by Talitha Fraser. All Rights Reserved
Of communion, Jesus says I will not take this drink again until
I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.
In brief, Australia’s approach to border control and refugee/asylum seeker resettlement has both onshore and offshore solutions. In particular, the offshore response sees to it that “boat people” never reach the safety they set out in hope of. The UN has found Australia in breach of protecting the human rights of asylum seekers and leaked files from Nauru paint a harrowing picture of the sexual, physical and emotional abuse received by those seeking our protection.
The intention of the picnic was to physically create the space we would like to live in, that kingdom where Jesus might join us for a drink, even if only for an hour. How can we make that grass verge feel like space of celebration and welcome?
by Talitha Fraser. All Rights Reserved
With yarn bombing, banners, different flags, welcome in different languages, families and friends… At each picnic blanket, a spare place set at the table – a visual demonstration that there is room at the table for the ‘other’ and enough food to share. In the face of the continued and indefinite detention of refugees and asylum seekers including children – we sought to respond with an act of hospitality, an act of welcome, and act of love – witnessing there is room at THIS communion table.
by Talitha Fraser. All Rights Reserved
We acknowledge that we gather on the land of which the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation have gathered since time immemorial to tell stories, sing songs and share food together. We gather to do these things ourselves around this idea of showing welcome to refugees and asylum seekers and we have chosen a specific place, time and context in which to do that.
by Talitha Fraser. All Rights Reserved
Place: We host our picnic on what was the site of an Explosives Factory during WW2, then converted to accommodation for migrants and is now the current site of the Immigration Detention Centre. We are gathered where refugees and migrants have been arriving for the last 50 years.
by Talitha Fraser. All Rights Reserved
Time: We host our picnic on the first Sunday of Lent, Sunday 14 February (also Valentines Day). This date would often have a focus theme of a continued call to conversion and seemed fitting for a demonstration of love. The intention of this picnic is to physically create the loving kingdom space we would like to live in – demonstrating the kind of welcome and abundant hospitality we as Christians believe Jesus might extend and asking of our own discipleship how we feel called to respond.
Context: We host our picnic as state leaders dispute federally legislated law, medical practitioners refuse to sign off of returning patients to off-shore detention and the UN has condemned Australia’s treatment of refugees as breaching human rights… the government, media, society are all sending strong messages – in an environment that seems more focused on reacting out of fear than love, how might we respond with clarity and compassion?
by Talitha Fraser. All Rights Reserved
There is an invitation to stand – in this place, at this time, in this context and sing. This is not a new idea… we sing in the tradition of so many justice movements: civil rights, suffragettes, apartheid, slavery…in the words of Ched Myers to “Sing about it, until it can be realised”.
This first one is from the Ngatiawa River Monastry, up the Kapiti Coast of New Zealand, a contemporary contemplative community retreat centre.
This is my body given for you
Remember me.
This is my blood of forgiveness,
Remember me.
Tricia Watts is an Australian singer, composer. From her resource ‘Sanctuary’, we want to offer Sanctuary, we want to link hand in hand, we want to hear the voice of justice cry.
Hear the voice of justice cry,
Moving through our land,
Ringing out o’er hills and plains,
Linking hand in hand.
Written for the Love Makes A Way movement. I wrote this trying to find words for a situation I don’t have words to explain.
There is Room
There is room at the table (x3)
Bring them here, let them stay.
There is room at the border…
There is room in our hearts… (playgrounds, classrooms, etc…)
There is hope for a new tomorrow…
We say love makes a way…
As well as poet and cartoonist, Michael Leunig is a bit of a prophet, speaking out of hope and darkness, on behalf of many voices reminding us love is born
Love is Born The recorded version by Nathan Brailey: https://soundcloud.com/nathan-brailey/love-is-born ]
Love is born with a dark and troubled face
When hope is dead and in a most unlikely place
Love is born,
Love is always born.
Love is born,
Love is always born.
And from the civil rights “Sing for Freedom” workshops, African-Americans in the 60s in the South were singing “We’re gonna sit at the welcome table”, today we have to acknowledge that we’re already sitting at the welcome table (or the welcome picnic blanket). We sing “they’re” as we aspirationally hold space and hope that those inside our detention centres will one day come outside and join us at this table.
