Monthly Archives

September 2020

MADE AND REMADE

Lessons from the Potter

 

For so many of us, the news cycle has become a wheel of misfortune. With cyclical regularity we are spun into another fit of despair. COVID numbers continue to mount, along with the baffling assertions of officials and pundits desperate to convince us all is well. The loss of Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg unleashed a political firestorm that, however it resolves, will leave us to repair long swatches of scorched earth. Racial injustice rears its head regularly, as the flagrant mishandling of Breonna Taylor’s case reminds us again. Most days it feels like we’re on a merry-go-round that is neither merry nor going in any kind of hopeful direction. Just around and around and around.

We are not the first generation to experience this. Times were comparably tough for the prophet Jeremiah, as he watched his nation fall apart before his eyes. He railed against injustice in very public and persuasive ways. Yet he couldn’t move the people away from their own self-destructive habits and sinful attitudes. The news may have traveled more slowly back then, but the same cyclical kind of despair—one thing after another after another—was Jeremiah’s daily portion. He’s not called The Weeping Prophet for nothing!

After another experience preaching to deaf ears, God instructs Jeremiah to visit a pottery studio, where he sees an artisan rescue a flawed vessel by remaking it. “Can’t I do the same with you?” God asks, addressing the prophet as much as the nation he cares about.

One of the great lessons from the Potter is that we are all works in progress, being made and remade, consistently perfected until we’re finished vessels. And along the way, when we place ourselves in the hands of the Master Craftsman, our cracks and flaws get mended. Why? Because it’s in the Potter’s best interest to make us over. We can’t be as useful to him/her if we aren’t sufficiently strong and adequately shaped to “hold our own.” And for this reason alone, we become the beneficiaries of divine patience, compassion, and care.

This happens on a different kind of wheel that spins a different kind of way and follows a different set of cycles than what we get in the constant spin that intimidates us with its gloom and doom. Even as the world seems like it’s whirling out of control, we are firmly held in the Potter’s hands. The pressures exerted on us give us shape. The remaking may be painful, but it also works out impurities that might distort the Potter’s intentions for us.

The struggle, of course, is learning to rest on the wheel, recognizing its spin and the pressures of reshaping are necessary discomforts. We are becoming, always becoming what the Potter knows we can be.

“Can’t I do the same with you?” God asked the prophet. God asks us the same of us today.

Join us this coming Sunday, when Gather hosts its monthly online worship at 5pm CDT. You can access the service at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCldChQ-w8vS1vkbSDyyxLOQ.

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.

Word of Life

Scripture’s Power to Inspire and Animate

 

Anyone who’s spent time in its pages will tell you the Bibleis a force of nature. Actually, it’s several forces of nature that meet and mingle to produce a powerful, life-giving experience. There is, most notably, a divine presence in our sacred texts—a sense that what we’re reading originates with a Creator whose love prompted ancient writers to pen the words. On some level we believe the source of scripture and the Source of life are one and the same. Even if people were the instruments through which these texts came into existence, their power transcends human invention.

But we are also a force of nature in these texts, because none of them escaped human interference. Not one original manuscript for any book in the Bible is known to exist. The best we have are copies of copies—handwritten copies—which defy consistency we find and expect in mechanical publishing.  And even high-tech replication doesn’t assure perfect copies every time! We know ancient languages present challenges for translators whose own work becomes problematic over time. Compare the King James Bible with today’s more current Common English Bible to get a sense of that. Then there are shifting thoughts and circumstances that invariably impact interpretive approaches. What one generation sees and believes clearly another barely sees or doesn’t believe at all. (The most infamous example: early American use of ancient texts to justifychattel slavery; the very thought of employing scripture to defend enslavement is and should be abhorrent today.)

Finally, no account of scripture is complete without acknowledging the written or spoken word as its own force of nature. The text actually announces this when, very early on, it tells us God breathed God’s life into the human. Embodying that divine gift not only inspires and animates us, it also empowers us breathe life into thoughts and words that, in turn, inspire and animate. The creative force we call the “Logos”—the wordbehind Creation—also exists in our words and literature, in our creative capacities.

Inspiration and animation are how God works. Allowing scripture to inspire and animate us is how we hear God speak.It’s also how we experience God. When we combine these three forces of nature, God, humanity, and literature, we experience transformation. And learning how to do that becomes an art—a force of nature—all its own.

As with any art form, reading scripture in life-affirming ways requires much practice and skill. Because so many of us encounter scripture at an early age, we often associate it with other childhood occupations that don’t ask much of us. That’s why so few of us really experience the full force of scripture. But if we develop a love of the art of reading scripture, we’lldiscover it is indeed life-giving, life-affirming, and life-changing.

Our weekly study series “Reading Sacred Texts: Resistance and Renewal” continues each Thursday in September. Join us via Zoom at:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88660895432, Meeting ID: 886 6089 5432

If you prefer to join by phone, dial 1-312-626-6799 and use the same meeting ID.

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.

BLAME THE MESSENGER

When “The Bread of Life” Goes Bad

 

Depending on how people you’ve known studied and applied scripture, reading the Bible can be one of life’s greatest pleasures. Or it can be akin to holding a loaded gun in your lap. Some of us hear music in the psalmist’s confession, “I keep your word close, in my heart, so that I won’t sin against you” (Ps. 119:11). Others note how holding our sacred texts close seems always to end with sin and condemnation. For many, the Bible is the Bread of Life. For possibly more of us, this “Bread” has gone bad—grown stale, molded over, turned toxic.

The problem may isn’t the content, but rather how it’s been mishandled. When the Bible is reduced to an oversized catalog of do’s and don’ts, there really isn’t much life-giving value in it. Instead, it’s life-taking, since these backward readings typically generate and promote fear. Yet, as 1 John 4:18 stresses, perfect love won’t abide fear. So using scripture to make someone afraid or submitting to fears that arise from how we’ve been taught to read these texts is counterproductive to its purpose.

Our faith ancestors regarded sacred texts as a life source. In them they found hope and healing, clarity of purpose and imagination for carrying out tasks they undertook as people of faith. They did this in defiance of how scriptures were treated in their day because (brace yourself—this is going to shock you) even in the time of Jesus and Paul there were “Bible fanatics” who treated the texts like scorecards and prided themselves on how closely they followed scripture to the letter while wholly missing the Spirit it conveyed.

To read sacred texts as sources of life and freedom and wholeness has always been a revolutionary project. Folks who prefer to read and respond to it as a frightening threat will always outnumber those who embrace its gorgeous challenge to live fully.

This is not inherent in the texts, though. The problem is the messenger—the preacher or teacher or influencer who exploits biblical texts to enforce his/her/their personal will on a crowd. If you’re struggling with problematic passages of scripture, you’re not alone. Anyone who reads the Bible mindfully runs into parts that are unseemly, archaic, impractical, and inapplicable to their lives. It’s not unusual for those very same passages to be the ones people hang over our heads as demanding and damning.

The problem isn’t the text. That can be parsed and interpreted and embraced in highly valuable, life-giving ways. The problem are messengers who’ve get this whole scripture thing so twisted they use it to destroy life. Don’t blame the Bible. Blame them. And then leave them to their own amusements while you feast of fresh Bread!!

Each Thursday in September we’ll take a closer look at Reading Sacred Texts and how to avoid the pitfalls that trip so many people up. Join us each Thursday at 7:30pm CDT via Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88660895432; Meeting ID: 886 6089 5432

Or you can join by phone at 312.626.6799 and use the same meeting ID.

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.