Monthly Archives

April 2021

PRACTICE!

Dear Gather Friends and Family,

It’s such an old joke it no longer merits a rimshot. Nonetheless, there’s so much truth inside it, it will likely outlast the edifice it names.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice, practice, practice!

Mastering theory, aesthetics, and historical knowledge are necessary for any artist. But not one of them will transform an amateur into a serious musician. That requires practice: studying the score, reviewing the same passages again and again, teasing out nuances that turn what’s on the page into experience; giving voice to specific phrases and passages; acquiring deftness to maneuver the interplay of spirit, mind, and body to create something uniquely your own. Practice.

Perhaps the most powerful intersection of Buddhist and Christian thought is at the point of practice. While both traditions embrace communal rites, they are adamant that daily spiritual practice and discipline are the real transformative pieces of the puzzle. And—particularly distressing for those of us enamored with novelty and ornament—Buddhist and Christian practices are famously repetitive and unadorned. To borrow again from the musical metaphor, they’re closer to practicing scales than performing (or composing) arias.

Over and over and over. Pray and meditate. Read and reflect. Remain mindful and react mindfully. Look inward to find an active outward path. Over and over and over. As Christians, our texts and traditions are overrun with admonishments to embrace this lifestyle. But too many Christians prefer patronizing the Carnegie Halls of religion instead of answering the call—and living into the promise—of authentic practice. Any good Buddhist knows the answer to this question: how do you follow the Buddha? Practice, practice, practice. If we ask the same question, we get the same answer.

How do you follow Christ?
Practice, practice, practice!

This Thursday evening we’ll wrap our April series with a closer look at practical approaches to spirituality that Buddhism and Christianity share. Join us at 7:30pm CDT.

Join our conversation on Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83567085701
Meeting ID: 835 6708 5701
Or dial in at 312-626-6799, using same Meeting ID

Peace and blessings,
Pastor Tim

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.

TRANSCENDENCE

Christianity’s animating idea is transcendence. God makes God’s self known in the person of Jesus, and that revelation enables us to look beyond, and live into, a deeper reality. It’s more than what Jesus said and did. It’s embodying what he meant and permitting the gospel of unconditional love and grace to shape our being and behaviors. The Christian concept of transcendence is one of inward transformation that turns our attention outward to others and the world.

Many would like to bisect this idea into one or the other—contemplative (or meditative) practice and active (or missional) practice. To place one over and above the other, however, results in an incomplete experience. In Colossians 3:16-17, we find this delicate balance described beautifully: “The word of Christ must live in you richly. Teach and warn each other with all wisdom by singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing to God with gratitude in your hearts. Whatever you do, whether in speech or action, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus and give thanks to God the Father through him.” Start with contemplation. End in action.

We see many parallels in the practices of our Buddhist friends. Their deep personal work of contemplation ultimately points toward the strengthening of community. And both Christian and Buddhist thought seek transcendence through a paradoxical idea: looking inward compels outward action to ease the suffering of others.

We’ll explore these ideas in more detail this Thursday at 7:30 CDT, as we continue our comparative studies of two traditions that are very different and yet speak very clearly to one another. Join our conversation on Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83567085701
Meeting ID: 835 6708 5701
Or dial in at 312-626-6799, using same Meeting ID

Peace and blessings,
Pastor Tim

PS: And make sure to join us this Sunday for our monthly YouTube worship, “Meeting the Moment.” Invite friends—especially those who don’t like church too much. You and they will be blessed. You can find the service here:

Click Here

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.

DEEPER REALITY

It may surprise some that the great Buddhist writer Thich Naht Hanh finds many similarities between his tradition’s emphasis on mindfulness and Christian emphasis on the Holy Spirit. As Hanh explains so eloquently in Living Buddha, Living Christ, mindfulness is entering “deeply into this moment [to] see the nature of reality” (16). Statements like this sound exotic to our post-modern Western ears. But our age habitually over-emphasizes what we can measure with five limited senses and explain with finite logic.

How often we get reminded our grasp of “what’s real” is inadequate, as happened last week with news that the muon, a sub-atomic particle, undermines presumably hard-and-fast laws of physics.* Our limitations would hardly surprise Jesus, who taught that mindfulness for what we can’t see and know opens a deeper reality he called “God’s kingdom.” Explaining why he used stories to make his teaching accessible, he told his followers, “You have been given the mysteries of God’s kingdom, but these mysteries come to everyone else in parables.” And then, borrowing from the prophet Isaiah, he warned not even easy-to-understand parables would be sufficient to illuminate closed minds (Luke 8:10).

