Early in this new year, I came to Luke 4:1 "And Jesus, full of a Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was guided in the wilderness by the Spirit." (DBH translation). The start of 2022 has not magically delivered us from the wilderness, we're still there. Maybe in some respects we are always there, with a few oases that show up from time to time on the journey. The story continues into what's called the temptation of Jesus. When you're in the wilderness, your hunger and your thirst become very insistent companions. You find yourself looking for ways to appease those desires, and you want to get out! What's so remarkable about Jesus's humanity, is that he is able to resist taking the easy way out. He doesn't opt for the easy options to satisfy human desire, he seems to recognize that navigating the wilderness will mean accepting what he lacks, what he can't finally have; enough power, popularity, personal security that promises satisfaction of our desires. The paradox is that the only thing that will satisfy your desire is accepting that you cannot satisfy your desire - at least not in this lifetime. This is what being guided by the Spirit in the wilderness might mean: that God’s Spirit comforts us in our limitations, empowers us to embrace our lack, and teaches us to honour desire as that which moves us, but doesn't have to rule us. GS
A Reflection on 'The Gate' by Marie Howe
My participation in the current Two River’s Learning Room, based on the book ‘The Artist’s Rule: Nurturing your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom’, by Christine Valters Paintner has compelled me to revisit some of my favourite poems. One such poem is ‘The Gate’ by Marie Howe from her book ‘What the Living Do’, a collection of poems about the death of her beloved brother whose dying would teach her how to live.
The Gate
I had no idea that the gate I would step through
to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was
a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then,
done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold
and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me.
And I’d say What?
And he’d say, This – holding up my cheese and mustard sandwich.
And I’d say, What?
And he’d say, This, sort of looking around.
Her brother’s THIS reminds me of our practice of the Sacrament of the Ordinary – seeing the luminous in the mundane – a simple cheese and mustard sandwich; the blanket of snow in my yard patterned with shadows from the low-lying late afternoon sun; the exhaust from my furnace that rises and dissipates in the frozen air outside my window reminding me that our life is but a breath.
While I have not had a sibling who passed away, my father’s illness this fall underscored for me that all of life is spiritual and interconnected–the room that held my father’s intubated, comatose body became a sacred space – our very breath, past and present, life and death all held in the great mystery. In the face of uncertainty everything became heightened for me, as though seeing the world beyond surface appearances.
We have just celebrated Epiphany: the discovery of the Christ-child whose birth enables us to see the divine revealed and present in each moment, and whose death became a gate of sorts for us to experience life in fullness. I want to live each day as a gift, in awe and wonder at simply being alive, to be fully present and open to all this life has to offer in this world and beyond. Fried egg and avocado toast anyone? (Dan Veldhuis)
A Poem for Epiphany
THE PASSING OF THE WISE MEN
By. Pattiann Rogers
They collected them one by one
like seed-size pearls and put them
in their black velvet bags, gathered
them like small marbles of amethyst
and alabaster, plucked them
like white cherries from a tree.
They placed all of them carefully
in their velvet bags scarcely filled.
And they were patient, gathering
them slowly all their lives, some
like berries of glass, like the slighter
fruit of mistletoe, some appearing
like tiny flames flashing on sunless
river bottoms or shining like quicksilver
schools of fish in the deep. A few
were as cold and black and enigmatic
as skull-sockets where eyes should be.
When the end came, they crawled
into their black velvet sacks themselves,
pulled the drawstrings tight over
their heads, looked around and above
in the speckled dark and more than once
toward the east, then assembled
their instruments and resumed the study
of their everlasting treasures - Sirius,
Polaris, Arcturus, Capella, Vega,
Andromeda, Cygnus X, guides,
messengers, hope.
