Blogging Towards the 2nd Sunday of Advent, December 9, 2012

Malachi 3:1-4 & Luke 3:1-18
The Second Sunday in Advent
PEACE | The Holy Family

Advent is both terrible and hopeful.  It’s terrible because it’s about a hopeful word, a newness about life – which promises to overthrow all our old, comfortable, sinful ways.  And it’s hopeful for the very same reason.  We know the shape of Advent, and yet we don’t know it.  We may know the stories of the prophets, the Exile, the Exodus and the birth of the Messiah – but we often struggle to see that this “old” God is also breaking in upon human life in awesomely new ways still today – even here in 2012!  Who would ever have looked for God to enter the world through a baby born to poor parents in a dry desert land dominated by the Romans and overshadowed by the wealth of Egypt?

Blogging Towards the 3rd Sunday in Advent, December 16, 2012

Zephaniah 3:14-20, Isaiah 12:2-6 & Luke 1:26-38

The Third Sunday in Advent

Joy | The Shepherds

Joy is a great thing, one of the best parts of human life.  And yet completely unexpected joy, the realization that deeply held hopes will be or have been fulfilled, is especially awesome and freeing.  It’s not just waking up to find presents under a tree, it’s like waking up and discovering that you do have a tree and gifts underneath it.  Joy is the realization that life is a gift, which we haven’t earned, deserved – or even really asked for.  It’s what set the shepherds in motion to see what happened in the manger that night – and sent them exuberantly into the world to share what they’d witnessed.   Joy is our response in faith to the discovery of the love of God that we know in Christ – a love that overcomes all things, heals all things, undoes all things, frees all things

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, December 2^nd

Jeremiah 33:10-16 & Luke 21:25-36

The First Sunday in Advent

Hope | the Prophets

Advent is the liturgical season or period marked by the four Sundays preceding Christmas.  In the Ancient Church it was a reflection of the season of Lent – a time of preparation, reflection and celebration before the feast of Easter (for Lent) and Christmastide (for Advent).  The word Advent comes from the Latin for coming, or arriving.  We celebrate Advent by special markers: the colors purple or blue and the Advent Wreath of 4 candles, one for each Sunday, culminating with the lighting of the Christ Candle (the 5^th one) on Christmas.  It’s a concrete way for us to articulate the waiting that defines this season. 

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, November 11^th         

Exodus: 18:1-27

This week has been filled to overflowing with talk of politics, partisanship, gridlock, decision-making and agenda-setting.  We see the unavoidable challenges before us that cannot be ignored away with a magic wand, or avoided until the solve themselves.  How do we do leadership as Christians?  The day after the election I heard CNN talking about how Protestants and Born-Agains voted for Romney while Catholics and people of color vote for Obama.  I doubt that things are that clear and simply categorized.  Maybe part of the reason for which we have such difficulty in our democracy regarding addressing the problems we face is that our media outlets play to the extremes, they like “good TV” – rather than speaking with bridge-builders and door-openers they focus upon fear mongerers and demagogues.

Blogging Towards Sunday, November 4, 2012

Exodus 16:1-26

We live in culture plagued by a vicious cycles of instant and incessant gratification.  We want to quench our thirst, satisfy our hunger – and we want it our way!  Our culture has become a society defined as consumer and consumeristic.  In the midst of our hungers and thirsts (which are natural) somehow we get lost.  The fear that there isn’t enough to go around, leads us to symbiotic anxiety and mistrust.  We need to get ours or get git.  In such presumed scarcity our needs are morphed into wants, desires and fantasies.  We want it all, otherwise we might not get any.  We want it how and when we want it, otherwise it might not be around.   And yet the God of the Bible points towards a different way of life together, a community of koinonia or fellowship based upon the shared life-transforming experience of God’s love known in Jesus of Nazareth who gave his life rather than give into the anxiety of scarcity.  His sacrifice changes everything, giving us a new lens through which to see the world as it truly is.  How do we live this paradoxical truth by faith in a society based upon the myth of scarcity?  How do we love our neighbor when we are told that our neighbor is out to get what we have?  How do we testify to a life-sustaining God in a culture in which we are told to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and to save ourselves, because no one else will?

