spiritstirrer

Why do you look for the living among the dead?
Luke 24:5b (CEB)

I love cemeteries! So much history, beauty, and sacredness in one place. There is also much of the present, fresh flowers, little toys, bottles of liquor, an occasional visitor in a chair, new grief and old grief. There is something about the cross-section of life and death, now and later, this life and the life to come?

In my years as a pastor, I have also paid more attention to other small details. Living people who have their names on a gravestone just waiting for their day. Young lives lost alongside long lives lived. Graves that tell the truth even when it hurts and the occasional grave for an unknown person.

Cemeteries are key places in our lives . . . but we cannot stay there! We cannot expect life to come, only the reality of our own mortality that paves the way for new life, for healing, wholeness, and the possibility of a better tomorrow.

Yet we love to hang out in the places of the dead when we struggle. We love to go to the past and believe the scripts that the past tells us about ourselves, our situation, and about the other. When anxieties and fears come visiting we tend to go to the well-worn path. We thinking that we might find answers but so often we find ourselves just strengthening our positions, digging our heels, feeding on hopelessness.

Each of us has our cemeteries. The places where the skeletons of our life can be found. They too are full of stories, wonder, and awe. They too contain the remains of our family stories and unresolved grief. These cemeteries are important for us as long as we recognize that there is no life there, that there is only death.

We go to these places because they are familiar. We are all hungry for meaning, connection, and comfort. The familiar is the fast food of those things, it provides immediate relief that does not last.

In our life of faith, it is easy to settle for resuscitation, for being the same person just breathing again. No real changes, just the relief that we are breathing, heart beating, and moving through life. Just an intellectual ascent to Jesus with an occasional trip to see him in the cemetery. There we can worship, connect, and walk away feeling like we have done our best. No real sacrifice, no transformation, just a benevolent more of the same.

The good news is that we are called to a new life. Resurrection means that we are transformed, renewed, and redeemed. Our whole selves now being shaped by a new Spirit, God’s spirit, shaped and guided by God’s love. New eyes, new ears, new posture, and a new attitude. No longer bound by our past we can freely live into a new future. No longer letting death define us, our script define us, or our past define us. Now being defined by grace and allowing grace to lead us into loving ourselves, our neighbor, and God.

Allowing our old self to die is difficult work. It is even more difficult once the Easter lunch is finished. Once the nap has been taken the well-worn path takes over, the signs pointing, and the every day of life with its worries and rhythms making us deaf to cries of resurrection.

Easter is a season so I’ve been wondering about what resurrection might look like for us in the days, months, and years ahead? What does new life centered on God’s love look like for us as individuals but also for us as a congregation? What does it mean for us to put aside our old selves and begin to search for the living among the living? How do we allow love to guide us not fear, anxiety, prejudice, or security? How do we help each other grow in compassion, peace-making, and forgiveness?

How do we help each other stroll out of the cemeteries and into the land of the living?

 

 

So I give you a new command: Love each other deeply and fully. Remember the ways that I have loved you, and demonstrate your love for others in those same ways.
John 13:34 (The Voice Bible)

Holy Thursday is one of my favorite remembrances of the Christian year. There’s something about food, story, and urgency that compels us to remember and to rehearse.

I often think that Jesus could have said so many things, could have called us at that moment to so many things, yet his command was a simple return to what God’s work had been about from the beginning, love.

Love modeled in service to one another.
Love that beginning with eating, drinking, and conversation.
Love through dirty feet and achy knees.
Love misunderstood, vulnerable, and abundant.
Love becoming primary identity as God’s people for the world.
Love without disclaimers or pre-requisites.

Each time we gather, each time we eat and drink together, each time that we remember that we are baptized, each time that we claim to be Christian, we are re-committing ourselves to the way of love that Jesus modeled for us.

On this Holy Thursday, we have an opportunity to go beyond intellectual recollection of what Jesus did on that fateful night. We have an opportunity to get beyond the sadness of an event that took place long ago. We have an opportunity to get on our knees, tie a towel around our waist and show the world what it means to be a follower of the way.