We Are Held
People turn their faces to the side as I approach them through the mall. I'm tempted to hold my breath until they're past - ok, I did hold my breath until they had passed. Unaware, until this instant, the ground feels shaky under us again. Whom do we engage? At what distance? Who do I believe? Who really knows what's going on? I catch the trace of a song, a spiritual in the midst of holiday schlock. Transfixed, I wonder that enslaved African-Americans under conditions far more grievous than my social anxieties, could sing 'He's got the whole world in his hands, the whole wide world in his hands'. It's become my Christmas carol for today. The vulnerable God/child of the cradle, held by parental hands, subverts the accepted order and we discover it is we who are held. This is our position, our primary comportment in the face of anxiety - we are held. Settle in. GS
“Advent, First Frost” by Anya Silver
Something has descended
like feathered prophecy.
Someone has offered the world
a bowl of frozen tears,
has traced the veins and edges
of leaves with furred ink.
The grass is stiff as the strings
of a lute.
And, day by day, the tiny windows
crack their cardboard frames
seizing the frail light. The sun,
moving through
these waxy squares, undiminished
as a word passing
from mind to speech.
Every breath a birth,
a stir of floating limbs within me.
I stay up late and waken early
to feel beneath my feet
the silence coming.
"Prophecy without doxology is ideology"
"Prophecy without doxology is ideology."
This quote from Walter Brueggemann reminds us that the prophetic calls us out of selfish preoccupation, protective entitlement, and insensibility to the anguish of the world into compassion and reconciliatory practices. All good. But Brueggemann's aphorism also cautions that we must not divorce it from the priestly vocation given to all humanity. This vocation is a mediation of that with which we've been entrusted to the glory of God; both in humble adoration and raucous celebration. An unhealthy separation and preoccupation with either usually comes at the expense of the other. In either case, it can become a totalizing and narrow preoccupation that impoverishes our lives and leaves hurt in our wake. When the church loses the integration of prophecy and doxology, it becomes a leaning building, a danger to all who fall within its shadow. Listen to the prophets in this Advent season who call us to repent of our numbness, and to inhabit compassionate action and passionate praise in the power and joy of the Holy Spirit.
Culture Making
One of the TRC practices is Culture Making. We encourage everyone to pay attention to their everyday interaction with the materials of the creation as a way of connecting to God’s presence. In Malcolm Guite’s new book ‘Lifting the Veil’, we find this wisdom that enhances our understanding of Culture Making:
”Whenever we create or make something with kenotic love—be it art or craft, song or quilt, book or bookshelf—we are both inhabiting and re-sounding (echoing), what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘the lovely shapes and sounds intelligible of that eternal language, which thy God utters, who from eternity doth teach himself in all, and all things in himself.’ Creativity, claims Coleridge, is the work of the Logos within us; it is a ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.’ This is the glory and the joy of human creativity.”
Anhelo
From Heidi Neumark:
The distance between the world as it is and the world as it should be tears at my heart. At least it’s Advent. Probably the reason I love Advent so much is that it is a reflection of how I feel most of the time. I might not feel sorry during Lent, when the liturgical calendar begs repentance. I might not feel victorious even though it is Easter morning. I might not feel full of the Spirit even though it is Pentecost and the liturgy spins out fiery gusts of ecstasy. But during Advent I am always in sync. Advent unfailingly embraces and comprehends my reality. And what is that? I think of the Spanish word anhelo, or longing. Advent is when the church can no longer contain its unbearable, unfulfilled desire and the cry of anhelo bursts forth: Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus! O Come, O Come, Emmanuel!
On Receiving
I reluctantly receive the slippery conjectures of old men glowing with God
I gladly receive the crock of stew prepared for the meeting
I reluctantly receive the lost iota dividing friends
I gladly receive the pint they shared after
I reluctantly receive forty minutes sermons
I gladly receive the coffee hour
I reluctantly receive the council’s vote
I gladly receive Sarah’s hideous hat
I reluctantly receive the Board Member
I gladly receive the clown
I reluctantly receive the offering plate
I gladly receive the peace of Christ
I reluctantly receive easy confidence
I gladly receive the sweeper of corners looking for God
I reluctantly receive priority boarding
I gladly receive the complimentary crackers
I reluctantly receive the happy funeral
I gladly receive the amen. GS
"Nuance is sacred"
By David Dark:
“I want very badly to challenge the ease with which we succumb to the false divide of labels, that moment in which our empathy gives out and we refuse to respond openhandedly or even curiously to see people with whom we differ. As I see it, to refuse the possibility of finding another person interesting, complex and as complicated as oneself is a form of violence. At bottom, this is a refusal of nuance, and I wish to posit that nuance is sacred. To call it sacred is to value it so highly that we find it fitting to somehow set it apart as something to which we're forever committed. Nuance refuses to envision others degradingly, denying them the content of their own experience, and talks us down tenderly from the false ledges we've put ourselves on. When we take it on as a sacred obligation, nuance also delivers us out of the deadly habit of cutting people out of our own imaginations. This opens us up to the possibility of at least occasionally finding one another beautiful and the possibility of communion. It could be that there's no communion without [nuance].”