Blogging Towards Sunday October 21st

Blogging Towards  Sunday, October 21^st        

 Exodus 12:1-42

Passover: it’s the beginning of months, the religious festival that marks time from the freedom of Israel from slavery, it’s the celebration of the experience of God’s redemptive action – it turns the past into a celebration of the future.  As Christians we don’t necessarily follow, observe or celebrate Passover – and yet it’s more than just history, more than just the cultural background of the world of Jesus.  It’s also an invitation to us as seekers of God, followers of the teachings of Jesus, and practitioners seeking our center in the Spirit.  Passover is an invitation for all those who follow God to live with a new sense of time, a new sense of social relationships and identity, and to have a new relationship to the past and the future.

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, September 30^th      

 Exodus 5:1-9,15-6:9

Is God really there for and with us?  If so, shouldn’t life be easier?  Shouldn’t we not suffer?  Since we still suffer, struggle and live in strife, does that mean that our hope is misplaced in God? That God is unloving?  Or that God is impuissant to save, protect and heal us?  Theologians call this existential question that of THEODICY:  is God good?  Is God all powerful?  If so why is there evil?  If not, how can God be God?  Today’s passage tells the return of Moses to Egypt, his initial confrontation with Pharaoh, and what seemed to be a great failure in the eyes of the enslaves Israelites.  The Israelites only see the bricks their made to make.  God sees something else: the bricks with which God wants to build a new land, a new people, a new hope.

Blogging Towards Sunday, September 23^rd     

  Exodus 3:1-22

What’s in a name?  That’s the question with which today’s scripture from Exodus wrestles.  Always a propos, the question seems even more poignant in this time of increasingly vehement and violent religious discourse, political action and violent extremism.  All the religions of the world lift up compassion, justice and peace.  And yet multiple mysterious things are done in the name of divinities: the storming of an embassy in Libya, the Japanese invasion and occupation of the Korean Peninsula, the blockade of the West Bank, the enslavement of Africans, the Crusades, the 9/11 bombing, the Spanish Inquisition and the cold blood murders of medical workers who perform abortions.  It’s easy for us to look at actions taken in the name of other gods and traditions as see how they are twisted, and yet we have to admit that in our own faith community tragically destructive things have been done in the name of the God we serve and follow.  So where does that leave us?  If we claim to do things in the name of God, are we religious extremists?  When we pray in the name of Jesus of Nazareth are we intolerant activists?  If we don’t invoke the name of God in our actions, decisions and talk are we denying our faith out of the fear of being labeled extremists or even terrorists?

Blogging Towards Sunday, September 16^th     

  Exodus1:1-2:22

“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” – J. R. R. Tolkien

We’re starting a new series wrestling with the story of the Exodus.  The underlying theme of the book is about freedom.  That God frees us from slavery for covenant life together.  As you read that sentence, and as we work through the text in the coming weeks our guiding interpretive question is what does that mean?  Then?  Now? 

We also should ask ourselves How does this mean?  “Unlike the recipes in a cookbook or the instructions in an elementary arithmetic book, there are meanings and truths that simply are not sayable in a series of simples sentences.  Indeed the richer the meanings, and the more important the truths, the more difficult it is to say them simply in the spirit of one plus one equals two.  Therefore, poets, and storytellers, too, resort to a variety of strategies for using words in ways that will catch and embody meanings and truths that we may all have felt and believed to be real or at least hoped against hop might be so, but find it difficult to express.” – J. Gerald Janzen in Exodus.

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, August 19^th    
Mark 14:32-72

"The killing of Jesus, however incidental to the tasks of governance for the Roman and Jewish authorities, masks the worst in human brutality. Regimes do this to people in the name of all kinds of claims to common good and, not least, to the furtherance of peace. People do this to people, when anger and fear conspire to suppress love and goodness. We all do it. Mark's is an 'in your face'  account of the killing of love."

– William Loader

Theological Themes:

This week’s passage in our ongoing reading of Mark, is commonly read on Good Friday, as the passion narrative.  Other texts habitually read with it are Isaiah 50:1-9 and Philippians 2:5-10.  We reflect and celebrate the paradoxical horror of Good Friday because, as the world continues to turn upside down, Jesus is still at work transforming lives, transforming governments, and transforming societies.  That’s the theological affirmation underneath this story of suffering, desertion and ultimately death and finally new life.