May we make love known,
Christ known,
in our eating and our drinking.

May we make love known,
Christ known,
in our engagements and in our conversations.

May we make love known,
Christ known,
in the way that we come alongside the forgotten, the last, and the lost.

May we make love known,
Christ known,
in the ways that we forgive and reconcile.

May we make love known,
Christ known,
in the ways that we treat all people as God’s own children no matter what.

May we make love known,
Christ known,
by washing in waters of cross-shaped love.

May we make love known,
Christ known,
by walking in silence, re-membering love with every step.

May we make love known,
Christ known,
by confessing our loveless attitudes, actions, and encounters.

May we make love known,
Christ known,
in our beginning again, through sacrifice, posture, and courage.

May we make love known,
Christ known,
by being what God in the flesh, Love in the flesh, is.

Hail the heav’n-born Prince of Peace!
Hail the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings
Ris’n with healing in His wings
Mild He lays His glory by
Born that man no more may die
Born to raise the sons of earth
Born to give them second birth
Hark! The herald angels sing
“Glory to the newborn King!”

Charles Wesley in “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”

We’ve been waiting and now peace has come visiting!

It might not seem that way. There is still so much enmity, violence, oppression, and evil in the world. The list of injustices, fears, and hatreds too long to list here, the ways that we harm one another, ourselves, and God, too numerous.

But then we remember!

The people who had been living in darkness
have seen a great light.
The light of life has shined on those who dwelt
in the shadowy darkness of death.

Isaiah 9:2 (The Voice Bible)

In remembering, we are, as theologian James K.A. Smith tells us “catapulted in the future.” A future of salvation, consummation, healing, wholeness, and new life. A future filled with possibility, a future rooted in God’s creative and re-creative intention for all the created order. A future of promise because the light of Christ has come.

With all that is happening around us, it is easy to be discouraged, easy to be afraid. It is easy to believe the voices that tell us to build more walls, to fear the stranger, to be suspicious of neighbor. Easy to want to exclude, demonize, and answer violence with more violence.

It is at these moments that we remind ourselves that the one of peace has come. That the good news of salvation has come in the flesh. God becoming one of us, God brought low so that all humanity could live, could flourish, could be raised, and could experience a new birth, a new life, a whole life!

This Christmas Eve we’ll gather and celebrate that a savior has been born. Because God became one of us we no longer have to live in darkness, we no longer have to live in brokenness, we no longer have to live in strife with ourselves, each other, and creation.

¹⁵ He is the exact image of the invisible God, the firstborn of creation, the eternal. ¹⁶ It was by Him that everything was created: the heavens, the earth, all things within and upon them, all things seen and unseen, thrones and dominions, spiritual powers and authorities. Every detail was crafted through His design, by His own hands, and for His purposes.¹⁷ He has always been! It is His hand that holds everything together. ¹⁸ He is the head of this body, the church. He is the beginning, the first of those to be reborn from the dead, so that in every aspect, at every view, in everything—He is first. ¹⁹ God was pleased that all His fullness should forever dwell in the Son ²⁰ who, as predetermined by God, bled peace into the world by His death on the cross as God’s means of reconciling to Himself the whole creation—all things in heaven and all things on earth.

Colossians 1:15-20 (The Voice Bible)

Peace. With Us. Peace. With All Creation. Thanks be to God!!

⁵¹     God’s arm has accomplished mighty deeds.
        The proud in mind and heart,
        God has sent away in disarray.
⁵²     The rulers from their high positions of power,
        God has brought down low.
    And those who were humble and lowly,
        God has elevated with dignity.
⁵³     The hungry—God has filled with fine food.
        The rich—God has dismissed with nothing in their hands.

Luke 1:51-53 (The Voice Bible)

It’s hard to imagine the kind of reversal called by Mary the mother of Jesus. Her prophetic utterance a blue print for a salvation that brings about change to the social order of things. This salvation turns the status quo upside down and calls all who hear to work together against the way things are.

