Monthly Archives

May 2019

THE BEATITUDES

Conflicted

Tim: Our time with The Beatitudes is winding down.

Shea: We could have used another few weeks, because there’s so much to unpack!

Tim: What was especially exciting was how tiny epiphanies kept breaking through—quiet aha moments that put things in perspective.

Shea: Like last week’s recognition that Jesus isn’t talking about different groups of people. He’s summarizing characteristics and circumstances that define discipleship.

Tim: Which raises some very big questions. Can we embrace poverty to make room for God’s abundance? Will we master meekness, becoming ever more gentle even as we grow strong? Can we sustain a constant craving for justice, living with insatiable hunger and thirst? These questions define a true disciple of Christ.

Shea: And this week we have the final three sayings, which many find most difficult.

Tim: Why do you say that?

Shea: We’re looking at peacemakers, those who are persecuted, and finally Jesus’s warning that people will bully and tell lies about his followers. Given he’s talking to his disciples early on, it’s a rather unorthodox recruitment strategy!

Tim: That’s true. But Jesus often reminds his followers of the price they’ll pay. So he’s actually setting a precedent here. He’s letting them know there are going to be struggles and conflicts, within their group and from without as well.

Shea: It’s interesting that he saves that for last. I’d be tempted to put it out there right away and close with the “good stuff”—the hungry being filled, and so on.

Tim: Remember: Jesus is an expert community organizer. His leadership skills are unequaled. When we read these final three sayings closely, we see there’s more going on there than high-flown idealism. He’s training his folks.

Shea: You mean Jesus is picking up a guitar and leading a chorus of “Give Peace a Chance”? Just kidding…

Tim: Peace is never a bad thing, as long as it doesn’t mask complacency or coercion. But here Jesus is really lifting up gifts we need to survive conflict. He’s telling us, “Learn to build bridges, endure harassment, and outlive lies. And perhaps most important, learn to transform your anger and injury into joy and gladness.”

Shea: If only we could be on that hillside and get a sense of how the disciples feel…

Tim: Let’s see how it makes us feel! This Thursday will be one of those terrific times when we wrestle with all that Jesus is laying down. Are we up to it?

Shea: I hope so!

Join us this Thursday as we conclude our series, “The Gospel Guide to Happiness: Believing & Living the Beatitudes.” We meet at 7:30pm CDT in the chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. Or you can catch us online at FB Live. See you soon!

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.

THE BEATITUDES

Consider the “Un’s”

Shea: We got off to a really strong start with the Beatitudes last week. What’s next?

Tim: After looking at the poor, the grieving, and meek—

Shea: Who should not be confused with the weak—

Tim: Exactly! After looking at those three groups, we’re going to focus on another cluster of three traits I like to call the “Un’s”.

Shea: Okay… I’m game. Who or what are the “Un’s”?

Tim: The next three Beatitudes are dedicated to folks who display these qualities: they’re hungry and thirsty for righteousness. They’re unsatisfied.

Shea: I gotcha. And the next group, the merciful?

Tim: They’re unselfish.

Shea: And the pure in heart?

Tim: They’re unsophisticated.

Shea: Really? I get how unselfish is a powerful attribute. I’m interested in how it ties back to mercy, though.

Tim: What prevents us from being merciful? However we construe our scorn or cruelty or vengefulness it always comes back to putting self above the other.

Shea: If you don’t think like I think, behave like I behave, or believe like I believe, my self-centeredness blunts my ability to be merciful. And cruelty is always selfish, while vengefulness is even worse. OK, so I’m good with the merciful-unselfish equation. Still a little fuzzy on how those who desire righteousness are “unsatisfied.”

Tim: These are folks whose cravings for justice can never be satisfied, whose thirst can never be quenched. It’s not personal. It’s principled. They see inequities and harmful injustices that need fixing, and they can’t rest until corrections are made.

Shea: And the promise of their satisfaction is the kingdom of God.

Tim: The kingdom of God—or, as Matthew calls it, the kingdom of heaven—figures into all the promises in the Beatitudes. Now I bet you want to know how the pure in heart get pegged as “unsophisticated.”

