The Last Supper: A Whole New Kind Of Kingdom - Jeff Wiersma

Jesus loved to teach in parables. At this Passover supper, he was trying to teach his disciples that the new kingdom God was launching was not concerned with taking or maintaining power.

When Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table, he said to them, “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” He did the same with the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is ... my blood, poured out for you.”

When Jesus broke the bread and passed the cup with his disciples to celebrate Passover, he gave them a tangible symbol of his impending death. Jesus identified himself as the sacrificial lamb from the Hebrew story of Passover and deliverance from slavery in Egypt, an analogy that was unmistakable to these Jewish men who were his followers.

Can you imagine the disciple’s confusion? Jesus had told them that he was the Messiah; the promised one sent from God, the one whose arrival their people have been waiting centuries for. They believed that the Messiah would forcefully lead them out of the oppression of Empire and establish a new kingdom of Israel. The disciples were expecting the Messiah to be like the Moses of the Passover story, not the lamb that was slaughtered. Yet Jesus is speaking of himself as the sacrifice!

It can be difficult from our perspective 2,000 years later to remember that the disciples had no way of knowing that Easter would follow Jesus’ execution. After all, every lamb which they had seen serve as the Passover sacrifice did not miraculously come back to life.

But the Messiah being a suffering servant and not a violent conqueror is what Jesus’ life was all about. At this Passover supper, he was trying to teach his disciples that the new kingdom God was launching was not concerned with taking or maintaining power. Jesus’ mission as the Messiah wasn’t about giving those carrying out oppression a taste of their own medicine. The Messiah's work was not playing the same game as, nor turning the tables on, those doing harm - because violence and oppression dehumanize both the perpetrator and the victim.

Rather, Jesus’ mission was about setting an entirely new table where, by grace, all are rehumanized and free from the cycles of oppression, violence, and hate. Jesus is saying that sacrificial acts of love are the way that God’s kingdom works to reaffirm the basic, inherent dignity of all.

I’m sure that all of us have seen instances when a small act of kindness and giving has set amazing transformations into motion. Jesus understood this quite well. Throughout his life, Jesus transformed ordinary loaves of bread into something extraordinary; moments of radical, unqualified love for whoever needed love at that time, regardless of and in intentional subversion of the oppressive social order of that time.

At the last supper, Jesus transformed an ordinary meal into the launch of God’s extraordinary kingdom of love and grace.

Imagine If You Were There: Making Holy Week Feel Real - Jeff Wiersma

The stories of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday are endurable each year because we already know how the story ends. We know that Jesus' crucifxion is not a defeat, but rather a victory revealed by the events of Easter Sunday.   But what if we - like the people that we read about in these stories - didn’t know that? 

"God so loved the world that he gave his only son - even to the obscene horror that is the cross.” - Frederick Buechner

The days of Holy Week that precede Easter don't match the usual qualifications of events one usually considers worth celebrating.  These days are the ones Christians remember Jesus; God in human form – who came to announce good news to the poor, liberation for the oppressed, sight for the blind, and life to the lifeless - was executed by the powers-that-be.

Maundy Thursday is a day that saw the betrayal of a close friend and false arrest by scheming religious authorities who controlled the Temple that Jesus called his "father's house."

Good Friday is a day of pain; a day of thorns and cross and wood - a day of betrayal and abandonment by friends and the casual cruelty of violence. It is a day when love was put to death - when the evil and powerful seemed to have the last word.

Holy Saturday is a day of fear, uncertainty, and dwelling in the "place of death."

These stories of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday are endurable each year because we already know how the story ends.  We know that Good Friday is not a defeat, but rather a victory revealed by the events of Easter Sunday.
 
But what if we - like the people that we read about in these stories - didn’t know that? What if we were experiencing it in real time for the first time?

What if the pain and suffering we witnessed caught us by surprise and shook us to our very core?  What if we were confused by what was happening and felt devastated when our expectations and hopes were dashed? What if someone we loved dearly was suddenly and brutally taken from us?

Wouldn't it feel exactly like “real life” itself does sometimes?

This year, try imagining that you're witnessing these stories taking place right as they're unfolding, even though you've likely heard the hundreds of times.  You might be surprised at what you realize, feel, and encounter.

