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Join us this coming Thursday at 7:30p CDT as we being a new, life-giving series called “Praying the Psalms.” We will meet each week via Zoom. You can access the study at

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/564427274?pwd=WnhETHQ2Rzltc1A2SXFmTnU0ODkwUT09

Meeting ID: 564 427 274, Password: 318652

Or you can dial in at:

1-312-626-6799 and then enter the ID and password information when prompted.

Love is the Answer

It’s a Thursday evening, around the holidays. People are pouring into the city to visit relatives and honor ancient traditions. The markets are packed. A lot of last-minute planning—so much to do! Things feel especially tense, tenser than usual. But holidays always bring out the troublemakers and crazies and would-be messiahs.

Just a few days back some northerner staged a crazy parade that lampooned Roman power by doing everything on the cheap. No impressive stallions; just a young donkey. No royal carpets stretched along the route; just a bunch of threadbare coats and a few palm branches. No trumpets and cheers; just a chorus of tone-deaf provincials croaking, “Hosanna! Save us!” It was a bold move. But few noticed, given the chaotic crowds and heightened police presence.

Apparently, the self-appointed savior didn’t get the attention he needed. The next morning he turned the Temple market upside down. Called the merchants and religious leaders “thieves.” It got real ugly. And if he makes it through the week alive if will be a miracle. All it takes is one troublemaker to mess things up for everybody.

With all of this swirling around Jesus of Nazareth, it’s an odd time for a wanted man to host an intimate dinner party, maybe not the smartest move given tensions surfacing inside hiscircle. Friendships are cracking.

There’s a bounty on the Jesus’s head, a lot of cash, about $200 worth, which can feed a lot of people, fund a lot of projects. Something to consider. Then there’s guilt by association. If Jesus gets arrested, who’s next? These folks have families to think of, businesses to run, lives to live. They didn’t come all this way to land in jail!

Maybe this dinner isn’t such a good idea.

But they go and immediately everything turns upside down. (Doesn’t it always, though?) The guest of honor insists on washing their feet, a task so menial it’s usually relegated to a servant girl. Then Jesus reveals there’s a traitor and liar among them. Does he send either away? No! He shares his food with the traitor and lets the liar stay for the entire meal.

It’s all very strange. But not as strange as the topic Jesus keeps returning to. And that’s love. Jesus knows the storm isn’t lifting any time soon. He knows forces at work in the world will continue to captivate the minds and fears of millions. He knows the public is fickle and can’t be counted on to do what’s best for them. He knows the disciples are going to spend a lot of long days and nights hunkered down behind closed doors, keeping their distance from danger that walks the streets. Jesus knows the only thing to sustain them will be unshakable faith in the power of love—God’s love, his love, the shared love of his beloved friends.

Love is the commandment because love carries us through the storm, whether it’s a political firestorm in first century Jerusalem or a 21st-century pandemic that viciously preys on theplanet’s weakest and poorest. The broken governments of both eras are fueled by untrammeled greed, power plays, and brutal disregard for the truly needy. Both governments have no realsolutions and reliable answers for their problems.

Yet the word for us this Holy Week is not “fear.” It’s “love.” Love is how we ride out this storm. Love is our assurance that life ultimately overpowers death. Love is the core message that causes us to proclaim, “This is not the end of us!” Easter is coming. Amen.

Join us this week as Gather revisits Jesus’s farewell dinner with his friends. We will meet virtually via Zoom on Thursday, April 9, at 7:30p CDT. Join the conversation by going to https://us04web.zoom.us/j/998881155?pwd=NExiTTl6eUhmck85V0lUMWpZNWswQT09. Meeting ID: 998 881 155; Password: 031850

An agnostic friend texted me the other day:

“When this is all over, you’ll have something in common with literally every other inhabitant of the planet: ‘What did you do during the Pandemic?’ Maybe we’ll find we have more in common than we previously thought. That comforts me.”

