Monthly Archives

October 2020

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In Weekly Update

MALE AND FEMALE

What the Creation Story Tells Us About Gender

God created humankind in God’s image… male and female God created them. – Genesis 1:27

In the ancient Hebrew imagination, Creation was perfect, because it was God’s doing. Our task, as God’s ultimate handiwork, is to hasten the world’s return to its original perfection. That can sound rather simplistic until you dig a little deeper into what Israel’s poets, prophets, and rabbis meant.

For them, perfection meant wholeness. And that applied to everything God makes in the Genesis 1 narrative, from the stars in the heavens to the tiny things creeping through the grass. Thus, when the early rabbis read Genesis 1:27, they assumed gender wasn’t an either/or category, but rather an all-of-the-above proposition. This idea was so prevalent in Jesus’s day that soon thereafter it was inscribed in Jewish commentary. “Said Rabbi Jeremiah ben Elazar: In the hour when the Holy One created the first human, He created him [as] an androgyne” (Genesis Rabbah 8).

Why is this important? First, it tells us that in the minds of Jesus’s teachers the creation of a male or female human would be incomplete because being created in God’s image would necessarily mean having all the qualities we associate with God, whether they are manly or womanly traits. But also beginning with a dually gendered human makes sense of a later story in Genesis in which the “male side” and “female side” are separated to enable them to face one another.

Most important for us today, in a world where gender fluidity is finally being more widely accepted, this reading calls us to fresh awareness that we don’t live in an either/or world because we’re not made by an either/or God. There’s simply no such thing as an “all-man man” or an “all-woman woman.” And that causes us to question limits and definitions we create around gender. It’s imperfect thinking because it’s incomplete.

How radically would our gender assumptions be altered if we embraced our androgynous origins? How easily could we open ourselves to more gender variance—not worrying about what little boys and little girls are made of, becoming more fully like the all-encompassing God who made us? How would that ease our discomfort with others who may not fit so easily in our binary boxes?

Creation is perfect. We are not. But we can move closer to perfection—closer to the Holy One who made us in a non-binary image to reflect our Maker’s non-binary nature.

This week we conclude our series, In the Beginning: Creation Across Cultures, with a look at how the making of humankind is portrayed. We invite you to join us on Thursday evening at 7:30p CDT, using the Zoom information below. If you’ve missed this opportunity you can find a recording of the discussion on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCldChQ-w8vS1vkbSDyyxLOQ.

 

Via Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88285720765?pwd=bWd2Z1dCVjVMWkIxdEgxSW90Z2dIZz09

Meeting ID: 882 8572 0765, Passcode: 930247

You can also phone in at 1-312-626-6799 using the same meeting ID and passcode.

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.

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In Weekly Update

MADE FOR PRAISE

Not “Again”

Isaiah tells the story of a national crisis. Weak leaders have sold the country out. Enemies have invaded the land. The capital and its beloved Temple are reduced to a sand pile. The best citizens are taken hostage while those left behind—somewhat tellingly called “the Remnant”— long for the day when they can make their country great again, forgetting its collapse was brought on by greed and xenophobia, all under a veneer of false piety.

After the equivalent of 18 American Presidential terms, the captives come home. The dream of a return to “normal”—complete with rebooted economy, a restoration of old systems of power and a revived sense of ethnic supremacy—doesn’t jibe with God’s thinking. “Again” isn’t on God’s mind. “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old,” God says to Israel. “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Is. 43:18-19)

Why isn’t God so gung-ho about a “great again” plan? Restoring earlier glory doesn’t take much. Just some money and elbow grease. Yet God is abundantly clear this new thing has one purpose. God is doing something new for “the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise” (v21).

God wants our praise. In fact, we are made for praise. And that means we are made to expect more from God and ourselves than reviving a fabled past that never really existed. I’m about to do a new thing, God says. Don’t you get it?

Both testaments make it abundantly clear that when we praise things get shaken up. In Joshua, we see the Israelites raise such raucous praise walls crumble. In Acts, Paul and Silas go into such a high praise their prison cell can’t hold them; they literally sing and shout the jail doors off their hinges! The God of new things desires praise and when we praise, God does every more revolutionary things.

But praise is hard because praise seems silly to us—all this telling God how wonderful God is, all this noise and singing and clapping and shouting “Hallelujah!” (which, by the way, literally means to praise God exuberantly). In other words, praise is uncomfortable. And for that reason, a lot of us would rather dream of the past than step outside our comfort zones to see what kind of new ideas God’s got in mind. We’ve lost the praise that pushes us into a new reality.

