February 2020

Make Bible study part of your Lenten practice as we look at six Christian mystics down through the ages—from St. John the Evangelist in the first-century to the cutting-edge thought of Sister Ilio Delio, a contemporary Franciscan mystic and scientist. We meet each Thursday at 7:30pm CT at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. Or you can join us online via Facebook Live.

Approaching Lent Holistically

Next Wednesday, the Western Christian community worldwide will cross a portal into the soulspace of Lent. Many will come to the moment in pious sobriety, weighing where they are in their spiritual adventure, naming places where progress is needed, identifying practices to strengthen and sustain them. Others will come ritually, passing by the altar to receive the sacred sign of ashes as a witness of faith and reminder of mortal frailty. Others will dismiss Ash Wednesday as an ancient, outmoded tradition. Still others will blink and miss it altogether, perhaps in the blur of having celebrated a wee bit too bountifully on Shrove Tuesday. Such has been the way since 6^th-century Roman Catholics instituted a rite of ashes as the proper gateway to Lent’s season of penitence and self-denial.

Yes, this has been going on for a long, long time.

For most folks, the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday is when you’re supposed to “give up something”—reducing the fast to a quasi-religious kind of New Year’s resolution, as if avoiding chocolate or loose language or the occasional adult beverage holds some kind of inherent spiritual value. Yet scripture repeatedly scorns shallow, self-serving fasts as ineffective (see Isa. 58; Jer. 14:10-12; Matt.6:16-18). Laying off curse words, Hershey bars, and Moscow mules might make you a “better person.” Or it actually might make you more difficult to be around and drown you in all sorts of egocentric behaviors, from self-congratulation to self-pity (all of which come with an unhealthy dose of self-gratification). But our “betterment” is not Lent’s endgame. Reining in desires so God’s Spirit can more fully inhabit our nature is what this season is about.

We can also go too far in another direction and overly complicate or intellectualize Lenten practice, which is its own sort of vanity. Lent isn’t about wit and intelligence. It’s emotional, calling for rawness and candor that enable our souls to be fully laid bare before God. If we get too clever—too geared up with ornate practices and smart approaches—we will have replaced Lent’s unvarnished simplicity with self-aggrandizing complexity. There’s a reason why the desert has prevailed as Lent’s metaphor: it’s where the grit of sand wears down our pride and hot blasts of wind blow away the residue of over-thinking.

So Lent is serious business. But if you’ve spent any time at all in the wilderness, you know deprivation isn’t always dismal. Beauty breaks through in unexpected ways. Joy finds you at unexpected turns. A welcome rain recharges the air with scents of sage and creosote. A spindly cactus explodes with vivid blooms. The barren ground becomes a dancehall for wildlife. The moans of sandswept wind mingle with a cool breeze to create entirely new music.

As we prepare to pass through Ash Wednesday’s portal, I pray we will go into Lent with mindful simplicity and an eager outlook for moments of refreshing. Self-denial is part of it. But awareness beyond one’s self is also essential. There is beauty all around us, even in our wilderness, because God is with us.

Please join us on Sunday March 8, at 5pm for “Desert Springs”—a special worship experience that turns our thoughts to refreshment in the wilderness. You can also join our weekly study series, “Into the Mystic” that uses the lives, experiences, and devotional practices of six Christian mystics down through the ges as guideposts for our own journeys. We meet each Thursday at 7:30pm. All of our meetings are hosted at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park, IL. You can also join us virtually via Facebook Live.

Malleability is one of the many pleasures of Jesus’s parables. The stories work from every angle. You can find entirely new meaning simply by giving the “lead role” to a character other than the intended star. Take the Prodigal Son for example. Shift focus from the brash son who leaves home to the faithful son who sticks around and you’ve got an entirely different story—a cautionary (and maybe problematic) tale that could suggest faithfulness is its own reward.

