Very, Very Simple: Love Is The Main Thing - Kayla McClurg in inward/outward

Through which lens are we seeing life?

A lawyer tries to trap Jesus by asking, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

I’m glad he asked because it leads Jesus to clarify the main thing: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'”

Through which lens are we seeing life? Through the lens of the personal, we calculate what will bring the most success, the greatest protection, the most comfort and praise. Through the lens of loving God with all of who we are, we reach out to others, but we know our limits, how we can’t do all that needs to be done. It’s okay. We are not here to be God.

We are here only for the main thing: to love God by learning to love ourselves and letting that love flow to others. We do not have to do all, or see all, or be all. Very, very simple.

We love God by getting to know our whole self, all the hidden caves of our hearts, souls and minds. Only with greater understanding of our most intimate, vulnerable self in all our fractured glory—each of us precious images of God’s strength revealed in and through weakness—are we able to love our neighbor, in whom we see the best and worst of ourselves. It costs us our prejudice, our fear, our religiosity, all our walls and wars—everything that keeps us from the one path, the one pursuit, the single purpose, the all.

The full article is available here

5 Way Churches Can Help Stop Ebola Hysteria - Tom Ehrich in Sojo

 Our society's worst instincts, as always, are to blame those portrayed as being "other," to imagine barriers and travel bans that would protect us, and to turn against each other.   Such nonsense plays well in an election year, at least with a certain portion of the electorate.

Similar instincts served us poorly after 9/11, during various Red Scares, with the migrant children refugee crisis, during the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII and countless other instances. They are like a child’s instinct to hide under a bed: We crouch in fear without thinking first.

Many of our current legislative leaders have little instinct for leadership. They've been willing to harvest votes among the fearful by stoking their fears. All but the most responsible media have joined them in sowing misinformation and fear.

Let’s imagine a better scenario, perhaps even one that faithful people could help to bring about.

1) No cheap blaming.  God isn’t causing this virus to spread through western Africa as some sort of punishment for the people there, or to come to these shores as some punishment of us. Diseases happen, and they spread through a combination of bad luck, human error and ignorance

2) Avoid the hysteria.  Turning to our most primal, base and reflexive instincts is an unreliable way to make good decisions.  We should think critically about who is saying what for what reason.

3) Get informed.  We need to be able to provide useful guidance to children and the vulnerable and take appropriate precautions within our sphere of care and influence.

4) Identify who needs help.  We need to look outside our walls to see who needs help. Beyond family, beyond church, beyond our community — where is help needed, who is already involved, and how can we partner with our support them?

5) Prepare to stand against forces of fear.  We need to muster our personal and spiritual resources and find the courage to face something largely beyond our control. If the Ebola virus breaks out of current containment measures and spreads into the general population, our communities will require people with mature judgment and the courage to stand against the legions of fear.

The full article is available here

Benediction: Being A Blessing Everywhere That We Go (based on Genesis 12)

We have been called to be a blessing in this world which God created and called "good."

So may what we've sung and said here, as well as what we've heard and learned here, continue to guide
us as we do God’s work of bringing out the best in everyone and everything.

Reflection and Renewal: Not Seeking Guidance (based on John 9:1-3)

God,

Sometimes we struggle in dealing with the unknown. Sometimes we worry about all the unanswerable questions and what other people might think, so we stay on the sidelines of life and don't engage your world.

Sometimes we see the unknown as a thrilling thing.  But sometimes, instead of discerning what we are doing and seeking to be guided, we charge ahead full-speed, following our own instincts and desires.
When we do that, we forget to take the time to consider other’s needs or the impact of our actions on their lives.

Other times we have a severely limited view of what you can do, where you can do it, or with and through whom you can work. In our hunger for certainty, we are blind to how big and all-encompassing
your love is, so we can’t imagine you doing and being more than the boxes we try to put you in.

Often we do these things without a second thought.  But even when we try to trust in your way and follow your guidance, we all-too-easily slip into our old, familiar ways of thinking.

So we ask for forgiveness. Help us to have the faith to trust that what you've asked us to do is what we should be doing.  Help us to care for your world and where you've called us to be active in it.