Rest for the Weary
It doesn't take much discernment to recognize the raised levels of irritability these days. Facing our limits has exhausted already low levels of patience, and everybody is a little bit 'touchy' (as my Mom used to say). I am noticing some of these things around church, and noticing it in myself as well.
Jesus has a word: "Come to me all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls; for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”.(Matthew 11)
What you are feeling is real. That which is causing your impatience is real. It will not help to deny these things; but Jesus is offering his companionship and non-anxious presence for this moment in time - and all time. To connect to his calm in the midst of the storm may well produce some generosity within us - the generosity of patience and kindness - towards ourselves, and then into the world, which needs it more than ever. GS
Choice in Church
“Because (North) Americans always attend the church of their choice, church inherently lacks the ability to resist accommodation to economic and political powers.”
Stanley Hauerwas
You may be wondering - what is the alternative? Perhaps it is the church closest to you, or it is the church that you were raised in, or the one that your spouse was attending when you got together, none of which are likely your ideal church. The point is that there will always be something you don’t care for, or someone you don’t like, yet, somehow people think that if they can just find the place that fulfills their needs, wants, and desires, then they will have found the right church. That place does not exist. A church full of consumers, will be a church that looks just like the culture, but with Jesus sprinkled in. Unless you are being completely ignored or abused, faithfully worship Jesus somewhere where you don’t have to control or manage anything according to your preferences, and it just might might start to look like discipleship. GS
Shame and Kindness Meet
From Richard Beck’s Experimental Theology:
Shame isn't very popular. Neither is guilt. But I can't shake the conviction that, at root, these emotions aren't pathological. In fact, they ground our humanity. If we lost shame and guilt we wouldn't be human, and people who lack a capacity for shame and guilt have a name. We call them sociopaths. To be sure, guilt and shame can become pathological. But what I'm talking about is the innate goodness of these emotions, how they provide us with emotional information when we've caused harm. We need that information. Otherwise, we'd do even more harm.
If you're like me, you are haunted by shame and guilt. Memories. But what I don't want is for someone to tell me that these feelings don't matter. I do not want evasion or minimizing. I want and need an honest accounting. To me, that is what the cross gives me. An honest picture of my guilt and shame. I see in the cross, along with all humanity, all the damage and harm that I have done. There I stand, a sinner. And yet there, in that exact same space, I am met with the kindness of God. Mercy, grace, and forgiveness. And it's the juxtaposition and intersection of these two experiences which creates the overwhelming power of the Christian faith. For it is precisely where I'm stripped naked, where my shame is wholly exposed, where all the sad, hard truths are shouted aloud, and all the skeletons drug out of my closet and into the daylight, precisely there I am met with tenderness and embraced in love.
This, I submit, is the great power of the cross. The cross exposes our shame and guilt. We stand before it as sinners. No minimization, so secrets, no evasion. And precisely there, in that moment, we are met with the kindness of God. Just look at the cross, both things are happening simultaneously. Shame and kindness meet.
Be the Church
These days, returning to church is a big topic amongst those who have a vested interest in these things (presumably Christians, their denominations, and their leaders). Everything from technical adaptations for those who enjoyed worshiping from remote virtual locations to protocols for physical gatherings make up the topics under discussion.
Unfortunately, these preoccupations drag us back into the old paradigm that church happens at particular location at a particular time, and your job is to show up to it, and that constitutes being church.
