Monthly Archives

March 2020

HEARTS ON FIRE

Renewal in a Stable

No one paid much attention as William Seymour boarded the train from Houston to Los Angeles. It was 1906. He was an African-American of modest means. Although he’d made many friends during his travels as a seminarian and minister, he was by no means famous or esteemed. He was just a man going west because he heard something unusual was taking place out there and he felt drawn to be part of it.

After he got to L.A., he quickly joined a home prayer meeting that met in the city’s working class neighborhood. From the first, Seymour sensed an extraordinary event was taking shape. People with no formal training were sharing scripture and uniting in deep prayer. Their hearts blazed with conviction that God wanted to do great things. They felt a huge shift was coming and knew they would be crucial to it. In short, their earthly credentials weren’t exceptional. But their spiritual IQs were off the charts. And, unlike the upper-class society that haughtily dismissed them, they were undaunted by racial, class, gender, and religious diversity. People of every color and identity began to crowd the Bonnie Brae cottage. Soon they had to find another place to pray.

Someone recalled an old church on the rougher side of town that had been turned into a stable. It sat on Azusa Street, a narrow lane few people knew by name. With Seymour serving as their leader, they moved prayer meetings there and no sooner did they get settled than a full-on phenomenon exploded. A “second Pentecost” fell on the place and people began to worship in ways that echoed the first Pentecost in Acts. There were prophecies and visions. People were unable to stand upright in the divine presence that saturated the atmosphere. And many of them spoke in unknown tongues, ecstatically receiving the gift of a miraculously provided language of prayer, praise, and soul-stirring intercession.

There was an irony that couldn’t be ignored: a faith that began 2000 years ago in a borrowed stable had found renewal in another barn 7500 miles from Bethlehem.

The keepers of conventional Christianity were outraged at what they heard and saw at Azusa Street. It was too unseemly—especially the mixing of races and classes and genders and ethnicities. Spanish-speaking folks were rejoicing alongside English-speaking folks. Men and women, clergy and laity were preaching and prophesying. Black men caught white women who toppled backward when they “slain” in the Spirit. All of it made for sensational newspaper copy, to the distress of the traditional churches and professional clergy, who denounced Seymour and the Azusa Revival as heresy.

In the end, Seymour stood tall. The revelations he gathered as a prophet and mystic turned modern Christianity on its head. The Pentecostal movement was born and continues to be the fastest growing form of Christian faith in the modern world.

What was Seymour all about? Why was he chosen? We’ll look into that this week as Gather continues its Lenten study series, “Into the Mystic.”

Join us this Thursday via Facebook Live at 7:30p CDT as we explore the Seymour story and its impact on contemporary faith. It will be an exciting—and unusual—story!

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 DARK NIGHT

When Shea Watts and I planned our Lenten series on Christian mystics, we had no way of knowing the week dedicated to St. John of the Cross would coincide with the national onset of COVID-19. St. John, a 16th-century Spanish priest, poet, and contemplative is perhaps best remembered for his poem The Dark Night, which later would be called The Dark Night of the Soul. And here we are.

Without prompting, two different friends have recently described their current anxieties about the pandemic as a “dark night of the soul.” The phrase evokes an impenetrable void—a dangerous and desolate place that must be traversed, an experience akin to trudging through a seemingly endless tunnel.

For St. John, however, the dark night is the contemplative’s path to God. Darkness is not a sign of evil or sinfulness. It’s a symptom of inadequacies that can only be remedied by embarking on the journey. This concept didn’t originate with him. The notion of a dangerous, even painful move toward the Divine had been around since Aristotle, most famously in The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14th century, anonymously written treatise about contemplative life. Yet St. John was without equal in his conviction that knowledge of God is beyond human capacity.

John envisions the journey to God in two forays, one of senses, followed by one of spirit. In both, God’s radiant presence is so intensely experienced it thrusts everything else into sharp relief. Much like brilliant light blinds the eyes, the unknowable presence of God creates a darkness that reduces sensation to ash and spiritual pride to embers.

It’s a fascinating premise that retains remarkable currency. In the 1960s, the great Howard Thurman echoed St. John’s thoughts when he wrote The Luminous Darkness, a book about racial segregation that saw sacred splendor in black skin and culture—a divine presence so radiant it creates light in darkness and binds the many lives of humankind to the Life we call God. One might almost say the idea has become a motif in modern popular culture, ranging from the work of T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen King to the music of Van Morrison and Depeche Mode.

This is the heavy week in our “Into the Mystic” series and it comes at a perfect time. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore a powerful concept that will give you plenty to ponder while we all wait out the viral storm we’re surviving together.

Gather will meet virtually via FB Live until further notice. Join us each Thursday at 7:30pm CDT as we explore the thoughts and practices of some of Christianity’s most influential mystics.

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.

DIVINE LUSHNESS

Healing Power and Singing Life

 

Hildegard of Bingen was a 12th-century nun who broke every rule. When women were personae non grata in Western Christianity, Hildegard oversaw a community of nuns and monks. When pulpit was confined to the (all-male) priesthood, galvanized congregations all over southern Germany with her preaching. When sacred music was limited to chanting, Hildegard believed melodic song was the soul’s purest way to express the life of God. When the idea of a female theologian was taboo, she maintained a prolific correspondence conveying her ideas of faith with male superiors. Pope Eugene III, a frequent recipient of her letters, would undertake widespread clerical reforms at her urging.

Even though revelation was regarded a thing of the past, Hildegard told of visions and supernatural insights. While the church grew increasingly subject to superstitions, she excelled in medicine and herbal remedies. She was many things: prayer warrior, teacher, mentor, musician, playwright, theologian, healer, preacher, scientist, and, most significantly, mystic.

Hildegard thought in ways that challenged, inspired, and unnerved religious standard-keepers. She envisioned the natural world through in ways that brought new meaning to everything around her. Although she wasn’t a formally trained scholar, she used a Latin word, viriditas, to flag her signature idea about God and faith. Strictly translated, the word means “greenness.” But its essence points to a richer understanding more akin to “lushness.” This core concept is perhaps more relevant today than it has ever been.

 Viriditas was very pliable in Hildegard’s hands. She applied it to the divine nature, ascribing to God a fundamental healing power that encourages growth and wellness. In this sense she melded the notion of God’s will with an environmentalist’s passion. Because God is “lush”— always creating and generating growth—Hildegard wrote the best place to find God isn’t in a stone-cold cathedral or a silent monastery. God is best encountered in thick forests and verdant fields, in places where life erupts and disrupts. In these places where the “green force” of the divine is most obviously manifested we also find plants and flowers that enable healing. It was all of a piece in her mind.

The greenness of God doesn’t start and stop with nature walks, however. Hildegard also viewed singing as the way the Spirit makes its breath felt in worship and devotion. Singing is what divine lushness sounds like—a human expression that joins the harmonies of nature as non-verbal witness to God’s power. Her compositions are still sung and recorded to this day, with perhaps the most famous being Canticles of Ecstasy, which you can hear below

When I began this post, I was going to connect all the dots. But as I reread this, I believe no help is needed. Hildegard is someone you want to know more about. And you can learn more about her this week at third installment of “Into the Mystic,” our Lenten study series. Don’t miss this wonderful discussion. You can join in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. Or you can catch us online via Facebook Live. We start at 7:30pm CDT. See you there!

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.

WILDERNESS CROSSINGS

Finding Our Place in the Story

 

As most of us know, Lent is intended to be a somewhat literal rehearsal of Jesus’s 40-day ordeal in the desert. The Gospels tell us after his baptism the Spirit drives him into the wilderness to confront the tempter. It’s a grueling experience, but not just because of physical and social deprivation. Jesus’s enemy, the devil, knows what buttons need pushing to break him down. He’s left the Jordan with some bold claims as John the Baptist’s successor, the Promised One of Israel, and God’s beloved Son. And Jesus’s spiritual adversary meets with a series of soul-flaying taunts that question his identity and loyalty to God: “If you are the Son of God…” “If you worship me…”

This is tough stuff, the kind of experience we’d rather not emulate. First, it may not strike us as a particularly healthy—fasting, praying, setting ourselves up for tests we’ll likely fail. Second, it’s not very clear what we get from this exercise, outside of feeling guilty and apologizing to God and promising—hoping—we’ll do better next time.

We may be missing an important piece of the puzzle, something that doesn’t get talked about too often, but something the Early Christians immediately caught. Jesus’s experience was not unique. It was never meant to be unique. In fact, Jesus’s wilderness trial was, and is, supposed to be viewed as typical of anyone whose true identity and calling has been revealed. All through scripture we see this trope. When you discover who you are and accept it, you go into the desert to find out what you’re supposed to do next.

The Hebrew Bible flows with one wilderness crossing after another. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, the Hebrew slaves, Joshua, Ruth and Naomi, David, Elijah, Elisha, the Babylonian exiles (to name the more famous few) cross harsh and barren places after they realize who they are and the work they’ve been given. Of course, Jesus goes into the wilderness. Of course, his identity is questioned. Of course, his commitments are tested. That’s how this works!

Lent is not just about self-discipline and deprivation. While we talk a great deal about confronting weaknesses and sinful impulses, it’s not only about that. It’s about more than embracing vulnerability. Lent is about finding our place in this story, being driven into the wild like Jesus and his ancestors and knowing the reason. It’s about realizing who God calls us to be and going in search of clarity that defines our purpose. It’s about accepting who we really are so we can live truthfully and effectively.

Sit with that for a bit. It will inspire and guide your wilderness adventure. Promise.

Travel with us as we join a long line of Christian mistakes in our quest for clarity in the Lenten wilderness. We meet for Bible study each Thursday evening at 7:30pm CT and we’ll come together in our only Lenten worship experience this Sunday, March 8, at 7pm CT. You can join us live at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park, IL. Or if you’re joining from a distance, meet with us via 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.