They’re gonna sit at the welcome table
They’re gonna sit at the welcome table
They’re gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days (hallelujah)
They’re gonna sit at the welcome table
Sit at the welcome table one of these days (one of these days)
They’re gonna feast on milk and honey…
A-ll God’s chil-dren gonna sit to-ge–ther…
They’re gonna sit at the welcome table…
We’re gonna share our songs and stories
by Talitha Fraser. All Rights Reserved
This post is part of our October Living Into the Shalom of God series.
Our Top Ten recent books dealing with shalom and reconciliation:
- Embrace, Leroy Barber (October featured author)
- Prophetic Lament, Sooong-Chan Rah (October featured author)
- Roadmap to Reconciliation, Brenda Salter-McNeil (October featured author)
- Shalom and the Community of Creation, Randy Woodley
- Sabbath as Resistance, Walter Bruggemann
- A New Heaven and a New Earth, Richard Middleton
- Ambassadors of Reconciliation: Volume 1, Volume 2, Ched Myers & Elaine Enns
- Reconciling All Things, Emmanuel Katongole & Chris Rice
- Friendship at the Margins, Christopher Heuertz & Christine Pohl
- The Book of Forgiving, Desmond Tutu & Mpho Tutu (We used this last month but the stories and concepts are central to this month’s themes as well)
What are your favorite books about shalom and reconciliation? Please comment below.
Saint Francis of Assisi, whose feast day we celebrate in this piece, is not an easy one to live with. He is deeply and simply radical, to the point where, when you examine his life, like the rich young ruler meeting Jesus, you must either shake your head and walk away, or give your everything to God. Perhaps that is the greatest sign that he was a true follower of Christ.
Francis made the Living Christ the centre of his being. His faith did not live around the edges of his life, it was his life. His goal, if he was aware of one in his utter humility and servanthood, was to allow Christ to live through him. He embraced lepers as well as poverty and saw God everywhere, not as a pantheistic inherent power, but by seeing creation as incarnation, not in competition with Christ, but in coherence with Christ, through whom all was made.
This moves me deeply as I grow in my own small faith, and find myself enraptured by the tiniest of God’s creatures and discover sisterly compassion for every morsel of suffering I see in the world. I thought that being virtually housebound with my illness and unable to socialise, that I would find myself hardening, becoming shielded from empathy. But the opposite has been the case. Last year I wept buckets over a tiny ladybird that hatched crooked from its cocoon that we had to put out of its misery. This year a piece of land covered in trees has been auctioned off behind the main road in my sightline and I am devastated, knowing that those beautiful, growing, living, breathing creatures and all who shelter there will be killed or made homeless.
It seems that if we make Christ and relationship with the Trinity through Him the centre of all, living a life where prayer is a priority rather than an option, we will always find our hearts softening. Love is heartbreaking.
Francis understood this better than anyone. He knew that the passion of the Christ was the ultimate suffering in heartbreak coupled with the ultimate love. His prayer before receiving the stigmata on Mount La Verna near the end of his life was,
My Lord Jesus Christ, I pray You to grant me two graces before I die; the first is that during my life I may feel in my soul and in my body, as much as possible, that pain which You, dear Jesus, sustained in the hour of your most bitter Passion. The second is that I may feel in my heart, as much as possible, that excessive love with which You, O Son of God, were inflamed in willingly enduring such suffering for us sinners.
Love and pain are soulmates in the Christian life. We cannot have the one without the other. There is no eternal life without difficult death, no overcoming without the cross. The Garden of Gethsemane cannot be got around or avoided, no matter how much we try to kid ourselves. But what a love we are compensated with, both to give and receive!
I have little in common with Francis. I struggle to rejoice in my physical weakness or my financial poverty, most days it all just feels too hard to bear. And I am nowhere near courageous or bold enough to pray such a dangerous prayer! Yet I do understand his offering to the world of a Christ-like model of setting everything aside but God: Deus meus et omnia (my God and my all) – another of Francis’ prayers. It seems unattainable in this life, such love and devotion, but like all conversions, though it may begin grandly, it goes on by a process of growth, unstoppable if we give our yes to it daily. And we may always stay little more than beginners next to the deep surrender that Francis became able to give to his saviour. But the important thing is to start, to continue, and to mean it: to learn to love and suffer and let each work together and interchangeably as joy and pain – for in the gospel life there is joy in suffering and pain in love as well as the other way around. To begin that metanoia transformation by giving up that very hardest of sacrifices, our stubborn and selfish will.
