A Christmas/New Year Prayer

Every time you move you are given the gift of examination. You need to take the time to figure out what things are worth moving, what things are worth passing along or leaving behind, and what things need to meet landfill. Hopefully at the end of it you are left with a tight grip on the things that reflect and shape who you are.

Two and a half years ago Jen and I moved, in just about every way a couple people can. We moved into our home on Pulawski SW. But we also moved into parenthood, into a new season of life, into new friendships, and we moved deeply and irrevocably into The Church. In that last move we tried to be very careful about only holding on to those things that are closest to our hearts as followers of Jesus, and leaving everything else open so we could learn from the community we were joining at Servant's.


One of the things that we carefully wrapped in newspaper and tucked away for the journey was the quite rhythm of the church year. We knew that our own worship needed guidance from the shepherd's staff of these old movements of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany; Lent, Easter and Pentecost. When we got to Servant's we talked with Ben about his commitments for our worshiping life and with the elders about theirs, then we tentatively unpacked the rhythms observed by saints throughout the centuries.
For the third time we'll spend half the year treading the well worn path of these seasons, trusting that with every lap around the calendar their ancient lessons work deeper into our life and witness.

It is interesting how often the themes of the Church year line up with the calendar and the seasons of creation. Easter's empty tomb enters into call and response with the budding trees, Pentecost sets the Spirit fire anew when the city heats up for summer, and Christmas sets us up for boundless hope and possibilities as New Years resolutions are made (and often broken).

One of the biggest blessings of my job is when families give me the gift of walking into a hospital room to pray over a new born child. Every time it happens I am overwhelmed with a sense of wonder and hope for the little person in my arms. They seem to literally burst with life. Everything, right down to their shallow breathing, is so new and unknown.



I get the same feeling for the church every year when we have these two precious weeks of the Christmas season. After my Advent longing for God's people the newborn message of Christ's coming is fertile ground for joy and expectation for what God has in store for his bride. Combine that newborn expectation with the close of another calendar year and all the budgets and ministry plans that go with it and it serves as a pretty good time to reflect and look forward. You'll hear a bit more of that next week from me. For today, a Christmas/New Year prayer

I'd like to invite you to post a comment with your own prayer for the seasons to come.


God of glory, God of grace
Fill this year with the power of your presence
As you came so long ago, come anew
Be born in us today and every day

So that the brightness of your beauty
might be reflected in your bride
So that the goodness of your grace
might be given from our receiving hands
into the waiting hands of the world

Meet us, O Lord, in our lives of worship
and change us in the meeting
Call up from our deep and hidden places
the gifts that you knit into our being
and grant us the vision and boldness
to be the incarnation of those finger prints of the Spirit

Help us to be more than what we are
Help us to see with eyes more true than our own
Help us to walk with purpose deeper than we plan
Help us to grow in gratitude for your love that precedes ours

Teach us to Live.

In the name of Emmanuel, Amen.

The Slip

Well, coming off vacation into Christmas week caught me a little busier than I expected. So this week I give way to another trusted voice. Wendell Berry is one of the most prophetic and challenging voices in the American church. His writings on the biblical concepts of sabbath and jubilee have left me uncomfortable many times. But, for all his great essays, I love him for his poetry (found in some of his best collections like this, this and this). So this week an Advent poem from Wendell Berry.

Please take a minute to post a comment on a favorite line or image from the poem. Whoever you are, however often you read this blog, if you are a part of Servant's or not, let us hear your feedback.










The Slip
The river takes the land, and leaves nothing.
Where the great slip gave way in the bank
and an acre disappeared, all human plans
dissolve. An awful clarification occurs
where a place was. Its memory breaks
from what is known now, begins to drift.
Where cattle grazed and trees stood, emptiness
widens the air for birdflight, wind, and rain.
As before the beginning, nothing is there.
Human wrong is in the cause, human
ruin in the effect–but no matter;
all will be lost, no matter the reason.
Nothing, having arrived, will stay.
The earth, even, is like a flower, so soon
passeth it away. And yet this nothing
is the seed of all–the clear eye
of Heaven, where all the worlds appear.
Where the imperfect has departed, the perfect
begins its struggle to return. The good gift
begins again its descent. The maker moves
in the unmade, stirring the water until
it clouds, dark beneath the surface,
stirring and darkening the soul until pain
perceives new possibility. There is nothing
to do but learn and wait, return to work
on what remains. Seed will sprout in the scar.
Though death is in the healing, it will heal.

~Wendell Berry

Eat This Book

Jen and I are taking a week of vacation to get a little breathing room this week. That makes for a great time to link you all out to a respected voice.

