law set by Rome), grace requires a response as well.  Stop bullying. Stop extorting. Stop framing.  Just because you can get away with something doesn’t mean you should.  Choose to abide by the law you are supposed to uphold. Earn the respect you get instead of simply enforcing your title.  Respect for title has its place, but it is the lowest form of respect. Instead, command respect from the quality of your character molded by the grace of God.

     In case you hadn’t noticed the obvious that is often lost on us reading this text two millennia and 7,400 miles removed from its original cultural context, note that John didn’t refuse to talk to the tax collectors and soldiers.  I don’t know who the parallel to tax collectors and soldiers would be for you.  Dodgers fans and players?  Of course.  But perhaps there are others who, by the very mention of their name, you have a visceral reaction.  Pedophiles? Drug dealers? Illegal drug producers? Crooked politicians? Corporate fat cats who enrich themselves on the backs of those they can legally and illegally take advantage of? Warmongering world leaders? Your Ex?  We each probably have our long list.  John, in his response to all who came to hear him is unequivocal.  All are welcome to receive the grace of God, with the proof of receipt being a changed life marked by the fruit of grace – all the things that contribute to shalom.

     Have you ever watched or read Charles Dickens’ tale, A Christmas Carol? At this time of year, you should.  I hate to be a spoiler, but how do we know Ebeneezer Scrooge was a truly changed man after his night of heavenly visits?  It wasn’t just his changed attitude, or his words of “Merry Christmas” to those he encountered.  It was his behavior, too.  He became immediately generous, born from his joyful transformation.  Are you “Scroogy” this year?  You don’t have to wait for nightmares.  Watch the movie.  Or get your head out of your gloom and wake up to the beauty as well as the need around you.  You and me – we have a life to live, and a life to offer that will make a difference.  Often times, the more “we” we offer the world in love, the more joy we feel.  Stinginess leads to less joy in my experience.

     But what about the texts about inextinguishable fire or separating chaff from wheat?  While these certainly appear to pose grave threat, commentators quickly point out that such an interpretation may be robbing us of John’s joyful Gospel intent. Separating the wheat from the chaff isn’t about separating people into binary camps of “in and out.” Farmers then and now separate the husk-chaff from the wheat not to ruin it but to save, extract, or cull the grain, to allow it to be used for its intended purpose – used to provide nourishment for others.  The separating is an act of redemption, not condemnation.

     What about the fire?  The fire burns that which we don’t want, not what we do want.  It disposes of it entirely, never to return.  This is great news!  It means there is hope for us to move beyond the worst of our past, to realize the hopeful aspiration that we are new creations in Christ!  You may have been a stingy jerk all your life until you came to grips with grace, and it leveled you with love.  Let the stinky jerk husky shell burn! Embrace the generous lover within you!  You may have been getting away with cheating someone you should have been loving.  Let the cheating husk die! Embrace the faithful love within you!  You may have been a bully all your life because bullies get away with a lot because they are big and loud.  Let the bully husk die and win favor with grace and love.  Choose to be a big, bold lover instead of a big, bold bully.

     I believe John’s heart and mind were warmed by a heat greater than our Sun.  That heat had and still has the power to melt away our greatest fears, our deepest insecurities, and are darkest dread.  The unquenchable fire of the Spirit of God is here to burn away your chaff, my chaff, our chaff, the whole world’s chaff so that we might thrive as the new beings we were intended to be.  That is so hopeful!  That is such joyful news!  Luke wasn’t off his nut after all!  This really was and is the Gospel!

     May you choose to realize that the Love that is the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of all creation still welcomes you to the waters of transformation.  You “Children of Snakes,” Merry Christmas!  May the Joy that is before you bring you to your knees in joyful adoration, and as you begin to trade your non-shalomy attitudes and behaviors for those reflective of the new life within and before you, may you have eyes to see the unwanted chaff blowing in the wind toward a fire where it will be eradicated once and for all.  May you become the “you” that you were intended to become.  May we become the “we” we were intended to become, that together we will one day sing from our collective experience, Joy to the World!  The Lord IS come!And is always and forever coming at every moment.

Peace

Note: To watch this teaching, visit YouTube.com/CrossWalkNapa/videos. To listen to this teaching, search for CrossWalkNapa on your preferred podcast app.

Our collective home, planet Earth, can feel massive.  If you’ve ever flown over an ocean or the Sahara desert, it is hard for our minds to comprehend how much water or sand we’re covering at a speed of over 500 miles per hour for hour after hour.  You’ve likely seen – or maybe even constructed – models of our solar system.  Our closest star, the Sun, is huge compared to all the planets in our solar system. While Earth is bigger than some other planets, it is dwarfed by the largest planets Saturn and Jupiter.

     Our solar system, of course, sits within our Milky Way galaxy.  The largest star we can see with the naked eye in our galaxy sits as the left shoulder in the Orion constellation.  That star is called Betelgeuse (pronounced “Beetlejuice”), which is much larger than our Sun.  If the Sun was the size of a billiard ball, Betelgeuse would be the size of an apartment building!  I’m feeling kind of small right now, how about you?

     I find it cool that our ancestors in faith saw the same stars that we do.  They were likely humbled and overwhelmed like we might be when we take it all in.  I think taking time for stargazing can lend itself to peace.  I wonder if it did for Joseph, a key character in the birth story of Jesus:

The birth of Jesus took place like this. His mother, Mary, was engaged to be married to Joseph. Before they enjoyed their wedding night, Joseph discovered she was pregnant. (It was by the Holy Spirit, but he didn’t know that.) Joseph, chagrined but noble, determined to take care of things quietly so Mary would not be disgraced.

     While he was trying to figure a way out, he had a dream. God’s angel spoke in the dream: “Joseph, son of David, don’t hesitate to get married. Mary’s pregnancy is Spirit-conceived. God’s Holy Spirit has made her pregnant. She will bring a son to birth, and when she does, you, Joseph, will name him Jesus—‘God saves’—because he will save his people from their sins.” This would bring the prophet’s embryonic revelation to full term:

Watch for this—a virgin will get pregnant and bear a son;

They will name him Immanuel (Hebrew for “God is with us”).

     Then Joseph woke up. He did exactly what God’s angel commanded in the dream: He married Mary. But he did not consummate the marriage until she had the baby. He named the baby Jesus. – Matthew 1: 18-25 (MSG)

     Poor Joseph.  A poor carpenter truckin’ along in life, engaged to a girl his parents probably arranged years before, suddenly finds himself in a lot of turmoil – the opposite of peace, perhaps.  Whatever dreams he may have had before seemed lost, irretrievable.  Add to that the emotions revolving around this conflict – with Mary, but also her parents, his parents, the community, and internal conflict as well.  What a mess! 

     We don’t know much about Joseph beyond a few verses, but we do know that he chose to pursue peace even as he decided to divorce Mary quietly.  Matthew is envisioning Joseph as a mature, kind person who sees no need to make things worse for Mary, who’s life will be forever altered by this unwanted pregnancy – who would want her now?

     I can imagine him, heartbroken and the wind knocked out of him, drifting off to sleep, only to discover that he couldn’t even get peace while he slept!  How annoying! A powerful dream entered his consciousness with a crazy invitation to reconsider the divorce and choose to go forward with the marriage to Mary because the child she was carrying was going to bring salvation in some way to the world.  At a time when dreams were taken much more seriously than they may be today, Joseph found himself in more chaos.  What to do?

     This is a story, and we are invited – even expected – to engage in dialogue about it.  How did he get to a place of peace with all of this?  I wonder if part of what helped was like what we experience when we gaze at the stars.  Perhaps he was humbled by the magnitude of all that was happening, and especially the visit from the heavens that reminded him that he was part of something much bigger than himself. 

     When faced with the grand scope of things, perhaps his perspective was changed.  His ego needs were not as significant as the whole world. The world and God’s story was too big to get caught up in his own junk. Yet at the same time, life may have felt too big to ignore what he was feeling, too.

     He surely must have processed his feelings because he continued to be kind and supportive to Mary, and Jesus and his siblings appear to have turned out to be decent human beings, to which he surely contributed.  Life was too big to get hung up on his small issues.  His life was too short to lose too much by holding on to all that was not peace for him.  The salvation that this child would bring was a saving that connotes wellbeing and wholeness.  Apparently, Joseph was one of the first recipients.  Perspective can facilitate significant peace. 

     Back to stargazing.  Our solar system is part of the Milky Way galaxy.  We see the Milky Way because of where we are seated within it.  It’s as if we were somewhere toward the middle of a frisbee looking out, through it – we see the density of starlight which creates the milky band of light.  Earth is barely a speck within the Milky Way.  If the Milky Way was the size of the continental United States, our entire solar system would be the size of a coin in Denver, Colorado. The milky band and stars would be akin to seeing the light of the city of Denver.  We are quite small.  Take that into perspective.

     Sometimes we hold onto grudges.  We hold people in a state of unforgiveness because of what they have done to us (real or imagined).  The pain we have experienced is real, leaving us without peace.  To forgive feels like injustice, so we hold onto unforgiveness and often hold it over the ones who wronged us. 

