Christmas Morning

Christmas morning! What excitement for each and every family! Parents and grandparents pour expressions of love into children and one another. Families visit one another, enjoy a festive meal together, take time away from daily toil and struggles for livelihood. For this day, life is as idyllic as we can each make it.

Many families start their day with a reminder of the origin of this greatest festival of our calendar, gathering children together to reflect on Christmas before opening gifts. Some light the center candle in the family advent wreath (having built up to this moment with the lighting of each of the other four candles on the four Sundays leading up to Christmas); some read famliar passages of the gospel accounts of the birth of Jesus.  Children might be a little impatient, but they grow up to treasure these moments and will very often maintain these as traditions in their own famlies, anchoring Christmas in its context.
So let us reflect on this context of Christmas. We know that Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus; but furthermore, we are told in the Gospel accounts of the story that this was a most remarkable birth, in that Jesus was born as God appearing in the flesh, as a human being.
Now let's chew on that for a moment.  God didn't show up in the perfect likeness of a human being, as our nativity scenes suggest - a perfect little doll in the manger; no, God showed up in an actual baby, needing to be burped, fed and changed like any baby, growing up with all the bumps and scars from play as any child would have, facing manhood with all the struggles a teen has.
Think about what this means.  We think of God as perfect, and we all know that we are each very imperfect, subject to change, disease, hurt and decay in our physical bodies.  With a huge gulf between God and us, where is hope? Where is meaning?
But God came to us humans in Jesus; God took the step to bridge that gulf.  And in coming as Jesus, God celebrated being human as being a beautiful expression of God's creation.  With all our imperfections, God still loves each person, indeed all his creation.  When God created the world, he said it was good; when God created human beings, he called it "very good".  When God came in Jesus, he reaffirmed that each human has a value that we haven't really fully grasped.  Nor can we ever.
Christmas Morning.  God values each and every person, just as they are.  And so should we.

Emmanuel

At this time of year, anticipating Christmas, we sing “Emmanuel”, which we have been told means “God with us”.  But what does that look like?  Think “God moving into the neighbourhood”.    And when God moves into the neighbourhood, things look different; there are different priorities than those to which we are accustomed, just like the priorities of Jesus were different than those of the religious people of the time of his ministry among the poor and disadvantaged of his corner of the Middle East.

 

We get a clue of what this looks like when we read the verse of prophecy from Isaiah 61:1 which he quoted at the outset of his ministry, Luke 4:18-19, which, in “The Message” translation says: “God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s year to act!”

When we look at what these words meant in the three short years that followed, we get an idea just what it looks like when “God moves into the neighbourhood”.  The self-righteous religious people are shown up to be unworthy on their own proud account, while the down-trodden, those at the edges of society are treated tenderly, lifted up with compassion and given a value they never believed they had.

Richard Rohr, in speaking about this says: “In each case Jesus describes his work as moving outside of polite and proper limits and boundaries to reunite things that have been marginalized or excluded by society: the poor, the imprisoned, the blind, the downtrodden.

“Jesus’ ministry is not to gather the so-called good into a private country club, but to reach out to those on the edge and on the bottom—to tell those who are “last” that they might just be first! That is almost the very job description of the Holy Spirit, and therefore of Jesus. Today some call it God’s unique kind of justice or “restorative justice.” God present with us and in us, Emmanuel, justifies things by restoring them to their true and full identity in Himself, as opposed to “retributive justice” which seeks only reward and punishment.”

So, this season as we think what “Emmanuel” means, let us resolve to do our little bit to help our community feel what it is like when God moves into the neighbourhood, when those who are down and despondent start to realize what a marvelous potential and value they really have.

"Follow Me"

Some words from Franciscan priest Father Richard Rohr in a recent meditation are sobering and prompt us to ponder over them, as we think about how we have made Christianity into a religion, when it was intended to be a lifestyle.  The first believers referred to their calling as “the way”; for them following Jesus was a lifestyle. 