There can be no doubt that what we’re going through is life altering. We’re confronting how little we actually control and we’re being called to accountability for the things we can manage. We’re suddenly and strangely aware of our personal space. We recognize that recklessness on our part holds serious implications for those around us. We’re learning the true meaning of patience, as another friend who survived COVID-19 recently told me.

We’re changing, and our choices in this crisis insist we do better. Our instincts for self-preservation extend beyond us to include everyone around us. If we are careless with ourselves, we are uncaring about others. That’s transformative thinking in a world that has habitually sacrificed community for individualism, ethical principals for economic profits, compassion for self-righteousness. The invisible space between “I” and “we” has narrowed dramatically, even though we’re keeping our physical distance. We are changing.

Nearly all transformation—real transformation, that is—comes with fear, anxiety, and trepidation attached. It ushers us into of uncertainty. It puts before us open roads with no discernable destination. To change is to become something other than, hopefully better than, maybe more than. Yet when our Maker and the planet force transformation on us, we should expect something good to emerge in what we’re becoming. News reports whisk us around the globe and the stories are all the same because (as my friend reminds us) we are the same. That will lead to comfort, even if we’ll likely travel through much grief and despair.

The Franciscan mystic, Sister Ilia Delio, is a wonderful hybrid—a theologian and scientist whose embrace of evolutionary theory yields a powerfully enlightened view of spirituality. We’re constantly changing, she tells us. “Chaos really is a saving grace… We emerge out of this long, cosmic process we call evolution. But evolution is about deep relationality. We are created for love, and that’s what keeps pulling us onward.”

As we wander through this COVID-19 desert, may we be increasingly mindful of what we’re becoming—of how we’re evolving—of what God is doing to bring forth transformation. May we never forget that love keeps pulling us onward. Its claim cannot be shaken. It calls us into, through, and out of the dangers that currently encompass us.

We are changing. We are becoming. Love is drawing us to new ways of being.

This week we’ll explore Sr. Ilio Delio in more depth as the final voice in our “Into the Mystic” Lenten series. Join us Thursday evening at 7:30p CDT as we learn more about the mystical aspects of living in an ever-changing world.

NOTE: We will meet via Zoom to enable better interactivity. It will be an exciting time together! The study can be accessed here: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/935975182. (No password is necessary.) You can also join by phone at 312-626-6799. The meeting number is 935 975 5182#.

Renewal in a Stable

No one paid much attention as William Seymour boarded the train from Houston to Los Angeles. It was 1906. He was an African-American of modest means. Although he’d made many friends during his travels as a seminarian and minister, he was by no means famous or esteemed. He was just a man going west because he heard something unusual was taking place out there and he felt drawn to be part of it.

After he got to L.A., he quickly joined a home prayer meeting that met in the city’s working class neighborhood. From the first, Seymour sensed an extraordinary event was taking shape. People with no formal training were sharing scripture and uniting in deep prayer. Their hearts blazed with conviction that God wanted to do great things. They felt a huge shift was coming and knew they would be crucial to it. In short, their earthly credentials weren’t exceptional. But their spiritual IQs were off the charts. And, unlike the upper-class society that haughtily dismissed them, they were undaunted by racial, class, gender, and religious diversity. People of every color and identity began to crowd the Bonnie Brae cottage. Soon they had to find another place to pray.

Someone recalled an old church on the rougher side of town that had been turned into a stable. It sat on Azusa Street, a narrow lane few people knew by name. With Seymour serving as their leader, they moved prayer meetings there and no sooner did they get settled than a full-on phenomenon exploded. A “second Pentecost” fell on the place and people began to worship in ways that echoed the first Pentecost in Acts. There were prophecies and visions. People were unable to stand upright in the divine presence that saturated the atmosphere. And many of them spoke in unknown tongues, ecstatically receiving the gift of a miraculously provided language of prayer, praise, and soul-stirring intercession.

There was an irony that couldn’t be ignored: a faith that began 2000 years ago in a borrowed stable had found renewal in another barn 7500 miles from Bethlehem.