Forgive us for when we've missed the point. Thank you for extending grace to us time and time again.

Amen.

Responsive Call To Worship: God's Presence and Guidance (based on Psalm 16:7-9)

Reader: Let us give thanks to God who guides us
All: We bless the Lord who is present among us, as he is in all of creation.

Reader: God’s wise teaching and kingdom way of living directs our days.
All: We will not be shaken or live in fear even though we may lack certainty.

Reader: Divine Presence sustains us and surrounds us.
All: We will sing God’s praise and worship with joy!

Real Life & The Bible - Brian McClaren

Call To Worship: Trust and Seeking (based on Luke 7:1-10)

God, we come today wanting to believe in many things but actually trusting very few if we're completely honest. Our faith in you may be ragged and worn around the edges, but you’ve promised that you don’t brush aside the bruised and the hurt.

Instead, you welcome all who come seeking; so meet us where we are. You're a God of limitless love, creativity and compassion.

For this, we give you praise.

Next Trip To The Fridge, Think On This - Bread For The World

There is a difference between charity and justice. Charity treats symptoms; justice addresses cause.

Imagine 100 cities the size of New York City, all bunched together in one location. One by one, the people walk by you, begging for a piece of bread or chunk of cheese. And imagine that happening again tomorrow, and the next day and the next.

It is a fact. Every day, 842 million people in the world are hungry. More than one in five children in the U.S. live in households that struggle to put food on the table.

If you doubt this fact, contact your local school and ask what percent of your school district’s children qualify for free lunches.

It matters to God and to Jesus that people are hungry today.  The question is: Does it matter to us?

Don’t get me wrong. Many wonderful things are happening within congregations to feed hungry people. But many of these efforts involve charity.  There is a difference between charity and justice. Charity treats symptoms; justice addresses causes.

A well-worn but appropriate analogy goes like this: A church may stand on the riverbank, rescuing children who have been mercilessly thrown into the current. But eventually, the church should go upstream and ask, “What is creating this crisis? Who is throwing babies in the river?”

God cares deeply about physical as well as spiritual hunger. Jesus did not divide human beings up into sections and say, “I care about getting people into heaven, but not about their empty stomachs.”

The full article is available here

Changing The Climate - Paola Fuentes in Do Justice!

I used to be one of those people who thought that I did not have the time to care about the environment and climate change.

One of the issues that caught my attention was climate change and its impacts on vulnerable communities around the world. From doing research and talking to people that I respect who know a lot more than I do about environmental degradation and climate change, I learned that climate change is a problem and that we need to do something about it. But what could I do? There was that question again.

I used to be one of those people who thought that I did not have the time to care about the environment and climate change because I was too busy caring for people and those in situations of poverty. However, after working in Nicaragua and learning about the effects of climate change on farmers there and then learning that what I had seen in Nicaragua is a common theme throughout the world, I can now resonate with one of the signs I saw at the march that read “Climate Action = Loving our Neighbors.”

It is important for Christians to be a voice in the public square on the issues that matter. Climate change and environmental degradation is one such issue. As Christians, we bring the hope to overwhelming tasks like addressing the climate crisis that our efforts are part of bringing the kingdom of God and the flourishing of all creation on earth.

The People’s Climate March was a global event--hundreds of thousands of people marched in streets across the world to demand action to end the climate crisis. The march occurred on Sunday, September 21, to coincide with the United Nations Climate Summit held in New York City on September 23.  

Participating in the march was both a humbling and an empowering experience. It was humbling to be part of such a large demonstration and to realize the scale and complexity of climate crisis and the large number and diversity of people and organizations working on different aspects of the crisis. It was also empowering because being in the midst of such a large gathering of people helped me to realize the power that we have as individuals when we unite and work together to solve a crisis and demand that our global leaders join and strengthen our efforts.

The full article is available here 

Nobody Is Getting Left Behind - Zack Hunt in The American Jesus

American Christian's love for the rapture reveals a lack of love for the very world Jesus came to save.

The very idea of the church abandoning the world in its time of need is endemic of an American Christianity that is more focused on the self than the needs of the other, more gnostic (concerned with right ideas and escapist hatred of the world and flesh that God created and called "good") than actually Christian, and hyper-focused on the hereafter to the detriment of the here and now.