 

As Father Richard puts it:

“It seems to me that it is a minority that ever gets the true and full Gospel. We just keep worshiping Jesus and arguing over the exact right way to do it. The amazing thing is that Jesus never once says, “worship me!”, but he often says, “follow me” (e.g., Matthew 4:19).

“Christianity is a lifestyle—a way of being in the world that is simple, non-violent, shared, inclusive, and loving. We made it, however, into a formal established religion, in order to avoid the demanding lifestyle itself. One could then be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain at the highest levels of the church, and still easily believe that Jesus is “my personal Lord and Savior.” The world has no time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on Earth is too great.”

A religion? Or a lifestyle? Something to think about.

The Authority of Scripture

Anglican Bishop N. T. Wright unpacks this phrase, “the authority of scripture” in a recent book (2011) entitled “Scripture and the Authority of God”, subtitled “How to read the Bible today”.

It is certainly true that for all churches, the Bible is very important; the Bible’s authority is prominent in doctrinal statements, and the western mind in the modern world has set it up to be the answer book of religious information to guide our views and actions, to check on how we are doing compared to the other guy who doesn’t pay heed to the Bible.  Too many of us have used “the authority of scripture” to prove ourselves right and others wrong.

If we look at 2 Timothy 3:17, we see the purpose to be “so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work”; that’s quite different than being thoroughly equipped to prove me right and you wrong.

Wright says “As I have argued in this book, ‘the authority of scripture’ is really a shorthand for ‘the authority of God exercised through scripture’”.

“The whole of my argument so far leads to the following major conclusion: that the shorthand phrase ‘the authority of scripture’, when unpacked, offers a picture of God’s sovereign and saving plan for the entire cosmos, dramatically inaugurated by Jesus himself, and now to be implemented through the Spirit-led life of the church precisely as the scripture-reading community.”

He continues: “We read scripture in order to be refreshed in our memory and understanding of the story within which we ourselves are actors, to be reminded where it has come from and where it is going to, and hence what our own part within it ought to be.”

“’The authority of scripture’ refers not least to God’s work through scripture to reveal Jesus, to speak in life-changing power to the hearts and minds of individuals, and to transform them by the Spirit’s healing love.”

“In other words, if we are to be true, at the deepest level, to what scriptural authority really means, we must understand it like this: God is at work, through scripture (in other words, through the Spirit who is at work as people read, study, teach, and preach scripture) to energize, enable, and direct the outgoing mission of the church, genuinely anticipating the time when all things will be made new in Christ.”

Hmmm, that’s quite different from using the Bible to give me authority to do what I want to do and to give me the authority to judge someone else who sees things differently.  Something to think about.

Belonging Before Believing

At Community Life Church, we are making a conscious effort to put “belonging before believing”.  We think that perhaps churches sometimes put the emphasis in the wrong place: “get your beliefs all lined up and make sure that they are perfectly aligned with ours and then you can belong”.

We’ve all heard the saying “Birds of a feather flock together”.  Making sure we all believe the same before we can belong together is a sure way to be  “birds of a feather” church.

People who believe exactly the things we believe make us feel better about ourselves.  A “birds-of-a-feather church” is a comfortable church, in which we can feel secure and pat each other on the back because we all think and believe the same way.  A “birds-of-a-feather church” doesn’t take kindly to having among them people who don’t think and act just the way they do; a church which doesn't readily accept others who might think and act differently.

Romans 15:7 - “Accept one another, then, just as Christ has accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.”

Look at Romans 15:7 again.  Key here is “as Christ has accepted you”.  Jesus didn’t say, "get your beliefs right and then I will accept you".  But that is what many of our churches have done in the past (and perhaps some still do). Acceptance of others comes directly out of having been accepted by Christ.  When we know He has accepted us, we are freed from the need to prove to ourselves and to others that we are right.  This frees us to accept others. Because we are accepted.

At Community Life Church, we want to be able to make this statement:  “Christ has accepted me, as I was, as I am, and as I am striving to become.  No matter how differently you and I may look at things, I accept you”.