“I’m up to something new—something only I can do—something that will inspire and command high praise. DON’T YOU GET IT?”

We are made for praise. God is always giving us new reasons for praise. When we live in a state of praise, we see beyond stale ideas and golden oldie days. Not “again.” Never “again.” Always new. Can we step out of our tightly drawn comfort zones to give God the praise God deserves? It depends on how well we believe God when God says, “I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”

Don’t miss this Sunday’s YouTube worship experience, “Praise & Protest” that links praise with demanding more than a weak-spirited “great again” philosophy of life. This will be an uplifting time together. You can access the service at 5pm CDT (on October 25) via our YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCldChQ-w8vS1vkbSDyyxLOQ. See you then!

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.

admin
In Weekly Update

WONDERS OVERHEAD

Day Four of Creation

Heaven is declaring God’s glory; the sky is proclaiming God’s handiwork. – Psalm 19:1

The six-day creation account in Genesis 1 takes an interesting turn on Day Four. The first three days are elemental: light and darkness; land, sea, and sky, with an invisible “dome” preventing a constant deluge of rain. Plants emerge in these early days, as they must, to anchor the land with their roots and because, when you put water on soil, something always grows. The Creator is clearly up to something. But what it is doesn’t come into focus until the fourth day, when the sun, moon, and stars are set in place to be “for signs and for seasons and for days and years” (Gen. 1:14-17; NRSV).

But it’s interesting that daylight and moonglow are almost afterthoughts. In the ancient imagination the wonders overhead bore two important functions. The sky was often scrutinized for divine “signs” that held predictive or confirming capabilities. Astrology is an art as old as religion, and many people looked to it for indications that they were pleasing their gods. Indeed, these instincts are so deeply imbedded in our nature, we see a shooting star or a blood moon or an eclipse and read all kinds of meaning into it!

More importantly, the movement of the spheres kept track of time. Like many cultures, the Israelites got very good at marking months and years by the heavens. Our own liturgical calendar is derived from such moves. For instance, not many folks realize Western Christianity’s highest holy day—Easter—dances around the calendar because it’s tied to lunar behavior. We celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox ushers. We do this because the Easter narrative is set on the first day of the week after Passover, which occurs on the first full moon of spring.

What makes all of this more than a trivia exercise? It shows we primally understand our Creator to be deeply implicated in our own time, history, and hourly existence. The Psalmist looks up and doesn’t merely gasp at celestial beauty. The poet “hears” the heavens boasting of God’s glorious ability to mark time. The first few verses of Psalm 19 are a ravishing account of daytime, with the sun’s rising and progress compared to a warrior bridegroom leaving his honeymoon bed. And what’s interesting about that is scholars are convinced this is borrowed language, a sly adaptation of earlier poetry about Egypt’s sun god. In other words, the heavens declare God’s glory in every dialect, every tradition, in every way we’ve come to understand signs and times. It’s such an enormous idea, no one religion can claim exclusive rights to it. Which is just as it should be.

Our look at Creation Across Cultures continues as we spend this week contemplating the heavens. Join us each Thursday evening at 7:30 CDT via Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88285720765?pwd=bWd2Z1dCVjVMWkIxdEgxSW90Z2dIZz09

Meeting ID: 882 8572 0765, Passcode: 930247

You can also phone in at 1-312-626-6799 using the same meeting ID and passcode.

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.

admin
In Weekly Update

MASTER OF THE SEA

Divine and Human Domains

As Genesis rolls out its Creation narrative, arranging the elements becomes the first concern after the creation of light. The primordial world needs organizing! The sky is hung above the sea. Dry land is summoned from the ocean floor and plants take root. Days Two and Three complete and “God saw how good it was” (Gen. 1:12).

The heavens are the exalted domain, where God resides, watches from, and comes from to intervene in our affairs. The land is where we live, where our food and raw materials come from. It’s the stuff we’re made of. That takes care of land and air. What of the sea?

For the ancients, the sea epitomizes chaos. It’s unpredictable, mysterious, and often treacherous. It supports strange life forms that can’t be found anywhere else. Things change quickly at sea. A sudden squall can turn smooth sailing into a nightmare.

That’s why so many myths and legends valorize sailors: Odysseus, Sinbad, and other maritime heroes who overcome sea monsters and nymphs luring them to certain death all come to mind. In our own time, we abide a number of sea myths, most notably the story of the Bermuda Triangle, where sailors and pilots vanish for no reason.

