Monthly Archives

December 2018

Advent Love

When Love Runs Out

 

Tim: Our final Advent study focuses on love, of course. But we’re going to raise some difficult questions that typically don’t make the cut when Advent turns its attention to love.

Shea: With Advent’s fourth Sunday sitting in closest proximity to Christmas, we usually focus on the power of love and the language comes very close to going over the top. Love can change the world. Love is all we need. Love can do anything. But I’m not so sure about that. I’ve had times when all the love in the world couldn’t change a thing—other than me, I suppose.

Tim: See there. Love did make a difference, just not the one you wanted! I think the contradiction that comes with loving others is one of the big take-aways in our last essay from Anne Lamott. In “Jah” she recalls trying to love a recovering alcoholic friend back to wellness. But apparently love doesn’t conquer all. As Bible-believing Christian, I’m not quite sure what to do with that. I’m not sure I’m comfortable admitting that love sometimes stops working. What about 1 Corinthians 13: “love never fails”?

Shea: Does love ever stop working? Or are we trying to work love in ways that love simply resists? Lamott loves her friend the best way she knows how. But there’s a kind of willfulness in her love, a determination to bring her friend around to her way of seeing and being. The turn-around Lamott wants is more than her friend can handle.

Tim: If there’s a twist in the story, it’s in how love goes to work on Lamott. After she thinks her love has failed, she finally allows her friend to join the conversation. Before that, when she was trying to force love on her friend, she did what so many of us do: she turned their dialogue into a monologue. She did most of the talking and not much of the listening. Even her prayers were more about telling God what needed doing than asking what was best.

Shea: The beauty of Lamott’s essay surfaces in what she discovers after her attempts at love run out. When our ideas about love fall short, grace and hope come to the rescue. Not always for the people we think we’re loving so well, but usually grace and hope come looking for us, because that’s what we need.

Tim: Gives us plenty to talk about this week at Gather, that’s for sure.

Shea: Yes! Powerful stuff and, despite the difficulty of the topic, a great gift to take into the Christmas holiday!

Join us this Thursday at 7:30 as we conclude our Advent study series, Hopeward Bound, a hope-peace-joy-love sequence of conversations in tandem with Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. We meet in the Chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park, Illinois. If you’re unable to get there in person, find us online at Facebook Live. 

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

Advent Joy

Turn It Up!

 

Tim: In her essay “Humans 101,” Anne Lamott says we’re designed for joy. Assuming you agree with her, what do you think she means?

Shea: I do agree and, based on how she discusses joy, I believe she’s connecting joy with wholeness, a kind of deep contentment we sometimes refer to as “shalom.”

Tim: Are you saying our joy is contingent on having that kind of wholeness? If so, there would be plenty of days when joy would be impossible for me because shalom doesn’t always show up on my daily menu. There are plenty of days when I’m depleted, disjointed, cracked open in ways I didn’t see coming. But, rather oddly, on many of those days I still find joy.

Shea: Exactly. Joy is not contingent on wholeness, because there’s a discipline to it. We practice joy, particularly when feeling joyful seems beyond our reach. I think that’s what Lamott is talking about when she recommends going back and redoing the “joy training.”

Tim: Advent, of course, is the perfect season for contemplating joy, in part because it’s so central to the tradition and story. This coming Sunday churches around the world will light the “joy” candle and, of course, the texts and hymns and sermons will point toward rejoicing.

Shea: Yes, but I also think we need to take care not confuse Advent joy with “Yuletide cheer.” There’s a lot of sentiment wound into the holidays—the festivities and movies and decorations and songs playing nonstop wherever you go. That’s all part of the cheer. Joy runs deeper. Joy abides.

Tim: My mind keeps racing toward Jesus’s last conversation with his followers, where he assures them they are loved and then tells them, “I’ve told you these things so that your joy might be complete” (John 15:11).

Shea: And then he commands them to love one another, to the degree that they would be willing to die for one another. So there is a connection between profound joy and the deepest kind of love.

Tim: I couldn’t agree more. And that connection can unlock the mystery of abiding joy. The “joy training” Lamott talks about is actually closer to learning to love as fully as possible.

Shea: And if we want to turn up the joy this season, we’ll have to fire up our love lights and keep them burning at full brightness as well.

Tim: Yes! This Advent let us go back into the joy training and turn it up to full volume! Lamott is right. We are designed for joy!

Join us this Thursday at 7:30 as we continue our Advent study series, Hopeward Bound, a hope-peace-joy-love sequence of conversations in tandem with Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. We meet in the Chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park, Illinois. If you’re unable to get there in person, find us online at Facebook Live. 

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

ADVENT PEACE

A Letting Go 

 

Tim: This week our attention to turns to peace, which traditionally becomes the focus of Advent’s second Sunday.

Shea: But we’re looking at peace in a slightly different light, thanks to Anne Lamott.

Tim: In her book Almost Everything, she reminds us that peace is something we must find for ourselves.

Shea: What’s more she lets us know we can’t give peace to anyone else, even those we love dearly who may be desperate to find it.

Tim: Lamott calls peace “an inside job”—it’s very intense, personal, and hopefully enduring, work.

Shea: What interests me is how she sees peace as a result of letting go the shame and frustration—even sometimes the sense of failure—that we inherit from social demands and family expectations. And I’m wondering how that connects with Advent’s longing for peace. How does that work into this pattern Lamott draws for us?

Tim: It’s an interesting question. So often we take the Advent “peace” texts for granted. The child will be a Ruler of Peace, Isaiah promises. The lion and lamb will rest beside one another. High places will be brought low, depressed places will be lifted up. This poetry is in our bones. We’ve heard it for as long as we can remember. So long, in fact, that we don’t really think about these familiar verses very much.

Shea: What should we be thinking?

Tim: That’s what we’ll explore in this Thursday’s study. Onething I’d encourage us to consider is that the Gospels tell us Jesus was not born into peaceful circumstances. Both in Bethlehem and in the foretelling of Christ’s return, Advent actually disturbs the peace. Now why would that be?

Shea: Because the presence of Christ brings something new and powerful into the being. It requires us to let go of so much of what we rely on: our understanding of what is “normal” and “acceptable,” our belief that we are self-sufficient—

Tim: Our nagging worries that we don’t measure up—

Shea: And in the end our fear of losing control. That’s really how the coming of Christ disturbs the peace. And yet it’s also how peace comes to us.

Tim: To find peace means letting go, surrendering the idea that we’re in control, that we ever were or could be in control. It’s what pushes us to rely on the saving and keeping power of divine grace.

Shea: The coming of Christ teaches us peace is an inside job, something we have to wrestle out with ourselves.

Tim: This week’s look at peace is going to challenge us in a lot ways!

Shea: It will be a gift, that’s for sure.

Join us this Thursday at 7:30 as we begin our four-week Advent study series, Hopeward Bound, a hope-peace-joy-love sequence of conversations in tandem with Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. We will meet in the Chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park, Illinois. If you’re unable to get there in person, find us online at Facebook Live. 

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.