your kindness melts my hard, cold soul.
your beauty fills my dull, sad eyes.
Yesterday there was another school shooting. This time right in my backyard. In fact I had been at Seattle Pacific University walking across the area where the shooting occurred, just a couple of hours before. One person died, three others injured, one still critical. It is probable that more would have been killed if were not for a student, John Meis, volunteer security guard sprayed the gunman with pepper spray and tackled him, with other students then jumping on top.
The horror of the senseless loss of life, the pain and agony of family, the trauma to those around hits my heart with great heaviness. When will this gun violence stop I wonder? When will we realize that there need to be restrictions on sales of guns?
Guns do not make a nation or a family safer. Quite the contrary according to this article published in the American Journal of Medicine last year. The U.S. has more guns and more gun deaths than any other country in the world.
One of my biggest struggles with living in the U.S. has been the acceptance of violence as a way of life – even amongst Christians. And maybe we will not see a change in the gun laws here until Christians change their attitudes. We are not called to violence we are called to peace. The images of God’s kingdom are of a peaceable kingdom in which there will be no death or violence or war.
I think it is time that we not only embraced this imagery but practiced it. Can you imagine how different our world would look today if followers of Jesus all laid down their guns and looked for peaceful ways to resolve conflict and violence. Until we are willing to do that I don’t think that we will see any change in the violence of our society or in the attitude towards guns.
What do you think?
Table fellowship
As you know I am getting ready for the upcoming blog focus on Hospitality and the Kingdom of God. Have been doing lots of reading, thinking and praying about it.
When I decided on this topic I had no idea how impacting it would be on my own life. It is helping me to rethink the focus of my faith and how I practice it.
Communion not conversion. Eating together, sharing life and fellowship together this is the place where we are inspired by Christ and fed by him to go out and do his work in the world.
So many today find church boring and irrelevant, but eating is relevant for all of us. And when done properly with us all sitting down together, relaxed, laughing, sharing stories, it is the richest experience of Christ and Christ’s family we can ever have.
This morning I found my thoughts focusing once again on the two occasions we read about Jesus eating with his disciples after his resurrection. Christ comes in the stranger on the Emmaus road. His true nature is recognized only when he breaks bread together with his fellow travellers. (Luke 24:30, 31) We also find him by the sea of Galilee, preparing breakfast for his closest friends. Here he is recognized when the nets almost break with the abundance of God’s provision. And then they break bread together, sharing their lives with the living Christ. (John 21:13). Even when Jesus appears to the disciples together it is at the dinner table, and he proves who he is by eating with them (Luke 24:42).
How much, I wonder, does our fast food, TV dinner lifestyle disconnect us from Christ and God’s family? Eating alone, isolated from our human families, unaware of where our food comes from and of those who have produced it, strips us of both our humanity and our divinity. To be made in the image of God means to eat together with friends and strangers alike. It means to make the excluded feel included, as Jesus did by sitting down with the tax collector. It means to see abundance when others see scarcity, as is demonstrated by the feeding of the 5,000. And it means to be caught up in a foretaste of the kingdom banquet feast, as the first disciples were when they ate the last supper together.
We need to rediscover the joy of eating together – not just of sitting down at table, but the joy of growing and preparing food together. Perhaps its time we all joined the Slow Food movement, a global, grassroots organization linking the pleasure of good food with a commitment to their community and the environment.
Chris Smith and John Pattison authors of Slow Church will be with us Monday night. In this wonderful and timely book they remind us that:
Slow Food and the other Slow movements hold important lessons for the American church. They compel us to ask ourselves tough questions about the ground our faith communities have ceded to the cult of speed. And they invite all of us—clergy, theologians and laypeople—to start exploring and experimenting with the possibilities of Slow Church. Not as another growth strategy, but as a way of re-imagining what it means to be communities of believers gathered and rooted in particular places at a particular time.
I think that they are right. We need to learn that at the centre of our faith is the communion table, a place of rich fellowship and shared life, an experience that cannot be hurried if we truly value our faith and the faith communities of which we are a part.
What do you think?
The prayer above is one of the prayer cards that we produced last year. I have it set up on an easel on my desk and find my eyes and my thoughts continually moving to it during the day. It revolves in my mind, refreshing and renewing me, focusing me beyond myself to God and to the world in which I live.
I am awed by the creativity that flows from God through all of us. It is part of who we are and who God calls us to be. Allow God to work through you to be creative today. May it refresh and restore you too.
Ascension Walsingham via Bosco Peters at http://liturgy.co.nz/ascensionday
We are living between the days of Jesus’s ascension and Pentecost when the gift of the Holy Spirit was received. It must have been a challenging time, hoping yet I am sure also doubting. Could the disciples really believe the amazing things that had happened in the previous 40 days. Was it all an illusion? Had Jesus really been resurrected? And what happens now? Was he still with them?
I am sure that his followers, all 120 of them gathered for support and comfort. I can imagine them sharing their doubts and their fears, praying for strength and courage to go out and do the things Jesus asked of them. I can imagine them wondering if it was all a dream, and praying for faith, for equipping and for the fulfillment of God’s promises.
Not much difference from where we are at today. God’s people are always gathering, waiting for the spirit to fall in fresh ways, waiting and hoping for manifestations of God’s spirit that will equip and strengthen us to go out into the world and be spread as light and love. And like the disciples we wait hopefully but unsure. We wait expectantly, but fearfully. Can we really accomplish what Jesus asks of us?
We live at a time when numbers in churches are declining. We are concerned, fearful, wondering if God’s presence in the world is declining. Yet there are still 1 billion people who call themselves Christians. Imagine if the spirit fell on all of us igniting us with the same fire that filled those early disciples. This world would indeed be transformed and God’s new world of wholeness and abundance would indeed come in its fulness.
Lord Jesus Christ
You have ascended into heaven.
Do not leave us alone.
Do not leave us comfortless,
In this season between the times
Of promise and fulfillment.
Come to us Lord Jesus
Send your spirit.
Let it fill us.
Let it strengthen and equip us.
Come to us Lord Jesus,
Send your spirit.
Let it prepare us,
Let it proclaim who you are.
Come to us Lord Jesus
Set your spirit.
Let it ignite and spread,
Let it multiply your presence,
Let it shape your world,
with love and peace and generosity.
Amen.
I am struggling today, not because I am discouraged or disheartened but because I am challenged once again with the radical call of the gospel. And the centre of my struggle is the question Why do I think this is so radical, it is meant to be ordinary living for followers of Christ?
Live and love in the name of Jesus probably sums it up. Or as Jesus himself says Love the lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and love your neighbour as yourself.
Why does that seem so radical to us? At the centre of our sinfulness is a turning from God and neighbour to self. Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent. Neither of them wanted to take responsibility for their own actions. Self preservation triumphed over community good. And the result was isolation and alienation – from each other, from God and from God’s good creation.
This is something that I find I constantly need to be reminded of. It is so easy for all of us to fall into the sin of self centredness from which I often feel all other sins radiate. Jesus death and resurrection unleashes a totally new form of existence in which the giving of oneself in love takes us from the death of isolation to the true life of fellowship and community.
Reflecting on that this morning I wrote this prayer
Let us give up our lives today
in love for Go and neighbour.
Let us give up self centredness
and offer ourselves to the world.
Let us give up isolation
and join the fellowship of God’s family.
Let us share in the shaping of God’s world
laying down our lives in nurture and help for others.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this and reflections on What can you do today to move away from the isolation of self centredness to the otherness of love for God and neighbour?
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