As I blogged last week, we Christians are people of the book. I have thought a lot about what that means and how scripture does its work to form us. Perhaps my most influential guide in that thinking has been Eugene Peterson. Some people from Servant's have been reading his book "Eat This Book" in which he delves into questions about the way we engage scripture. This week I want to send you to an interview he gave soon after that book was published. Hopefully it gets some juices flowing.

Eugene Peterson on Scripture

Let us all know what you think.

People of the book

"People of the book."

Four years ago in January of 2005 I had a once in a lifetime opportunity to visit the Sultanate of Oman with a group from Western Theological Seminary where I was studying. There is a group of donors connected to the school who highly value the experience of the gospel in different cultures, so they make sure that every person studying pastoral ministry at Western has the opportunity to do so. So with nine other students and one ethics professor I flew 22 hours to spend some time with Michael Bos, an RCA missionary living in Oman. (where, by the way, the RCA has an amazing history including providing doctors for the Sultan and starting the first school and hospital)

I could write about that trip for a long time, but there is one phrase that got me thinking about my time in Oman again. "People of the book." I heard this term a couple of times as we were welcomed into conversation with some of the highest governmental and religious leaders in this Islamic Sultanate. It would pop up in a sentence like, "it is only right for us to work together towards peace in our region, because you are people of the book."

I was so intrigued by this phrase that I started asking more about what it meant. My favorite answer came from a young Arab Muslim scholar who met with our group. I have, unfortunately, forgotten his name, but I haven't forgotten his response. He said, "being people of the book means that you do not found your faith on something as tentative as personal experience, you are rooted to a text." You can get a more expansive answer here or here.

I started to claim that phrase by the end of the trip. That's not to say I agreed with what it meant for our Muslim hosts who used it. Although I appreciate their willingness to find common ground to work upon, I believe with all I am that Genesis and Revelation are the book ends on God's written revelation. And while I am comfortable working with people of other faiths towards peace and justice in our communities, I make no apologies for my faith that Jesus is the only anchor for my hope and the only source of peace and justice in the world.

What I claim is the truth in my host's answer. We Christians remain rooted to a text or we are rooted in nothing. We submit all our experience and insight to the light of scripture or we wander in the dark. We are people of the book and that is why scripture is my top signposts for finding the Jesus Way.


But in what ways do we let scripture do that work? How do we turn to it for direction, both individually and as a community? How do we let it shape our imagination and those of our children? How do we live as people of the book?

Help out all of us who read this blog and take a few minutes to share your thoughts. As I said last week, I have to ok all comments to keep undesirable content off the blog, so if you don't see your comments immediately give it a little time.

Signposts part two

Something in my heart awakens every time I see one of the three highway signs marking my exit for home. On the eastbound Ford it's Lake Michigan Drive, on the westbound it's Lane Ave. If I'm coming from the south it's Wealthy Street off 131. Most of the time I don't even notice them. They are are there for others who may not know the way yet, but for me they slip into the backdrop of a drive my muscles take care of without much help from my brain.

When I do see them, I mean really see them, it's usually because I have been away from westown long enough that they seem novel again. And when that happens, something wakes up and I remember that I love this neighborhood. Not the idea of it, or what it represents, but the actual dirt and concrete of it. That ability to really see things carries me from the off ramp to home. Something triggers and it's like, Oh yeah, Wealthy Street. I notice the colors of the sign for the Big Chipper and the faded outline of "The Loading Zone" at Butterworth and Straight, even though it is now "The Hot Zone".

All that to say, when we talk about signposts for the Way of Jesus, we talk about finding them in a particular place, namely the places, we live and work and play in. Eugene Peterson speaks to this well in the book I mentioned last week, The Jesus Way. Here is how he starts the book.

"This is a conversation on the spirituality of the ways we go about following Jesus, the Way. The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular, local.

The ways employed in our North American culture are conspicuously impersonal: programs, organizations, techniques, general guidelines, information detached from place. In matters of ways and means, the vocabulary of numbers is preferred over names, ideologies crowd out ideas, the gray fog of abstraction absorbs the sharp particularities of the recognizable face and the familiar street...

This is wrong thinking, and wrong living. Jesus is an alternative to the dominant ways of the worlds, not a supplement to them. We cannot use impersonal means to do or say a personal thing - and the gospel is personal or it is nothing."

This is one of the main reasons Jen and I fell in love with Servant's. This church is bound by a sense of common mission to a particular place. It is westown in all of her complexities and diversity that we find ourselves and it is in this neighborhood that we walk out our journeys on the Way.