     Lewis Smedes wrote years ago that when we finally forgive someone, we set a prisoner free, only to discover that we were the ones in chains.  Forgiveness is a process that requires intentionality but that results in tremendous healing.  We don’t forget, but we do create a new way of remembering.  Brenee Brown advises that recognizing that people are doing the best they can do helps in the forgiveness process.  It’s not that people are intentionally choosing to suck, but that they may not be able to do any differently given everything that has formed them.  There is much wisdom here. 

     While there are personal benefits to doing the work of forgiveness, no longer holding unforgiveness over others impacts ongoing relationships for the better.  I’ve been on both sides of this – holding unforgiveness over others and at other times not being forgiven. The relationship in an unforgiving environment is limited – it cannot get too deep because depth requires vulnerability.  When walls of unforgiveness are in place, vulnerability is not possible. The relationship suffers. All parties in that relational system suffer the consequences.

     Life is too small to allow the heartache we have endured to have an oversized impact.  Life is too short to waste on the negative energy produced by unforgiveness when peace is within our grasp.

     Up until about 100 years ago, scientists thought the entire universe was simply the Milky Way galaxy we call home.  The Hubble telescope changed everything, helping us to see beyond the Milky Way, only to discover that there are likely TRILLIONS of galaxies in the expanding universe.  It turns out that our entire galaxy is a mere speck in a massive sea of galaxies!  If we thought we were small before...  And yet within us is a microscopic galaxy all its own – we’re huge! 

     Joseph clearly did the hard work of sorting through what he was feeling and going through, eventually to devote himself to something bigger than himself without letting it sabotage his life.  He found peace, healing, wellbeing, and wholeness – salvation.  We are Joseph, facing our own struggles, our own messed up narratives and dreams because of outside influences.  Salvation is possible, but it requires genuine faith to get there.

     Richard Rohr, writing about the need for ongoing, deep, curiosity-filled work in our lives, offers this:

     God comes into the world in always-surprising ways so that the sincere seeker will always find evidence. Is sincere seeking perhaps the real meaning of walking in faith?  The search for truth, the search for authentic love, and the search for God are finally the same search. I would rather have “one who lays down one's life for one's friend” (John 15:13) by sincere seeking, demanding scholarship, and authentic service, than those who are on no search, do no mental or emotional work, and have no open heart for the world, but just want to personally “go to heaven.” We have coddled this individualistic non-Christianity for far too long, and with no encouragement from Jesus whatsoever. – Richard Rohr, Daily Meditations: Evidence for Things Not Seen (December 2, 2024).

     To a degree, healing comes with time.  Time heals a lot of wounds, but not all wounds.  There are some hurts that we nurse all the way to our graves.  What a tragedy!  Faith calls us to work toward the peace that was available to Joseph and is available to us.  It is not easy.  It is a process.  There are innumerable resources to help us move forward.  Therapy helps.  All of this is core to becoming who we are created to be.  Life is too small (and too big) to ignore this.  Life is too short to willfully live without peace, without shalom in its fullest.

     The Apostle Paul encouraged the Philippian church to this faithful pursuit:

     So, this is my prayer: that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much but well. Learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush. Live a lover’s life, circumspect and exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of: bountiful in fruits from the soul. – Philippians 1:9-11 (MSG)

     And in a letter to a different community, he offered this benediction: “May God himself, the God who makes everything holy (well) and whole, make you holy (well) and whole, put you together – spirit, soul, and body – and keep you fit for the coming of Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:23 MSG).

     Christ is constantly coming, bringing salvation in myriad forms, including peace.  How will you welcome it?

Still Relevant?

As we begin Advent this year, as with every year passed, we still have every reason to sing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”!  And we should.  We must.

  Christian traditionally has viewed the fulfilment of the song as the second coming of Jesus Christ as depicted in Luke 21:25-36, when Jesus is depicted as triumphantly returning to earth to be its global leader, at which point everyone will apparently fall in line or die.

  Many scholars see that vision as one born from and stuck in its first century context, that they (and perhaps even Jesus if they remembered and recorded his words accurately) misinterpreted the vision of the Son of Man’s return.  Perhaps that’s not how the story will end. Perhaps that was never the vision.

  What if there is a simpler vision that proclaims what we already know to be true from experience, that when calamity of all kinds hits, Emmanuel (God with us) is more present. Not more present because things finally deteriorated to the point that God finally cared enough to show up.  Open and Relational Theology assumes and proclaims that God is already fully present, that everything lives and moves and has their being in God. 

  We experience the Presence more when calamity hits because we wake up, we open our eyes because of our suffering, we seek God and discover that God has been with us he whole time.  In our humbled, broken state, we sometimes have the capacity to see humanity’s complicity in the human-made calamities such as war, rape, abuse, slavery, and all the “isms” we can usually think of.  We sometimes can recall when we said no to the nudge of God that would have helped change the course of thing for the better. But we didn’t, and it caught up with us.

  Every calamity’s rendition of “O Come” is a new altar call, where we say once again that we are listening, that we need love and guidance, that we are open and looking for the nudge of God.

  Like the North Star, we find that God continues to guide all people toward shalom, toward redemption and safety. For ourselves. For all people. For the planet we are inextricably related to.

  Is the calamity loud enough for you to listen, to see, and to care? We don’t have to wait. We can be proactive with our attention and lives and seek God’s guidance. We can follow the guidance of shalom at every moment should we choose it.

  What are we waiting for?

Beyond Grateful

What are you grateful for?  Take a second and list five things right now.

     What are the benefits of gratitude?  Take a minute and write down benefits you can think of.  Then Google it (or check this article out from Positive Psychology, Potential Benefits of Practicing Gratitude).

     When I was gifted sabbatical leave in 2022, I wanted to use the time wisely and put tools into place that I thought might help me make the most of the time away from the demands of my role.  I picked up a Mind Journal, which is made with men in mind (good Christmas gift for men!). The journaling practice incorporates gratitude every day, because it works. 

     One of the journal prompts was to list everything I was grateful for.  I filled a few pages.  Want to guess how I felt at the end of that exercise?  Light. Grateful. Grounded. Loving and loved. Shalom. Energized. Hopeful.  If you’ve never attempted such a thing, carve out some time and space in your schedule – maybe 20-30 minutes – and give it a go.  You’ll be glad you did and surprised by the experience.

     The perspective gratitude provides is more powerful than we can imagine.  It can sometimes be used as a denial technique to avoid really painful issues.  I’m not talking about that. What many have discovered is that taking time to reflect on what we are grateful for can buoy us even when faced with suffering that is part and parcel of the human experience.  In case you have noticed, Pollyanna, life is a mixed bag. 

     Myriad expressions of hardship great and small come with the bargain.  I am an eternal optimist, which has meant that at times I have minimized, dismissed, or completely denied (consciously and/or unconsciously) the painful realities of life.  I have been guilty of being Pollyannaish.  Yet life has a way of providing reality checks from time to time, and more of them as we age.  We feel our physical age and cannot deny the changes. We suffer the consequences of decisions we or others made years before that get played out now. 

     Sometimes life just sucks.

     Yet, as counterintuitive as it may sound, gratitude helps.  A lot.  I have presided over literally hundreds of funeral services over my nearly 30 years of being a pastor.  Where there is deep grief, there has been deep love.  Where there is deep love, there is deep gratitude.  Taking time to write out all the ways we are grateful for those we’ve lost can be deeply healing. It doesn’t magically take away the pain, but it does change it in powerful ways, softening the pain somehow, grounding it, I guess. As my mother-in-law’s memorial service approaches, my wife and I feel the loss as we swipe through photos of so many shared experiences over the last decades.  The pain is real, but the gratitude gives grief opportunity for healthy expression.  Give it a shot.

     Holocaust survivors have even noted how much gratitude has made a difference in prevailing through the horrors of one of humanity’s worst offenses.  There is a lot of power in the practice of gratitude.

     Our faith offers us another level of gratitude that can exponentially turbo charge the power of gratitude.  The proclamation of our Jewish and Christian tradition (and from several other enduring traditions – maybe all of them in their own way) is that this life we live is happening within a much greater Life that we call the presence of God, or Spirit.  Jesus was convinced (and many before him), that this Presence can be characterized as benevolent, loving, kind, gracious – all the words that collectively give us the definition of the Hebrew word, “shalom”.  In the Easter story, Jesus’ disciples collectively experienced quite mysteriously and in various forms Jesus post-grave.  The big take away? There is something more than simply life of flesh and blood.  And it is welcoming and good.  John’s words at the beginning of his “Revelation” certainly hint at such thinking:

John, to the seven churches that are in Asia:

     Grace and peace to you from the one who is and was and is coming, and from the seven spirits that are before God’s throne, and from Jesus Christ—the faithful witness, the firstborn from among the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

     To the one who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, who made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father—to him be glory and power forever and always. Amen.

     Look, he is coming with the clouds! Every eye will see him, including those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him. This is so. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “the one who is and was and is coming, the Almighty.” – Revelation 1:4-8 (CEB)

     John’s weird Revelation reflects a lot of the hope Easter’s message proclaims.  It is helpful to remember that he wrote at a time of despair.  The Jewish community by that time had distanced themselves from the increasingly non-Jewish Jesus-following believers eventually known as Christians.  On top of that, the Roman Empire was barely tolerant of the group since it challenged Domitian’s claim of being God.  Recall that John wrote this general, coded letter to the churches while exiled on the island of Patmos, a penal colony. He had reason for despair.  Yet hope was bigger.  He recognized that God is Alpha and Omega, beginning and end.  Christ – the Presence – is, was, and will always be.  And will always be shalom in character and deed.

