Monthly Archives

August 2021

PRESENCE

Dear Gather friends and family, old and new,

Our summer tour of Exodus concludes this week, and I’ll miss hanging out with Moses and his people every Thursday. Watching them wander and learn, mess up and recover has been instructive and inspiring—a regular reminder that a life of trust is not easy. Paul stressed this in his second letter to the Corinthians. “We walk by faith, not by sight,” he reminded them (2 Cor. 5:7). When he wrote those words, he could have been thinking of his ancestral heritage, because that’s what Exodus is about: learning to live freely and moving forward by faith. While that sounds very spiritual, heroic even, it’s still a wacky way to cross a desert without a map or a final destination.

In Exodus, walking by faith tests everybody’s patience. With few exceptions (which are more likely omissions), folks stumble and lose heart. Nobody—not even Moses—keeps it together all the time. Yet they keep going. How do they do it? Why does Moses keep pushing the people farther into the unknown? I’m mystified at how they keep bouncing back after things break down, always moving, walking by faith with no real destination in view.

Where and how does it end? Most people assume Exodus finishes in the Promised Land. Not so. They’re still in the wilderness with only two years of their 40-year journey under their belts. And that’s fine, because there’s a more relevant and exciting idea on the loose in Exodus, a more powerful and enduring promise in play—more than real estate or national identity or marking borders. The story ends exactly as it should, given how the action begins. It all starts when God pledges faithfulness to Moses. From the flames of a fiery bush God declares, “I will be with you” (Ex. 3:12). And here’s how the story wraps: “The Lord’s glorious presence filled the dwelling” (Ex. 40:34). Bookends!

The message of Exodus—its theme as high school lit teachers would put it—is really about living in the present, trusting the divine promise of presence, and accepting we are never alone. This is not always easy to do. Indeed, if we look to Moses and Co. as our example, it takes years. Allowing God to be present is hard because it means we have to let God be God. And we don’t like that. We want to see where we’re going. We want to predict what’s next. We want to manage every minute. Yet the past year has taught we can’t see the future, we can’t manage every detail. We’re pretty much always walking by faith and not by sight as it is. So why don’t we take God up on the promise of presence? It takes a lot of practice. Years. But since we’re in the desert anyway…

Join us this Thursday at 7:30pm CDT as we spend time reflecting on our own summer journey through Exodus.

See you this Thursday at 7:30pm CDT.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82424012625
Meeting ID: 824 2401 2625
Or dial 1-312-626-6799 using the same meeting ID.

 

Peace,

Pastor Tim

 

PS: Make sure you join us this Sunday at 5pm CDT for our monthly YouTube worship. We have a special guest musician and lots of wonderful features to strengthen and encourage us on our own journey. You can access the service via our YouTube channel:

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.

The Self-Invited Guest

Dear Gatherers,

 

Depending on your appetite for detail, the Tabernacle chapters of Exodus either: 1) make your inner Bible nerd giddy with pleasure, or 2) give you brain cramps. Or maybe a little of both. Aside from the infamously tedious genealogies (“so-and-so begat such-and-such”), Exodus 25-31 is one of the most challenging expanses of scripture because it’s almost entirely focused on fabrication. Build this. Sew that. Make this.

 

Yet every now and then, to keep us emotionally invested, God reminds us what’s behind all the design and décor: “I will be at home among the Israelites, and I will be their God. They will know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of the land of Egypt so that I could make a home among them. I am the Lord their God” (Ex. 29:45-46).

 

Back in June, when we began this journey with Moses and his followers, we talked about how this greatest coming-out story ever told was, at its core, a freedom saga. We affirmed that God liberates Israel from Egypt because God defends the poor and frees the captive and welcomes the outcast. (That’s why we do the same, btw, as children of this God.) Amid the carpentry and construction, swatches and needlework, we find a very clear reason why God lifts the downtrodden and mends the brokenhearted and heals wounded souls. I brought them out so I could make a home among them.

 

God wants to live with us! That’s what all of this is about. God wants to live with us—all of us, regardless how we identify or what anyone else thinks. That secret’s been there all along, and once we uncover that truth, we can only say, let’s get busy and get this place ready. God’s moving in!

 

Of course, God’s not going to live just any kind of way. This week we’ll look at all the fashion and ritual demands he makes on his hosts. But the ask is nothing compared to the brilliance of securing a divine address among ex-slaves in recovery and outcasts from the fringes and homeless folks tramping around in the desert. How cool is that? Join us as we put the finishing touches on the tabernacle and say a heartfelt thank you to the Self-Invited Guest of Honor who keeps company with us by choice.

 

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82424012625
Meeting ID: 824 2401 2625
Or dial 1-312-626-6799 using the same meeting ID.

 

See you this Thursday at 7:30pm CDT. And if you’re in the Chicago area plan now to be with us for live worship, popping up this Sunday (8/15) at Thee Beauty Bar, 810 E. 43rd Street, Bronzeville at 5pm CDT. We have a surprise special guest artist scheduled to join us, along with our own amazing house music worship team. Come for the worship. Stay for the dance.

 

Peace,
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.

From Privacy to Presence

Dear Gather Friends and Family,

The rapid privatization of spirituality intrigues me. In the last century, we’ve hurdled from regarding faith as a communal experience to “personal salvation” (which answers the annoying question “What’s in it for me?”) to a new approach in which religion seems best kept as a tightly guarded private affair.

And yet we don’t think twice about self-disclosing all sorts of private information: what makes us feel amused, anxious, amorous, angry, alienated, what we ate and drank last night (pics please!), where we were, who we were with, and so on. Many of us make big consumer choices based on what our purchases may suggest to complete strangers, sometimes vaunting our ability to access places and goods others only dream of. We hear a lot of talk about transparency, which never seems to be available where it’s needed most but always shows up when discretion may be the better choice. We’re inundated with TMI—so much posture in so many posts. But faith? Well, that’s private.

I once asked someone about their faith, and they pulled out the default “higher power” reply. Fair enough. Then I got real curious and asked, “How do you experience your ‘higher power’?” Which (you guessed it) summoned a list of practices: “I meditate. I pray. I spend time in nature. I recite daily affirmations.” All good. But when I asked, “How is this power present in your life?” it felt like I was prying because, well, that’s private.

The ancient Israelites and, later, their rabbis routinely spoke of God as “The Presence.” This was the God who self-identifies as the verb I Will Be, whose name is so awesome it’s never spoken aloud. Such a God sounds perfect for private-belief predilections. Yet the Exodus account goes the opposite way. Once the Israelites seal their love covenant with God, their faith launches a brashly public project of constructing a fancy moveable dwelling for their higher power—which borders on insanity, if you think about it, considering they’re out in the desert relying on daily manna drops to survive. Why would they take on such a task? Because they wanted to visibly demonstrate God was active and present in their life together.

At first, this week’s study chapters (Exodus 25-27) read like a tedious HGTV to-do list: make this out of this, use these fabrics and patterns, accent with these touches. What’s behind it all? A compulsion to attend to the Presence that binds them together. That’s what we’ll look at this Thursday at 7:30pm CDT. Make sure you’re with us!

 

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82424012625
Meeting ID: 824 2401 2625
Or dial 1-312-626-6799 using the same meeting ID.

 

Peace,
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.