The keepers of conventional Christianity were outraged at what they heard and saw at Azusa Street. It was too unseemly—especially the mixing of races and classes and genders and ethnicities. Spanish-speaking folks were rejoicing alongside English-speaking folks. Men and women, clergy and laity were preaching and prophesying. Black men caught white women who toppled backward when they “slain” in the Spirit. All of it made for sensational newspaper copy, to the distress of the traditional churches and professional clergy, who denounced Seymour and the Azusa Revival as heresy.

In the end, Seymour stood tall. The revelations he gathered as a prophet and mystic turned modern Christianity on its head. The Pentecostal movement was born and continues to be the fastest growing form of Christian faith in the modern world.

What was Seymour all about? Why was he chosen? We’ll look into that this week as Gather continues its Lenten study series, “Into the Mystic.”

Join us this Thursday via Facebook Live at 7:30p CDT as we explore the Seymour story and its impact on contemporary faith. It will be an exciting—and unusual—story!

When Shea Watts and I planned our Lenten series on Christian mystics, we had no way of knowing the week dedicated to St. John of the Cross would coincide with the national onset of COVID-19. St. John, a 16^th-century Spanish priest, poet, and contemplative is perhaps best remembered for his poem The Dark Night, which later would be called The Dark Night of the Soul. And here we are.

Without prompting, two different friends have recently described their current anxieties about the pandemic as a “dark night of the soul.” The phrase evokes an impenetrable void—a dangerous and desolate place that must be traversed, an experience akin to trudging through a seemingly endless tunnel.

For St. John, however, the dark night is the contemplative’s path to God. Darkness is not a sign of evil or sinfulness. It’s a symptom of inadequacies that can only be remedied by embarking on the journey. This concept didn’t originate with him. The notion of a dangerous, even painful move toward the Divine had been around since Aristotle, most famously in The Cloud of Unknowing, a 14^th century, anonymously written treatise about contemplative life. Yet St. John was without equal in his conviction that knowledge of God is beyond human capacity.

John envisions the journey to God in two forays, one of senses, followed by one of spirit. In both, God’s radiant presence is so intensely experienced it thrusts everything else into sharp relief. Much like brilliant light blinds the eyes, the unknowable presence of God creates a darkness that reduces sensation to ash and spiritual pride to embers.

It’s a fascinating premise that retains remarkable currency. In the 1960s, the great Howard Thurman echoed St. John’s thoughts when he wrote The Luminous Darkness, a book about racial segregation that saw sacred splendor in black skin and culture—a divine presence so radiant it creates light in darkness and binds the many lives of humankind to the Life we call God. One might almost say the idea has become a motif in modern popular culture, ranging from the work of T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen King to the music of Van Morrison and Depeche Mode.

This is the heavy week in our “Into the Mystic” series and it comes at a perfect time. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore a powerful concept that will give you plenty to ponder while we all wait out the viral storm we’re surviving together.

Gather will meet virtually via FB Live until further notice. Join us each Thursday at 7:30pm CDT as we explore the thoughts and practices of some of Christianity’s most influential mystics.

Healing Power and Singing Life

Hildegard of Bingen was a 12^th-century nun who broke every rule. When women were personae non grata in Western Christianity, Hildegard oversaw a community of nuns and monks. When pulpit was confined to the (all-male) priesthood, galvanized congregations all over southern Germany with her preaching. When sacred music was limited to chanting, Hildegard believed melodic song was the soul’s purest way to express the life of God. When the idea of a female theologian was taboo, she maintained a prolific correspondence conveying her ideas of faith with male superiors. Pope Eugene III, a frequent recipient of her letters, would undertake widespread clerical reforms at her urging.

Even though revelation was regarded a thing of the past, Hildegard told of visions and supernatural insights. While the church grew increasingly subject to superstitions, she excelled in medicine and herbal remedies. She was many things: prayer warrior, teacher, mentor, musician, playwright, theologian, healer, preacher, scientist, and, most significantly, mystic.

