speaking up for the poor

Last night I attended a community meeting around establishing a new shelter for homeless in Flagstaff. The meeting became emotionally charged with words that summed up to mean 'not in my neighborhood'. Check out the local write up here.

I had to respond, at least my little part for speaking on behalf of the poor, helping to raise the voice that not only do we help the poor, but they help us to become more human through the way we see them as real human beings, a stretch for many. I was pretty frustrated with their comments and short sighted vision for helping those without as you can tell. Either way, here's my letter to the editor:

"As a concerned citizen for the homeless and as a clergy frequently assisting such individuals myself, I was looking forward to a hopeful conversation around a community yearning to help the poor. What I found was a sad expression of community social interest more concerned about self-preservation than hope-filled community engagement. I can’t say I’m completely surprised, but I do believe we have to stop demonizing people and believe that if our communities are as strong as we say they are we can use that strength to perpetuate goodness rather than to allow ourselves to be controlled by fear. We will never get anywhere in our journey to become more human if we can't understand that how we treat the poor is a statement for how we really think about ourselves. I came to the meeting with my children in hopes of allowing them to see what a community caring for others might look like. Unfortunately, I was not able to shine the light bright for them for this kind of witness. No doubt, fear is driving this. It is interesting to me that many are afraid for how the ‘bad’ people coming to the neighborhood while simultaneously registered sex offenders exist right down the street (I looked online!). Do we really think the Flagstaff shelter wants more negative activity engaging the neighborhood? Until we can make a home inside ourselves for the homeless, identify with their radical brokenness, I wonder who the homeless really are in this town?"

What difference does it make? Well, I guess I'm more interested in being faithful to what it means to live in the way of Jesus, this of course, means sharing the values of God with a community who may or may not listen.

embodiment

The following quote comes from Roberta Bondi in an article through Christain Century, Nov. 2, 2004. I was reading this morning in preparation for today's sermon (i know, leave me along about sermon prep).

These words remind me that was is of ultimate importance for an authentic spiritual community, the communities the emerging world is trying to facilitate, is more concerned with embodiment than intellectual pursuit or elitism seeking to justify its existence. I especially appreciate the last sentence below from Bondi.

"While I had continued to read and be profoundly moved and strengthened by the early monastic abbas and ammas, I was happy where I was, teaching Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac to small classes of students. I didn’t want to leave. But the imagined voices of my early monastic teachers wouldn’t leave me alone. "You have a choice," I heard them saying. "You can continue teaching Semitic languages which you enjoy, or you can act on what you know -- that we have saved your life over the years, and we can save the lives of others as well if you chose to teach them about us."

What could it look like for a community of forgiveness and hope to embody the very existence it seeks to understand and describe? At what point does embodiment shift to become more important than philosophical constructs or argumentation? I truly believe the emerging community, in its seeking authentic expressions of life through faith, at its heart desires to be a community embodying this truth in its own fractured and fumbling way. It is not a claim of truth by what it says, but by how truth itself becomes embedded in its very ethos; reflecting fruits of this very truth, of love, peace, patience, kindness, etc.

sacramental meanderings

Check out my friend tamie's blog. She does some great imagining around sacrament, sacramental life/eucharist and its place in and through church communities. If, as many are saying that all of life is worship, than how is this exploration different? Perhaps, this is the tangible connection and reminder we all need over and over again that both shapes our identity and purpose; one that is deeply connected to the divine in and through all of life.

One of the essential leanings through this eucharistic theology/ecclesiology directly references God's own presence as lived out in and for the world. The challenging part of this perhaps is the polarity of connecting what goes on inside the gathered community, as church, and what that means for the scattered community, again as church. Embracing this seemingly ambiguous reality is the key that this notion is attempting to either bridge, breakdown or critique. There is a simultaneity in its gathering/scattering ethos that, for some reason, we so quickly want to compartmentalize or segregate out from the world instead of connecting it to the world as a means for receiving/extending The Life that is offered to us, individually and collectivelly, and lived through us, individually and collectively.

rant: what the hell is this emerging community doing?