     The Apostle Paul never knew Jesus personally but was overwhelmed by Christ over a decade after Jesus’ death, experienced as a blinding light and voice that literally stopped him in his tracks.  Paul was utterly transformed by this encounter with shalom.  A satori moment for sure.  And it stuck.  He became a champion of the Gospel – the Good News – that Jesus proclaimed.  Sometimes it cost him dearly yet hope prevailed and called him forward with renewed strength, all the way until the day he was martyred.  Hear his words to a conflicted church in ancient Corinth:

     The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Lord’s Spirit is, there is freedom.

     We are experiencing all kinds of trouble, but we aren’t crushed. We are confused, but we aren’t depressed. We are harassed, but we aren’t abandoned. We are knocked down, but we aren’t knocked out... 

     We know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will also raise us with Jesus, and he will bring us into his presence along with you. All these things are for your benefit. As grace increases to benefit more and more people, it will cause gratitude to increase, which results in God’s glory.

     So, we aren’t depressed. But even if our bodies are breaking down on the outside, the person that we are on the inside is being renewed every day. Our temporary minor problems are producing an eternal stockpile of glory for us that is beyond all comparison. We don’t focus on the things that can be seen but on the things that can’t be seen. The things that can be seen don’t last, but the things that can’t be seen are eternal. – 2 Corinthians 3:17; 4:8-9,14-18 (CEB)

     As people of faith in the More, as Marcus Borg would suggest, our gratitude certainly includes all the normal things that show up on a Thanksgiving List.  Yet because of the Good News Jesus proclaimed, lived, and represented, we are beyond grateful, filled with gratitude because we believe there is something beyond the confines of flesh and blood’s limitations.  Beyond grateful with the hope that we are never alone – never have been, and never will be – because the Presence of God what gives us life and breath is our Ground of Being that never lets us go. The Spirit of God has been the fertile soil from which we sprung forth and will be the space we  find rest when these earthly lungs give out, giving way to a new, deeper, greater Breath and breathing.

     Scholar and mystic Barbara Holmes offered these poetic words, born from her real-life experience of suffering and prevailing with the shalom-Presence of God:

At the center of every crisis 
is an inner space 
so deep, so beckoning, 
so suddenly and daringly vast, 
that it feels like a universe, 
feels like God.

When the unthinkable happens, 
and does not relent, 
we fall through our hubris 
toward an inner flow, 
an abiding and rebirthing darkness 
that feels like home.

    This Thanksgiving, be grateful for the many things you can be grateful for. And be beyond grateful as well, because no matter what life doles out, we have hope for shalom to come.

The Whole Wide World Awaits

We welcome Brian Henderson to the stage, Executive Director of the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists, an international organization of 180+ churches around the world who are welcoming and affirming of the LGBTQ+ community and more.

From Soup to Shalom: Generosity

Enjoy the conclusion of this three week series offered by Angie Barker Jackson!

From Soup to Shalom: Community

Enjoy this teaching from Angie Barker Jackson as she takes us deeper in to the transformational power of community!

From Stone Soup to Shalom: Humility

Enjoy the kickoff to this three-week series offered by Rev. Dr. Angie Barker Jackson!

Life After God Week 5: own and poof!

What motivated you when you first embraced faith?  For some, it was simply part of the family tradition into which you were born.  I hear this a lot for folks raised Catholic.  Catholics have done a good job cultivating that with their rituals and sacraments.  I was a Baptist version of the same thing.  I grew up in the church – a pastor’s kid, no less.  It was a huge part of our life.  I have never really known a season of my life without the Church or faith. 

     Some people embrace the faith for purely practical reasons. They heard that heaven is in the balance of their decision.  So, even if they aren’t sure about the faith or heaven, what’s the harm?  This is reminiscent of Pascal’s wager that we learned about a few weeks back. 

     I knew another person who embraced the faith very late in life – deep into retirement – because he finally understood the magnitude of God’s grace and accepted, it, weeping.  He wept because of the release of shame and guilt he had carried for decades after the Korean War where he took many lives in battle.  He felt completely unworthy of God’s love and welcome due to his actions.

     I’ve also known people who were directly and indirectly told that they were no good from a young age.  Their parents and family, by their words and actions, created and reinforced an awful self-image that they assumed reflected God as well.  These people are victims of others’ awful behavior.  Hearing and believing that God loves them – that at their core they have value – is absolutely transformative. 

     What compelled you to embrace the faith?  Were any of the above part of the motivation?

     Jesus’ first sermon after returning from his post-baptism camp trip touched on some of these themes.  In that Nazareth Shabbat gathering, Jesus chose what text to speak on.  He was intentional when he read Isaiah’s vision of what God’s anointed one would be about (Luke 4:18-19 CEB):

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because the Lord has anointed me.

He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,

to proclaim release to the prisoners

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to liberate the oppressed,

and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

     In another space, Jesus was remembered saying, “I am the Door; anyone who enters in through me will be saved (will live). He will come in and he will go out [freely] and will find pasture... The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, until it overflows). (John 10:9-10 AMPC).  And in yet another, “This is eternal life: to know you, the only true God... I’m not asking that you take them out of this world but that you keep them safe from the evil one. They don’t belong to this world, just as I don’t belong to this world... I pray they will be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. I pray that they also will be in us, so that the world will believe that you sent me. (John 17:3, 15-16, 21  CEB)

     Mark Feldmeir, in his book, Life After God, notes what isn’t mentioned in Jesus’ borrowed vision of what he was to be about.  There is nothing about heaven, or saving your soul, or asking Jesus into your heart.  And yet for many churches, this has become a primary reason to embrace and nurture the faith.  In the 1800’s, preachers began using the threat of hell in earnest to coerce people into accepting Christ.  Billy Sunday led massive crusades in the 1920’s; Billy Graham picked up his mantel and packed stadiums for decades with this central question: are you going to say yes to Jesus or eternity in hell?  Fear is effective.  That’s why with every election cycle, we hear commercials for political candidates filled with fearful rhetoric.  Facts don’t matter much, apparently, because they don’t seem to make much difference in our current election.  They haven’t mattered a lot for many who were frightened into the loving arms of Jesus with the threat of facing a wrathful God if they didn’t.  The horrible logic in this sales pitch should have been enough to cause many to balk.  Yet millions have caved under fear.  Fear is powerful.

     How did fear factor into your decision to embrace faith?

     Jesus wasn’t about fear.  He won people to faith with love, welcome, hope, and what might be possible for the future.  For those of you who came to faith wooed by love and grace that overcame the shame and guilt of decisions past and/or the voices of many in the present, who were not so much won over with the promise of heaven but emotional healing now, consider yourselves lucky.  You experienced the invitation of Jesus that he extended to everyone.  If you embraced faith for lesser reasons, maybe it’s time to let go of the fear filled lies and trade up to unconditional love.

     Feldmeir suggests that our embrace of faith isn’t a singular decision, but a process where we decide again and again whether to follow Jesus.  It’s not so much about becoming born again as it is about being born again and again and again and again...  In the first death and birth of faith, we shed the lie that we are unworthy of love, acceptance, and dignity.  Religion wraps this in God language. We believe that God loves us unconditionally, wholly, which therefore means these things are true for us.  Some stay there, content with this very good news.

     In the second death and birth, we awaken to the truth that everyone and everything is loved as much as we are, worthy of love, acceptance, and dignity.  This is the beginning of the death of egocentrism and is difficult, because it feels like we are losing our specialness.  If we’re not more loved than others, that somehow devalues us, which is, of course, not true. Just because everyone is special doesn’t wipe out anyone’s specialness.  When this takes root, we begin to see and treat others differently, more graciously, because we recognize their inherent worth. This leads us to give people a break for being human just like us.  This allows room for the forgiveness process as well.

     The third death and birth: we die to self and embrace the vision of Jesus, willing to expand our personal vision to invest in the wellbeing of others, including our enemies. (Life After God, 187-189)

     Each of these moves and more require a death before a birth, a letting go of the past and an openness to the new.  Like a lobster molting out of its too-small-outer shells, the process is difficult, probably painful, and leads to an incredibly vulnerable in-between period as the new shell grows into place, only to happen again and again as the lobster grows. 

     Have you ever met a lobster who refused to leave its shell?  They are infamously grumpy.  So are Christians who refuse to grow, which requires letting go.  It’s hard.  It’s painful. Babies cry at the top of their lungs when they leave the womb, and we generally act like babies with every significant change.  By the way, Jesus let go of former ways to embrace the new.  He encouraged others to do the same – what do you think the parable of the wineskins was about?

     Where are you in your unfolding faith and life process?  According to theologian Bernard Loomer, a sign that we are growing is an enlarged heart, where we become increasingly concerned about the wellbeing of others.  Why is this a sign?  Because the salvation offered by God and proclaimed by Jesus was shalom for all.  Wellbeing.  Wholeness.  Equanimity. Healthy relationships. Healthy planet.  Love abounding. Peace.  I believe shalom is what we all truly want for ourselves and for everyone and everything.