Last week I asked about our personal signposts, the things that help us find and walk on the Way of Jesus. This week I wonder how we, as the church, stand as a signposts for the "recognizable face and familiar street." How do we stand as markers of the Way for the neighbor we shovel snow by and the cashier in the grocery store? How do we encourage others to join in the journey?


Let's continue to get momentum going in the comments here. Thanks for the responses last week, both on the blog and in person. Sorry for the delay on comments. I have to moderate them to prevent unsavory spam from popping up, so once you post a comment I get an e-mail where I must approve the comment before it is posted. I try to check a couple times a day.

Signposts

I've found myself using the phrase "signpost" quite a bit lately. It's one of those things that you don't really think about, you just all of a sudden notice one day that you've been dropping it left and right in conversations. Realizing my frequent use of the term has me thinking more about what it reflects.

As city dwellers, those of us in westown, have no shortage of signposts. Some of them I always notice; A&B Party Store, Parkway Tropics (the neighborhood strip club), The Other Way Ministries. They serve as a reminder of who is in this neighborhood and what they are about. Some of them slip into the back ground; West Fulton Parking, Marion St., McDonalds. They are so much a part of the landscape I just stop noticing them. There are other signs that come in and out of focus depending on the season, like "no parking odd dates november 1st-april 1st," the even-date/odd-date plow schedule that you ignore in the summer but notice again when the snow flies... Or at least some people on the block notice when the snow flies.

As a hiker, signposts have at times meant the difference between a warm tent and a long night in the middle of a national park. When hiking there are few things more beautiful in the gathering darkness than a wooden post with a number and an arrow on it. Between that and a good map you can figure out which way to turn to get back to your campsite. Sometimes signposts even help you figure out how to avoid trouble to begin with.



Our lives are full of signposts, but I haven't been talking about the metal and wood signposts of our city landscape or back country trails. I've found myself talking about signposts as a metaphor for the life of faith. In fact, last week I used that term in this blog referring to some words from our website. And every time I use the term I recognize echo's of Jesus in the background saying, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life."

I am not looking for just any signposts, I am looking for signposts that help me find The Way. It is a powerful image for me. An acknowledgement that following Jesus, is about more than believing the right things, it is about walking the right way, the Jesus Way. In fact that is what some of the first Christians saw themselves as doing, they were "followers of The Way." Last year my favorite author Eugene Peterson put out an entire book about this metaphor called, "The Jesus Way." It's a great read.

But the point, I guess, is this; if following Jesus is about following in The Way of Jesus, we'll need some help to understand what that way is, where it is taking us, and how we stay on it. I can tell someone to get to our house by heading east or west on Fulton, turning south on Marion at the McDonalds then east on Pulawski (at least I could before someone stole the lovely street sign in the picture) and park on the side of the block with odd address numbers.

I want to be able to do the same for people that want to move through life on the Jesus Way. So I'm always on the lookout for signposts of The Way. Those markers and guides that help us find our way forward.

My hope for this blog is to get some dialogue going, so give me some help this week and post a comment about the signposts you rely on.

How do you learn what the Way of Jesus is? Where do you find hope in where it is taking us? And most of all, what signposts help you figure out how to stay on it?

big words

"As we follow Jesus we may not always know what God is calling us to do, but we are pretty sure of what kind of people God is calling us to be. People of hope, so compelled by the healing and justice, the grace and reconciliation of the gospel that we guide our lives by it. That is at the center of who we long to be as Servant’s Community Church, and we believe that everyone God calls into this community brings with them unique gifts and a unique role to play as we partner with that gospel work that God is doing in our midst."

I wrote those words earlier this summer in response to a nagging need to simplify what this whole church thing is about. They sit on the home page for Servant's website now as some sort of signpost for finding our way forward.

The words that make up that short paragraph are big words. Hope. Justice. Grace. They are big like a blazing Lake Michigan sunset, where your eyes get lost somewhere between the endless shoreline, the sprawling eastward sky, and the line where reality and reflection meet at the horizon. In other words, too big to take in.

But at the end of the day, I guess those big words are not ideas to be understood and tamed. They are more like the tools we have to tell a story. We borrowed those words of course. They come from a redemption story that is bigger than our story, yet one we find ourselves in. When we use those words it's a lot like taking a snapshot of that blazing sunset. Like all snapshots it's dissapointing when compared to the real thing, but it none the less gives enough of the color and contrast to get you back on the beach.



Our journey together as the people of God is an attempt to take those big creator words like hope, justice and grace, and create a little beauty ourselves. Hopefully this blog helps tell that story.

So every Tuesday when you fire up the computer and settle in for the day, take a swing over for a new post. Comments are highly encouraged, and hopefully those of us who are already a part of the Servant's family can pick up some of the conversation face to face.