A Social Network Christmas

Continuing on the clever Christmas videos with post-modern and technological twists, I'm including another addition: A Social Network Christmas.

The Christmas Prophecy

Advent Video

Advent is my favorite time of the year, in large part because in church communities we read through sections of the prophets, in particular Isaiah.  I find it to be a deep spiritual time for me, a renewing of hope, an articulation of what the world is meant to be(come) and be about.  This year there have been numerous creative digital and electronic creations around Advent and Christmas.

Here's one I heard about through a French friend, a creative way to retell the prophetic poetry of Isaiah in and for our context today.

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The Digital Story of the Nativity

I've been sent links to this video by several friends this week.  An interesting take on a sometimes too familiar story.

Trader: the video.

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This one seemed appropriate to me in this season of Advent.

Blogging Towards Sunday, December 12, 2010

The 3rd Sunday of Advent: JOY

Isaiah 35:1-10 | Psalm 146:5-10 | Luke 1:47-55 | Matthew 11:2-11

Is Jesus for real? Do we really want him in Christmas?

This is my new favorite Christmas song this year, "There's Still My Joy"[VIDEO] : [lyrics] by the Indigo Girls.  I'm haunted by the repeated chorus line: "One tiny child can change the world.  One shining light can show the way."

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Blogging Towards Sunday, December 5, 2010

Isaiah 11:1-10 & Matthew 3:1-12

The Isaiah passages in the readings proposed for this Second Sunday in Advent grab me.  Filled with word pictures, I find my mind's eye inundated with possibilities, stimuli and connections.  The Stump of Jesse is contrasted with the wind of the Spirit.  This stump, symbol of the ancient royal line of David (Jesse was his father) is stumped, dead, finished after the Babylonian and Assyrian invasions of the 6th and 8th centuries BCE.  The once great line of wise God-fearing rulers is gone.  But a new leader is coming, blown by the wind, filled with the spirit, called to be a great leader who will rule with justice in particular in regards to the meek and the poor as opposed to rule in a partisan way blowing with the winds of propaganda, gain and public-opinion.  The stump is immobile, unwilling and unable to change, to adapt, to grow.  The Spirit, or wind (in Hebrew and Greek it's the same word) is fluid, active, transformative, inviting, moving all those that it comes into contact with.  And so this first half of this passage (1-5) is dominated with these two images: Stump & Wind.

CAPC Community Thanksgiving Meal Highlights

set the video to 480 p to get the best viewing.

Over 150 people helped us in our annual efforts to feed the hungry.

This year we served over 200 people thanks to all our partners!

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Blogging Towards the First Sunday of Advent

November 28, 2010

Isaiah 2:1-5  &  Matthew 24:36-44

This week's passages paint huge pictures of vivid images of an idyllic future and captures the ways in which I think we live between poles of anxiety and apathy in our modern, urban, globalized life.  Isaiah 2 is one of my favorite parts of the Bible.  If I had to choose 10 chapters from the whole Bible to keep, it would be one of them.  Yet it seems too good to be true.  Swords into plowshares?  A global multicultural, multiracial, multilingual community brought together by and for God?  My heart beat has picked up as a type this.  WOW!  Wouldn't that be.....beyond belief?  And yet I think that's often how we - and maybe I mean me - see it.  Beyond belief.  A pipe dream.  In between the anxiety of trying to keep a job, stay safe, take care of those we love and the apathy of being inundated by surrounding needs,  fears, uncertainties it just seems easier to put my trust into small, realizable things rather than in massive universal-transforming visions of hope.  Maybe that what Jesus is pointing to in Matthew 26: don't give up or into anxiety and apathy.  Stay awake.  Be watchful.  Be thoughtful.  Be ready.  

Blogging Towards Thanksgiving

Deuteronomy 26:1-11 & John 6:24-35

Thanksgiving is a funny holiday.  Is it a religious one?, or historical?, political?, cultural? or nationalistic?  In our post-modern setting we view the original myth of the sharing between Pilgrims and Native-Americans through the lens of the hermeneutics of suspicion.  While not necessarily Christian in totality, it does harken back to the worldview that was primarily shared between those that framed and shaped what would become our national identity and metanarrative.