   The late Will Campbell was a preacher and civil rights activist who escorted black students into the newly integrated Little Rock High School. As hate mail from conservatives came in, he recognized he hated the haters as much as they hated him and the integration itself. In his estimation, he was no better that those he was accusing of hatred. So, he began sipping whiskey with KKK members, even becoming known as the Chaplain to the Klan.  He slowly began winning them over. In time, however, he began receiving hate mail from more liberal people who challenged his relationship with the Klan members.  His response? “If you’re gonna love one, you’ve got to love ‘em all.” (191). That’s evidence of a person who has been born again and again and again and again.

     For many who came to faith based on the threat of hell and the promise of heaven, the above is hopefully a breath of fresh air.  Yet we also cling to the hope of heaven.  What do we do with that?

     Jesus is remembered as not shying away from the question about what happens when we die.  According to those who wrote down what they remembered of his teachings, Jesus believed there was more to come, all awash in the love of God.  We can often get caught up in literal details and miss the themes Jesus was trying to communicate.  In John 14, Jesus cast a wonderful vision of post-grave life as being spent in a sprawling complex built by God for us.  I hope that’s not literal.  Can you imagine how big that place must be by now? How long will it take to catch an elevator?  And what about parking?  Let’s hope and pray something more was being communicated.  Hint: it was.  The disciples would have been terrified after Jesus’ crucifixion and likely accused of being his followers, making them apostates as well.  Sure religious leaders would have told them of God’s coming wrath for their heresy.  In those moments, perhaps they would recall Jesus’s point: God accepts them now and forever. Believe it.  Trust in it.

     Yet my confidence is not only my intellectual conclusion that the God Jesus proclaimed is indeed experienced as graceful, loving, and forgiving, which means I will be allowed to pass through the Pearly Gates.  Jesus was offering a time-stamped expression of hope to his audience and all audiences who wonder about the nature of God as it relates to our lukewarm devotion to the Spirit.  The bottom line for Jesus was that everyone is loved even if not everything we do is lovely.

     My confidence is in my ongoing, growing awareness and experience of the “more” that we call God (to borrow a Marcus Borg phrase). The “more” is gracious and spacious, is present, is supportive, is the sense of love itself.  This love has held me my whole life, has shaped me, wooed me toward love for the sake of love. This love seems to be always flowing, has been forever, and will be forever.

     What, then, is the final act for me and the whole world?  It seems to me that Jesus’ insight and that of his followers was that love was the end goal: shalom for everyone and everything. I trust that.  If that means there will be a massive family reunion of sorts where everyone is somehow their best selves and still recognizable, and everyone gets along and forgets and forgives the reasons they haven’t before, I’m cool with that.  If the end is more like rivers flowing to the sea, becoming one, where all of our drips make up the whole, always part of the whole, becoming the ocean and discovering we’ve been the ocean? I’m cool with that.  If, when I draw my last breath, there is no breath here or beyond the grave, I won’t have any capacity to be anything other than cool with that!

    Regardless of the vision that will become reality, I live in hope and with hope. I trust love. I choose love as much as I am able, even if I struggle most of the time. Love has held me, saved me, continues to woo me. I don’t think love will ever let me go, and that gives me great peace. To not have any anxiousness about our end may not be possible. No getting around that. Yet I am okay trusting in the “thisness” that is the fabric of life itself. I am a part of it. It is part of me. That will never change. So, until I draw my last breath, I simply choose to breath.

Life After God Week 4: hum & buzz

If you have ever deeply loved a pet, you will resonate with this story.  We had a little dog named Banjo.  He was a “Chi-Weenie” – a mutt, really, but with some Dachshund and Chihuahua influence.  When my kids were in Middle School, they made it known that they wanted a lap dog.  Well, it was our daughter Laiken’s dream to have a lap dog.  We had a huge dog at the time, named Chico (which of course means small), weighing in at around 120 pounds before we scaled back the jerky treats...  Lynne did not want another dog, thinking the caring and feeding would largely fall on her.  CrossWalker Trudy Brutsche was rescuing a litter or pups and invited us to come take a look.  Banjo sort of chose us.  The kids and I won out, and we brought home a teeny, little puppy, somewhat to Lynne’s chagrin.  To make things easier, I brought the puppy with me to work for a couple of weeks (this is before we had to stop allowing dogs on campus).  My noon Praxis group got to cuddle with him, bringing a lot of love and joy.  Incredibly, Banjo somehow knew which Shaw family member he needed to win over – Lynne.  Long story short, before too long Lynne was head over heels in love with Banjo. She was his favorite.  She would never again sit on the couch alone.  We would never again have a bed to ourselves!

     When I was on a trip to Africa to visit a mission that CrossWalk supported, Lynne shared terrible news with me when I called home.  Banjo was not well. It turns out he had an auto-immune condition that affected his central nervous system.  Without help he would not be able to walk.  With help, there was a chance we’d have him with us for a year or so.  We chose to help, which meant that every month we would take him to UC Davis on back-to-back days, twice each day to get a shot that was used to fight cancer but was also effective at keeping the swelling around his central nervous system down.  The treatment cost a lot of money and time, but it worked!  Banjo remained a part of our family.

     The Banjo years saw a lot of change in our lives, and a lot of challenges that come with raising two very busy kids through their teenage years.  Banjo was there to provide comfort when Chico died.  Banjo was there to provide grief support when our beloved Karen died, who was a much of a grandma to our kids as their biological family members.  Other stressors crept in as well, and Banjo remained his loving, little self.  He acted as a conduit of love somehow that calmed things down when things were difficult.

     We had agreed from the beginning that we didn’t want Banjo to suffer, and that we would keep up his treatments so long as he could “be a dog.”  We had watched a neighbor keep his dog alive too long, in our opinion, because he couldn’t let go.  We wanted Banjo to live only if his quality of life was sustained.  The time came when it couldn’t be any longer.  We traveled one last time to UC Davis where the staff knew and loved him after five years of treatment.  I held him as he drew his last breath. I felt his heart stop.  I have never experienced greater sorrow. This shocked me, because I’ve lost very important people in my life who I have dearly loved.  Maybe it was in part because I was holding him, or maybe it was the absence he left us with.  I don’t know.

     When we got home, we sat in the quiet sadness of grief, together, in our back yard.  As we mourned, a white moth flittered by, playing off the breeze.  We hadn’t ever seen a white moth in our back yard before, so it caught our attention.  It felt like any time we were down for the days and week s ahead, that white moth would show up.  Call us weird, but we placed meaning on the visit.  We embraced it as some sort of sign of love that brought comfort, sort of like a white dove representing the Spirit of God descending on followers.  Even though we know it’s a moth, whenever we see a white moth, we call it Banjo.  We accept the presence of the moth as a gift from God, a reminder that love lives on. Every instance a reminder of the love we had and shared for our beloved dog.  Was God in any way part of this?

     What do we do with “spiritual experiences” where we feel like we’re encountering some aspect of the divine?  Is this just wishful thinking?  Since the Scientific Revolution, as a culture we have become more and more rationally oriented as we have come to understand how the world works. So much so that when people speak of spiritual experiences, feelings, or things like I described above, they can be written off as wishful thinking, emotional nonsense, or just hogwash.  I get it.  Our culture’s rational bias has made me wonder the same.  Am I nuts or is there really something happening that appears to be a divine interaction of some sort?

     Our Jewish ancestors were quite intentional in their story craft.  Their primary name attributed to God - by far - was Yahweh.  As we noted last week, Yahweh as a word is more of a verb than a noun. I AM WHAT I AM refers to a presence that has been in the past, present, and future that flows and is constantly around, like wind.  Ruach, the Hebrew word for Spirit, also refers to wind and breath.  These are things that are experienced for than something you can turn into an object.  Perhaps this might be why making an idol representing God was forbidden – it cannot be done and also severely impedes our understanding of what we’re talking about. 

     Stories of a breathy, windy God show up in powerful ways in the Bible.  Creation in Genesis 1. The story of the parting of the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds) during the Exodus. Elijah’s hearing God in the sound of silence (where he could only hear his own breath). Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones becoming alive again only after receiving the wind-breath of God. Peter seeing the wind that was allowing him to walk on water and freaking out, sinking.  And Pentecost, with the sound of wind filling the room (along with tongues of fire and new tongues of language) all representing the Spirit’s overwhelming, unmistakable presence for all.  These are just a few of the mystical experiences from our deep tradition. The ancient world had no problem with such encounters – the world itself seemed magical.

     Today, we struggle with such whimsy.  But should we?  It seems to me that there will always be a tension between our experiences of Divine Breath and our rational minds wanting to discount it.  Surely even in the magical past the tension was also pronounced.  How was Abraham feeling about a strong sense of divine call leading his to start fresh in a new land?  Or Moses sensing a call to return to Egypt? Or Jesus saying yes to a countercultural, counter intuitive vision that would cost his life?

        We will never be rid of the tension.  We’re going to have to deal with that.  For those who are “all in” on mystical experiences, we need to embrace community who might help discern our experiences, so we don’t do something that is really stupid and overly driven by ego.  For those who are so questioning of Yahweh’s presence that they are practically deaf and blind to what they are swimming in, we need community to help recognize where the breeze of the divine has already been blowing in their lives to perhaps open their ears and eyes to things that have always been and will forever be. Insights on either side of the spectrum cannot be forced, and so we must walk together in humility and grace, following the breeze that will always feel like shalom, will always encourage shalom, and will always direct us tows shalom. 

    Today, may you catch the breezy breath of Yahweh that is always blowing.