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for 
Sunday, June 10^th  

  Mark 11:27-12:17

Authority.  That’s the key issue underneath the scriptures that we wrestle with this morning.  The religious leaders of the day are challenged and confused by the authority that Jesus seems to have.  Their antagonism seems to come from the fact that he has taken a different path then they have.  He’s not studied like them.  He doesn’t speak like them.  He’s outside of their sphere of influence.  Are they jealous?; insecure?; threatened?; close-minded?  What we see throughout the text is the fear the leaders have of the crowd (11:32 & 12:12).  The leaders are politically isolated, fearful of the very people they purportedly serve.  As I study the text I find myself wondering how I – how we as a faith community – are like these leaders – out of touch with the crowd, the people on the street, the larger population? How are we stuck in our own box and unable to think outside of it?  How do we understand that in a time of great, radical and overwhelming change that impacts us in terms of society, technology, relationships, communication and life-style?  How do we act as coherent, authentic followers of Jesus in a world that is increasingly pluralistic?

Questions for going deeper with the Scriptures for Sunday, June 3^rd 

  Mark 11:12-26

Prayer.  It’s something that we all invoke, even if we claim to be spiritual but not religious.  But what is prayer all about?  Is it us expressing our needs, hopes and fears?  Is it God listening to us?  Is it an energy that we plug into through centering actions of silence and mindfulness? Is it a way in which we relinquish our will and accept God’s, connecting with the work that God is already about in our world?  Today’s scripture points to all these facets of prayer and also offers a deep challenge to an exclusive vision that God only listens to prayers done in one particular spot.  Common in Jesus’ day, and mostly foreign to us, this notion of having a privileged or exclusive relationship with God still makes up part of the religious perspective we move in.  How do you experience prayer?  How do we as a community?  How is God calling us to move beyond our expectations, to being a house of prayer in a deeper and wider way?

Blogging Towards Sunday April 22^nd

Mark 9:38-50

A common joke among pastors goes like this: “If it weren't for the people, I'd love my church!"   While irreverently funny, it points to the true challenge of following the teachings of Jesus:  other people.  It’s easy (or at least seems easier) to work to love God, as Jesus said, with all our intelligence, passion and life-energy.  It’s other people that are difficult.  There’s a reason that Jesus claimed that anyone can love their friends and family.  What’s truly revolutionary is to actively love your enemies in a way that transforms us, them and the world.

Blogging Towards Sunday: April 15^th 
Mark 9:30-37

WWJD? [What Would Jesus Do?] is a phrase commonly printed on bracelets and t-shirts these days to proclaim a message of Christian ethics, morality or world-view shaped action.  It’s an acronym that has entered the lexicon of our national and pop culture.  It comes from the work and thought of Walter Rauschenbusch, an American theologian and Baptist minister of the last century [1851-1918].  He was one of the key figures in what became known as the Social Gospel movement: an effort to care for the poor, widowed, orphaned and excluded.  It began out of an effort to live out the teachings of Jesus, to truly be able to pray may your will God be done on earth as it is in heaven.  That movement faded in glory, losing popularity in the beginning of the 20^th century to the growing evangelical and fundamentalist perspectives.  But now, the essence of the movement is back, feeding those later movements with its vigor.  I wonder though if the acronym isn’t wrong in itself?  I don’t think Jesus asks us to do what he did so much, as he asks us to find our identity in his kingdom and Way, asking us What Will You Do when you are confronted with….?

Blogging Towards  Easter Sunday: April 8^th 

Isaiah 25:1-10a & Mark 16:1-8

Easter is about more than just eggs.  It seems stupid to say it.  Yet in our current cultural context, commercial settings and pop culture vernacular, it has to be said.  What is Easter about?  Historically, we know that the group of Hebraic and Israelite followers and disciples of Jesus of Nazareth claimed that he rose from the dead, leaving his tomb empty, at sunrise on this third day after his crucifixion, as the Jewish Sabbath ended.  That community soon became diverse and different, incorporating and engrafting people from diverse cultures, languages and nations; as well as involving both men and women as full participants.  This diversity – which today seems commonplace – was radical in the time of the Roman Empire.  In the Ancient Worldview nations and tribes all worshipped their own gods. And so didn’t mix with other peoples by marriage, real estate location outside of their cultural ghettos and in religious communities.