Neither Jesus nor the Buddha would suggest mindfulness requires esoteric knowledge or exotic practices. As Thich makes plain, mindfulness in Buddhist parlance is comparable to the Holy Spirit in Christian thought—a force that penetrates surface realities to deepen our understanding of the world as it actually is. In his final teaching Jesus promises, “The Holy Spirit will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). EverythingAll. Wow.

Perhaps hearing this concept reframed in less familiar, Buddhist vernacular can inspire us to perceive more than meets the eye. In Christian thought, without the Holy Spirit—the Comforter, Teacher, Advocate who guides us into all truth—we cannot touch a deeper reality where suffering is felt and healing happens. Thich would (and does) agree with a gently breathed “Amen!”

On Thursday evening at 7:30pm CDT, we’ll talk about this in more depth. (See what I did there?) Join our conversation on Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83567085701
Meeting ID: 835 6708 5701
Or dial in at 312-626-6799, using same Meeting ID

Peace and blessings,
Pastor Tim

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.

TWO GREAT TRADITIONS SIDE-BY-SIDE

One of the great joys of religious curiosity emerges when we compare our traditions with other beliefs and practices. In part, the delight comes from flagging ways we may have misunderstood or been misled. I remember being a teenager before learning Roman Catholics place statuary in their churches to keep memory of saints alive. Unlike what I’d been told, they don’t worship idols. They remember their ancestors when praying, believing those who’ve gone before are close to God. What a wonderful tradition!

Setting aside common misjudgments and our own vague notions, we can discover the underlying sacredness of others’ beliefs and practices. Often, we’re intrigued by how closely they reflect our own sensibilities. None of these relationships is closer Christianity and Buddhism. Though they are different on many levels, their approaches to life and spirituality bear some striking resemblances. This month, we’ll be looking at the two traditions side-by-side and discerning how they reflect and relate to one another.

Working from the great Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn’s classic Living Buddha, Living Christ, I trust we’ll find new impetus for vital spiritual practices like silence, mindfulness, and the meaning of true discipleship. These and other principles are fundamental to Christianity and Buddhism, and they speak to one another (and us) in remarkable ways.

We’re very excited about spending April exploring these two great religions. You’ll be surprised, I believe, at what you’ll discover. And if you’ve not had a chance to appreciate the value of comparative religious study, this will be a great start!

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83567085701
Meeting ID: 835 6708 5701
Or dial in at 312-626-6799, using same Meeting ID

See you each Thursday in April at 7:30pm CDT.

Blessings, with metta (loving-kindness),
Pastor Tim

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.

WHY IT’S PERSONAL

Holy Week’s events are meant to provoke profound questions. Why would God elect to meet us in our own flesh and why was 1st-century Palestine the right setting for this redemptive encounter? Why would God choose to live and move among powerless country peasants rather than infiltrate the Jerusalem power brokers and 1%, overturn the Roman occupation, and seize power as Israel’s long-awaited king of kings? Why would Jesus’s friends prove so fickle that not one of them rushed to his defense? Why would Jesus go to such extremes to prove what psalmists and prophets had been saying for centuries: God’s love for us defies all description and measure? We ask these kinds of questions every year. And even when we can tease out some theological significance, the answers exceed our comprehension.

Yet there is a second set of “whys” that should also interest us. Why does this story hold meaning for each of us—in equally real but often radically different ways? Why does the account of Jesus’s last hours stirs so many different emotions in us? What do we gain in telling this story again and again?

This week Gather will meet for a Maundy Thursday Zoom service that makes room for personal reflection. Plan to be with us at 7:30pm CDT as we recall the fateful Thursday evening that began with a Passover dinner party (complete with singing!) and ended with what surely looked like the end of the Jesus movement. As we recall the specific events of that evening, we’ll hear testimony and song to deepen our appreciation of just how personal this story gets.

On Sunday April 25 we will come together to rejoice as life slowly returns to “normal.” But what will that really look like? The pandemic has surely changed us in many ways. How we meet this moment will be of major importance in the future we co-create with God and one another. Join us for a special service of exuberant joy and thoughtful challenge.

Click Here

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.