I'm sick and tired of assumptions that think the emerging community is a relativistic, 'anything goes' cocktail of a little 'my friend Jesus' here and a little 'whatever you want' there, with a couple candles, icons and a cup of joe thrown in to make everyone feel cozy and warm and somewhat spiritual (but not too much for fear of stepping on toes). The emerging church is not a free for all exchange of ideas for the sake of 'i'm ok, you're ok', with no serious engagement for who God is, what God is up to and how God wants us to get on board with it all.

What it seems to me, both from my own experience and my fumbling attempts, is that the emerging churches are enacting a radical notion of living out the tension between a missional congregation in relationship to its context. This, of course for some, seems to create an ambiguous relationship that appears to allow everything. The emerging church radically and authentically seeks to wonder and live out what it means to be church, not just talk about it. The essence of this answer is best arrived at in relationship to the very God who brings it all into existence: the trinity, a holy community engaging in 'mutual interpenetration.' That is, through Jesus God is known in time and space...in the Spirit, Jesus continued ministry of (not about) God is made manifest through communities willing to listen and engage and ponder and serve.

I found this great quote from Scott Frederickson who wrote a paper that was presented at Luther Seminary's first annual missional church conference in 2005. In this thesis entitled "The Missional Congregation in Context" he is talking about this tension around congregation and context. He mentions 'coinciding' as it refers to the trinitarian undrestanding of God coinciding as three persons, persons as it relates not the independent identity of each, but rather, the interdepedent identity, the importance of each 'person' as it is defined in relationship to and through the other. This 'otherness' is key! He says:

"The God of Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit, has created and redeemed this coinciding. The very incarnation of God into the Son and the resurrection of the Son to God is the way Christainity claims the context. This means that a missional congregation and its context are related. The missional congregation claims the reality of the context (the Incarnation) while not being subsumed wholly beneath it, in order to show the context of a deeper reality (the Resurrection), namely, that God is constantly at work in the world."

I love this idea for how context/culture is redeemed as God's presence in and around the incarnated Christ (Holding). I love that we can be free to engage alongside and with our culture and context without "being subsumed wholly beneath it." (Hospitality/Humility) I love the idea that we could challenge and interject hope that God hasn't given up on the world and that God can be trusted. I love the idea of sharing a new vibrancy for what God is doing in the world and how it is available for all.

What is difficult, I think, for people to understand about the emerging communities is this differentiation between the essence of church and the serious engagement with and alongside of culture.

This is not the end of the conversation of course. This is only one slice of pie, or whatever taste this might leave with you. Hopefully, it's something nourishing and somewhat tasty and doesn't just taste like shit, although a few of you out there might think so. The emerging community seeks to embody this challenging notion of missional community contextualized. It certainly is a venture that leaves many wondering 'why has everything become so watered down'. On the other hand of course it has energized others to re-engage an environment, context/culture, that has dismissed us for dissing them, trusting profoundly that both, working on each other, are necessary for God's continuing emerging work in and for the world.

what is worship?

I got this great email from my friend Ryan and wanted to pass it along. These are helpful thoughts that further an understanding of church, and the worship life of church, that is more driven by the way individuals and communities embody the message that they so desperately seek to articulate and embrace. These words are at the heart of an emergent expression of church and the way it seeks to order its life through worship, and faith active in love. Enjoy!


"The conversation continues. I was just thumbing through "Love and
Living" by Thomas Merton and came across the following on page 181...

"The West has lived under the sign of will, the love of power, action,
and domination. Hence, Western Christianity has often been associated with a spiritual will-to-power and an instinct for organization and authority. This has taken good forms, in devotion to works of education, healing the sick, building schools, order and organization in religion itself. But even the good side of activism has tended toward an overemphasis on will, on action, on conquest, on 'getting things done,' and this in turn has resulted in a sort of religious restlessness, pragmatism, and the worship of visible results. There is another essential aspect of Christianity: the interior, the silent, the contemplative, in which hidden wisdom is more important than practical organizational science, and in which love replaces the will to get visible results."