I’m sorry Left Behind fans, but there is no such thing as the rapture.

The idea of a rapture never even appears on the church’s radar until it was invented in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

You would think that such a pivotal moment in the life of the church would get a least a brief mention by someone like Luther or Calvin or Aquinas or maybe Augustine. But there is only silence.

Why? Because the term "the rapture" never appears in the Bible and - most importantly - the very idea of the rapture is antithetical to the narrative of scripture. The Bible is a story about a God who journeys with people through hard times. He doesn’t pluck them out of danger.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that the Bible is not a road map to the future. It is the declaration that justice will be granted to the oppressed, and all things will be made new.

The full article is available here

How’s Our Comprehension? Kayla McClurg in inward/outward

We are not meant for violence and greed. Aggressive love and forgiveness are our calling, not aggressive apathy or aggressive avoidance of the realities of war and poverty and the destruction of our earth home. 

In elementary school I remember getting high marks for Reading Skills but not quite as high for what was called Comprehension. Similarly, we can “read” Jesus quite fluently without truly comprehending him. 

It is easy to point at the chief priests and elders who were listening to Jesus without comprehending and call them slow, but the rest of us are not winning any races when it comes to comprehending some of the most basic truths. 

People of forgiveness, called to be heralds of peace, yet too often silent and complicit in greed and violence. Called to extreme generosity and the rule of love, we seem unable to grasp the seriousness of our failing to steward the earth and one another.

We have been entrusted with an awesome responsibility to care for all creation. We are not meant for violence and greed. Aggressive love and forgiveness are our calling, not aggressive apathy or aggressive avoidance of the realities of war and poverty and the destruction of our earth home. 

Isn’t it time to slap our global forehead in disbelief that we have been such thoughtless stewards? Isn’t it time to beg collectively for pardon and seek to make amends? Or we can just keep plodding along, acting and reacting mindlessly, reading the signs of these times without comprehending. It is our choice. I wonder what kind of marks we will receive.

The full article is available here 

Have We Gotten Heaven All Wrong? John Murowski in Religion News Service

"What the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies,” said Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York. “The end times are not the end of the world — they are the beginning of the real world — in biblical understanding.”

Scholars on the right and left increasingly say that comforting belief in an afterlife has no basis in the Bible and would have sounded bizarre to Jesus and his early followers. Like modern curators patiently restoring an ancient fresco, scholars have plumbed the New Testament’s Jewish roots to challenge the pervasive cultural belief in an otherworldly paradise.

The most recent expert to add his voice to this chorus is the prolific Christian apologist N.T. Wright, a former Anglican bishop who now teaches about early Christianity and New Testament at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews.   Wright’s insistence that Christianity has got it all wrong seems to mark a turning point for the serious rethinking of heaven. He’s not just another academic iconoclast bent on debunking Christian myths.

"What the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies,” said Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York. “The end times are not the end of the world — they are the beginning of the real world — in biblical understanding.”

In classic Judaism and first-century Christianity, believers expected this world would be transformed into God’s Kingdom — a restored Eden where redeemed creation would be liberated from death, illness, sin and other corruptions.

The sect of first-century Jews who believed Jesus was Messiah also believed he inaugurated the Kingdom of God and were convinced the world would be transformed in their own lifetimes, Wright said. This inauguration, however, was far from complete and required the active participation of God’s people practicing social justice, nonviolence and forgiveness to become fulfilled.  Doing God’s Kingdom work has come to be known in Judaism as “tikkun olam,” or “repairing the world.”

Many clues to an early Christian understanding of the Kingdom of heaven are preserved in the New Testament, most notably the phrase “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” from the Lord’s Prayer.  The two dimensions intersect and overlap so that the divine bleeds over into this world.

“Our picture, which we get from Dante and Michelangelo, particularly of a heaven and a hell, and perhaps of a purgatory as well, simply isn’t consonant with what we find in the New Testament,” N.T. Wright said. “A lot of these images of hellfire and damnation are actually pagan images which the Middle Ages picks up again and kind of wallows in. Heaven isn't a Platonic, timeless eternity, which is what we were all taught."