President George Washington made a proclamation in 1789 declaring the last Thursday of November to be a day of thanksgiving, echoed and transformed to the 4th Thursday by President Abraham Lincoln in his proclamation of 1863, the holiday has its roots in an experience and expression of gratitude.

This act of thanksgiving, recognizing that the gift of life as we have it originated outside our actions, beyond our power.  The only response to such as gift is gratitude, thanksgiving: an expression of "thank you" in our actions, relationships and being.  

Church: 

trying to meet the future 

by doing what we did in the past.

I watched a video on education reform making the rounds on Facebook this afternoon while doing some household chores.  It's a 20 minute clip of Sir Ken Robinson [personal site], a speaker and writer, advisor on education.  It's clever, insightful, concise and potentially disturbing.  He basically makes the point that the world is rapidly changing.  We don't know what life will be like in 30 years (when my kids will be active adults) let alone in 5 years.  And yet we continue to educate children in the same way that we have for over 100 years.  While keep trying to address the paradigms of the 21st century, seeking to educate our children so that they have a sense of cultural identity, so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being a part of the process of globalization, with strategies and expectations of the 19th century.  We are continually trying to meet the future by doing what we did in the past.

I'm including the video below.  I found it invigorating thinking about my own children and the near-epic struggle to ensure that that get a life-feeding education.  In my own work as pastor - a teacher alongside a community of faith - I wonder if we aren't doing the same thing. Do we do church in a way that was conceived for the context of the 19th and 20th centuries dominated by the transformational experiences of what we call the Reformation and the Enlightenment?  Maybe our churches have decreasing attendance and increasingly bored members because we are talking about faith in a way that doesn't resonate with our questions of today and the ways in which we process our wonderings about the meaning of life.  Church is focused around a sermon: a passive listening to an expert talk to you about something in an abstract way.  A format that seems to be the least sought after in the ways in which people live, work and communicate today.

If you're game to respond to this post, why do you find church incoherent, out-to-lunch or less than life-giving?

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Blogging Towards Sunday, November 21

Jeremiah 23:1-6 | Luke 22:33-43 | Colossians 1:11-20

What would you do if you were king (or queen) for a day?  It's what we dream of: be in charge, have that castle, the crown that implies power, prestige and authority.  Yet what would we do with such power?  We might want to change the world, heal the wrongs, bring justice, and maybe also do a little something for ourselves.  A favorite band of the 80s - the Thompson Twins - wrote a song about this.

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Blogging Towards Sunday, November 14, 2010

Isaiah 65:17-25 & Luke 21:5-19

The end of the world, or just as we've known it?

Two passages that paint wide and big visions of the world  the ways it is and the way God wants it to become.   Are they talking about the recreation of the world?  The end of the world?  Or the end of the world as we know it?

Seminary

We live in a hard time economically filled with many choices.  How can we make life better for ourselves, those we love and live with and our larger community.  That desire to serve others is one of the main forces that drives some folks to try seminary, believing that a connection between faith and daily life might be a vocational call.  As with all calls it's not exactly what we expect when we undertake the journey at the beginning.  I loved seminary - all three of them that I attended.  It was a challenging time, stretching my intellect, expanding my personal faith through the adventure of the integration of head-learning and heart-convictions, theo-speak and God-experience.  And yet what would have been more helpful that another Greek class, history class, or lecture would have been a basic business class, an Adobe Software Suite course, basic accounting, a marketing seminar and a season of community organizing.

We often think - or hope - that we can change the world through our service, example and commitment.  Oftentimes it's unfortunately the world that changes us when we are confronted with the loneliness, impossible vastness and relational triangulation of clergy work.  Yet each vocation has challenges, costs and benefits.  It's easy to second-guess what we've chosen, to fall prey to the all-too-easy-trap of suspecting that the grass is greener elsewhere.  What's harder is to enjoy where we are, laughing with the good and hard, celebrating the grey.  On twitter this week I stumbled across this humorously clever and wickedly sarcastic video someone made about seminary and the earnest hope we all share (wether in seminary or elsewhere) to go out and change the world.

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