This is an uncomfortable gospel!

In some ways it faces us with the question: Do we really want salvation?

It is much easier to say yes if salvation means to “accept Jesus,” “allow Jesus into our hearts,” or “going to church.” Intellectual ascent, emotional response, or societal duty are easy and really do not change anything. It does not require anything from us and often our Christianity seems to underscore our already made up minds, positions, and opinions. Often unquestioningly supporting our place in the social order as providence.

This season what are we to do with a savior that according to scripture calls the mighty to fall, the rich to walk away empty, the stranger to be welcomed, the poor lifted, the hungry fed, the first to be last, the uncleaned touched, the enemy loved?

This week we meet Mary once again. We meet a young unmarried peasant woman who is bearing an illegitimate child. A woman who says yes in spite of her own life being on the line. A woman who sees the cosmic effects of her yes to God!

We too have an opportunity this season to experience the reversal that salvation brings. A reversal that initiates the peace that we and the world so desperately need. A reversal that makes us participants in God’s work of redemption for the life of the world. Our own hearts transformed, our own lives changed, our own perspectives altered, our brokenness made whole, our alienation from our true selves, each other, and all of creation healed.

So friends are we ready for salvation? Are we ready for the redemption that Christ promises? Are we ready to allow our life, our families, our community, our world to be reversed? Are we ready to be last, hungry, blind, take risks, be servants to the least of these? Are we ready to join the risky, dangerous, and revolutionary work of the one of peace?

 

It has been a difficult set of weeks. We have faced sin and death in our lives, in our community, and in our world. Fear has come calling, terror has visited, and despair wants to settle in. It is normal to want to build walls, lock doors, and hit back.

We have arrived at church looking for hope and it has been hard to find! There we have been reminded of what we have been living through phone notifications, website updates, and the daily news. The texts of the season made incarnate and thus difficult to hear. We come looking for hope, for a word of the Lord, for the promises of Christmas and instead we are reminded that we must experience the disorientation of exile in order to be able to experience the reorientation of salvation.

Exile is being a stranger in a strange land. Exile forces us to look at our shaping – assumptions, presuppositions, and worldview -with suspicion. We must be suspicious because exile shapes us in the ethos of the false self that serves the purposes of a self-centered and self-serving dominant narrative – a narrative of fear, exclusion, and enmity.

Hopeful imagination reorients us and shows us the pathway for our return home. The pathway is paved by repentance, by the change of our hearts and minds, from the dominant narrative into the alternative narrative of God’s kin-dom. A narrative rooted in love, healing, and justice; a narrative of safety, embrace, and reconciliation. This narrative is centered in the person of Jesus Christ.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann reminds us that we develop a hopeful imagination by studying the:

themes, metaphors, and dynamics which give new life to the tradition, which summon to faith in a fresh way, and which create hope for a community so deeply in crisis, that it might have abandoned the entire enterprise of faith. This literature of realism and candor referred the loss to God and thereby released energy, courage, and passion in the community.

from Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile, 3

For the last few weeks we have struggled together realistically and with much candor. We have faced the realities of our current needs for salvation. We have heard the groans of creation and of our participation in structures of sin and death.

We have also been called to prepare the way. The hindrances to salvation have been lifted. The community does not have to live in denial, fear, and anxiety. Instead we are to allow for the Spirit to change our hearts and life. In very real ways we have rehearsed what it means to refer all of our struggles, insecurities, fears, prejudices, and injustices to God.

Now that we have turned over our sin-full practices as individuals and as a community our hearts are open to the coming of the Christ. Our souls ready to receive the gift of grace, the soil for God’s kingdom in us and in the world bursting with possibility!

So this weekend we begin rehearsing the story of a God who becomes one of us. A God who chose not to abandon us and creation choosing instead to come to our rescue. This weekend we begin to rehearse the hope for a peace-full world. We come recognizing that peace requires sacrifice, requires practice, requires our participation in life with God.