The full article is available here

Why The Rapture Isn’t Biblical & Why It Matters - Kurt Willems in Patheos

With the release of the film Left Behind, critically-thinking Christians are once again needed to refute the pessimistic, escapist, divisive and unbiblical notions put forth by this franchise.

The unbiblical, recently-fabricated understanding of The Rapture invites us to escape this world: the last thing that Jesus would have ever taught! “On earth as in heaven” is what he said, not “in heaven away from the earth!” Our world’s future is hopeful. Let’s tell that story and not the escapist narratives that many of us grew up with (and that the Left Behind franchise continues to perpetuate).

I grew up in American church culture, which taught that this “world is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through.”  This mentality was reinforced by a wide-range of Bookstore McChristianity kitsch; from movies to books, music to posters, bumper stickers to t-shirts.

World and physicality = bad.
Jesus and spiritual bliss in a distant heaven = goal of the game.

This distinction came with a subset of beliefs about the destiny of God’s world.  Eventually this planet would be destroyed and we Christians would “fly away” to heaven at the rapture of the church.

The church of my youth probably had the rapture all wrong.  You see, the Bible flows from Creation (Gen 1-2) to Renewed Creation (Rev 21-22).  This is the narrative of Scripture.  Nothing in the text (if read in its proper context) alludes to the actual complete destruction of the planet.  Christ will return to resurrect, to purge, to heal, and to establish the eternal kingdom of God on this earth. Heaven and earth will unite like a bride and husband – for all eternity. That’s it.

This world’s worth to the Creator runs deep and because of this, the world as a whole ought to be intrinsically valuable to us.  Physical/earthly realities such as social injustice, violence, hunger, preventable sickness, and the destruction of nature are invitations to the church of Jesus to get our hands dirty and proclaim that this world matters (even in its broken state)!

The unbiblical, recently-fabricated understanding of The Rapture invites us to escape this world: the last thing that Jesus would have ever taught! “On earth as in heaven” is what he said, not “in heaven away from the earth!” Our world’s future is hopeful. Let’s tell that story and not the escapist narratives that many of us grew up with (and that the Left Behind franchise continues to perpetuate).

The full article is available here

And That Is Grace - Joe Kay in Sojourner's

We like to put flesh-and-blood on the notion that we are recipients of some great gift that arrives unexpectedly and is given freely. Someone or something that comes into our life and significantly changes it for the better in some ways.

It’s interesting how the word “grace” gets used a lot, even by those who don’t necessarily consider themselves religious. It’s a favorite name for a character that represents someone who is a gift to us — I’m thinking about Bruce’s girlfriend Grace in Bruce Almighty, or Eli’s reassuring encounter with a woman named Grace in the second season of the TV series Eli Stone.

You can probably cite many more examples of characters named Grace in different movies, television shows, and books.

We like to put flesh-and-blood on the notion that we are recipients of some great gift that arrives unexpectedly and is given freely. Someone or something that comes into our life and significantly changes it for the better in some ways.

But what is grace? Who is grace to us?

You make a bad decision and suffer the consequences (we‘ve all been there). You make what seems to be a good decision and it has unintended consequences (we‘ve all been there, too). Some people are there with you through it all, no matter what it costs them. They think that you are worth whatever price has to be paid to be with you. And you are willing to pay the price to be there for them, too.

That is grace.

You feel lost and alone. You begin to despair about whether you can get your life together. You feel trapped. You feel inadequate. And yet you find others who remind you that you are amazing. They make you see the possibilities of each day. And you end up doing the same for them.

That is grace.

You think that if anyone knew the real you, they wouldn’t like you. You hide parts of yourself from others. And then you find that there are those who want to get to know those parts of you and appreciate them and celebrate them with you. And you want to do the same with them.

That is grace.

You realize that life is limited. You lose sleep over the realization that you’ll never achieve all of your dreams. Someone comes along to remind you that you’re never alone in your worries and concerns. They tell you that you are perfect just as you are. And you are inspired to remind others of it, too.

That is grace.

The full article is available here