Life After God Week 3: Hmm (the aim of god)

Psalm 139 is a very popular poem written about God, attributed to King David. We don’t really know what led to such a gushing of praise in prose, but it must have been something pretty powerful.  A moment of insight? Or a moment of conclusion after a long period of reflection?  We don’t know. Whatever happened, the poet was left extolling ideas about God that have  resonated with many people throughout the ages, even up to now, showing up in Ellie Holcomb’s song,Where Can I Go.  The poet offers his insights about God’s character and nature, believing that God knows everything about him – even the number of hairs on his head! He believes that God is absolutely everywhere, which is huge claim lost on us in our time – gods were largely understood to be regional in that time in history. He notes that he believes that God knows the future in advance, including every word that the poet would ever utter.  The poem is itself a declaration of adoration, but he goes further to say that he hates God’s enemies and wished them dead.  Kind of a dark turn before a more positive finish.  The poet is overwhelmed at what he perceived to be God’s knowledge, power, and magnitude.  Yet the poet doesn’t necessarily declare that God is good or kind or loving.

     At this point, it is good to remember that Psalm 139 is a poem, not meant to be doctrinal even if it certainly communicates aspects of the poet’s theology.  We need also remember that the Bible is a collection of books written over hundreds of years capturing roughly 2,000 years of ideas about God with multiple genres.  It is a marvelous collection of how people thought over time based on their learning and experience. God didn’t write the Bible; people like us did. With great care, I might add.  Sometimes what they wrote resonates so much with us that we might even say it was inspired. Yet it remains what it is, and that makes it a great gift and invitation to us.  A gift because we get a courtside view of the struggle people went through as they developed their thought. An invitation because the Bible itself displays contrasting ideas throughout, which means we are invited to wrestle ourselves with such big ideas about the nature of everything, including God.  We can take issue with the writers and craft our own poems and positions in light of our learning and experience, including what we have learned from them.

     So, where do you agree with the poet. And where don’t you agree?  If you wrote your own poem using Psalm 139 as a reference, what would you keep? What would you cut? What would you modify to make it your own? You are allowed to do this.  You already have over the course of your life, again and again and again.

     Sometimes we get tripped up by the Bible because we approach it wrongly, as written by God. When we do that, the ideas about God’s foreknowledge of everything becomes problematic. It implies that we really don’t have any volition in our lives. No agency. It has been written.  We are predetermined – the good, the bad, and the ugly.  If your life is awesome, good for you!  You won the lottery, apparently.  If your life feels sucky, well, that’s a bummer.  Too bad for you for getting handed that script.  Such thinking limits our personal responsibility.  “Hey, sorry for the pain my life has caused. But don’t get mad at me – I was just following the script – get mad at the author.”

     What do you think – is your life predetermined? Do you have relative agency over your own life? Are your decisions yours or were they scripted before “in the beginning”?

     We see a contrast in another popular passage of scripture coming from a time of agony. Israel was overtaken by the Babylonian Empire. Except for a small remnant of folk, most Jewish people were taken to Babylon as exiles.  They wondered what to make of it all, what it said about them, God, and their future.  The prophet, Jeremiah, in his reflection offered a beautiful word of hope about God’s position on the subject:

I know the plans I have in mind for you, declares the LORD; they are plans for peace, not disaster, to give you a future filled with hope. – Jeremiah 29:11 CEB

     In other parts of Jeremiah, the idea is presented that Israel’s exile is due to their disobedience. If they had been more faithful over the centuries, they would still be in the Promised Land.  If only they had followed God’s plan.  The idea of God’s plan is a whopper for a lot of Christians.  I have watched people agonize over major decisions, wondering, “Is this God’s plan for me? What if I get it wrong?”  I have, at times, agonized as well.  Yet, as Mark Feldmeir correctly notes in his book, Life After God, Jeremiah isn’t referring to some already predetermined plan but rather hopes, dreams, a vision of something more.

     How does this change things for you regarding interpreting God’s plan for you or will for you?  On the one hand, it takes a lot of pressure off knowing that “plans” are really hopes and not a playbook we must follow or suffer God’s condemnation.  On the other hand, it implies we bear responsibility for our own lives.  We don’t have to entertain God’s hopes into our lives at all! We can do what we want.  We always do.

     The whopper question is, what do we want to do with our lives? What role does our understanding of God play in our decisions? Why would we care about God’s hopes and dreams, according to Jeremiah’s view?  Further, which view of God in the Bible do we choose to embrace?  Some passages portray God as a hot-headed, immature jerk that is incredibly temperamental and even untrustworthy, ready to punish us if we get out of step.  Maybe that’s why there are people of faith that are jerks – they are basing their belief on that understanding of God.  The Bible is a gift in that way. When we recognize that many people from the distant past had divergent views of God, it reminds us that we are on the journey, too, figuring out what we believe, why it matters, and what we are going to do with it.

     A major theme that shows up throughout the Bible is a very big idea wrapped up in the word, shalom.  Feldmeir expresses it this way:

Shalom means to make something whole. Shalom is an experience of fullness, completeness, contentment. Perhaps the closest word to shalom in the English language is something like well-being. But even that’s inadequate, because well-being doesn’t come close to capturing the radical and counterintuitive nature of shalom. In the Hebraic way of thinking, this fullness, completeness, contentment, well-being called shalom is the result of the joining together of opposites or ostensibly opposing forces. (74-75)

     For the Jewish people, shalom is salvation.  Even though there are references to an angry, judging, wrathful God waiting to strike (a reminder of the human origins of biblical text), there exists throughout the Hebrew scriptures a counterintuitive, countercultural vision of shalom as described above.  The theme continues throughout the Christian New Testament but using Greek words instead.  Salvation itself referred mostly to the themes of shalom – being healed, made whole, deep and abiding peace.  The salvation spoken of by Jesus was also countercultural and a direct challenge to the Roman Empire, which also claimed to offer salvation.  The Pax Romana – the Peace of Rome – was peacekeeping by force: obey the Empire unless you want to suffer the consequences.  The Salvation Jesus promoted was aligned with the Jewish shalom that he undoubtedly knew and embodied. This was not peacekeeping, but peacemaking.  Not a peace kept by force, but a peace cultivated by love.  Jesus was all about this kind of salvation, a holistic wellbeing, deep peace, and abiding love that invites, compels, and instructs our lives going forward.  Jesus lived this shalom, taught this shalom, and in inviting others to follow, he was wooing them to do the same.  This is a way of seeing and engaging the world that affects our intrapersonal lives (our relationship with ourselves), our interpersonal lives (our relationship with others), and also the global community (how nations and peoples get along with each other). I believe that while we often settle for a cheap imitation of peacekeeping by force, our heart of hearts longs for the deeply rooted peacemaking shalom of God.

     This shalom, by the way, requires some very hard work.  Bringing opposites together, shining a light on things we would rather avoid or deny yet are always with us, informing us.  Feldmeir speaks into this regarding our past.  He quotes William Faulkner who famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  Feldmier goes on to suggest that “our past determines our present and informs our future possibilities. We are products of our past. We are the sum total of our past choices and experiences, and the sum total of the world’s past choices and experiences” (78).   As we move forward with our lives there are three variables that determine our future.  The past and what we do with it, the always present, shalom-oriented invitation of God, and ourselves. 

     What do you want for your life?  Feldmeir offers insight on the shalom-way forward:

“Shalom is refusing to get mired too deeply in the past and refusing to live too far into the future... Shalom, wholeness, well-being happens when we join our imperfect, less-than-ideal past with the more hopeful and real possibilities of the future and choose to live most fully in the real and present moment, deciding today who we will be, how we will live, whether we will pursue the aim or intention God has set before us” (80-81).  How is this landing with you today?  Perhaps there is unfinished business in your life, unresolved, unhealed wounds from your past.  Could the woo of shalom be inviting you to take steps toward healing, maybe with the help of a counselor or close friend or a journal or at minimum time and space where you no longer pretend it’s not there?  Perhaps today you are being wooed toward peacemaking instead of peacekeeping in your relationship with yourself, others, and in the way you view global turmoil. Sometimes peacekeeping is needed to stop bloodshed, but if that’s all we settle for, there will eventually be more bloodshed. Peacemaking leads to lasting peace.  Perhaps all of us today way be feeling the invitation to refresh our commitment to living our lives by the True North of shalom, which happens to be what we are agreeing to when we pledge our allegiance to following Jesus.  Perhaps declaring such commitment regularly – daily – will remind us to stay the course even when the prevailing winds of culture come at us with gale force, demanding a different direction.  These are the biggest questions of life, and they are always before us.

    May you trust in shalom, which is to trust in God. May you fully embrace the vision that shalom-God truly does have a vision for your life that does not harm but is full of hope. May you feel the fresh breeze of invitation to this life every morning, every moment, and may you say “yes!”

Life After God Week 2: Psst (the call of God)

This series is based on Mark Feldmeir’s book, Life After God.

Below are some quotes used in Sunday’s teaching.

Letting go...

Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem. – Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

But before you dismiss everything or even anything you already believe, attend first to that which you know, through your lived experience, has gladdened your soul and added beauty and wonder and joy to your life. Consider the very real possibility that such experiences might be hints of the transcendent, holy epiphanies, divine encounters, the quiet, hidden work of God. Behold them with kindness and reverence and astonishment. Protect them fiercely, even if they do not conform to what tradition or convention or orthodoxy calls authoritative or even real. Love them for what they are, for their courage to have shown up, for their companionship, for their generosity. Hold them closely, tenderly. Give thanks. (44)

Tohu va-vohu

The preexistent, primordial chaos and disorder, the wild and waste, the empty and void between being and not-being. (49).