The prominence of sailors in so many folklores sparks curiosity about why neither the Hebrew Bible nor the Christian texts ever focus on a sailor. It could be argued the Jewish nation simply wasn’t a seafaring culture. Yet that’s also curious, since it sits on the Mediterranean shore, at the trade crossroads that joined the East and Europe. There might be something more significant than geography going on here.

Genesis positions God as the Master of the Sea. The deep’s power is mediated when God calls forth land. Its dangers are contained, its threats minimized by the decision to create a home for humans on dry ground. Meanwhile, although scripture doesn’t give us one heroic sailor, it gives us plenty of nautical episodes, nearly all of which go sideways. Jonah, the disciples, and the Apostle Paul are subjected to harrowing storms and (in Paul’s case) even shipwreck. Yet all of these tales end happily with divine intervention. Whatever other lessons there are, the underlying moral is always the same: God alone is the Master of the Sea.

We live in tumultuous times of uncertainty and near-constant squalls. The stormy seas of existence feel less like a metaphor and more like lived reality. No sailor heroes are emerging in our story to lead us home. But we aren’t dismayed because our trust is too precious to invest in a mere sailor. We place our confidence in the Master of the Sea. As the sailor-poet of the great hymn “Amazing Grace” put it, “‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far / And grace will lead me home.” Amen.

If you’re not catching our October series “Creation Across Culture” you’re missing a treat. Join us each Thursday evening at 7:30 CDT via Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88285720765?pwd=bWd2Z1dCVjVMWkIxdEgxSW90Z2dIZz09

Meeting ID: 882 8572 0765, Passcode: 930247

You can also phone in at 1-312-626-6799 using the same meeting ID and passcode.

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.

admin
In Weekly Update

LET THERE BE LIGHT

Intuitive Theology

Northwest indigenous peoples tell of Raven, a trickster character, who grows weary of hunting in the dark and finds a way to incarnate himself as a child. He ingratiates himself to his grandfather who’s been hoarding the light. When the old man isn’t looking, Raven steals the light and flies away with it. In the process, the light is broken into many pieces that become the moon and stars. It’s a lovely origins tale that intrigues and surprises those of us who only know the primeval creation narratives of Genesis. And it points to an understanding that often goes unnoticed.

Theology simply means “talking about God.” When we talk about the universe’s Maker and Keeper, we reach for metaphors and stories and symbols to explain what can’t be comprehended, let alone spoken. In this we are hardly alone. Every culture has stories that extol a divine presence at work in the world. They always begin with how the world came into being and nearly all of them feature two constants: the presupposition that “someone” is there before the beginning, and the first act of creation involves the appearance of light.

Raven performs a trick that enables him to enter the sphere where light is being held captive. In many ways that’s very different than our Genesis story, where darkness is equated with chaos and the realm before creation is a flood with God’s spirit gliding above the waters. Our story with begins in murky abstraction and order is established as creation becomes increasingly concrete. In the Raven myth, there is already a world and (apparently) humans; there just isn’t any available light.

Yet the instincts are very similar. There is someone, or something, pre-existent that possesses the power to create and contain light. “God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And so light appeared.  God saw how good the light was. God separated the light from the darkness.  God named the light Day and the darkness Night,” we read in Genesis 1:3-5.

The prevalence of light-and-darkness myths across cultures suggests there are instinctive aspects of theology that we may undervalue. In our determination to categorize, define, and analyze, we may forget awareness of the divine is deeply rooted in our consciousness and we come to these ideas from a place that precedes logic. Is our understanding of God and how we came to be intuitive?

In 2 Corinthians 4:6 we find these words: “God said that light should shine out of the darkness. He is the same one who shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ.” Light is knowledge and that light enables us to see God’s glory in Jesus and one another. The Raven is not far from this idea in that he enables the world to see what was hidden from it. Let there be light!

Join us during October as we embark on a fascinating series that compares the Genesis creation narrative with similar tales from other faiths and cultures. We’re doing intuitive theology this month, and it’s going to be an illuminating time together. We meet every Thursday evening at 7:30 CDT via Zoom.

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88285720765?pwd=bWd2Z1dCVjVMWkIxdEgxSW90Z2dIZz09

Meeting ID: 882 8572 0765 Passcode: 930247

You can also join by phone at 1-312-626-6799, using the same ID and Passcode.

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.