As we sing songs of praise this weekend and as we hear the story told again may we develop a hopeful imagination for the promised future. May we allow our reality check to fill us with energy, courage, and passion. May we come together as a community of believers to be peace makers in the world!

 

John brought this divine message to all those who came to the Jordan River. He preached that people should be ritually cleansed through baptism as an expression of changed lives for the forgiveness of sins.

Luke 3:3, The Voice Bible

This week we encounter a prophet. One that calls people, especially the mighty and powerful, to pay attention to the ways that the created order does not reflect God’s peace-full reign. To the ways that the people have walked away from one another, from themselves as a people of the promise, and from God. From the ways that they continue to perpetuate injustice and oppression.

Often the people have become comfortable. So comfortable that they no longer see how their life and their behavior towards one another no longer mimics God’s call to a deeper love of God and neighbor. Soon the people begin to confuse their apathy, prejudices, attitudes, and worldview to God’s intention for them and for those around them. No longer seeing the plight of neighbor, making exceptions of themselves, making a god who thinks, feels, and acts like them.

The prophet’s message is hard because the people need to be woken up! It’s hard because most of us find it difficult to be confronted about our failures, mistakes, and wrongdoing. Hard because acknowledgment of our sin means letting go of our power and control.

In the end, the prophets were not extremely successful. We do have a record of their prophetic utterances and we do recognize how they have inspired their communities in retrospect. But in their time most of them were killed by those in power. Their message too dangerous, too real, too on point for the mighty to ignore. The prophetic message is always a threat to those in power, to the majority, to the comfortable, and to the prosperous. A threat to those with the most to lose!

One of the roles that I believe that the pastor plays in a community is that of prophet. Truthtelling for the sake of transformation, for the sake of a change of heart and life. Proclamation that reminds the community again and again of its call to be agents of God’s kingdom — agents of peace, reconciliation, forgiveness, and love. Proclamation that wakes up our hearts to the least, last, and lost.

The prophetic role should come with warning labels. It is easy to come across preachy, arrogant, and self-righteous. It is easy to offend to the point that one is no longer heard. It is easy to leave little room for conversation and for nuance. At the same time, it is easy to tell God’s people only that which is comfortable, safe, and that which will not cost you anything. It is easier not to push, challenge, or question. Easier not to meddle . . .

This week I invite you to read Luke 3:1-18. Hear the voice of the prophet: How is it challenging you? What are the demands of the kingdom according to John the Baptizer? Where are you feeling pushed, made uncomfortable, or bothered?

This weekend come prepared to hear what I pray is a loving yet challenging word as we continue preparing for the coming of Christ.

He preached with many other provocative figures of speech and so conveyed God’s message to the people—the time had come to rethink everything.

Luke 3:18, The Voice Bible

 

 

 

The empathetic imagination moves in a direction opposite to that of fear. In fear, a person’s attention contracts, focusing intently on her own safety, and (perhaps) that of a small circle of loved one. In empathy the mind moves outward, occupying many different positions outside the self.

Martha C. Nussbaum in The New Religious Intolerance, 146

 

This past weekend we spoke about the importance of developing what Martha Nussbaum calls an “empathetic imagination,” or what I would call a kin-dom imagination. (If you missed it, you can watch the sermon here.) An imagination that fosters in us the ability, the spiritual gift, of seeing the other not as someone to be feared, demonized, or ignored, but instead as a fellow creation of God.

This imagination is centered and rooted on Jesus’ call to “[l]ove your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” (Luke 6:27-28, NRSV)

Love, not just of our neighbor, friend, or family, but of also of our enemy is centered on our recognition of a common humanity, on a kin-dom. The reality that all of us are God’s own creation, all of us fallen, all of us in need of redemption. But also all interconnected and constantly tempted to break that interconnection, to create enmity, to see ourselves as better. As theologian Walter Brueggemann reminds us, to see ourselves as exceptional:

[T]his future, conditioned by justice, is not an arbitrary imposition of an angry God, but is a conditionality found in the very fabric of creation. It is indeed how life works, no matter how much the strong and the powerful engage in the illusion of their own exceptionality.