Let there be...

The God of the Bible is a God whose power is expressed not in the capacity to make something happen, to prevent something from happening, or to coerce anything or anyone to act, but in the power to persuade us to pursue the divine wish, dream, hope that the tohu va-vohu stuff of our lives and world would say yes to all the hidden possibility that only God can fully perceive. Some theologians call this divine power of persuasion the lure of God that draws, leads, entices, and calls us and all creation forward by saying, Psst! You can do this! You could be this! (52)

Unilateral v. Relational Power

The first, unilateral power, is the ability to produce intended or desired effects in our relationships through influence, manipulation, or control to advance our purposes.

Unilateral power is one-sided, one-directional, one-dimensional, non-relational in nature, and almost always diminishes or robs the agency of the other. It takes whatever is necessary to get whatever it wants. (55)

Relational power is the capacity both to influence the other and to be influenced by the other. Relational power is grounded in mutuality, openness, responsiveness, persuasion, and interdependence. It involves both giving and receiving. (56)

Creating God in Caesar’s Image

The early twentieth-century mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead reminds us where and when the Christian tradition departed from ancient Jewish thinking about God: When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. . . . The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. . . . But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar. (58-59)

Yahweh and El Shaddai

Yahweh means simply, I Am, or I Am What I Am. The ancient rabbis believed Yahweh was not a noun but a verb form that expresses past, present, and future tenses all at once. They said YHWH means something like the one who was-is-will be. I Am is everywhere, in all things, in every moment, for all time. (60)

El Shaddai is from the Hebrew root word, Shad, meaning breast. The Hebrews translated the name El Shaddai not as God Almighty, but as The Breasted God. Can you envision the divine as The Breasted God who desires to embrace and hold you like a mother or a father, to nourish and care for you with a deep and abiding love? (61)

Jesus’ Abba/Dad

Life after the God we can no longer believe in can be one of the most fertile seasons for claiming a life in pursuit of the God we have never met— a God who loves us too much to coerce or control us, a God who lures, beckons, persuades, and woos us toward the divine dream, calling us to becoming, to goodness, to beauty. (65)

All quotes are from Mark Feldmeir’s book, Life after God: Finding Faith When You Can't Believe Anymore. Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

Questions to think about...

1. If you imagine organized religion as your “boat in the storm,” how do you decide when the challenge of hanging on is worth the risk of letting go?

2. Consider Walt Whitman’s advice to “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul.” What beliefs have you found to be insulting to your soul? How do you feel about the author’s advice to, before discarding, “give them permission to exist, to sit beside you, to just be,” and then, if you find they have no further value for you, “Tell them thanks for sharing, but it’s time for them to move on now”?

3. In contrast to those things that insult your soul, what has “gladdened your soul and added beauty and wonder and joy to your life,” as the author says?

4. Is there anywhere you see God currently at work in your life or in the world? Are there small or ordinary things presently beckoning or calling you toward greater meaning, beauty, or wonder?

5. What is the difference between a God who works through relational power and one who works through unilateral power?

6. What do you make of the ancient rabbinical idea that “God/Yahweh” is not a noun but a verb? How does that affect the way we might choose to relate to God?

7. Can you identify with a call from God that sounds like “Psst. You could do this. You could be this”?

Life after God: "shh" (the problem of god)

This series is based on Mark Feldmeir’s book, Life After God.

Some select quotes...

Theodicy

I’m sitting in a seminary professor’s office one afternoon when, all at once, he pulls a gun on me. He fishes it out of his desk drawer, points it at my chest, leisurely pulls back the hammer, and asks me if I believe in God. It’s all so completely unexpected and so seemingly out of character for a professor who is, by all accounts, a vegan and a pacifist and is known for being really into the universe and having lots of houseplants and smoking peyote in the desert and practicing tai chi and commuting to campus on an old Schwinn Wayfarer ten-speed and wearing a tan corduroy sport jacket with those brown leather elbow patches. He is that kind of professor. (10)

Pascal’s Wager: Better to believe in God, because if God actually exists, you’re better off as a believer.  But to not believe in God if God exists might result in eternal condemnation.

C.S. Lewis to write his well-known book, The Problem of Pain, to resolve this enduring theological puzzle. In it, Lewis wrote famously, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, and shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” But later, after the death of his wife, Joy, Lewis reconsidered his notorious megaphone theodicy. In his book A Grief Observed, as he pondered whether God might be the “Eternal Vivisector,” the “Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile,” he confessed that, in the end, “you can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.” (20)

When Pascal died, his servant found sewn into his jacket a brief document titled “Memorial,” which summarized his mystical experience and included the words— “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. . . . Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God.” (21-22)

No Hard Questions?

What? Why, Shh? Because we don’t talk about these things. I tell you all of this because chances are the Shh! is as real for you as it was for me, and because there is for all of us the gun and the bullet and the questions and the contradictions and the faint sound of your own voice whispering, “I want to believe but I don’t know what I believe or how to believe.” Maybe you see the beauty of God and you can’t say no, but you see the suffering of the world and you can’t stop asking why. Maybe you believe and doubt and despair and you want to know that even this is faith. But then someone, something, some collective voice says, Shh! And then you stop asking why. And then you stop saying yes. And then you just stop believing. (26-27)

The God we no longer believe in

The Jewish sages taught that Jacob’s story suggests there’s another world—a dimension of the spiritual—right here within this world, that lies open to us whenever we awaken to it and pay attention to it. Like Joseph, we can access that world from this world, if only we can learn to see differently. (31-32)

Book Quotes: Feldmeir, Mark. Life after God: Finding Faith When You Can't Believe Anymore. Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

Questions to Consider

1. The author begins with the story of his professor’s hypothetical question about God stopping a fired bullet. How do you find yourself challenged by questions of theodicy, or why an all-loving and all-powerful God does not stop bad things from happening? Do you consider this a problem that must be solved?

2. What do you think of Pascal’s wager that it is safer or wiser to believe in God than to risk eternal punishment? Do you agree with Pascal that “reason impels you to believe”?

3. How might the opposite—“reason impedes your ability to believe be true instead?

4. Have you heard the “shhh” the author discusses—the implicit or explicit warning not to ask the hard questions about God? What questions seem most threatening to some people?

5. How would you describe “the God you no longer believe in”?

Divine Violence

Enjoy this lecture by scholar Eric A. Seibert that does not dismiss violence that is attributed to God in the Bible, but rather offers compelling ways to think about it. Below is the handout he provided for his presentation.

“The Lord Will Take Delight in Bringing You to Ruin and Destruction” (Deut. 28:63, NRSV):

The Violent Old Testament God as a Problem for Open and Relational Theologians

Eric A. Seibert

eseibert@messiah.edu

ORTCON 22

July 6, 2022 - Grand Targhee Resort - Alta, WY

I.               The Presence of Divine Violence in the Bible

A.             How many verses?

B.             How many casualties?

II.             The Cornerstone of Open and Relational Theology

A.             God is love.

B.             Quotes

 

God's unchanging nature is love.... love is what God does....love comes logically first among divine attributes....God cannot not love....open and relational theology says God must love (Oord, Open and Relational Theology, 124).

 

To love is to act intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being (Oord, Pluriform Love, 28).

III.          The Problem

A.             Is God's violent behavior in the Old Testament loving? Does it promote

overall well-being?

B.             Violence: physical, emotional, or psychological harm done to a person

by an individual, institution, or structure that results in serious injury,

oppression, or death (Seibert, Disarming the Church, 10).

IV.           Three Possible “Solutions"

A.             Reject the Old Testament (change your view of the Bible)

B.             View God as both good and evil (change your view of God)

C.             Defend Cod's violent behavior as loving behavior (change your   interpretation of violent verses)

V.             My Proposal: Deconstruct Violent Portrayals of God

A.             Emphasize the human origins of the Bible,

B.             Contextualize violent Old Testament portrayals of God.

C.             Acknowledge God did not say or do everything the Old Testament

claims.

1.              Archaeological evidence

2.              The nature of ancient historiography

D.             Distinguish “between the textual God and the actual God.”

E.              Use the God Jesus reveals to challenge violent portrayals of God in the

Old Testament.

 

Premise 1: God's moral character is most clearly and completely revealed through the person of Jesus.

 

Premise 2: Jesus reveals a God of love: one who heals rather than harms, is kind rather than cruel, forgives rather than retaliates, and behaves nonviolently rather than violently.

Three Objections

(1)            The temple cleansing.

(2)            Not coming to bring peace but a sword

(3)            Eschatological judgment

Premise 3: God's moral character is consistent throughout time.

Interpretive Implication: The God Jesus reveals should be the standard by which all literary Portrayals of God are evaluated. Portrayals that correspond to the God Jesus reveals should be regarded as reliable rejections of God's character, while those that do not should be regarded as culturally conditioned understandings that do not reflect God's true nature.

VI.           Where Do We Go from here?

A.             Stop defending God's violent behavior in the Old Testament.

B.             Start publicly deconstructing violent portrayals of God.

C.             Offer a more accurate view of God as gracious, loving, and nonviolent.

D.             Do something creative, constructive, and responsible with Old

Testament passages in which God behaves violently.