And to back this up, we put in our doctrinal statement that it is okay to have questions and doubts as we dig deeper into our faith.  The purpose of this is to try to create a safe place within our fellowship for people to ask questions and wrestle with their doubts, for that is the way to build a stronger faith, to move forward on the journey each of us is taking.

In his book “More Ready Than You Realize”, Brian McLaren summarizes the approach of a “birds of a feather” church: “We’re on the inside, but you’re on the outside.  We’re right and you’re wrong.  If you want to come inside, then you need to be right.  So, just believe right, think right, speak right and act right and we’ll let you in.”

At Community Life Church we want to be motivated by acceptance, to be the kind of a church that McLaren describes in his book like this:  “We are a community bound together and energized by faith, love and commitment to Jesus Christ.  Even though you don’t yet share that faith, love and commitment, you are most welcome to be with us, to belong here, to experience what we’re about.  Then, if you are attracted and persuaded by what you see, you’ll want to set down roots here long term.  And even if you don’t you’ll always be a friend.”

Everyone believes in something; and for a lot of people that something is not really very clear. At Community Life Church we want you to feel that you can belong, even if you haven’t yet sorted out just what you believe.

At Community Life Church, we want to welcome “birds with different feathers”.

Mother's Day

When God chose to show us what we should be, in the ultimate human, the ultimate image of God, God came into the world in Jesus, through a young woman who would have the awesome responsibility of raising a little boy to become a man who would show us what God is like and what a human, the image of God, should aspire to be.

We don’t know very much about Jesus’ childhood, or his teen years.  We know he was a pretty bright young man, confounding scholars with his understanding; but we know little about how he dealt with all the angst and confusion of being a teen.   I expect he dealt with all the struggles that any teen boy faces, and I expect that the unconditional love of his mother helped him grow and mature to be the brilliant expression of being human that he would demonstrate in his brief years of healing and teaching.

Richard Rohr noted this morning: “Most people (though not all) have experienced unconditional love not through the image of a man, but through the image of their mother. She therefore became the basis for many people's eventual God image, presuming it was a good God image. (I am convinced that many people sour on religion because the God they are presented with is actually less loving than their mother and/or father!)”

He continues: “For much of the human race, the mother is the one who parts the veil for us. She gives us that experience of grounding, of intimacy, of tenderness, of safety that most of us hope for from God. However, many people also operate from a toxic and negative image of God. For those people, little that is wonderful is going to happen as long as that is true. Early growth in spirituality is often about healing that inner image, whether male-based or female-based.”

When you think about it, for the past 2,000 years, the male dominated Church has done a gross disservice to humanity by projecting God as violent, vindictive and totally male; a god in the image of the rulers of this world.  We would do well to see mothers as the image of God too, showing God’s unconditional love, tenderness and safety.

Richard Rohr continues: “Most of us know that God is beyond gender. When we look at the Book of Genesis, we see that the first thing God is looking for is quite simply “images” by which to communicate who-God-is (Gen 2:26-27)”

He concludes: “God is just looking for images—“images and likenesses” of the Inner Mystery. Whoever God “is,” is profoundly and essentially what it means to be male and female in perfect balance. We have to find and to trust the feminine face of God and the masculine face of God. Both are true and both are necessary for a full relationship with God. Up to now, we have strongly relied upon the presented masculine images while, in fact, our inner life was more drawn to our mother's energy. That is much of our religious problem today.”

Something to think about, especially today, as we honour mothers, who can teach us a lot about what God is really like.

Easter - First Day of New Creation

Easter celebrates the start of the new creation!

Anglican Bishop N. T. Wright has written extensively on Jesus, the early believers and their church and especially about the amazing resurrection of Jesus, something no one was expecting, and an event that started a movement that set out to change the world.  In his book “Simply Jesus” on page 191:

“When Jesus rose from the dead on Easter morning, he rose as the beginning of the new world that Israel’s God had always intended to make.  That is the first and most important thing to know about Easter.”

“This is the real beginning of the kingdom.  Jesus’ risen person - body, mind, heart and soul - is the prototype of the new creation.  We have already seen him as the Temple in person, as the jubilee in person.  Now we see him as the new creation in person.”

