The Day of Resurrection!

Good Friday

Jesus lived, the nonviolent, self-giving love of God to its fullest.  He never compromised that love, even in the face of ridicule, punishment, and the cross.  When he calls out, "It is accomplished!," he is announcing the wholeness of that life.  In a way, it is the completion of God's original creation, because Jesus has fulfilled the life that God has intended for all of us "from the beginning", and opened a path of fulfillment for us.  This is why we call Holy Friday "Good!"  And because love is the power of God, the greatest power, death will never have the last word.

Maundy Thursday

"To allow Jesus to cleanse our feet is to remove all that prevents us from using our feet to follow him, to scrub way our insecurities, to wash away our weariness, to buff off our bitterness."
                                                                                        --Alyce McKenzie

From Hearing to Moving to Being

As we begin our Lenten Journeys, I want to remind everyone of the powerful story of Jesus calling his first disciples in Luke 5:1-11.  Jesus has been proclaiming the good news of God's love for all people; it has been a message that has excited people and begun their experience of being liberated in God's love.  But here and now, he is calling specific people not just to hear the Word but to join him in a way of life.  
Jacopo Bassano's The Miraculous Draught of Fishes is printed in your notebook.  It portrays an overwhelmed Simon Peter falling at Jesus' feet and begging him to go away, "for I am a sinful man."  This happens even as Simon's partners gather the huge catch of fish.  Of course, what is truly miraculous is not what Jesus is doing with the fish, but what Jesus is doing with them! 
Jesus does not go away, but instead tells Simon not to be afraid, for from now on he will be "catching people!"  His gifts, his personality, his hard work will be dedicated to God's glory.  When the new disciples follow Jesus, they leave the narrow limits of life as they have known it.  In the eyes and care of Jesus, they get to know themselves much better, and also the God who so loves them and continues to be creative in their lives.
Review your pages on discipleship.  And rejoice!

Good News, Release, Sight, Forgiveness

" When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, Jesus went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom.  He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him.  He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."  And he rolled up the scroll, gave to back to the attendant, and sat down.  The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon him.  Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."  --Luke 4: 16-21

Sabbath Day Worship

Worship is so much more than a weekly activity that we "go to."  In class, we have been exploring how we might experience Worship as "loving God with all our hearts, and with all our souls, and with all our minds, and with all our strength!"  That's not something that is happening everywhere in town!
In our faith practice, Sabbath Day Worship is a core activity (maybe the core activity) of communal life, where we gather together weekly to love God and one another with everything we have.
The practice of "sabbath" is more than just coming to worship.  For us, worship is an essential part of sabbath, something that God includes as one of the Ten Commandments.  Here are some things you may not know, or haven't thought so much about recently.

(1)  Sabbath is a radical practice.  It honors God breaking into weekly life on our behalf, rescuing us from busyness and exhaustion and activities that do not satisfy our spirits.  It is a time of renewal, refreshment, communion with God, and celebration of life as God has always intended it to be.  Sabbath is a real-life experience of being delivered by the God who loves and saves us.  In the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:8; Deuteronomy 5:12-14), Sabbath is to be "remembered" and kept holy, a gift from God.  Re-membrance is putting all broken pieces (members) of our lives back together and experiencing wholeness. In Exodus, God is described as resting on the seventh day of creation, the sabbath.  When we rest after six days of creative work we are sharing in God's wholeness.  In Deuteronomy, God's people are to remember on the sabbath that God is a God who delivers God's people from slavery to freedom.    I have called sabbath a "radical" practice.  Radical means rooted; in this case, our lives are rooted in God!!!

(2) Our Worship liturgy is a daring act of imagination.  Our worship service at St. Andrew's begins with us  declaring the peace of Christ among us and sharing it with one another.  Jesus is the one who comes to free us from anxiety, offering us a peace far beyond our present understandings!  Our Call to Worship draws us into intentional communion with God, putting God at the center of our attention rather than the million other things that dominate our attention.  Already we have an opportunity to break free, and we haven't even sung yet!  The first hymn, and those that follow, allow us to offer our voices and hearts to God in soulful praise, to "lose ourselves in order to be found!"  God's for-giveness frees us in God's eternal love for honesty, for expression, for healing, for repentance, for new starts.  The Time of Confession and Hope is an opportunity for honest expression and speech to God about our needs, our hopes, our pains, our struggles.  Liberation is realized in such honest encounter with God.  The Scriptures open up the rich story of God and God's people; the Gospels declare and show us God's astounding love for all people without exception--a loving power that never ends!!  The sermon(s) proclaims this good news and identifies where it hits ground in our lives.  We respond to the invitation to recognize ourselves as part of the holy story, and are equipped to follow Jesus in our own lives today.  This is transforming!  There are many places where we are given opportunity to offer ourselves, our gifts, our investment in these values and the new life that is embodied when we do this together.  We pray to God; very importantly, we share prayer concerns and people in need and lift them up.  We identify blessings and joys and thank God for them together, freed in our thanksgiving.  We celebrate God's abundance, rather than what the world defines as scarcity.  It is a different way of seeing!  Each month, we gather together at the Lord's Table. We leave as people whose lives and priorities have been reordered and replenished in the love of our Creator.  That's what worship is about!

(3) Our Worship expresses belief in God who is doing hands-on work to make new human futures.
When we worship we are engaging the God who is committed to our well-being and to the deliverance of all God's people.

(4) Worship is resistance to the dominant, life-flattening order.  God did not make any of us merely to "fit in" to the world's order.

(5) We explore the experience of covenant community. The real practice of community is a revolutionary practice and a sign in the world of God's new order for the world.  We are precious as individuals who are God's children, beloved, created for God's pleasure.  But we are more together than we can ever be just by ourselves.  We love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and we love our neighbor as ourselves.

(6) Worship is celebration of a world that is fruitful and generative.  Ours is a liturgy of God's abundance, not the world's myth of scarcity.

(7)  God's themes of wholeness and completion break into a world that is often half-baked and distorted. Everything about us matters to God!

(8) Our worship is rooted in the peace of Christ (an antidote to anxiety).  God is delivering us from anxious lives!

(9)  The fabric of our lives depends on fidelity, not "productivity."  The measure of our value in God's eyes is never in how "useful" we are!!  even though it can be good to be productive in life, especially when it benefits others, God did not put us in the world merely to be "useful!"  Faithfulness to God, and loving solidarity with one another, are what we are made for. We celebrate this in worship.

(10) Liturgy is an act of imagining the world differently and acting according to that inspired imagination.



(Thanks to Walter Brueggemann and all the participants in our mid-90's Kirkridge retreat!)

Worship

What is worship? We said:
--Individuals coming together sharing heart, soul, strength, and mind with each other.
--Gathering as a group: teaching, learning about Jesus.
--"Coming to church"
--Praying
--Active Listening
--Participating
--Praising God
--Teaching others about God
--Being taught
--reading the scriptures
--coming with anticipation
--singing
--fun
--Loving God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, all our strength
The soul (in Greek psuche, from which we get the English word "psyche") is the core of our being.
Perhaps our worship involves:
--praying with everything we have
--singing with everything
--bringing the fullness of ourselves, our gifts, our yearnings, our love
--connecting the stories of the scriptures with the stories of our lives (Jesus' life and our life as one)