Hildegard thought in ways that challenged, inspired, and unnerved religious standard-keepers. She envisioned the natural world through in ways that brought new meaning to everything around her. Although she wasn’t a formally trained scholar, she used a Latin word, viriditas, to flag her signature idea about God and faith. Strictly translated, the word means “greenness.” But its essence points to a richer understanding more akin to “lushness.” This core concept is perhaps more relevant today than it has ever been.

 Viriditas was very pliable in Hildegard’s hands. She applied it to the divine nature, ascribing to God a fundamental healing power that encourages growth and wellness. In this sense she melded the notion of God’s will with an environmentalist’s passion. Because God is “lush”— always creating and generating growth—Hildegard wrote the best place to find God isn’t in a stone-cold cathedral or a silent monastery. God is best encountered in thick forests and verdant fields, in places where life erupts and disrupts. In these places where the “green force” of the divine is most obviously manifested we also find plants and flowers that enable healing. It was all of a piece in her mind.

The greenness of God doesn’t start and stop with nature walks, however. Hildegard also viewed singing as the way the Spirit makes its breath felt in worship and devotion. Singing is what divine lushness sounds like—a human expression that joins the harmonies of nature as non-verbal witness to God’s power. Her compositions are still sung and recorded to this day, with perhaps the most famous being Canticles of Ecstasy, which you can hear below

When I began this post, I was going to connect all the dots. But as I reread this, I believe no help is needed. Hildegard is someone you want to know more about. And you can learn more about her this week at third installment of “Into the Mystic,” our Lenten study series. Don’t miss this wonderful discussion. You can join in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. Or you can catch us online via Facebook Live. We start at 7:30pm CDT. See you there!

Finding Our Place in the Story

As most of us know, Lent is intended to be a somewhat literal rehearsal of Jesus’s 40-day ordeal in the desert. The Gospels tell us after his baptism the Spirit drives him into the wilderness to confront the tempter. It’s a grueling experience, but not just because of physical and social deprivation. Jesus’s enemy, the devil, knows what buttons need pushing to break him down. He’s left the Jordan with some bold claims as John the Baptist’s successor, the Promised One of Israel, and God’s beloved Son. And Jesus’s spiritual adversary meets with a series of soul-flaying taunts that question his identity and loyalty to God: “If you are the Son of God…” “If you worship me…”

This is tough stuff, the kind of experience we’d rather not emulate. First, it may not strike us as a particularly healthy—fasting, praying, setting ourselves up for tests we’ll likely fail. Second, it’s not very clear what we get from this exercise, outside of feeling guilty and apologizing to God and promising—hoping—we’ll do better next time.

We may be missing an important piece of the puzzle, something that doesn’t get talked about too often, but something the Early Christians immediately caught. Jesus’s experience was not unique. It was never meant to be unique. In fact, Jesus’s wilderness trial was, and is, supposed to be viewed as typical of anyone whose true identity and calling has been revealed. All through scripture we see this trope. When you discover who you are and accept it, you go into the desert to find out what you’re supposed to do next.

The Hebrew Bible flows with one wilderness crossing after another. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, the Hebrew slaves, Joshua, Ruth and Naomi, David, Elijah, Elisha, the Babylonian exiles (to name the more famous few) cross harsh and barren places after they realize who they are and the work they’ve been given. Of course, Jesus goes into the wilderness. Of course, his identity is questioned. Of course, his commitments are tested. That’s how this works!

Lent is not just about self-discipline and deprivation. While we talk a great deal about confronting weaknesses and sinful impulses, it’s not only about that. It’s about more than embracing vulnerability. Lent is about finding our place in this story, being driven into the wild like Jesus and his ancestors and knowing the reason. It’s about realizing who God calls us to be and going in search of clarity that defines our purpose. It’s about accepting who we really are so we can live truthfully and effectively.

Sit with that for a bit. It will inspire and guide your wilderness adventure. Promise.

Travel with us as we join a long line of Christian mistakes in our quest for clarity in the Lenten wilderness. We meet for Bible study each Thursday evening at 7:30pm CT and we’ll come together in our only Lenten worship experience this Sunday, March 8, at 7pm CT. You can join us live at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park, IL. Or if you’re joining from a distance, meet with us via Facebook Live.