This week’s installment of our current series, “Kingdom Stories: Seven Parables from Matthew,” turns to the famous wedding story in Chapter 22, where a father plans a big wedding feast for his son and invites a lot of important people. When they don’t show, the host goes ballistic. By story’s end, the message becomes clear that even the least desirable guest is welcome in God’s kingdom, with first set of invitees pretty much forgot, since most of them are dead.

We’ll delve into the story’s finer points on Thursday evening—including a look at the extreme violence Jesus injects in what seems like a fairly innocuous situation. But before we allow the grim fates of the original guests to erase them, it might be wise to give them starring roles for a bit and ask what exactly was their fatal flaw? After all, not showing up costs many if not all of them their lives. Why?

Their problem appears to be preoccupation. They’ve got too much on their plates to make it to the feast. That should strike a nerve in us all. What invitations are we turning down because we’ve already got too much going on? What’s so sacred about the things we’ve fastened our attention to that we can’t stop to celebrate and enjoy the company of others?

Just today, I rode the elevator with a man who never looked up from his phone from the moment he stepped into the car. After he got out 30 floors later, I wondered what was so important. It wasn’t as simple as bad manners or inadequate upbringing or introversion gone amok. The dude was clearly riveted to his phone—so much so that he may have never realized two other flesh-and-blood human beings were along for the ride.

We live in a world where preoccupation is the norm. And I suspect if we were among the invitees in Jesus’s story, we might have behaved just as regrettably. Is all of our beloved connectivity interfering with real connections? How much are we really getting done—or have we simply mistaken the doing as the deed? I hear so many folks talk about “living in the moment.” But is that possible if you’re not fully present? Are we so preoccupied with all we’ve got on our plates that we’re missing the feast? Could be.

Join us this Thursday at 7:30pm CST as we continue our look at the parables of Jesus. We meet at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. If you’re unable to join in person, we’re online via Facebook Live. Either way, we look forward to seeing you!

The stories Jesus tells are always accessible. He talks about everyday people and places his listeners knew like the backs of their hands. Farms, fishing, and markets, households and vineyards, domestic conflicts and legal dilemmas became the raw material for parables. Yet almost always Jesus’s listeners are baffled by the behaviors he describes. Repeatedly, they come right out say, “Huh? We don’t get it!”

Having the stories collected as well as a more complete sense of Jesus’s theology gives us insight into the big idea that courses underneath every tale: the kingdom of God runs in complete opposition to the world’s operating system.

So it makes sense for a farmer to waste precious seed to sow fertile ground. It makes sense to compare the reign of God to unstoppable weeds or yeast that turns a tiny flour ball into a big loaf of bread. It makes sense to be unconcerned about how one’s fields grow or how one nets all kinds of fishes. None of that makes sense to Jesus’s live audiences, who probably think, “Wait a minute… what? How’s that supposed to work?”

Jesus keeps describing easy tasks and they keep sounding unnecessarily difficult because he keeps getting everything backwards!

The story of a vineyard owner with seemingly unjust hiring habits is a great example. In fact, even today, it doesn’t make sense. It’s a workplace drama that, to our minds, would be an HR nightmare worthy of a strike vote.

The owner hires laborers at various intervals in the workday. The ones who put in the most time are outraged when everybody gets the same pay. What’s more, not only does their lengthy labor go unrewarded; they wait the longest to get paid! Myrna and Myron, who showed up at the end of the day, get paid first and if you do an hourly breakdown, they make nearly 10 times more than the folks who started at sunup. What’s up with that?

At this week’s Gather study, we’ll break down the vineyard owner’s hiring and compensation policies and why they conform to Jesus’s ideas about God’s reign, where “the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matt. 20:16). The story also serves as a cautionary tale to warn against presuming human logic is the must just and sensible. On the surface it looks like Jesus gets it backwards (again). But could we be the ones who’ve got it backwards? (Bet you already know the answer to that…)

Do your best to join us this Thursday at 7:30pm, as we continue our “Kingdom Stories” series. We meet at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. If you’re unable to be with us in person, you can find us online via FB Live.