Walter Brueggemann in Theology of the Old Testament, 645.

So how do we develop a kin-dom imagination?

I think it begins with rooting ourselves in the story of Jesus as found in the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John).

Even though we live in what at times seems like a Jesus-saturated society I am constantly amazed how unfamiliar we are with the breadth of the Jesus narrative in the gospels. We might remember a story we heard as a child or maybe even one we have heard in a sermon, but we ourselves have not made it a practice to read, reflect, and meditate on the gospel text.

In order for us to develop kin-dom imagination, we must immerse ourselves in the whole of the Jesus story, again and again.

Practice: The Gospel in 90 Days – One chapter a day with one grace day.

I also believe that we must purposely practice what saint and spiritual teacher, Ignatius of Loyola, called indifference. Indifference is “the freedom of detachment,” the ability to let go of anything that keeps us from God. Anything, especially our prejudices, opinions, ideologies, and even our religious understandings. Instead, we learn to recognize our blind spots,  our limited experiences, and humbly accept that God is mystery and yet still speaking, still revealing God-self to us.

In order for us to develop kin-dom imagination, we must practice indifference so that we open ourselves to experience God’s continual revelation.

Practice: Ask daily – Is anything (attitude, position, point of view, activity, relationship, etc.) keeping me from love of God, neighbor, and/or self today?

Finally, in order for us to grow our kin-dom imagination we must commit to live life in covenant community. Covenant is not a word that we seem to understand in our highly individualistic culture but covenant life and practice is at the center of the Christian faith.

In our baptism, we are grafted to Christ in the body called the church. Our grafting is rooted in God’s unfailing covenant with us and our ascent into living a covenant life with and in Christ’s body called the church.

It is in this body that we practice what it is like to be kin to one another. Baptismal kinship is not based on human bloodline but on the new covenant in Christ’s blood. We are kin across culture, time, space, ideologies, religious understandings, political affiliation, nation, and language.

In order for us to develop kin-dom imagination, we must see our differences as part of our shared humanity for baptism marks us as a people who see neighbor as covenant partner and enemy as one to be loved into covenant life.

Practice: Answer – What does it mean for you to be part of the body? What does it mean for all to be part of it too? What would change in you, in the body, in your community if the other joined you?

As we continue this Advent journey it is my prayer that we help one another grow in our kin-dom imagination. That we continue attempting to live into its reality and that our humble practice begins to bear fruit of peace (wholeness, healing, new life, love, restoration, salvation, holiness, blessing, justice, righteousness) in visible ways in our life, families, neighborhood, and city.

Now go imagine!!

[Luke] considered the reign of God to be not a benign reality but a deeply subversive and disturbing force that was already undermining the foundations of Rome and all earthly claims to power. Luke was promoting nothing less than an entirely new way of life that offered incredible blessing for both peasant and elite.

Karl Allen Kuhn in The Kingdom according to Luke and Acts, xvii

 

 

This morning we struggled together with what it means to live abundantly. Only once we begin to live this way are we going to be able to lead others into that abundance. At the cornerstone of this abundance is Christ in whom “we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28, NRSV)

It is Christ and Christ’s Spirit that allows us to look at the world through the lenses of the grace that has forgiven, restored, and transformed us. This grace is truly abundant, overflowing, spilling out, more than we need or deserve. It is both overwhelming and humbling.

Out of this abundance of grace, we encounter the other–neighbor, friend, and foe–and are able to extend that same openness, that same space, and that same love. This grace also allows us to be grace-filled in the midst of disappointment, difference, position, or preference.

When we find ourselves growing in anxiety, fear, anger, frustration, and despair towards others and ourselves we must ask if we are rooting ourselves in scarcity. What is at the core of those emotional responses? Why are we tempted to respond in ways that do not model the way of Jesus in how we respond, treat, and engage? How can we center ourselves, listen to the other, and graciously express our opinion, a point of view, or frustration?