In his book “Surprised by Hope”, Wright has a whole chapter:  “Reshaping the Church for Mission: Living the Future”.  He tries to get us excited about Easter:

“Easter is about the wild delight of God’s creative power . . . It’s about the real Jesus coming out of the real tomb and getting God’s real new creation under way . . . This is our greatest festival . . . This is our greatest day.”

He goes on to say that we each have a role to play in advancing this kingdom in this very real world of space, time and matter, we should not simply give up on this world.  “We must, rather, claim it for the kingdom of God, for the lordship of Jesus, and in the power of the Spirit, so that we can go out and work for that kingdom, announce that lordship and effect change through that power.”

Wright points out that if we are to be the agents of change for God’s kingdom, we must accept “that the whole world is now God’s holy land, we must not rest as long as that land is spoiled and defaced.  This is not extra to the church’s mission.  It is central.”

Working for this kingdom is a huge responsibility, and he adds “when the church is living out the kingdom of God, the word of God will spread powerfully and do its own work.”

He ends the book with one of his Easter sermons, in which he says, “When the final resurrection occurs, as the centerpiece of God’s new creation, we will discover that everything done in the present world in the power of Jesus’ own resurrection will be celebrated and included, appropriately transformed.”

Lots to get excited about, lots to do to work toward the fulfillment of this new creation!

The Day We Call Good Friday

On this day we commemorate the execution of a man who claimed to be the Messiah for the Jews.  For those who believed him and were watching at the time, it looked like just another bitterly disappointing tragedy.  Other would-be messiahs had risen to prominence and had been crushed and executed by the Romans, so the disappointed onlookers had little hope for any other outcome.

But what was unfolding was an event of cosmos shaking significance: evil was being defeated on that Friday and a new kingdom would be launched on Sunday. 

Reflecting on Jesus’ crucifixion, a concise and powerful depiction of the meaning of the cross is found in Brian McLaren’s book “Generous Orthodoxy”, page 105:

“Absorbing the worst that human beings can offer - crooked religiosity, petty political systems, individual betrayal, physical torture with whip and thorn and nail and hammer and spear - Jesus enters into the center of the thunderstorm of human evil and takes its full shock on the cross.  Our evil is brutally, unmistakably exposed, drawn into broad daylight, and judged - named and shown for what it is.  Then, having felt its agony and evil firsthand, in person, Jesus pronounces forgiveness and demonstrates that the grace of God is more powerful and expansive than the evil of humanity.  Justice and mercy kiss; judgment and forgiveness embrace.  From their marriage a new future is conceived.”

Excerpts from today’s meditation by Franciscan friar, Richard Rohr:

“Jesus hung in total solidarity with the pain of the world and the far too many lives on this planet that have been "nasty, lonely, brutish, and short.” After the cross, we know that God is not watching human pain, nor apparently always stopping human pain, as much as God is found hanging with us alongside all human pain. Jesus forever tells us that God is found wherever the pain is, which leaves God on both sides of every war, in sympathy with both the pain of the perpetrator and the pain of the victim, with the excluded, the tortured, the abandoned, and the oppressed since the beginning of time. I wonder if we even like that. There are no games of moral superiority left. Yet this is exactly the kind of Lover and the universal Love that humanity needs.

“What else could possibly give us a cosmic and final hope? This is exactly how Jesus redeemed the world "by the blood of the cross.” It was not some kind of heavenly transaction, or "paying a price" to God, as much as a cosmic communion with all that humanity has ever loved and ever suffered. If he was paying any price it was for the hard and resistant skin around our souls.”

Gives us lots to think about . . .

But, wait a minute, Sunday’s coming!

Skeletons in the Closet

Most anyone sitting down to read the New Testament will take a glance at the first chapter of Matthew and quickly skim over the long list of names, many of them pretty hard to pronounce anyway.  But Matthew might have been up to something here that deserves a second look.  If you read over the list of names, there are four women in the list, in brackets.  Let’s take a look at them:

First there was Tamar, who we meet in Genesis 38.  She married one of Judah’s sons, who died before they had children.  It’s a complicated story, but Tamar disguised herself as a prostitute to seduce Judah to have his child, the child that would be part of the genealogical line leading eventually to Jesus.  Respectable people would have considered this to be a “skeleton in the closet” of Jesus genealogy, but Matthew makes sure he lists Tamar right there for the world to read.