Of course, the discipline of participating in communal worship is critical to the formation and sustenance of believers, but so easily displaces the many ways we are to be the church. If we are to do any kind of self-evaluation around how we regather as the church in an emerging post-COVID world, then let us reflect on how we embody the life of friendship in our neighbourhoods; how we receive the gifts of grace and providence in the places we work and play; how we engage in movements for justice and reconciliation in the community; how we attend to the needs of our brothers and sisters in Christ in their everyday lives; how we pray and intercede for the kingdom to come; and then, how we show up to our gatherings.
Are you returning? Maybe you never left but didn't recognize it! Be the church, for it is through the church that the wisdom of God will be made known everywhere (Eph.3:10). GS
Anne Lamott on Imperfection
Author Anne Lamott on imperfection:
”Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for joy. Even (or especially) people who seem to have it more or less together are more like the rest of us than you would believe. I try not to compare my insides to their outsides, because this makes me much worse than I already am, and if I get to know them, they turn out to have plenty of irritability and shadow of their own. Besides, those few people who aren’t a mess are probably good for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation. This is good news, that almost everyone is petty, narcissistic, secretly insecure, and in it for themselves, because a few of the funny ones may actually long to be friends with you and me. They can be real with us, the greatest relief. As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things toward ourselves, too.”
Source: Almost Everything
The Church As Canal
I was struck by this analogy of the church I heard this week, and I’m not sure of the source, so I will paraphrase what I heard.
The church can be like one of three bodies of water: a swamp, a reservoir, or a canal. Even though we know biologically good things come out of swamps, let’s use a traditional picture of still, stagnant water that appears lifeless and unproductive; you have probably been part of churches like that. The image of the reservoir has moving water, but, tends to move in one direction controlled by its keepers, and which also hordes its water as limited resource. A canal, however, connects two bodies of water to one another, and the water flows both ways. The third image feels like the healthiest to me. The church is not limited or constrained by its environment, but operates between the sources of nourishment and need, which are always changing and flowing in different directions. An analogy can strain if it’s pressed too far, but, perhaps the lock system offers a measure of wise control in how quickly this water flows. In the end though, the church as canal is a conduit of God’s love which comes to it on its way to someone or something else; that’s something in which I could gladly get immersed! GS
Memento Mori
This from Laurence Freeman:
‘St Benedict says always remember that you are going to die: ‘Keep death constantly before your eyes.’ Now, he doesn’t mean go around thinking about death all the time, but don’t repress it. Benedict is not being morbid. He is expressing a universal spiritual practice, which you find in Buddhism and elsewhere, of being memento mori, being aware, being mindful of the fact that you are mortal. And the consequence of that is that you are free. All of that energy that goes into the repression of the fear of death is set free. Why should the awareness and the acceptance of death bring us to a fuller sense of wholeness? I think because it is part of the whole picture, and it needs to be integrated. We need to have a certain conscious space that is aware of our mortality and even aware of the complete unpredictability, the randomness of our mortality. We don’t know at any moment when we might die. So there should be a certain space in our available consciousness in which we welcome and accept this element of our mortality, and that makes us more whole, more integral.’
(Listen to the full talk here)
The Past and Present of the Word
We just finished our summer series on the Apostle's Creed, and I want to offer a few final thoughts upon reflection. For some, the Apostle’s Creed stands as a signifier of religion and its tradition, and thus not particularly enticing in its relevance to current events. We certainly want to stay away from ‘bad religion’, but, the church includes the voices of its ancestors in its community, and is always engaged in the task of translating what it has received from them into its current context. In fact, the primary meaning of tradition is 'the transmission of customs or beliefs from generation to generation'. The church has this responsibility and opportunity to transmit the treasure of God's previous communication into the current context. We cannot ignore the wisdom of the past, but, can trust that God has spoken through those who have gone before. That can be a tricky endeavour, but, also a very exciting one because what we transmit is a living thing - the Word present and full of the energy of the Spirit. Ben Myers writes at one point that the Creed is the simple framework of a story, in which we live and move. This makes sense to me. For some, great parts of the story are missing, and that is a legitimate critique; but for me, anyway, it does not disqualify the framework. We acknowledge its limitations and receive it as faithful witness to the reality of the Triune God. And perhaps that's the most important function, the witness to the very peculiar and mysterious distinctive of the Christian faith - that God is both one and three - and that from that beautiful communion flows a beautiful gospel to a flawed but beautiful church, which is most desperately needed in these dark days.