The Politics of Palm Sunday: The “Untriumphal” Entry - Sojourners

When Jesus entered Jerusalem riding a donkey, he was performing a political act. He was revealing that the reign of God is in stark contrast to the reign of Rome and every other political ideology that seeks triumphant victory by subduing people with violence and coercion.

Make no mistake: the Gospel is political.

Throughout his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus is political. He influences people to live into the Kingdom of Heaven. For Jesus, Heaven is not essentially some place off in the distance where you go after you die. No, Heaven is a way of life to be lived right here, right now. We see this clearly in the prayer he taught his disciples: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

When Jesus entered Jerusalem riding a donkey, he was performing a political act. He was revealing that the reign of God is in stark contrast to the reign of Rome and every other political system that seeks triumphant victory by subduing people with violence and coercion.

Jesus was engaged in political street theater. The procession into Jerusalem on a donkey was symbolic street drama, a parody of the popular expectation of a triumphant military liberator entering on a powerful war horse. Jesus came into Jerusalem as a King of Peace! He flipped the popular militaristic image of the messiah on its head.

Jesus revealed the alternative; a political way of life based on humble service, not triumphant violence.

This is not just a call to a personal ethic; this is a political ethic. Indeed, the politics of Jesus seeks to influence our personal lives, but it also seeks to influence our political lives. Wherever personal or political systems use violence, power, and coercion to be triumphant and victorious, Jesus beckons us to follow him into a different kind of politics – into the Kingdom of God that lives and dies by love, service, and forgiveness.

The full article is available here

Reflection and Renewal: Brokenness Limits How We Give and Receive Love (based on Genesis 2:18)

God, you've created us for community and connection. Yet often we worry about being hurt by others who we think are broken and damaged, so instead we isolate ourselves.

At the same time, we often struggle to see ourselves as anything other than broken and damaged goods, so we withdraw inward.

In both instances, we keep ourselves from experiencing the transforming grace of relationship and connection.

So God, we need your grace. Thank you that your mercy is bottomless and limitless. Help us to mirror how you give and receive love.

Amen

Responsive Call To Worship: All Of Us Are Broken, All Of Us Are Welcomed By God (based on Isaiah 42:3)

Reader: God, we come today as people whose lives contain brokenness ...
All: ... but you’ve promised that you don’t brush aside the bruised and the hurting.

Reader: Instead, you welcome all who come seeking.
All: You reach out to all of creation with open hands.

Reader: So meet us where we are.
All: We need your boundless, overflowing grace.

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

Healthy Religion - Richard Rohr

Call To Worship: God, Help Us To Be Open (based on Proverbs 19:11)

God, the noise in our lives is loud. Open our ears to your still, small voice.

God, the darkness within and around us feels threatening. Open our eyes to the light of your presence.

God of overflowing mercy, we cling tightly to so many things. Open our minds and hands in generosity and joy.

God of all people, we're often told that we need to fear those who are “other.” Open our arms to the stranger, the refugee, and the oppressed. Open our hearts to the expanse of your love.

God, replace our anger and fear with your peace. Open our souls to receive your grace as we give you thanks and praise.

The Trinity: The System Update Christianity Needs - Cynthia Bourgeault

Benediction: Grace Givers (based on Ephesians 4:32)

God, as receivers of your grace, help us to be grace-givers in the lives we lead in your world.

Responsive Call To Worship: We Have Brokenness In Our Lives (based on Psalm 34:18)

Reader: God, we gather as people who know we have brokenness in our lives.
All: We admit that we need your help.

Reader: Our need for your mercy is constant.
All: Yet we know that no one is beyond your grace.

Reader: So graciously move in our hearts and minds.
All: Keep reminding us of the hope that we have in you.

Reader: May the love of Jesus become alive in us.
All:  Thank you for your mercy and love.  We give you praise.

Lent: A Season to Remember - from Bread For The Journey

Teresa of Avila: A Mystic for Our Times - Mirabai Starr at Shalem Institute

What can Teresa of Avila offer us five hundred years after her death?

Teresa of Avila models the living balance between action and contemplation, serving others and developing an interior life, engaging in passionate human relationships and surrendering to the divine mystery. She was an ecstatic mystic and skillful administrator, a fool of God and an insightful psychotherapist, a penitent when she needed to be and an epicurean when she could be.