John the Evangelist and Divine Wholeness

The Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Word was with God in the beginning…

From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.

—John 1:1-2,16

Of the Gospels included in the Christian Bible, John is the last written and added to the library. While it contains some of the same (or similar) material found in the more closely aligned Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, one hardly needs an advanced degree to recognize how remarkably unlike them it is. Mark, Matthew, and Luke are collectively called the “Synoptic Gospels” because their main point is providing a synopsis of Jesus’s life and ministry. In other words, their driving question is: Where did this Christian movement come from?

Not John. The writer of this Gospel, known as “John the Evangelist,” asks: Where did Jesus come from? And John’s conclusion is a real mind-bender. Jesus doesn’t come from anywhere, because Jesus always was. While the others point to a distinct moment when the divinity of Jesus is revealed—at baptism in Mark, via angelic visit in Matthew and Luke—John tells us the Word was with God and was God before the start.

Inasmuch as John’s Gospel is biography, it’s not really the story of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s an account of the ever-living Word… the eternal Logos by whom God’s wholeness is witnessed… the Christ, or anointed messenger who brings Good News and becomes Good News… the epitome of God’s Child who transcends the parental metaphor to be one with God.

These big ideas become the raw material of John’s Gospel and their prominence sets it apart as the Christian faith’s oldest, greatest mystical text. It’s a stunning attempt to open our understanding of who God is and all God is. And rather than cramp our brains with a lot of technical language (as many mystical writers are fond of doing), this writer makes it so basic that, ironically, we struggle to comprehend what we’re hearing.

God is everything. Or God is “all in all.” Perhaps the best summation of John’s idea is simply God IS. Wherever we look, wherever life takes us, whatever our minds conceive bring us to “God is.” “From God’s fullness we have received grace upon grace,” John writes. We’ll dig into this “Is-ness” of God—the Wholeness that defines the Divine—as we launch our Lenten Bible study series, “Into the Mystic.”

But for now, as we begin our wilderness adventure, let’s open our prayer and meditation practices to God’s fullness. It can’t be contained. It’s more than we know. It’s bigger than anything we may confront in this season of self-denial. The Jesus of John’s Gospel is our namesake as Christians. Are we living in the fullness of what that means?

Make Bible study part of your Lenten practice as we look at six Christian mystics down through the ages—from St. John the Evangelist in the first-century to the cutting-edge thought of Sister Ilio Delio, a contemporary Franciscan mystic and scientist. We meet each Thursday at 7:30pm CT at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. Or you can join us online via Facebook Live.

Approaching Lent Holistically

Next Wednesday, the Western Christian community worldwide will cross a portal into the soulspace of Lent. Many will come to the moment in pious sobriety, weighing where they are in their spiritual adventure, naming places where progress is needed, identifying practices to strengthen and sustain them. Others will come ritually, passing by the altar to receive the sacred sign of ashes as a witness of faith and reminder of mortal frailty. Others will dismiss Ash Wednesday as an ancient, outmoded tradition. Still others will blink and miss it altogether, perhaps in the blur of having celebrated a wee bit too bountifully on Shrove Tuesday. Such has been the way since 6^th-century Roman Catholics instituted a rite of ashes as the proper gateway to Lent’s season of penitence and self-denial.

Yes, this has been going on for a long, long time.

For most folks, the time between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday is when you’re supposed to “give up something”—reducing the fast to a quasi-religious kind of New Year’s resolution, as if avoiding chocolate or loose language or the occasional adult beverage holds some kind of inherent spiritual value. Yet scripture repeatedly scorns shallow, self-serving fasts as ineffective (see Isa. 58; Jer. 14:10-12; Matt.6:16-18). Laying off curse words, Hershey bars, and Moscow mules might make you a “better person.” Or it actually might make you more difficult to be around and drown you in all sorts of egocentric behaviors, from self-congratulation to self-pity (all of which come with an unhealthy dose of self-gratification). But our “betterment” is not Lent’s endgame. Reining in desires so God’s Spirit can more fully inhabit our nature is what this season is about.

