Love Is The Source and Goal - Richard Rohr

Listening For Lent - Timothy Murphy at Progressive Christianity

Use this Lent to grow in listening and learning from those that are experiencing mistreatment and injustice by practicing solidarity.

Lent has come again (quite early this year!), and we should use it to start developing some of our atrophied spiritual muscles, like practicing solidarity.

Doing so is necessary if we are to break out of the mold we so often find ourselves caught in when it comes to relating to the suffering of others.

Most often, we fall into one of two ditches. On one side is anesthetized numbness. Either because of unfamiliarity or unease, we remain separate from the suffering within our wider communities.  In this ditch, we feel nothing, making the pain of another’s injury bearable. 

On the other side is the ditch of benevolent rescue. We see oppression and our hearts are rightly moved. Who could blame another for the instinctual desire to help? But we err when we act as if we are saviors for the downtrodden, that they are merely waiting for us to rescue them. 

The middle path, the narrow way, is one of solidarity. This means that we support the work of those directly affected by oppression, but as partners we take our guidance from those closest to the situation.  This is a humbling position, one that many of us are unaccustomed to. 

I invite you to make use of this Lenten time to grow in listening and learning from those that are experiencing mistreatment and injustice. What are they asking for? How can you and/or your faith community support the work they are already doing? Listen to them.

The full article is available here

Love and Welcome Someone The World Hates - CRC Office Of Social Justice

#BlessingNotBurden

God-Given Dignity of Immigrant Neighbors - CRC Office of Social Justice

#BlessingNotBurden

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

Reader: God, we come today wanting to believe in many things but trusting very few.
All: Our faith in you may be ragged and worn around the edges ...

Reader: .. but you’ve promised that you don’t brush aside the bruised and the hurt.
All: Instead, you welcome all who come seeking; so meet us where we are.

Reader: You're a God of limitless love, creativity and compassion.
All: For this, we give you praise.

Joy Is Hidden In Compassion - Henri J Nouwen

God In All

Spiritual Revolution: Relationships & Renewal - Diana Butler Bass in Religion Dispatches

A shift in our conception of God is at the basis of a cultural reorganization, a cultural rebirth. The boundaries of religion, the architecture that we built for the old world has failed.

Religious historian Diana Butler Bass is a preeminent narrator of the decline of traditional religion and the emergence of progressive and spiritual-but-not-religious faith in the 21st century.

Her newest book, Grounded: Finding God in the World, A Spiritual Revolution, turns to contemporary science, both physical and social, for evidence of ongoing “Incarnation,” what the ancient Hebrews called Emanuel, or “G-d with us,” or what religion scholars call “panentheism”—God in everything.

Bass seeks out God in soil, water, sky, and in fellow human beings and their communities. “A shift in our conception of God is at the basis of a cultural reorganization, a cultural rebirth," she says. "The boundaries of religion, the architecture that we built for the old world has failed."

"As an institution, (the church) has failed to ask us to address the questions of poverty and class and color and ecology that really do advance the privilege of some at the expense of others."

"We need to have something that is better," Bass says. "[W]hat we have now doesn’t allow us to be who we need to be in order to save the planet, or an economic plain where people can have dignity across the world."

"One hopeful thing that I see," said Bass, "is the rewriting of theology in a new generation; people who are not afraid to ask questions that we’ve needed to ask for a long time."

"Institutions naturally do two things really well, and that is rules and rituals. They do relationships really poorly," says Bass. "That's the heart of this spiritual revolution (we're currently experiencing). We are developing a new relationship with nature and with one another in new patterns of human community."

"The question that I have is this: Can we build relationships and networks that are more about relationships and renewal?"

The full article is available here

God Listens To ...

God Bless Those We Deem Unjustified - Kayla McClurg at inward/outward

Reflection and Renewal: Turn Our Hearts Towards Love (based on Matthew 22:39)

God,

You ask us to love others as we love ourselves.  But sometimes our eyes don’t look beyond our own little part of the world. Sometimes we feel so overwhelmed that we don’t open our hands to help those we see that need it.

And sometimes we are guided by what we’ve been told to fear by voices other than yours.

Turn our eyes toward your presence, your action, within us and around us. Open our hands to act as yours in your world. Soften our hearts so that we welcome the stranger, the refugee, the outcast.

Forgive us for when we ignore or shun you in the form of others. Keep us on the path of your kingdom which sets things right by renewing and restoring life.

Amen.