Teresa of Avila was fully, deeply, unapologetically herself. If she had written a letter to which her correspondent had not replied, she did not hesitate to write again, demanding, “Why haven’t you answered my letter? Don’t you love me? Do you have any idea of the pain your silence is causing me?”

Nor was she reluctant to talk back to God. In the midst of harrowing external trials, Teresa’s first response was to withdraw to a quiet place and go within. There, she would confront her Beloved: “What’s going on here, Lord?” One day, the divine voice answered, “This is how I treat my friends.” To which Teresa responded, “Well, then, no wonder you have so few!”

She was keenly discriminating about spiritual phenomena. When her nuns prayed so fervently they gave themselves nosebleeds, she would send them to bed with a sweet cup of tea and a soft blanket and forbid them from entering the chapel for a few days.

“God save us from sour-faced saints!” she would say about the self-important clerics who felt it was their job to uphold orthodoxy while never having held the Holy One in their arms and rocked him all through the night, as she regularly did.

The full article is available here

Sermon On The Mount: A Theology Of Resistance - Lindsey Paris-Lopez

Now is the time for a robust theology of resistance.

What do we make of a sermon that declares the poor blessed and commands us to love our enemies in a culture where profit equals power and war is endless?

The Sermon on the Mount is a call to resistance. It has always been subversive and counter-cultural because of its core ethic of nonviolence and its insistence on the blessing of the powerless.

Jesus blessed the people on the margins of his culture by embracing them, showing solidarity with them, building a community in which those who had always been shunned were welcomed and loved.  As the body of Christ, we are called to be that blessing.

Of course, this means we must stand with the immigrants and refugees who seek opportunity or simply survival in our nation, but it also means we must stand with those who mourn their loved ones in the wake of our government’s drone attacks and our society's economic exploitation.

The resistance Jesus teaches is neither acquiesce to evil nor returning evil for evil. Jesus instructs us to reject oppression by asserting our own dignity with firm compassion, refusing to participate in or perpetuate the cycle of violence. In doing so, we refuse to be either a helpless victim or a heartless monster, reaffirming not only our own humanity, but also that of the one who would dehumanize us.

The full article is available here

The Divine Image In All Things - Richard Rohr

Symptoms of Spiritual Awakening - Laura Marie

A time of awakening is when people have a strong desire to become their true selves as well as the change that they wish to see in the world.

We are living in a time of spiritual awakening.  Many people are filled with a desire for change. Many people are becoming more conscious and aware of issues and practices that have lasted for too long and that must change.

Many people now want to take their lives back into their own hands and escape the model imposed by society in order to really know happiness and live the life they truly want to live – not one dictated by television, magazines, movies, social identifications and all kinds of meaningless clichés many now want to get away from.

In such times, people's consciousness grows, their interests evolve, the meaning of life changes for them, and they have new aspirations and inspirations, coupled with the desire to change themselves in order to also for many, change the world.

Do you recognize yourself in any/some/all of these?

1) The feeling that something has changed inside of you

2) Awareness of your old negative habits 

3) The need to be alone or with new people more aligned with who you've become 

4) Rejection of superficiality and the inauthentic 

5) Deep sadness / compassion about the suffering in the world 

6) Feeling the need to make this world a better place 

7) A deep yearning for meaning in your life 

8) Hypersensitivity 

9) Creativity and increased inspiration 

10) Willingness to know who you truly are 

11) Increased intuitions and desire to reconnect with yourself 

12) Loss of interest in worrying – Actions based on Love and not Fear 

13) Loss of interest in any type of judgment towards others or yourself 

14) Increased willingness to love and give without expectations 

15) Feeling of being connected to everything and everyone

The full article is available here

The Bible's Upside Down Social Order - Rev Jim Wallis

God Doesn't "Bless America" - John Pavlovitz

When ideas of nationalism begin to define our theology or create our religious worldview, we fashion ourselves into an idol.

The phrase "God Bless America" implies that God chooses favorites.  This lazy phrase has saturated our Christian culture and flooded our churches and pulpits, and yet beyond an easy high, beyond a feel-good phrase to fuel our nationalistic and religious fervor—it doesn’t really mean much.

I understand patriotism. I get loving where you come from. I understand how proximity naturally breeds affinity.

It’s when these ideas of nationalism and home and country begin to define our theology or create our religious worldview that we fashion ourselves into an idol. We begin to actually renovate God in our own opulent, aggressive, materialistic image and ask that the world bow down to it.

