Prayer

"Prayer is acknowledging that we are always in the presence of God." -Desmond Tutu

Bishop Tutu's reflection is simple and yet deeply thought-provoking. As we began our consideration of prayer, group members shared understandings and experiences. here are some of the notes:

The experience of prayer involves:

--getting in touch with inner conflict

--Having a conversation with God

--Listening

--Seeking Guidance

--Discerning Direction

--Release (innermost thoughts, "confession," honest communication, expression)

--God's careful listening

--Authenticity (Prayer is not a performance)

--Making space; having space made for possibility

--Sense of deliverance

--No grasping

--Getting better acquainted with self

--awe and gratitude

We gave initial consideration to two texts:

"In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place and there he prayed." --Mark 1:35

We noted that in Mark 1 Jesus has spent much of the night healing people and attending to their needs. Early in the morning he goes out to a "desert-ed" place to pray. We are reminded of his time in the desert wilderness, a time of clarification and discernment. When his disciples come, complaining ("Where have you been? Everybody in Capernaum is looking for you!) Jesus instead tells them they will be moving on to other towns. He has come to proclaim the good news of God's love to everyone--this is his primary mission. The time of prayer has recentered him in the will of God.

"He was in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of the disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray . . ."--Luke 11:1

What follows is the prayer we call "The Lord's Prayer." We will consider its substance further.

Sabbath Day Worship

The Shape of Sabbath Day Worship

--Sabbath is a radical practice.
--Liturgy is a daring act of imagination.
--Theology of a God who is doing hands-on work to make human futures.
--Resistance to a dominant, life-flattening order.
--possibilities of a covenant community:
(a) celebration of a God-ordered life(b) practice of hope in the face of the world's hopelessness
--celebration of a world that is fruitful and generative (not "use-ful")
--God's themes of wholeness and completion in the midst of world that is half-baked and distorted.
--The peace of Jesus (an antidote to anxiety)
--Fabric of our lives depends on fidelity, not "productivity."
--Liturgy is a way of imagining the world differently and acting according to that imagination.
So this is what our Sunday Worship is about?!!!

(notes from 1994 Kirkridge Retreat)

The Bible

Some stimulating quotes:
--"The Bible is a record of God's search for humanity."--Robert McAfee Brown
--"We have so much to say about the Bible that we have we are not prepared to hear what the Bible has to say about us."--Abraham Heschel
--"The Bible is not just man's word about God but also God's word about man."--Karl Barth
--"Instead of reading the Bible as orthodoxy, or morality, or history, we take the Bible as a range of imagination that provides the community around the text with narrative and stories and songs and poetry and images that have the potential to move outside themselves . . . the Bible is not "user-friendly" for people who like the way the world is organized. It is inherently subversive." --Walter Brueggemann
--"There is no way you can read the entire Bible seriously and take every word literally. Contradictions start in the first two chapters of Genesis. There are two Creation stories, two stories of the making of Adam and Eve. And that is all right. The Bible is still true."--Madeleine L'Engle
--A redescribing of reality
--Understanding the world and ourselves through the lens of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection.

Key to our thinking about a "Jesus-centered" approach to reading and study of the Bible:
--"We need to read the Bible in principle and practice beginning with the gospel narrative of Jesus and the radically new thing he brings to the human situation. Jesus does not fit any of the current schemes of biblical interpretation, biblical literalist, literary critical, dispensationalist, which make the text more important than Jesus himself and thus neutralize the revolution of his teaching. Rather we should see that Jesus has brought a transforming possibility of nonviolence and forgiveness to our way of being human, and all biblical interpretation, including the pathways of revelation in the Old Testament, flow from that." --Anthony Bartlett

"Whoever has seen me has seen the Father." --Jesus in John 14:9
Much more to come.

The Kingdom of God

What Jesus calls the "kingdom of God" (basileia,realm, dominion) is also referred to in Matthew's gospel as "the kingdom of the heavens."
The kingdom (kin-dom) can be "seen" and "entered."
Our descriptive words:
--Paradise
--Utopia
--Fulfillment
--Life
--Peaceful
--"perfection"
--all-encompassing
--powerful
--beauty
--community of God

With regard to "perfection," we referenced Matthew 5:48, when Jesus says (after teaching love of enemy) "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect." The term "teleios" might be translated as "whole," "complete," or "fulfilled." We refelcted on those textures of meaning when we considered what it means to be the "community of God."
Matthew 4:17 "Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand ("has come near")." Jesus announces the kingdom of God in our midst. So turn around, be changed, welcome God's realm opening to you!
Matthew 5:3 "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the heavens"
Matthew 11:12 "From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of the heavens has suffered violence . . ." Again, in a historical context. The realm of God's nonviolent unbounded love suffers violence, absorbs it, overcomes it. God's realm never inflicts violence.