Shea: Well…

Tim: Jesus wasn’t a fan of sophistication. We get the word from “sophistry,” which applies to a deceitful and corrupt argument. It’s the opposite of purity. So Jesus is tipping his hat here to people who keep it simple and honest.

Shea: They will see God.

Tim: They’ve been seeing God, because they’ve kept their vision clear.

Shea: I’m really eager to find out how we build all of this out. I look forward to seeing everyone online and hearing what happens in the room!!

Tim: I am too!

Join us this Thursday as we open our three-part series, “The Gospel Guide to Happiness: Believing & Living the Beatitudes.” We meet at 7:30pm in the chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park or online at FB Live. See you this week!

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.

THE BEATITUDES

When Enough is Plenty

Tim: This week we turn to The Beatitudes.

Shea: This is Jesus as it his most quotable, poster-ready, and meme-friendly.

Tim: It sure feels that way. Although they’re rendered differently in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels, both sets clarify Jesus’s agenda. This kingdom of God idea he’s bringing to his followers is meant to upset everything.

Shea: Oh yes! The Beatitudes is where Jesus flushes out his great theme—a divinely ordained reversal that turns every human value and expectation upside down.

Tim: If you look at how Matthew organizes the discourse, often called The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes it plain that his notions of happiness and wholeness are rooted in faith in God’s abundance. That surely challenged an audience whose daily realities were steeped in scarcity, deprivation, and profound need.

Shea: We can’t read the Matthew or Luke accounts without forgetting that Jesus’s followers suffered under Roman occupation. They were so heavily taxed household staples like bread and wine often amounted to luxuries. They had no power to define their own fates. They had no expectations of being protected. Nagging uncertainty defined their lives.

Tim: And here comes Jesus, telling them they’re looking in the wrong direction. God’s power, provision, and protection have no limits. Their wellbeing and happiness cannot rely on pipe dreams of Roman defeat. They come from recognizing they already have more than they think. What seems like barely enough is plenty plus.

Shea: That surely must have been a hard idea for them. I imagine many who listened to Jesus had empty stomachs and wills so weak they struggled to stand in their own strength.

Tim: Yet, according to Jesus, they’re closer to being happy and knowing fulfillment than those who have power and wealth.

Shea: Why is that?

Tim: Their dependency rests entirely in their Maker and Keeper. All the systems have failed them. They’re poor. They’re grieving. They’re beat down. They long for justice.

Shea: Without any advantage, they’ve discovered the power of mercy, integrity, and reconciliation. When their ability to embrace these values puts them in the crosshairs of persecution, they keep their looking toward the always-abundant kingdom of God, where real power, provision, and protection prevail.

Tim: These are the happy folk, Jesus says. So the subtext here is that human misery arises out of insecurities that plague us when we work from the notion that there isn’t enough to go around.

Shea: An attitude of insufficiency is no way to live.

Tim: Amen to that! God is abundance personified. That’s the headline here. Enough is plenty. We’ll dig into this idea more deeply in our three-week look at the Beatitudes.

Join us this Thursday as we open our three-part series, “The Gospel Guide to Happiness: Believing & Living the Beatitudes.” We meet at 7:30pm in the chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park or online at FB Live. See you this week!

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.

Crosscurrents

Human Cruelty and Divine Grace

Shea: Would it be wrong to think of the cross as Christianity’s brand?

Tim: Not at all, because that’s what the cross has become. It’s the symbol that identifies Christian people, their spaces, their rituals, and so on. So, yes, on one level it functions like a brand. But most brands are fairly arbitrary, right? The Apple brand is a great example. The bitten-into Macintosh doesn’t point to a specific event in the company’s history. It began as a clever reference to Isaac Newton, asserting that personal computing would prove as revolutionary as Newton’s theory of gravity.

Shea: They weren’t wrong!

Tim: True that. Yet because the cross points to a single event in the gospel narrative, it transcends brand. It serves as a lightning rod where two enigmas strike the same place at the same time.

Shea: What does that mean?

Tim: First, we get a close look at human cruelty. The death of Yeshua of Nazareth is politically, religiously, and socially prompted. Jesus is a threat to the entire order and few disagree that he must be stopped in the most gruesome, humiliating manner imaginable.