When we imagine America as specifically blessed, we replace God’s will with our national desires. We make our country God’s focus. We act as if Divinity is on our payroll. We can then easily justify seeing those beyond our borders as inferior or dangerous or even evil.

The full article is available here

The Sad Irony of Refusing Refugees

Getting to Know Your Muslim Neighbors - The Banner

Our faith moves us to embrace people who are different from us.

I know a lot of Christians who are interested in relating with Muslims these days.

Some are learning Arabic or visiting mosques. Others are striking up conversations with Muslim business owners in their communities. While their approaches differ, all of these folks seem to be compelled by the same motivation: Christ’s call to love our neighbors as ourselves.

We don’t need to be experts on Islam to relate to Muslims. In fact, relationships are the best way for us to learn about Islam. While our brokenness makes us good at “othering”—ascribing evil motives to those who are different from us—our faith moves us to embrace our neighbor.

How magnificent it is that a Reformed theological understanding of the world affirms and encourages this kind of engagement!  Our faith moves us to embrace people who are different from us.

The full article is available here

God Of Infinite Abundance - Richard Rohr

Let Us Go Out With A Divine Dissatisfaction - Rev Martin Luther King Jr

Quotes from Southern Christian Leadership Conference address on  August 16th, 1967.

Let us go out with a divine dissatisfaction.

Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.

Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.

Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home.

Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied.

The road ahead will not always be smooth. There will be still rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair.

Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.

Inaugural Lament - Janel Apps Ramsey

An Exhortation To Action On Inauguration Day - Richard Rohr

The Church Needs To Actively Participate - Rev Martin Luther King Jr

How To Help Church Move On From "Praise & Worship" Music - Jonathan Aigner

Even by its own standards (i.e., number of butts in the seats) commercialized, contemporary praise & worship is a failed experiment at the congregational level.

I see the 3 main reasons for the decline (if not demise) of the commercialized "Praise & Worship" model.

(1) Younger generations are seeking old ways of doing things. This thankfully means an increasing rejection of the church of the 1990s and 2000s. More emphasis is being placed on liturgy and community, and less on using corporate worship chiefly as a contrived evangelistic tool. There is a burning desire to move past the shallowness of contemporary evangelicalism.

(2) Contemporary worship is an unstable and non-theological movement. To be thoroughly contemporary necessitates a slavish allegiance to the new, the current, the hip, the cool, and the commercial. It requires a thorough rejection of what is old, passe, not current, not cool, and what doesn’t make money. The bright shiny objects that get butts in the seats must continue becoming brighter and shinier. This bait-and-switch tactic is wearing thin.

(3) It's a failed construct. Even by its own standards (i.e., number of butts in the seats) commercialized, contemporary praise & worship is a failed experiment at the congregational level.  While it may fill ostentatious megachurches and suit their money-changer business model, it is an AstroTurf approach when congregations work best with grass-roots approaches.

Here are a few ways we can push forward toward a more profound understanding and experience of corporate worship.

• Choose music that can be sung well by a congregation. Corporate worship is about a time of gathering together, not about conformity to commercial forms. The "Praise & Worship" music that the Christian industry produces deemphasizes the human voice, and emphasizes soloistic interpretation, affected vocal production, and contrived performance.
• Stop conditioning attendees to be spectators. Look for liturgy, not entertainment. Worship is supposed to be the work of the people, not the jesusy entertainment of the masses. Music in worship isn’t supposed to be a vehicle for emotional manipulation, sensory gratification, or hooking an audience. Be a church where music serves the liturgy, not the masses.
• Reduce the influence of the commercial worship industry. It should disturb us greatly how much of contemporary worship is driven by money. It leads to a Sunday morning flood of poor compositions, both musically and theologically. It leads to what Michael Raiter calls “Hillsongization,” when everyone sings the same songs in basically the same way. It leads to the quality of a church’s “worship” being judged solely by how good their cover band is. It leads to a further loss of the importance of gathered worship, and the understanding of “worship” as more than just cool music. It leads to the mentality of, “With my iTunes, I can worship anywhere!”

It’s not really about music; it’s about the very purpose of gathered worship. It’s about theology, not experience. It’s about participation, not consumption. It’s about liturgy, not jesusy entertainment. It’s about being a church for the world, not getting butts in the seats.

The full article is available here