©Keren Dibbens-Wyatt 2016 Photo from Pixabay
St Francis of Assisi was a person who modelled God’s peace (shalom) in very radical ways. October 4th is St Francis Feast Day and so it seems appropriate to begin our October emphasis on shalom with a reminder of his life story and the ways it challenges us also be be radical proponents of shalom.
Francis’s goal was to imitate the life, and carry out the work of Christ in all he did. Ironically the prayers he is best known for Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace and Let Nothing Disturb Us, were not actually written by him, though they express some of the sentiments that we associate with his life.
What Is God’s Shalom?
God’s radical peace or shalom, a world in which all things are once more made whole is something that all of us long for but it is a hard concept to grasp, partly because we have never lived in a world in which God’s shalom dream is fully experienced, a world in which there is no death or disease, no oppression or exploitation of others, and no destructive acts towards creation.
Nicholas Wolterstorff says that at its heart, the Old Testament word shalom means “flourishing.” It embraces not just the flourishing of our personal lives but also our concern for the flourishing of all humanity as well as of God’s good creation. This, he believes is what the gospel is all about and what Christian education should also be about.
the goal of Christian education is to equip and energize our students for a certain way of being in the world, not just for a way of thinking, though certainly also that, but for a certain way of being – a Christian way, not one of your standard American ways of being. Suppose further that you agree with me that this way of being can be described thus: to pray and struggle for shalom, celebrating its presence and mourning its absence. How do we do that? What is the pedagogy – and indeed, the curriculum – for education with that goal?
Discipleship exposes our practices and our beliefs to the scrutiny of the Gospels. The life, death and resurrection of Christ becomes the lens through which we view all things – big and small – not so that we can disengage from the world but so that our thinking, and our actions can all be changed to be more like Christ. One of the mysteries of our faith is the continual transformation that God, acting through the Holy Spirit, continues to bring about in our lives and in our world.
That any of us can change our thinking is a miracle. That any of us can be transformed from the self centered, self absorbed people we are without Christ is incredible… that alone convinces me that God is still at work in our world, educating all of us to live the eternal shalom world that will one day break into ours in all its glory.
Educating for Shalom
So how do we more fully live into God’s dream of shalom?
1. Articulate the dream as often as possible. I used to teach a class on urban transformation which revolved around the concept of shalom. I would ask students what their neighbourhood would look like if God’s shalom was fully realized. They usually started with the religious stuff like a church on ever corner but the longer we talked about it, the more they started to express their real dreams for transformation – jobs and homes for everyone, harmonious relationships between neighbours, restoration of polluted streams, overcoming of crime, beautiful gardens, colourful street murals, community events that drew the community together.
2. Educate yourself on God’s dream for shalom. Learn more about God’s dream for shalom as it emerges in the Old Testament and is expressed through the life of Christ in the new. This has become the central theological study of my life. It began 25 years ago as I grappled with the reality of the poverty I had seen during my years on Mercy Ships and the affluence I now experience in life in America. I expressed some of my learning several years ago in the booklet Shalom and the Wholeness of God, but I find myself constantly challenged my new aspects of God’s desire for wholeness and flourishing.
Over the last few months at St Andrew’s Episcopal Church here in Seattle, we have started using the following words as part of our liturgy:
While Jesus lived among us he stood up for women and children, he touched the untouchable, healed the sick, and welcomed those who had given up hope of being included. Through him we see a path not only to our own freedom, but a path to the liberation of the whole world. He taught us that it will not be in the brutality of violence that our world will be saved. Rather it will be in showing kindness to our neighbour in standing up against injustice, in returning hate with love, in transforming one heart at a time. It will be in the simple but holy task of dining together, sharing bread and wine, truly seeing one another as beloved by God.
Repeating these words each week is imprinting them in my mind and helping me to think of other ways to embrace this dream. Tomorrow we will publish our Top Ten Books on Shalom. I challenge all of us to read these books and others that help immerse us in God’s real purpose for our lives.
3. Reorient our lives to reflect God’s shalom. It is not easy for any of us to grasp the radicalness of God’s dream and live each day as its advocates, but we need to accept this challenge.
Plan a shalom meal at which you talk about God’s dream for flourishing. Read through the wonderful description in Isaiah 65: 17-25 of God’s shalom world. Sit in silence with your eyes closed imagining what this could look like in your life, neighbourhood and God’s world. Discuss this with your friends. Now watch the video below which I put together several years ago as my own expression of shalom living. Is there a way that God is challenging you, your family and your friends to make this dream more central to your lives. What are one or two action steps you could take to move your life and priorities in this direction?