We can also go too far in another direction and overly complicate or intellectualize Lenten practice, which is its own sort of vanity. Lent isn’t about wit and intelligence. It’s emotional, calling for rawness and candor that enable our souls to be fully laid bare before God. If we get too clever—too geared up with ornate practices and smart approaches—we will have replaced Lent’s unvarnished simplicity with self-aggrandizing complexity. There’s a reason why the desert has prevailed as Lent’s metaphor: it’s where the grit of sand wears down our pride and hot blasts of wind blow away the residue of over-thinking.

So Lent is serious business. But if you’ve spent any time at all in the wilderness, you know deprivation isn’t always dismal. Beauty breaks through in unexpected ways. Joy finds you at unexpected turns. A welcome rain recharges the air with scents of sage and creosote. A spindly cactus explodes with vivid blooms. The barren ground becomes a dancehall for wildlife. The moans of sandswept wind mingle with a cool breeze to create entirely new music.

As we prepare to pass through Ash Wednesday’s portal, I pray we will go into Lent with mindful simplicity and an eager outlook for moments of refreshing. Self-denial is part of it. But awareness beyond one’s self is also essential. There is beauty all around us, even in our wilderness, because God is with us.

Please join us on Sunday March 8, at 5pm for “Desert Springs”—a special worship experience that turns our thoughts to refreshment in the wilderness. You can also join our weekly study series, “Into the Mystic” that uses the lives, experiences, and devotional practices of six Christian mystics down through the ges as guideposts for our own journeys. We meet each Thursday at 7:30pm. All of our meetings are hosted at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park, IL. You can also join us virtually via Facebook Live.

Malleability is one of the many pleasures of Jesus’s parables. The stories work from every angle. You can find entirely new meaning simply by giving the “lead role” to a character other than the intended star. Take the Prodigal Son for example. Shift focus from the brash son who leaves home to the faithful son who sticks around and you’ve got an entirely different story—a cautionary (and maybe problematic) tale that could suggest faithfulness is its own reward.

This week’s installment of our current series, “Kingdom Stories: Seven Parables from Matthew,” turns to the famous wedding story in Chapter 22, where a father plans a big wedding feast for his son and invites a lot of important people. When they don’t show, the host goes ballistic. By story’s end, the message becomes clear that even the least desirable guest is welcome in God’s kingdom, with first set of invitees pretty much forgot, since most of them are dead.

We’ll delve into the story’s finer points on Thursday evening—including a look at the extreme violence Jesus injects in what seems like a fairly innocuous situation. But before we allow the grim fates of the original guests to erase them, it might be wise to give them starring roles for a bit and ask what exactly was their fatal flaw? After all, not showing up costs many if not all of them their lives. Why?

Their problem appears to be preoccupation. They’ve got too much on their plates to make it to the feast. That should strike a nerve in us all. What invitations are we turning down because we’ve already got too much going on? What’s so sacred about the things we’ve fastened our attention to that we can’t stop to celebrate and enjoy the company of others?

Just today, I rode the elevator with a man who never looked up from his phone from the moment he stepped into the car. After he got out 30 floors later, I wondered what was so important. It wasn’t as simple as bad manners or inadequate upbringing or introversion gone amok. The dude was clearly riveted to his phone—so much so that he may have never realized two other flesh-and-blood human beings were along for the ride.

We live in a world where preoccupation is the norm. And I suspect if we were among the invitees in Jesus’s story, we might have behaved just as regrettably. Is all of our beloved connectivity interfering with real connections? How much are we really getting done—or have we simply mistaken the doing as the deed? I hear so many folks talk about “living in the moment.” But is that possible if you’re not fully present? Are we so preoccupied with all we’ve got on our plates that we’re missing the feast? Could be.

Join us this Thursday at 7:30pm CST as we continue our look at the parables of Jesus. We meet at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. If you’re unable to join in person, we’re online via Facebook Live. Either way, we look forward to seeing you!