The idea of "worshiping visible results" grabbed my attention. We discussed this before in regards to doing church a new way. Having visible results as top priority makes church into self-worship, right? Then self-worship deafens us to hearing God.

The new way puts the focus back on God. The less time spent looking for visible results, means more time available for listening."

Thanks again Ryan for these insightful thoughts.

holy communion?

On Saturday night I was invited by my friend Dahamane (to the right of me) to their end-of-Ramadan feast. It's always a joy to learn from and talk with my Muslim friends around great food, a cultural invitation, that I don't often get to engage in. I'm in the company of newfound friends from Yemen, Cameroon, Mali, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. It was one of those special evenings where, as you sit and listen, you feel...well, holy, a 'set apart' time, to cross the boundaries of cultures and religions for the sake of acknowledging that we are, all of us, held by God, that God has come all too close to us, united us in him in a strange way we may never completely understand.

So...for all intents and purposes we could go around and articulate, through our various doctrines, how we have come to hold God and realize that there may be some differences, but the reality is we are created in God's image for the sake of reflecting his love and life to the world. Was this meal holy communion? It certainly was a 'set apart' event, a communion feast, a meal where the alien outsider (me) was invited to the table. Not in the same way theologically that many have come to speak of...or is it? This meal was not consecrated in the name of Christ by whose very death the fear of death has been vanquished forever and in whose resurrection presence we celebrate until he comes again (whatever that means). Could we say that Christ was present? Could we say that the Christ who died to reconcile people one to another was present incarnationally embodying that very belief in the way we shared a meal with one another? Would it be true that this is the very kind of community that Jesus came to constitute through his very death on and resurrection from the cross? The very hope into which God's future is unfolding?

For me, the evening was an expression of my new, favorite phrase I've come to enjoy from my new mentor Miroslav Volf: this night was an experience of the "anticipated eschatological community of God."

casual update

hello everyone. needless to say, life has been very crazy. i was looking forward to a slower schedule when the summer came to an end, being the primary parent and having no other responsibilities than the pursuit of my dmin at luther and starting this emerging church. as it turns out, an opportunity came to help out a struggling local congregation here in flag as the interim pastor, part-time, 30 hours a week. so, that's the story. now i've got the craziest schedule when my wife kacey has been called full time as pastor for lutheran campus ministry and me, the part-time everything role.

it's good work helping out a church, one of those traditional types, helping to ground them in the missional church stuff, really helping me personally to bulk up on some of my own leadership skills and biblical/theological reflections in an adult community once again. it certainly is a breath of fresh air for me.

so that's it. i'll start blogging more when my 20-30 page paper is done for seminary...it's our missional ecclesiology paper; great stuff, this is precisely why i joined the program, for the rich theological engagement and the practical integration of it all. so keep me in your prayers as i continue with this venture.

also, i got sick and tired of waiting to start this emerging community. SOOOOO, this last thursday we met for the first time with seven of us in attendance. it was good conversation, great probing questions from legitimately suspicious folks (we have a lot to repent for in this church that segregates and delineates in too many exclusive ways creating an idol out of every newtonian segment of church). this is what gives me excitement and passion for doing the things that i'm doing. the interim is fine, but this is great! the challenge. the 'out there' aspect of our faith, alongside of those who believe, those who don't, those who question, those who are cynical and those who just want something real.

i'm going this friday to the episcopal convention down in phx as i've been invited to do a workshop on emerging churches. i look forward to it and hope they don't kick me out! i figured out what my handout will consist of...two images, that for me, encompass this missional church expression known as emergent church. one an icon, rublev's icon of the communal nature of God and the other which has become an icon to me, Kissing the Face of God, the window through which reflects God's embrace of all humanity. nothing else, no fancy powerpoints (thx tamie!), just me, Christ's church created, reflected, and brewed in me. a shot or two i suppose, of God's brew filtered through me with the grounds of emergent friends like karen, tamie, chris, richard, mike, morgan, bob, ryan and cecilia and so many more. Thank you God for this perichoretic community!