Shea: But it also can’t be solely attributed to the authorities, because that would legitimize Jesus’s challenge to power. So it gets staged as a mob action to imply the people—not just their leaders—want Jesus gone. The folks are restless and angry. The authorities know that. They play into those emotional crosscurrents.

Tim: All through the Gospels you get pulses of these tensions. Over and over we read that the authorities were afraid of the people. They feared Jesus might incite the masses to revolt. So mob mentality was top of mind for them.

Shea: And finally we have the great conundrum of God made powerless—literally nailed down—in order to bring about the greatest display of divine freedom we know, namely resurrection.

Tim: The cross’s connection to the empty tomb alters what we see. Human cruelty—the imponderable sadism of the crucifixion—is transformed by foresight of life-giving grace when death is defeated.

Shea: These crosscurrents resurface in our lives in choices we make between cruelty and grace. The cross’s drama constantly replays again and again. It’s not a brand. It’s a way of being!

Tim: Yes! Grace is the second enigma. The potency of God’s love is manifested in the extent God would go to unmask the impotence of hatred. Whatever the cross may mean to us, it stands as a monument to unyielding grace. That transcends brand. It’s the mortal testament to immortal generosity. Humanity at its worst meets God at God’s best.

Shea: That’s part of what we’ll talk about this week at Gather. It’s going to be a powerful discussion!

Don’t miss the final installment of our three-part study, “Once, For All: Reconsidering Atonement,” this Thursday evening at 7:30 CDT. You can join us in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church (460 Lake Street, Oak Park; Green Line: Ridgeland) or online at 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.

History and Meaning

Contemporary Relevance from An Ancient Story

Tim: When you consider what happened on the cross, you find you’re sifting contemporary meaning from an ancient event. Beyond scripture, historical record confirms a rabbi named Yeshua of Nazareth was crucified in first-century, Roman-occupied Palestine. So it would be rash and inaccurate to discount the events as fabricated or mythologized. It actually happened.

Shea: The meaning affixed to Jesus’s death holds undeniable significance. The cross—as a symbol and reference—means something to almost everyone everywhere.

Tim: Still, that meaning is varied and has evolved over time. What we say and think about the crucifixion today is not what many Christian leaders and theologians thought it meant in their day.

Shea: Despite regular attempts to conflate the various ideas about Jesus’s execution into a cohesive theology of atonement, many different ideas get snarled up in a blur of lingo and assumptions.

Tim: When we step back from all that’s been said about atonement over the past two thousand years—starting with the many interpretations in scripture—we see a beautiful pattern emerge. Christians from all times and places have mined this ancient story for contemporary relevance. Our early ancestors in the faith took a highly mystical view: the crucifixion was embodied proof of divine love’s power over death.

Shea: And they believed the scheme involved tricking the Devil into thinking death won—only to prove the opposite when Jesus rose! That view was obviously relevant to the Church of the Martyrs, where death was a constant threat. When we flash forward several hundred years, however, that relevance fades. It’s replaced with St. Anselm’s idea the Jesus sacrifices himself to restore the honor due God, honor we left unpaid.

Tim: Anselm’s contemporary, Abelard, wants none of that. He sees Jesus’s death as God’s love at its most extreme. Both men are deeply influenced by notions of chivalry.

Shea: Once the age of chivalry fades and conflicts in Western Christianity reach the breaking point, the two great Reformers, Luther and Calvin, want to make the cross very personal to believers. They focus on scriptures that suggest Jesus died in our place, specifically for our sins.

Tim: They become more fixated on the notion of the supreme sacrifice offered up as our substitute.

Shea: Bringing us back to the original point. What we witness is the beauty of a gruesome act becoming a powerful touchstone with different meanings to different eras. Now we have a growing dictionary of atonement terminology that we use loosely. Where this becomes an issue is how quickly we use these terms without understanding what they mean or testing their relevance to us. That’s this week’s project—the history of atonement theory.

Tim: And its importance, I would say. Lots of really fascinating material to go through! I’m looking forward to it!

Don’t miss this three-part study, “Once, For All: Reconsidering Atonement,” every Thursday evening at 7:30 CDT. You can join us in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church (460 Lake Street, Oak Park; Green Line: Ridgeland) or online at 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.