The Risks of Deifying Politics
My friend Todd Wiebe is a former evangelical pastor in the Vancouver area. He has a blog called Evangelically Departed, and I thought his latest post was worth reposting here:
“I have written before, in this newsletter, about the concept of taking stances and how stances are not to be confused with Christian spirituality. When religious faith becomes marked by taking stances on issues, faith itself becomes secondary. Within this frame, your faith becomes something that is manipulated by those who argue for the stances of a particular worldview or politics.
There is a curious, if troubling, example of this in the midst of this current wave of the COVID pandemic. Many health professionals have referred to this wave as the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. While there are a small percentage of people who have been vaccinated who are becoming sick with COVID, well over 90% of those who are being infected and requiring medical care are people who have not been vaccinated.
I have seen enough reports on who is choosing to not get the vaccine to at least ask the question, “Are people taking stances on the vaccination due to credible scientific evidence or due to political worldview?” It would seem to me that there is a significant percentage of the population whose views on the vaccine are determined by their political affiliation. This way of thinking works like this:
you find out what the stance of your particular “tribe” is
you then look for evidence (hello, internet) to bolster that stance
you adopt the talking points of your particular tribe
We can see how this becomes a huge and costly problem in society. Many people have died because they have listened to political pundits who they trusted over health professionals. Recently an American talk radio host, Phil Valentine, (who mocked people who argued for mandated vaccinations) died from COVID. He was 61 years old.
It is sad that Valentine died, perhaps sadder still that many others died because they listened to him about vaccination and about a horse de-worming medication being an effective treatment of COVID (it is not).
When I consider that a significant number of those opposed to vaccinations in the United States and around the world are right-wing evangelical Christians, I see it as an outcome of a political and religious tribalism.
Karl Barth, before the decimations of the second world war, argued against nationalism, patriotism and political worldview being aligned in any way with Christian faith. Barth’s words:
“As a battle for power, all politics is … fundamentally dirty. Flamethrowers, mine detectors, gas masks, bombers and submarines are simply not the equipment of the kingdom of heaven.”
Barth said that political views and events can become deified. Your adherence to a conservative or liberal or libertarian worldview supplants the place of true faith. Your faith then becomes manipulated by the leaders and voices of that political worldview. We are seeing this all around in these COVID days, particularly in this wave that is being kept alive by those who remain unvaccinated.
We must not deify our political views.
Here in Canada we are in the midst of a federal election campaign. Mercifully, this campaign is 36 days long, not like the unending American election cycle. When I pastored an evangelical church, around election time I used to remind the congregation that I hoped our church was made up of people who voted Liberal and people who voted Conservative and people who voted NDP and people who voted Green. There were often reasons of Christian conviction to support each of these political parties. If a church became a political monolith this was likely not a sign of faith but, instead, a sign of political deification. If you think that those who hold political views opposed to yours are stupid, then your politics have likely become deified as well.
For Barth, there is no such thing as Christian patriotism. He said that there ought to be no religious justification and glorification of a political view. Barth stated that even church and mission and strong convictions, even morality and pacifism and social democracy do not represent the kingdom of God, but the kingdom of humanity.
If we deify even good and helpful political ideas, this will be detrimental to faith and to seeing one another with compassion.”
Beliefs in Action
‘But when we are in the context of mission (or post-Christendom),
what we are saying no longer makes sense to people
who are not Christians. Beliefs, when separated from
practices, have over time become rote for Christians. The way
they are articulated loses touch with real life because they have
not been enfleshed in daily living. This is why, when renewing
the church (or planting it over again) in mission, the church
must refocus on cultivating the practices of Jesus among
a people. Beliefs cannot make sense to people outside the church
without seeing the belief lived in practice.‘
-David Fitch (What is the Church?)