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.