Asking ourselves this questions begins to make room for abundance to guide us. Our eyes begin to be opened to our continual need for grace and we begin to seek others, to hear their stories, and attempt to live life alongside them so that we can better walk together. We might still disagree, we might still see situations differently, we might still struggle but living alongside provides for a redemptive position, for a space where mutual respect and acknowledgement of our identity as God’s child can guide us into life together.

This week I invite you to live out of the grace given to you. I ask you to pay attention to what God might be up to around you, to the ways that you can be a participant in leading others into abundant life in Christ. This participation pushes us beyond our comfort zones into the healing, exorcising, feeding, and restoration of all people. Into living our baptismal promise:

Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you
to resist evil, injustice, and oppression
in whatever forms they present themselves?

Baptismal Covenant I, The United Methodist Hymnal

Into sharing the excitement of a God whose holiness–whose abundance–led to God becoming one of us so that we could know love. This way of engagement, this way of life, this way of faith could be our biggest witness to God’s amazing grace in our city and beyond!

“Since you are all set apart by God, made holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with a holy way of life: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.”

Colossians 3:12, The Voice Bible

I can hear it now: “Grace Community, a community of abundance . . .” I cannot wait to see you next weekend as we continue to do talk together about Quality Control: What Shreveport Needs from Us.

I come from a long line of survivors,
thrivers, perseverers,
go-getters,
and life-warriors.

I come from surprise,
the ellipsis of life together,
from rainy weather,
and joyful cries.

I come from rhythm,
from fast talk,
slow walks,
and “stayin’ with’em.”

I come from mystery,
attuned to awe, wonder,
pruned stories, made to answer,
and students of history.

I come from dreamers,
seers of another way,
ears to another whisper,
and justice screamers.

I come from lovers,
of all people, no matter the stories,
from mourners of the heartbreaks,
and pointers to the peace that hovers.

I come from thirty-seven,
from years of being companioned,
shaped by community and solitude,
and hopeful for earthly heaven.

Dear Garrett,

Eight . . . eight is the number of years since your leaving. So much life happens in eight years, so much grief outpoured, so much thinking and reflecting done. Eight is long enough to notice that time has gone by but when it comes to death, eight might as well be one. Such is the finality of death, such is the promise of eternal life.

Recently I told your story, our story again. This time around a dinner table as we gathered to say goodbye (for now) to Papa Gene. Death stimulates our longing for stories, death begs for re-membering, death begs for the balm that stories bring. So I told our story, your story again.

I know that I am not alone, that the many you touched in life are often telling your story, somehow still trying to make sense of it, trying to find healing for what is now a scar that will never go away.

In the last year, I’ve been constantly reflecting on scars. On how the pastoral life leaves you marked, the longer you live it, the more marked you become. This scarring is varied and unique to each person and place. In some ways it could be seen as the rings of a tree, a sign of age, perseverance, and new life.

At times it’s our baptismal mark that gets tender, these are the moments when it seems like God has come visiting. Babies being born, couples making covenant, people gathering around crumbs, and oil on foreheads for healing, all making our baptismal mark active, tender, and strong.

Then there are the marks of disappointment, trials, and heartbreaks. Those events, encounters, and seasons that make you question yourself, your call, and the ministry of the church. These scars are incarnate examples of the difficulty of discipleship but also of the power of God to work in us and through us in spite of our scars.

Eight . . . eight is the number of years healing, hearing, and heading into my continuing call. My re-membering guides my way, my scars, keeps me humble, and your leaving continues to inspire me to be a spirit-stirrer, space-maker, and gatherer of people.

I’m still marked . . . you are still missed . . . I’ll see you at the great feast!

Peace & Love, Juan+
______________________________

Be a hero, Donate Life! If you want to know G’s story click here.

Here are the previous yearly notes: In Memoriam, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII.