July 2020

Learn more about justice and mercy in our current weekly study series, “Just Living.” We meet each Thursday at 7:30pm CDT via Zoom. You can access the study here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82397695803

Meeting ID: 823 9769 5803

Or join via phone at 1-312-626-6799 using the same meeting ID.

Their lives will be like a lush garden; they will grieve no more. Then the young women will dance for joy; the young and old men will join in. – Jeremiah 31:12-13

With each passing day, another round of headlines the likes of which we’ve never seen. The pandemic losses are staggering. Struggles for racial equality give rise to panic as America’s white supremacist systems of power erode in real time. Economic hardship eats away at our peace of mind and our society becomes more and more fragmented.

You can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, they say. But there’s more than breakfast at stake and many of us are edging into traumatized responses and behaviors. We keep talking about being “in this together.” But we’re clearly not together. (We can’t even agree to mask up for the sake of otherfs.) We keep hearing about a “new normal,” although the prospects of what that might be aren’t terribly inviting—at least not from where we are at present.

In many ways, we feel off-kilter, displaced. This is not the life we know. It’s not a world we wanted to make. All of that contributes to feelings of helplessness. Many of us feel like we’re being held hostage to ideologies that bear us no good. Forget morale—many of us are experiencing what ethicists and psychologists call “moral injury.”

What we’re experiencing right now is not too far off from the Babylonian captivity of the 6^th century BCE, when many of Israel’s best and brightest were displaced and the nation’s proudest achievements fell into ruin. The prophet Jeremiah was horrified to watch his beloved country come apart at the seams. The trauma his people suffered grieved him deeply. He was able to connect the dots too, as the people had abandoned godly principles to pursue futile ambitions. And here they were, helpless and hopeless. Yet right in the middle of Jeremiah’s bleak dispatches of divine discontent a stream of bright oracles appears. There will be refreshing and restoration. Hope will be honored. Desolation will give way to lush life—complete with dancing and joy and abundance.

Can we apply these promises to our distress? Walter Brueggemann writes, “It is striking and odd that while the notion of promise is enormously inconvenient in the midst of modernity, those who are marginalized by modernity—the poor, the oppressed, and the disadvantaged—find [God’s promises] to be credible speech” (A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming). Where we are affects how firmly we cling to God’s promises. There’s hope in these helpless times. We will be refreshed, renewed, and restored. The new normal will be an improved normal. We will find a way to be in this together. Let’s cling to that. And if we struggle with our hope, let’s give it time, because we may find ourselves reaching for it sooner than we expect.

Don’t miss “Refresh,” a special online service this coming Sunday at 5pm CDT. You can join us on our YouTube channel, Gather Austin Oak-Park Church. See you there!

What’s On the Other Side?

In his recent book That All Shall Be Saved, the Christian philosopher David Bentley Hart asks some probing questions about salvation and its presumptive benefit, escaping eternal punishment. Bringing all of his brilliance to bear on one of our faith’s most sacrosanct topics—the afterlife—Hart begins at the beginning. Rather than ask, “What happens after we die?” he wonders how our faith ancestors understood salvation.

Hart is adamant that the original story of salvation was all about rescue. Our mortality enslaves us. Death is the thing we fear most, the eventuality no one escapes, the ultimate interruption that ends everything. And since, as followers of the Risen Christ, our faith rests on belief that death has no hold on us, we are free from inhibiting fears, fatalism, and defeatist mentalities. We are rescued from terror of the unknown and threats of torment.

How easily we forget that! How quickly we reach for beliefs we’re told we must believe despite our inability to reconcile them with who we know God to be. There’s something in us (especially us 21^st-century capitalist Americans) who cling to a narrative of winners and losers. It’s not enough to be loved by a merciful Creator. Our joy, it seems, must be framed by another’s suffering. Even those of us who devote our lives to taking everyone to heaven with us, there’s still a perverse satisfaction hidden in the belief that those who don’t join our merry band will pay a severe price for their error.

Yet, as Hart points out, in John 12:32, Jesus declares he will draw (actually, drag) all people to himself. This is the same God Incarnate who nine chapters earlier explains his presence as a divine gift of love for the world—not to condemn it but to rescue it (John 3:16-17). The language never rests with eternal punishment and torment; abandonment and destruction are always upended by unconditional love and bottomless grace. Yet, somehow, we’ve got things flipped, terrifying folks with grisly tales of torment instead of drawing them to Pure Love made real in flesh and spirit. What the hell?

As Hart puts it, we have become slaves to the belief that we must believe in a God who destroys what God creates, who gives us freedom and then tortures us if we don’t do as we’re told, who endows us with choice and then abandons us if we don’t meet demands placed on us. Something is woefully askew in this proposition. But dare we question it? Absolutely not! We simply must believe it. Or else!

Maybe it’s time we look more closely at how the afterlife has been commoditized (and commercialized) to manipulate us. Then we must ask, if we’re under the influence of control mechanisms that mean us no good, can we be rescued from them? Could that be what salvation is really about?

This week we finish our “Origins” series with a hard look at afterlife issues. How much of what we’ve been told is genuinely based in scripture and how much is embroidery? What would our faith look like if there weren’t implicit promises of reward and/or threats of punishment attach? Join us this Thursday at 7:30pm CDT, using the information below.

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85212231523?pwd=MC85VzJBVHF2MWYvVXRZcVFLdzJEdz09

Meeting ID: 852 1223 1523, Password: 072524

Dial-in: 1-312-626-6799, using the same ID and password

Spirit and Community

Early in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus returns to Nazareth after his first ministry tour. Reports of great exploits precede him and everyone packs the synagogue to get a look at the local Boy Wonder. He opens Isaiah and reads these words: The Lord God’s spirit is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me  to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim release for captives, and liberation for prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

All preachers make decisions about the opening and closing lines of their texts. And I’ve often wondered why doesn’t Jesus read on? The prophet extends the message of comfort for those in despair, widening the circle to include people who’ve lost their sense of belonging. In today’s vernacular they would be folks who feel disoriented after a devastating event has destroyed their sense of place. The prophet says the Spirit comes to “comfort all who mourn… to give them a crown in place of ashes, oil of joy in place of mourning, a mantle of praise in place of discouragement” (Is. 61:2-3).

Perhaps Jesus didn’t continue because he wanted his friends and neighbors to focus on the liberation message in the opening lines. Perhaps he was citing this text to explain his work, as in, “This is what I’ve been up to and what I’m called to do.” If I were preaching from Isaiah 61 these days, however, I’d keep reading because grief and mourning have been our constant companions these past few months.

We are all, to some degree, struggling with pandemic and political fatigue. While other countries have managed to keep the two apart (to their benefit), in America we can’t stop inflating everything into a political nightmare. If it’s not face masks in July, it’s how we offer season’s greetings in December. If it’s not stock car races in Alabama, it’s peaceful protests in Chicago. A day at the beach is nobody’s “day at the beach” and that’s not only because of obvious health risks; it’s also because going to the beach is now a political issue.

Isaiah reminds us the Spirit comes to heal and restore community, to bring us back to ourselves, to rebuild what we’ve destroyed and renew what has died in us. Our prayer must be, “Spirit of the living God fall fresh on us.” We need comfort. We need revival. We need hope that one day the glory we used to know—the sun that warmed our hearts and hands and faces—will be ours again. Fall fresh. Amen.

Don’t miss this week’s Origins study where we’ll explore the relationship between the Holy Spirit and community. As always, it will be a rich and rewarding time together. Study begins at 7:30p CDT. See you there!

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85212231523?pwd=MC85VzJBVHF2MWYvVXRZcVFLdzJEdz09

Meeting ID: 852 1223 1523; Password: 072524

Or you can participate via phone at 1-312-626-6799 (same ID and password).

What’s the Deal with Evil?

I form light and create darkness, make prosperity and create doom; I am the Lord, who does all these things. – Isaiah 45:7

The assignment sounded simple enough for a novice seminarian: a brief paper describing your assumptions about God. Why, this paper could write itself! God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-present. The omni “everything” God. The paper came back with a note: See me. In the subsequent conversation my professor said, “If God is all of these things all of the time, explain suffering.” It felt like a kick in the stomach. Then she said something I’ll never forget. “We have to stop burdening God and start taking responsibility for ourselves.” Wow. Do we really do that to God? Two weeks later a new assignment: explain sin and evil—this time with a caveat: “Don’t leave God out.”

These seemingly innocuous exercises (easy enough for a Sunday school kid!) unearthed a challenge most of us avoid. What we say and think about God matters. And if God is who we say God is, there might a dark side to all the omni-ness. Might be.

The ancients wrestled with this problem constantly and learned to make peace with its harder edges. If God is the source of everything—the Unmoved Mover, as Socrates put it—then there are pieces of “everything” that aren’t so wonderful. Evil exists because God allows it. Indeed, as the Creator, we must allow that evil originates with God, either intentionally or as a deficiency—an absence of qualities we “omni-fy” as God’s supreme power: omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and so on.

In Isaiah, God says flat-out, “I form light and create darkness, make prosperity and create doom.” The presumed readers of that text understood and accepted a God with all power could do anything. It all comes from God—light and darkness, prosperity and doom. (The Hebrew reads, “peace and evil,” and translators’ reluctance to go there shows how easily we try to help God out, which is more of a problem for us than God.)

Evil exists. We don’t need a divinity degree to know that. Why it exists is also obvious if somewhat jarring: because God lets it. But questions about God’s role also obscure more questions about us. If we know evil exists, why do we submit to it? Why, for instance, are so many of us willing to risk others’ lives because we’d rather not mask up during a pandemic? Why do we chase wealth at all costs, knowing, as Paul warned, all kinds of evil grows from greed (1 Tim. 6:10)? Why do we persist in our love of war-making and gun-play and drug-taking and race-hating and other deadly pursuits? And how come we’re so adept at dressing evil up to look and sound like righteousness? (Patriotism, prosperity, personal freedom all get pulled into the mix without concealing the underlying evil.)

Clearly there are some issues between God and us. A clearer understanding our role in perpetuating evil is how we ease the burden it levies on our world, its people, and our own lives. And in the process, we can ease the burden on God too.

Join our weekly study as we continue our “Origins” series with a blunt discussion of evil and its mismatched twin, sin. We meet each Thursday at 7:30p CDT via Zoom.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85212231523?pwd=MC85VzJBVHF2MWYvVXRZcVFLdzJEdz09 

Meeting ID: 852 1223 1523

Password: 072524

Or you can call in at 1-312-626-6799, using the same Meeting ID and Password.