The next bracketed woman in the list is Rahab.  Now the Rahab we meet in the book of Joshua was described as a harlot in the city Jericho, not your society lady.  This may not be the same “Rahab” listed in Matthew, as there is a Jewish tradition that Rahab married Joshua, and the Rahab in Matthew had a child by Salmon to be part of Jesus genealogy.

The next is Ruth, a very decent person, but she came from Moab [east of the Dead Sea, and often an enemy of the Israelites]; she would likely have been avoided by good self-respecting Jews.

The fourth woman mentioned is Bathsheba, but she is not mentioned by name but is noted in the account as “the wife of Uriah”, which makes the mention even more scandalous, as it reminds us of the whole sordid incident: Uriah, husband of Bathsheba, was murdered by order of King David by having the soldiers retreat from him in battle.  At the time, Uriah's wife was pregnant by David through an adulterous affair.  This is not the kind of story most self-respecting people would like to tell about their families, but Matthew airs it prominently in the genealogy of Jesus.

Why would Matthew take great pains to drag out these skeletons in the closet?  Could it be that there was a lot of tongue wagging going on about Jesus’ own mother before he was born?  Joseph was all set to wed Mary and discovered that she was already pregnant, and certainly not by him.  He was set to call the whole thing off, but was assured by an angel of the real and amazing story.  Nevertheless, you can bet the local gossips had a lot to say about the situation, and Joseph and Mary probably had to put up with quite a bit from the mean tongues around them.

Joseph and Mary knew the miraculous pregnancy and the awesome responsibility that was to be theirs, but you can bet the local gossips had their own explanations.  Could Matthew have subtly been reminding people that situations that self -respecting people would call “skeletons in the closet” became an integral part of the family tree of Jesus the Messiah?

And what about us? Who among us doesn’t have a few skeletons in the closet? Do we think we could be of no use to God because of things in our past? Matthew reminds us that God used all these people, skeletons and all, to be part of the family tree of Jesus. So if any of us has a skeleton that is bugging us, talk to God about it; God can handle it.

Learn to Fly in 2012

Welcome to 2012.

This is the year we are going to learn to fly; that's the ambition Pastor Jeff is inspiring in us and for us as people who gather together at Community Life Church.

Isaiah 40:31 says: "but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.  They will soar on wings like eagles; the will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint."

Here on Grand Manan we are used to seeing gulls swooping and soaring gracefully, even in gale force winds.  In fact, they are more agile in the air than eagles (but Isaiah didn't have the advantage of living on Grand Manan to be able to watch gulls in their agility and power in the air).  Can you imagine being able to do that?

Of course in our own strength, it would be impossible.  Just like being fully the human you were intended to be would be impossible in your own strength.  But take a deep breath, breathe in the Spirit of Jesus and let his Spirit work in you and you can start to be what you think is impossible in your own strength.

Want inspiration in this impossible task?  Look at Jesus.  He lived as the ultimate expression of what it is to be human.  He was the most fully human person who ever lived.  That is what he meant when he called himself "son of man".  Biologically and literally, Jesus couldn't be a "son of man" since he was born of a virgin.

In that time and culture "son of" meant "the ultimate expression of".  So when Jesus was referred to as "son of God", that was a way of saying that Jesus was the ultimate expression of God.  You want to know what God is like?  Look at Jesus.

Jesus often referred to himself as "son of man".  You want to know what the ultimate human person is like?  Look at Jesus.

Each one of us can be more fully and completely human than we are.  Breathe in the Spirit of Jesus; let the Spirit of Jesus work fully in you, providing you the strength to do what you thought to be impossible in your own strength, and learn to soar and swoop like seagulls, with the excitement of life as it is meant to be lived.  Like Jesus did.

So, let's learn to fly in 2012!