Portions of this presentation were adapted from my previous work, most fundamentally from Eric A. Seibert, Disturbing Divine Behavior: Troubling Old Testament Images of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009).

This. Is. My. Body.

Enjoy this compelling teaching offered by Rev. Dr. Angela Barker-Jackson.

Faith in Process: Putting it all together

Faith in Process: Creating a Life in God

“The main thing is to have God; to live in God; to have God live in us; to think God’s thoughts; to love what God loves and hate what God hates; to realize God’s presence; to feel God’s holiness and to be holy because God is holy; to feel God’s goodness in every blessing of your life and even in its tribulations; to be happy and trustful; to join in the great purposes of God and to be lifted to greatness of vision and faith and hope with God – that is the blessed life.” – Walter Rauschenbusch, The Culture of the Spiritual Life, 1897

If we want a faith experience like Jesus, we need to follow his lead, to learn and include his rhythms into our lives.  The “salvation” he offered was a whole and lasting life, one filled with abundance of love, joy, peace, meaning, wellbeing, genuine relationships, significance – the things most people really want from life that money cannot buy.  Jesus’ earliest followers followed his teaching and example so fully that they were first known as the People of the Way.  Oh, that we might be known for that once more!

Jesus incorporated five movements into his life which produced the fruit of the whole-life salvation/well-being/spiritual vitality he was known for.  He chose to stretch his thinking (lifelong learning), kneel in service to others, stand for grace and justice, commune with God intentionally, and connect with others in genuine community.  Cultivate these movements into your life rhythm to foster the fruit of life in God.

Stretch. How are you incorporating new insights about God into your life?  If you don’t make an effort to stretch in this area, it is likely that the faith you were born into will be the faith you take to your grave.  How tragic would that be? Invest in your theological perspective.  Check out our resources on CrossWalk’s website (CrossWalkNapa.org/Resources) for recommended books, podcasts, and online sources.  Make a plan for when you are going to read.  Get in on the Heart of Christianity class based on Marcus Borg’s book by the same name.  Take it again every few years. In my opinion, it is the most comprehensive book that helps with deconstruction and reconstruction of the faith.

Kneel.  We all have different capacities when it comes to serving others.  Our skills and passions vary to a person.  Our availability often is dictated by our stage of life and a wide range of issues like work, health, parenting, school, sports, an important TV shows we must stream or risk social ostracization (okay, the last one may not be true for everyone). Yet kneeling in service is as much a way of being in life as it is something to be accomplished or ticked off a task list.  When we carry an attitude of loving our neighbors wherever we go, life improves.  We look at everyone a little differently.  I believe that when we enter the world this way, we affect those we are around.  We become walking air fresheners wherever we go.  Of course, many of us have time and ability to serve.  Let CrossWalk know what your skills and interests are (if you haven’t already) and we will try to find a match.  There are also a lot of great organizations in our community that could also use volunteer support.  Check out VolunteerNow.org and find out how you can make a difference!

Stand.  We have neighbors in our community who have been told they are “less than”. They have been shamed. They have been “othered.”  They could use someone like you to proclaim a greater truth, that they are deeply loved as they are and are inherently worthy of abundant life.  You might get to be that person who makes another’s day that leads to a much better life, simply be speaking grace to those who need it.  Other neighbors face inequality, inequity, and are not included in decisions that impact their lives.  There are many issues and causes to champion, and often not enough time or resources to address them all.  Yet we can all do something.  Here are some things to consider:

·       Automate!  For the organizations you support financially, set up automatic contributions.  It takes it off your to-do list, and you’ll know you are supporting something you care about every month.  As an organization that offers scheduled donations, CrossWalk benefits from the consistency every month – thank you to all who have already automated!

·       Subscribe! For the organizations and issues near and dear to you, subscribe to their newsletters so you are kept up to speed on what’s happening and how you might get involved.  Here are some you might be interested in: Environment, Global Poverty, LGBTQ+,   Anti-Racism, Immigration Reform, Gun Violence, Human Trafficking, Food Insecurity, Women’s Rights.

·       Write! Know who represents you and contact them about issues you care about!  Use SmartVote.org to get started.

·       Gather! Keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities to peacefully assemble and let your voice be heard.

Commune.  Jesus regularly and intentionally spent time in solitude and silence for contemplation, meditation, and prayer.  When we begin our day with this practice, the likelihood of staying in the zone for the rest of the day rises significantly.  Here are some tips to help your daily commune work.

·       Protect the time and space. If possible, keep this time consistent.  It is difficult to pull off with interruptions. Choose a peaceful, tranquil space.

·       Swap “obligation” for “invitation.” When this daily exercise becomes a should, do whatever you have to do to get your head on straight, otherwise it won’t be of much worth.

·       Check in with yourself. Be aware of how you are feeling as you begin. Be honest with yourself. Your fake smile means nothing to God if your heart is breaking.

·       Spend “more” time on breath work.  Just do it.  Americans suck at being still and quiet.  You’ll be glad you did.

·       Incorporate devotional reading. Carefully choose a voice to invite into your head to guide and shape your thoughts.  The Center for Action and Contemplation offers a daily email that has helped hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Sign up!

·       Journal your thoughts and gratitude. Writing down our thoughts and gratitude is much more potent than thinking them.  Prove me wrong.

·       Transition with a benediction. Wrap your daily commune with a prayer to help you take your faith into your whole day.  Here are two from Rich Orloff – one to begin your time and the other to finish (or however you want to use them):

Daily Prayer

Thank you for this day
May I be aware of all of its blessings
May I notice each moment of love
May I appreciate each breath
May I see beyond my fears
May I recognize beauty
May I receive each molecule of joy offered
May I absorb kindness
May I not sabotage the happiness of myself or others

For the blessings of this day
I give thanks in advance
Today is an opportunity to experience
The miracle of every moment

Evening Prayer

May I recognize the blessings of this day
And of my life

May I absorb the blessings of this day
And of my life

May I always have access to the wisdom gained today
And use these blessings tomorrow

As I share my blessings with others
One love at a time
Till love blossoms into a field of joy
Covering the earth

Connect.  We need each other.  We are hardwired for community. We are interconnected and influence each other all the time – we may as well make the most of it!  Connecting with others increases our collective wisdom as we share our experiences with each other, especially when we invite different perspectives into the conversation.  Community can be incredibly helpful as we undergo unavoidable changes in life.  Community helps shape and support the ethics we live by – we are stronger in our resolve when we are together.  Connecting in a spiritual community especially help us learn to identify the nudge of the Divine in our lives and serves as a sounding board for discernment on what it might mean.   We also grow more as human beings when we are together, which is a key component of the abundant life Jesus’s Way offers.  How are you intentionally connecting with others?

Questions...

1.         Stretch. What am I going to read, watch, or listen to, to strengthen my faith over the coming months?

2.         Kneel. How am I going to kneel in service to others?

3.         Stand. How am I extending grace and supporting justice with my life?

4.         Commune. When am I incorporating quiet space to meditate, contemplate, and pray?

5.         Connect. How am I intentionally engaging others in community?

Faith in Process: Connect

Watch the video of this teaching here.

Key reasons why connecting with each other matters...

Interconnectedness and Mutual Influence. CrossWalk’s theological perspective emphasizes the interconnectedness of all entities. In this view, every individual and community influences and is influenced by others. CrossWalkers, who often embrace a vision of faith that includes social justice, inclusivity, and transformation, benefit greatly from being part of a community that supports these values. Community provides a space for mutual influence, allowing individuals to grow in their understanding of justice and love through the experiences and insights of others.

Shared Experience and Collective Wisdom. Our theological perspective suggests that truth and understanding emerge from the collective experiences and wisdom of a community rather than from isolated individuals. CrossWalkers might find that their spiritual and ethical insights are deepened and refined through shared dialogue and collective reflection. A community offers diverse perspectives that can challenge, enrich, and broaden one's own understanding of faith and morality.  Diversity is wonderful and should be celebrated!

Support in the Face of Change.  CrossWalk’s theological ethos views reality as constantly evolving, with a focus on becoming and change. We seek to engage with a world that is also in flux, advocating for change and transformation in societal structures. Community provides a crucial support system as individuals navigate these changes. It offers encouragement and solidarity, helping members sustain their commitment to progressive values even when faced with opposition or uncertainty.

Ethical and Relational Growth. In our view, the development of ethical behavior is seen as a relational process. We might engage in practices that promote social justice, equity, environmental stewardship, and much more. Being part of a community allows for the practice and reinforcement of these values in relational contexts, fostering a more robust and dynamic ethical life. The community serves as a forum for ethical discussion, accountability, and action, which can enhance individual and collective moral development.

Experiencing and Acting on Divine Impulse.  Our perspective posits that God is present in the ongoing process of becoming and influencing the world through what may be called divine persuasion: the nudging and wooing of God.  In this framework, CrossWalkers might see community as a critical resource to discern and act upon these divine impulses. By working together, they can better interpret the signs of divine activity and collaborate on initiatives that align with their vision of justice, compassion, and creativity.