Blogging Towards Palm Sunday, April 1^st

  Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29 & Mark 11:1-11

What is power?  We live in a season in which several people in our country are scrambling to become the President – the most powerful man (or woman) in the world.  What makes power?  A super PAC? An Ivy League degree?; Money?; a particular zip code?; military power?; connections?; luck?   We are in a confused age in which greatness, power, authority, fame, are aspired to – and yet often times responsibility to those over whom power is given, is shrugged off.  Look at our schools.  Look at what is happening in Syria.  Look at the major themes of the box-office smash movie of the past week “The Hunger Games.”  In an age and culture in which the squeaky wheel gets the oil, the loudest complainer gets ahead; the message of Jesus is counter-cultural, pointing to a parallel way of being in, but not of, this world.

The greatly influential German philosopher and poet Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) best frames the way that our world today envisions and defines power. He wrote of the will to power, believing to be the main driving force in man (and he meant man as he was an open misogynist).  Achievement, ambition, the striving to reach the highest possible position in life; these are all manifestations of the will to power.

Blogging Towards Sunday March 18^th   

Mark 9:14-29

 What is faith?  It’s a common question today in our culture in which many indentify themselves as spiritual but not religious.  Is faith about an institution?; or is it about the God at the center of it all?  Can you still doubt and have faith?  Can you lose your faith when you struggle with the difficulty of believing?  Today’s scripture passage wrestles with those questions in the context of a story about the remarkable faith of a father who radically loves his sick son, coming to Jesus for help.

Blogging Towards Sunday, March 4^th    

Mark 9:2-13

 

This past week our neighbors were robbed.  An occurrence that’s all too common in our city of Oakland.  I was most likely home, being dropped off by the car repair shop shuttle.  Odds are that I scared off the robbers, who left without the TV that they’d unplugged from the wall, while I chummed it up with the driver.  It’s not all that uncommon, as I’ve said; but I’d just spent the 20 minutes in the shuttle ride talking with another passenger, who lives in a less “edgy” and that’s not urbanite for “cool”, area of town than I do.  Her concerns were all about burglaries, violent crimes, with the fear of living in the city.  She saw true – but only part of what is.

Oaklanders seem to take pride in the grit.  Isn’t that why Oaklandish is so successful?  If you live in a dirty, tough town, it’s better to take pride in surviving it than to be paralyzed by shame for staying there.  For many of us, the city, and maybe Oakland in particular, is one of the last places to come to mind (if it comes to mind at all) when we think about where we encounter God in our lives or find spiritual renewal.  Instead, our minds wander to more peaceful and serene settings outside the hurried and complex life of the city: the mountains, the desert, parks, the ocean beach-side, silent retreat houses in the redwood forests of the North Bay. 

Blogging Towards Sunday, March 4^th    

Mark 8:22-9:1

Spiritual sight is something that most of us are looking for.  It’s not primarily the capacity to know all things that we long for, but more for perspective, balance and direction.  I’ve spent years praying for sudden illumination, the sort of explosive religious experience that comes to mind when you think of Paul on the way to Damascus, Moses in front of the burning bush, or Esther in her journey to queenship. 

We live among a few spiritual giants: Mother Teresa, MLK Jr., Desmond Tutu, Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, other yogis. We have our own lists which differ with specifics, but have the same focus.  I’ve been around people who had an authority that you could feel.  It was as if the air was different around them, the space changed, their perspective stretching out to impact me, to invite me to deeper vision, wiser words, radical humility and action.  But how do you achieve that?  You can’t buy it in the dollar bin at Target. Nor can you order it from the Great Speakers’ Series.

Blogging Towards Sunday, February 26^th   

Mark 8:1-21

How much is enough?  We live in a society where we want to super size everything.  So we should supersize faith right?  We should have a supersized demonstration of proof that God is and that God is what we think, before we believe.  It’s not asking the impossible.  It’s just asking for a little more, not that hard to get.  It only costs like another quarter to get it at McDonald’s, so God should be able to do it – easy!