The parables: The kingdom shall be compared to . . . a man throwing handfulls of good seed ev
erywhere, on rocky and thorny territory just as much as fertile territory. The kingdom is like leaven in a loaf . . .
Mark 9:1 "Some of you standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come in power." What then, is the nature of this power, and how has it come?
Mark 10:15 " It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom." This comes right after a fine young man with many possessions did not follow Jesus because he was unwilling to let go of his possessions and allow them to be converted into that which the poor badly needed.
John 3:3 "Unless one is born anew ("from above") they cannot see the kingdom of God."
Fred Buechner says that the kingdom of God is not a place but a condition. "Insofar as here and there, now and then, God's will is being done in various odd ways among us even at this moment, the kingdom has come already. Insofar as all the odd ways we do God's will are half-baked and half-hearted, the kingdom is still a long way off-- a hell of a long way off, to be more precise and theological.
As a poet, Jesus is maybe at his best in describing the feeling you get when your glimpse (the kingdom). It's like finding a million dollars in a field, he says, or a jewel worth a king's ransom.
It's like finding something you hated to lose and thought you'd never find again--an old keepsake, a stray sheep, a missing child. When the kingdom really comes, it's as if the thing you you lost and thought you'd never find again is you." (Buechner, Wishful Thinking).
Let's continue this week!

The Faith of God

(This is a reflection reprinted from our 2008 "Jesus 101" class)

God's faith in us is always greater than our faith in God. Consider God's faith in us as yet another expression of God's immeasureable grace. What does this mean for our discipleship? The upcoming Christmas narrative will remind us that God comes among us defenseless; in the Christ-child, God's blessed future for the whole world is placed in our hands for our care. The baby is fragile enough to be crushed by human violence, to be set aside and abandoned, or to be received and nurtured to fullness of life. Let those metaphors resonate within you.
The birth narrative further stimulates our reflection:
1) The world's salvation is carried and born into the world by a vulnerable, unmarried, "unprepared" young woman who at first cannot imagine being God's favored one (Luke 1:26-38).
2) Her companion is scandalized by God's action and quietly seeks to excuse himself from the narrative, tempted to deny their connection on "reasonable" grounds. Instead, he responds to the divine invitation not to be bound by fear (Matthew 1:20) and commits himself more deeply to the emerging covenant.
3) In spite of outward appearnaces and worldly wisdom, this fragile birth carries the power to turn the world upside down! (Lukle 1:47-55)
4) It is a harrowing and thrilling life or death story (Matthew 2) in which people from outside the traditional religious community--"foreigners"-play a critical role, embodying a faiththat they were not taught in Sunday School!
The story is full of journeys. God's people are always "on the Way." It is an awesome and peculiar privilege we have, one that is initiated by God's grace, rather than by anything we can muster for ourselves.

Mother Teresa wistfully said: "I wish God didn't trust me so much." Behold her life!

Salvation

It was astonishing (in a good way) that, when we discussed the concept of "salvation," no one said, "You go to heaven after you die!" Your responses were abundant:
--eternal life with Jesus Christ
--healing
--forgiveness
--love
--comfort
--community
--mercy
--grace
--awareness
--assuredness
--know it in your heart
--our faith-------------God's "faith" in us
--patience
--constant possibility of return
--new way of seeing, restored way of seeing the world, others, ourselves*

One of the beauties of this list is that each of the responses offers commentary and texture on the first response ("eternal life with Jesus Christ"). When we understand "eternal" as a reference to unbreakable communion with God, it enhances our perceptions. A sharing of life with Christ which has no boundaries.
The NT Greek verb sozo, translated "to save," can mean:
--to deliver
--to rescue
--to keep from perishing
--to make well, to heal, to restore

We considered three texts:
--Matthew 1:21 "for he (Jesus) will save his people from their sins." If sin is a manifestation of distance--from God, from one another, from the image of God within each of us--then Jesus comes to deliver us from these debilitating distances.
--Matthew 9:21 "If only I touch his garment, I will be made well (a translation of sozo)
--Matthew 16:25, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:24 "for those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save (find) it."
Letting go in order to receive or realize.
--John 3:17 "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him."
Referring to community, it was noted that in the Hebrew scriptures salvation is primarily understood as communal deliverance (deliverance of a people).
The definition of salvation as "a new way of seeing the world, each other, and ourselves" is testimony that the Apostle Paul (aka Saul of Tarsus) gives vividly!
Relative to concepts of heaven and life after death, we do well to understand them as fulfillments of God's will and deepest expressions of God's self-giving love and realm, rather than as destinations.
Feel free to add further thoughts and reflections!

Unbounded Love

The power of God is the power of unbounded love. In biblical language, agape love. The most common expression for this in the New Testament is the verb agapao. This is the self-giving, ever-welcoming love of God that we see and experience in Jesus. It is actively given; enacted. Unbounded love is the only power that can save us. Jesus' self-giving was not hindered by the cross; the threat of or the reality of death. God's love for all (particularly enemies)is poured out toward a future that is the promised full-fillment of God's unbounded love. We live, in faith, toward that future; our love is an investment in it.

Our descriptions:

--infinite/no end

--love no matter what (think of the worst circumstances)

--no limits, boundaries on love (take some time to reflect on all that this means!)

--unconditional (we confess that our love is so often laden with conditions)

--openness--for everybody

--can't earn it

--love not a commodity (no negotiation)

--No "fences"

--"we're all in it together whether we recognize it or not"

--experiential

--gracious

--You are the overflowing cup!

We spent some time pondering Paul's commission in the Letter to the Philippians:

"Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus" (2:5)

. . ."did not regard equality with God as somehting to be exploited, but emptied himself . . .

he humbled himself, and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross."

How is it that we live and act "with the mind of Jesus?" How does the unbounded love of God make that possible?

Think of some ways that we can practice unbounded love! Write them in the comment section. Be as specific as you can.