Encouragement of Holistic Growth. Finally, our stance supports the idea that growth is holistic, involving intellectual, emotional, relational, and spiritual dimensions. Community provides a nurturing environment where CrossWalkers can develop in all these areas. It offers opportunities for communal worship, learning, service, and support, which together contribute to a richer and more integrated spiritual life.

I give you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other. This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.

– Jesus, John 13:34-35 CEB 

Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works. And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially during challenging times like we are in now. – Hebrews 10:24-25 (NLT)

 A Prayer to Make Space for the Divine
(a response to Psalm 16)

As it is possible to walk through a field
Without seeing the grass
So it is possible to walk through life
Without seeing the Divine

I do not wish to believe in you
What I desire is to experience you
Not an idea in a prayer book
But a presence I can touch

Not above me
But beside me
Opposite me
Facing me
Surrounding me
Inside me
Not me
But available to me

Even if you are beyond definition
You are always within reach
Let me make a place for you
Let me be open to your voice

As I venture into scary places
Let me sense you alongside me
My prayer is simple:
Let your breath become my strength

What I Can Offer You

I cannot fix your pain
I cannot solve your problem
I can’t prevent the sorrow you’re feeling
Or even guarantee I’ll make you smile

However, because I’ve known
Joy embracing me and disappearing in the middle of the night
Feeling safe and despairing if I’ll ever feel safe again
Lowering my guard and being ambushed by camouflaged demons

And because I’ve also known
The miracle of healing when pain seemed inescapable
The joy of connection when isolation had me surrounded
Love returning and apologizing for its absence

Because I have experienced enough No in my life
To understand tragedy

Because I have been surprised by enough Yes in my life
To maintain hope

Because I’ve known
All these things
And more

I will gladly hold your hand
So you don’t have to face the pains of life alone
And I will wait with you patiently
Until the next miracle arrives

Faith in Process: Stand

Watch the video of this teaching HERE.

Today I shared the following poem, performed by the poet. I hope it moves you as much as it moved me.

Warsan Shire

Home

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Warsan Shire (born August 1st, 1988) is a British writer, poet, editor and teacher, who was born to Somali parents in Kenya, east Africa.  In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize, chosen from a shortlist of six candidates out of a total 655 entries.  Her words "No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark," have been called "a rallying call for refugees and their advocates."

Many of us who were brought up in church in the United States were not exposed to the biblical texts that informed Jesus and his followers.  Take some time (for the rest of your life) and immerse yourself in this sampling of texts:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good;

and what does the LORD require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

and to walk humbly with your God? – Micah 6:8 NRSV

Say no to wrong.

Learn to do good.

Work for justice.

Help the down-and-out.

Stand up for the homeless.

Go to bat for the defenseless. – Isaiah 1:17 MSG

Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves;

ensure justice for those being crushed.

Yes, speak up for the poor and helpless,

and see that they get justice. – Proverbs 31:8-9 NLT

“I can’t stand your religious meetings.

I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions.

I want nothing to do with your religion projects,

your pretentious slogans and goals.

I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes,

your public relations and image making.

I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.

When was the last time you sang to me?

Do you know what I want?

I want justice—oceans of it.

I want fairness—rivers of it.

That’s what I want. That’s all I want. – Amos 5:21-24 MSG

“The Spirit of the LORD is upon me,

for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released,

that the blind will see,

that the oppressed will be set free,

and that the time of the LORD’s favor has come.” – Luke 4:18-19 NLT

Anyone who sets himself up as “religious” by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air. Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world. – James 1:26-27 MSG

The LORD proclaims: Do what is just and right; rescue the oppressed from the power of the oppressor. Don’t exploit or mistreat the refugee, the orphan, and the widow. Don’t spill the blood of the innocent in this place. – Jeremiah 22:3 CEB

     “Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who will receive good things from my Father. Inherit the kingdom that was prepared for you before the world began. I was hungry and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothes to wear. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.’

     “Then those who are righteous will reply to him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you a drink? When did we see you as a stranger and welcome you, or naked and give you clothes to wear? When did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’

     “Then the king will reply to them, ‘I assure you that when you have done it for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you have done it for me.’ – Matthew 25:35-40 CEB

But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. – James 1:22 NLT

     Standing for Grace and Justice was baked into Jesus’ cake because it is baked into the heart of God.  To neglect such things is to neglect a central concern of the Spirit. For some of us, these verses may be a revelatory kick in the pants to incorporate grace and justice into our rhythm of life.  If we want a robust, meaningful, world-impacting faith, we need to follow the model and invitation of Jesus.  For all of us, this is a call to action.  How are we addressing the injustices of the world and offering support to its victims?  How are we standing for grace and justice?

     "The problem with smart people is they can come up with a good reason for not doing anything. They are smart enough to find the cracks, to foresee the challenges, and to talk themselves out of the idea. They are experts at justifying their lack of courage or lack of action with an intelligent excuse. 

     But there will always be reasons to not do something, and this is particularly true of anything worth doing. We value those moments in which we overcame challenge, not those in which we avoided it. Ultimately, action is a choice. The choice to emphasize the reasons for doing it despite the reasons you have for avoiding it." – James Clear, Atomic Habits

Putting it Into Practice...

What areas especially tug at your heart? 

What are you doing already that others might learn from?

How are we continually gaining understanding about the issue and our relationship to it?

Is there someone within your reach directly impacted by the issue that you can learn from and find out how to be most helpful?

Who are we learning from and with?

What local initiatives are already happening?

What county, state, and national organizations might be good partners?

What government officials can be contacted to nudge toward justice policies?

() Anti-racism () Gender equity and inclusion () Immigration () LGBTQ equity and inclusion

() Environment () Gun safety policies () Reproductive rights () Houselessness () Hunger

() Children’s Rights () Anti-trafficking () Militarism of Law Enforcement () Economic disparity

() Education disparity () Other (list below)

Faith in Process: Kneel

Faith in Process: Kneel

A life-giving faith fosters “the blessed life” every person desires. A key component to that faith is loving, helpful service of others.

Some Benefits of Serving/Helping Others

Feels good. Keeps things in perspective. Builds self-esteem. Benefits your career. Connects with new people. Relief from pain. Volunteering combats depression. Lowers blood pressure. Reduces stress. More happiness. Develops sense of purpose. Giving triggers more giving. Fosters a sense of belonging. Altruism is contagious. Volunteering as a family is powerful. Longer lifespan.

Some Bible Verses about Serving/Helping Others

·       Matthew 20:26-28 (NIV): Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his... – Jesus

·       Matthew 25:35-40 (NIV): For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger, and you invited me in, I needed clothes, and you clothed me, I was sick, and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me... Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. – Jesus

·       John 13:12-14 (NIV): When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. 'Do you understand what I have done for you?' he asked them. 'You call me “Teacher” and “Lord,” and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet.'" – Jesus

·       Galatians 5:13 (NIV): You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. – Paul

·       Philippians 2:3-4 (NIV): Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. – Paul

·       Colossians 3:23 (NIV): Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters. – Paul

Things to think about...

1.         What have been among the most positive experiences of serving others for you?  What did you do? Why did you do it? How did it help others? How did it make you feel?

2.         Have there ever been times when you served out of obligation, and you didn’t really want to do it? What did you do? Why did you do it? How did it help others? How did it make you feel?

3.         How was “serving others” framed for you growing up? How was it tainted with obligation? How did that impact your desire? Your attitude? Your experience?

4.         When has service come especially easy for you? Why? What was/is your motivation to serve in those situations?

5.         How might you set yourself up for a more life-giving-and-receiving orientation toward kneeling in loving, helpful service toward others?

6.         Who in your world are easy to serve? Who are more difficult for you to serve? How might changing our vision and motivation alter our capacity to serve them in ways that benefit yourself and the “challenging” person?

Faith in Process: Stretch

“Don’t be conformed to the patterns of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you can figure out what God’s will is — what is good and pleasing and mature.” – Paul, Letter to the Romans 12:2 (CEB) 

The main thing is to have God; to live in God; to have God live in us; to think God’s thoughts; to love what God loves and hate what God hates; to realize God’s presence; to feel God’s holiness and to be holy because God is holy; to feel God’s goodness in every blessing of your life and even in its tribulations; to be happy and trustful; to join in the great purposes of God and to be lifted to greatness of vision and faith and hope with God – that is the blessed life. – Walter Rauschenbusch, The Culture of the Spiritual Life, 1897

If you’re bored with your faith, or theology, or the Bible,

you’re doing it wrong.

May your curiosity lead you to discover more:

Who or what is God?

Where is God?

What are God’s primary characteristics?

What are God’s limitations?

What is the Bible and what is it’s role?

Who was Jesus and what is his role?

What is the goal of faith?

How do we live faithfully?

What does faith call us to do?

How does faith inform justice issues?

How does faith shape our spending?

Things to think about...

1.        How has the process of living through stages of life been like the process of growing in faith?  How has it been different?

2.        When have you been like Nicodemus, proactively pursuing understanding?

3.        When have you been surprised like the Samaritan woman, which led you to new insights about life and faith?

4.        When have you been like Peter and Paul, whose learning was prompted by failures?

5.        What keeps you from integrating intentional learning to develop your faith?

6.        What are some of the areas about your faith you are most curious about right now?

Resources...

·      The Heart of Christianity by Marcus Borg

·      How the Bible Actually Works by Pete Enns

·      Open and Relational Theology by Thomas Jay Oord

·      How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere by Davis and Clayton (editor