Thank God for blessings
Here in the northern hemisphere it is the season of harvest and thanksgiving. It is a time when we all like to count our blessings and remind ourselves of the goodness of God in providing these.
Today’s prayer is one that I wrote for our community meeting at the Mustard Seed House. After we read it together we had a time of sharing about the many blessings in our lives.
Get a group of friends together to celebrate the summer harvest and the bounty of God’s provision. What are you grateful for? What are the blessings that you are aware of at this season?
For more harvest and thanksgiving prayers check out Harvest Prayers and Resources.
by Lilly Lewin
by Lilly Lewin. All rights reserved.
One of my prayer practices is to pray while walking my dog. I started this practice in our neighborhood in Cincinnati, continued it the four years we lived in California, and I have started again in my new neighborhood here in Nashville. It’s an amazing prayer practice that doesn’t take extra time because I would be walking my dog anyway. During the years that I walked the Wonder Spaniel I was opened to pray for neighbors I knew and those whom I didn’t. I asked God to show me how to be available to my neighbors and what the needs were around me.
I prayed for health and peace in homes. I prayed for jobs and favor. Eventually my neighbors figured out that I was a praying person and would ask me to pray for specific things. I wasn’t creepy. I didn’t stop and lay hands on mailboxes or anything like that, I just walked my dog and prayed for each home I passed by and the people in those houses. If I knew of specific needs of neighbors, like someone was sick or needed a new job, I would pray for those things. Our local high school happened to be just around the corner, so I had the opportunity to pray for the teachers and the students and the principal and staff.
This prayer practice opens my heart to my neighbors and my town and opens me to what God is already doing in my neighborhood. My walk now includes a view of downtown, so this has encouraged me to pray for our mayor and our city council and for church leaders to really make a difference in our city for justice and the least of these.
by Lilly Lewin. All Rights Reserved.
Nashville is experiencing a tremendous boom right now but there is a tendency for people to forget those without access and those who need help. I pray that the people who know Jesus will begin to get out of their church buildings and into action for God’s kingdom and truly make an impact for the three L’s as my husband Rob says, “ the least, the lost and the lonely.” So my encouragement for all of us is to get outside this fall and walk the dog. And if you don’t have a dog, just get out and take an intentional prayer walk around your neighborhood. As you pray for your neighbors allow God to surprise you with gifts of beauty along the way…a bird, a flower, a sunset, etc. I’d love to hear about your discoveries, so email me at freerangeworship@gmail.com.
Check out my website freerangeworship.com for more creative prayer ideas.
This post is part of our September Creative Prayer theme.
I was angry. It seemed to be happening a lot lately. And I wasn’t just angry for a few minutes, I seemed to stew all day long. That’s when I began to realize something was wrong inside me, and it needed to change.
Our emotions and attitudes are often indicators of a need to stop, pay attention, and spend time listening to God about the deeper things going on in our lives. While most of our creative prayer practices this month have been fun, this one’s a bit more of a challenge. Spend some time reflecting on your attitudes this past week. Now ask yourself:
Are there areas in my life that seem to stir me up and stick with me like old gum on the bottom of my shoe?- Are there situations that so get under my skin that they infect my attitude and tarnish the way I relate to others throughout the day?
- Is there, say, a social media platform that, when I go on it I find myself getting angry and lashing out with words I’d not normally use, or sharing memes I know are hurtful or demeaning to others who don’t share my perspective?
I’m getting better, but every once-in-a-while I cross the line on Facebook. A few years ago I posted a cynical comment on Facebook regarding an event in the news, expressing some frustration. In response, a friend asked this question, “How do we effect change among (others)? Heck, how do I effect MORE change in myself?” Those questions stirred within me as I wrote a more cool-headed, thoughtful reply. Three years later those same questions continue to stir in me, precisely because they are essential questions for those of us who follow Christ and take his call to discipleship seriously.
Here’s how I responded:
I think you touch on two very important aspects of change: education and attitude. I’m in a love-hate relationship with Facebook; it’s great for getting in touch, and staying in touch, with friends, new and old, but it also is filled with bumper sticker-type proclamations that tend to feed extreme views and fuel anger, cynicism, and division. I admit, I’m part of the problem and have quit reading many of the inflammatory articles and memes that appear in my timeline.
