Monthly Archives

February 2019

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In Weekly Update

Liberty and Legalism

Side Effects

 

Tim: We’ve been talking about Liberation Theology and freedom. Yet I’ve met a lot of folks who don’t associate Christianity with liberty. In fact, they hold the opposite view. For them, the Church—a.k.a. “organized religion”—has been an oppressive force for ill in their lives. How do we resolve that?

Shea: It’s a big problem, because religious oppression takes many forms. That’s why I’m reluctant to lay it at the feet of the Church, the authentic Body of Christ. On the other hand, religion is, has always been, a challenge.

Tim: It’s an important distinction to make. For folks who’ve been shamed or wounded because of dogmatic overreach, religion is discredited as a false front for intolerance. It’s seen as a safe haven for bullies who harm folks unlike themselves.

Tim: For instance?

Shea: Historically, religion has spent too much energy keeping minorities and non-conformists out. The most glaring example is the subjugation of women. It’s hard to conceive that welcoming women into ministry and leadership is a relatively recent phenomenon. In America, racial segregation in worship and faith communities was the norm until the late 20th century. Now we’re working to reclaim LGBTQ folks who’ve become targets of religious hatred and violence.

Tim: It’s troubling that religion-bred homophobia, misogyny, and racism are still with us. Worse still, they’re not hiding out in musty church basements. Religious oppression operates loudly in the public square with no regard for the damage it causes.

Shea: It ruins lives and perverts the teaching of Jesus to create a country club mentality that rejects outsiders as “not our kind.” And there’s a wrapper around all of it that makes it possible.

Tim: It’s called legalism, a systemic effort to construct exclusionary and oppressive doctrines based on very narrow readings of ancient texts.

Shea: Now you’re in seminary mode! In lay English, please…

Tim: Abusing scripture to oppress and exclude other folks who don’t look, behave, or believe like the dominant group. It’s an age-old strategy: championing rules that keep the powerful on top while those with less or no power struggle. These moves are clearly side effects of organized religion.

Tim: And how does this intersect with Liberation Theology?

Shea: If, as Paul tells the Galatians, we’re set free to be free, we have to keep a close watch on legalism and its side effects. That means we have to really understand what these texts mean and ladder up to. If they don’t get us to freedom, we have to temper our response to them.

Tim: Sometimes it’s as basic as saying, “I don’t believe that,” and moving on. And yet, because I’m a liberation theologian, I also have to question what’s really going on with these texts that get misused. What is the Law’s purpose in our faith tradition?

Shea: That’s the big question this Thursday night! And I’m very eager to tune into the study, because one our great friends, Tyler Tully, will be leading us.

Tim: It’s going to be outstanding!

Join us each Thursday in February as we plug back into freedom with our new series, “Set Free to Be Free: Liberation Theology.” We meet at 7:30pm CST at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park with live-streaming via FB 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.

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In Weekly Update

Life and Freedom

No Turning Back

 

Shea: We’re looking at the Exodus this week, the cornerstone of Liberation Theology.

Tim: That’s a great way to describe it, because the story of how God frees the Israelites from Egyptian slavery is foundational to our understanding of freedom. It’s such an epic tale that it can’t be contained in religious thought. The Exodus is emblematic of virtually any account of human beings breaking free from oppression and confinement.

Shea: U.S. history is welded to Exodus—and not without some irony. The first Europeans painted their New World flight from religious persecution as their own Exodus. Early American documents ring with allusions to Moses and fleeing the whip of Pharaoh.

Tim: And this New World was routinely called “the Promised Land.”

Shea: A reference they may have take a little too seriously, since they behaved toward Native American peoples in the same violent, colonizing manner we observe when Israel takes hold of Canaan.

Tim: One of human history’s oldest lessons: the oppressed become the oppressor!

Shea: America was hardly the Promised Land for Africans who were abducted from their villages, shipped like cargo across the sea, and forced into slavery.

Tim: Yet the Exodus becomes their great theme, too, and slave songs crying out for freedom become America’s first great art form. For them, Beulah Land was freedom itself. The geography of the slave wilderness was mapped on the whiplashed backs and broken bodies whose dignity and humanity were denied by a new class of Pharaohs.

Shea: In more recent times, the language of LGBTQ coming out stories and racial justice movements echo with Exodus references.

Tim: Jesus’s ministry and message do the same thing. All you need to do is look at the Hebrew texts he cites to recognize him as the author of Liberation Theology! So what do we do with all of this?

Shea: We lay claim to the truth of scripture. God made all humans to be free and equal. Poverty, degradation, and oppression are the products of human opposition to God’s will. Thus, God upholds the poor, marginalized, and oppressed at the expense of human systems of power.

Tim: Freedom is, and must be, our most cherished value. That’s why, once we’re lifted out of oppression and poverty, we must never turn back. Egypt may look good in the rearview mirror. But it’s nowhere we want to be.

Shea: It’s nowhere anybody wants to be or ever should be. So our commitments to justice and righteousness compel us to live in freedom for freedom. If one of us isn’t free…

Tim: None of us is free. Lots to talk about this week!

Join us each Thursday in February as we plug back into freedom with our series, “Set Free to Be Free: Liberation Theology.” We meet at 7:30pm CST at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park with live-streaming via FB 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.

admin
In Weekly Update

Life and Freedom

Set Free to Be Free

 

Tim: This February we’re all about freedom at Gather.

Shea: Yes! Liberation Theology—so excited that we’re exploring this topic in more detail.

Tim: Well, we’re both liberation theologians. That’s the seminary tradition we’ve been schooled in.

Shea: And as children of Pentecostals, our faith is steeped in freedom and faith in a God who steadfastly stands with the poor and weak and marginalized. The fervor that springs from that idea was common currency where I grew up.

Tim: Yes, we just didn’t know there was a name for it. Seldom did a Sunday go by without our church breaking out in songs of freedom. You could set a service on fire with “I’m So Glad Jesus Set Me Free”!

Shea: There’s a Golden Oldie! Yet there’s the more to consider, right? The songs and shouts are just the tip of it. A powerful theology gives weight to everything.

Tim: It took years for all of it to coalesce and find a name, “Liberation Theology.”

Shea: Actually it emerged from Latin America, where corrupt regimes were destroying lives. Widespread poverty and oppression triggered a kind of faith that enabled people of South and Central America stand against the evil surrounding them. Their premise was beautiful: God sides with the poor, the oppressed, the powerless and marginalized.

Tim: When we look at scripture and watch God work, we inevitably find God’s presence revealed among the least in society. Why is that?

Shea: That’s a great starting question. When we think about that, our thoughts go to justice. God is just and righteous. But as we’ll see in this week’s study, it’s even more basic than that.

Tim: How so?

Shea: God is life. That’s what we mean when we say and sing things like “My life is not my own.” God isn’t merely the Giver of life. God is life itself. Our lives belong to God because God is life. Once we accept that, we have to confess all life is sacred. Our privilege and power shrivels against the sheer force of life itself, of God’s self.

Tim: So God doesn’t merely “side” with the least among us. God is the least among us, because even those whose struggles are greatest are alive.

Shea: Exactly. And trying to impose limits or oppress any other human is a kind of death because it undermines life itself.

Tim: That’s where we’ll start this series—the God of life, or better yet, the life of God.

Shea: We need to plug back into that idea!

Join us each Thursday in February as we plug back into freedom with our new series, “Set Free to Be Free: Liberation Theology.” We meet at 7:30pm CST at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park with live-streaming via FB 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.