I’m attempting this change in myself: If a post gets me angry, I’m trying to force myself to peer underneath my emotions and ask, “Why?” Am I falling into an intentional trap laid out to tick me off? Or is this a legitimate issue to be upset about? If it’s legit, how can I better respond in a way that moves toward understanding rather than alienates?
My role, as a follower of Jesus, is to be an “ambassador of reconciliation”. Too often I’m an ambassador of discord as I allow myself to be manipulated by media, provocation, and my own unexamined attitudes and emotions.
In other words, to effect change in others requires change first in me. I’m convinced this is the beginning step in personal, spiritual, and social change – and it’s not a one-off event, but an ongoing awareness of my internal attitudes, emotions, motivations, and underlying assumptions.
Once I acknowledge this and begin to put it into practice, I’m (more) ready to begin engaging in healthy spiritual practices which can further shape my inner character. [One might argue that our first spiritual practice should be to come before God with this kind of open, confessional-repentant attitude.]
I’ve come to realize how various spiritual practices can easily become just an extension of our broken and often cynical nature if we do not begin with the foundational (and ongoing) process of personal examination. Without this ongoing examination, I put up roadblocks to the work of the Spirit in my life and cripple not only my own spiritual growth but also my ability to walk effectively alongside others.
With the right attitude engaged, I can look again at how best to be an agent of change in a way that does not also intentionally or unintentionally alienate many of the people I’m trying to communicate with. It now becomes more possible for me to be an agent of education and change because I’m allowing God to shape my heart and mind around God’s purposes and God’s methods of healing and reconciliation in the world.
Well, these are nice words and thoughts… Now to live into them! This is my personal challenge as I journey forward. Believe it or not, I have been trying to change, but the combination of passion about various extremely important issues and the accessibility (especially through Facebook) of radicalized “news” articles and memes make it a real challenge to maintain a clear and open attitude. Enter community – good and trustworthy friends who can help hold me (us) accountable to our deeper calling.
As I now read back over these words, I’m stunned by both the simplicity and the complexity of my undertaking. The actions themselves are quite simple; the complexity is where emotions and habit enter in. To move forward I must be intentional about all my interactions, especially those that take place online.
Why “especially online”? A few years ago, while talking with a friend, I made the analogy of Facebook posts being like driving on the freeway. Because of the imagined anonymity or distance, people become more aggressive, acting in ways they never would in a face-to-face encounter. What I failed to realize at the time was how much I was also referring to my own online presence!
It Begins at Home
Jesus offers us a very simple, yet complex, invitation: “Come, follow me.” This is an invitation to discipleship, to spiritual formation. This is all about transformation, and that requires a desire to change. My friend’s question, “How do we effect change in [others]?” cannot really be answered until we honestly begin to answer his second question, “How do I effect change in myself?” It begins at home, in our hearts and minds, as we truly open our lives – our motivations, assumptions, pre-conceived notions, prejudices, and attitudes – to God and to a small community of followers.
Or as Jesus once put it:
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your neighbor’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your neighbor’s eye.” (Mt. 7:3-5)
Sure, Jesus is talking about passing judgment here, but isn’t that precisely where our attitudes often go astray? What, after all, causes me to respond to those I might disagree with by posting a meme that belittles their view or a snarky comment that’s demeaning and hurtful? If I am truly an “ambassador of reconciliation”, if my motivation is to love God with all I am and to love my neighbor as myself, how can I even begin to justify many of my actions and reactions on social media?
So here is my final creative prayer practice challenge for the month: spend time on your favorite social media platform. Look back through your posts, reposted memes, and comments. Sit with them. Bring them before God.
- How do they fit with who you are in Christ?
- How do they align with your call to be an ambassador of reconciliation?
- What attitudes were evoked inside you when you posted?
- Can you identify your motivation for posting as you did?
- Can you identify some of your own underlying assumptions that may have added to conflict or division?
- How might you respond differently, not to avoid disagreement or dealing with important issues, but to work honestly at building understanding and dialogue?
This is difficult work. I’ve gotten so much better at responding the past couple of years. But truth be told, I still fail. I fail more often than I care to admit. But when I do fail – and realize I’ve failed – I also try to go back and admit where I messed up and apologize.
Am I the only one wrestling with this? Judging by the posts I’ve seen the past couple of days my guess is, no. What are your thoughts?
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