Join us this Sunday as Gather unites in a worship experience that explores how grace and gratitude are connected. You will leave with a richer sense of thankfulness and an assurance that the grayest days and coldest nights are filled with grace. Worship begins at 5pm CST in the parlor of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. If you’re unable to be with us in person (and you really should try to make it), you can find us online via Facebook Live.

JOY AND JUSTICE

October has been a tumultuous month. The political landscape at home and abroad grows increasingly unstable. The environment groans beneath the imposition of personal carelessness and corporate callousness. California is on fire. In our hometown, untenable working conditions have pushed Chicago teachers out of the classroom and onto the picket lines. We’re allegedly experiencing one of the greatest economic booms in our history. Still, there doesn’t seem to be enough to go around.

News flash: there will never be enough. Why? There will always be people whose lust for wealth, power, and privilege emboldens them to grab more than their share. Until we get over our greed, neglect and poverty will always be with us. Even Jesus admits this in Mark 14:7: “The poor you will always have with you,” he says, adding, “you can help them whenever you want.”

Help them whenever you want—which means if folks aren’t helped, it’s because we don’t want to. That last bit needs stressing. At present, in capitalist white America, a strain of “conservative” and “prosperity” gospelers try to twist Jesus’s words to justify toadying up to power while ignoring its abuse of the poor, marginalized, and homeless. They forget two of Christianity’s basic premises: welcome and care for the other and resisting the injustices of Empire.

Simply because poverty is constant doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. Because everyone goes through hardship doesn’t mean we have to surrender to forces that cause it. Because some don’t know how to control their tongues doesn’t mean we’re not obliged to watch our words. And because someone comes into our community with a fat bank account, big house, and fancy car doesn’t entitle them to more admiration or trust than the individual who has little to nothing. These are the teachings in the Letter of James, bounded in the wisdom that, despite all the injustice and suffering we experience and witness, we hold on to joy… We reach for joy.

At Gather, we’re spending this autumn looking at those two sides of life: joy and justice. This Thursday we wrap our study of James. Next month we’ll pair our Sunday worship experience (November 10)—gratitude and grace—with a look at Ruth, Esther, and Judith, whose passion for justice rewarded them as the only women with biblical books bearing their names. Then we’ll spend December with Franciscan friar and author Richard Rohr, whose lovely devotional, Preparing for Christmas, will guide us through Advent. We will find joy in all these places and with that we’ll find strength to navigate the times. Don’t miss this opportunity to be part of Gather’s family!

Join us this Thursday at 7:30p as we conclude our series “Words & Music”—a look at worship from the Early Church to today. We meet in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park. Or you can join online via FB Live.

A Letter from James

Martin Luther famously couldn’t decide whether or not the Epistle of James deserved space in the Holy Bible. On one hand, he was concerned because the letter has very little to do with Jesus. In fact, Jesus only gets two mentions, one in connection with the author, and a second time as part of a challenge to Christians who claim to believe in “our glorious Lord Jesus Christ” while showing favoritism to rich people in their community.

And it’s that second reference—James’s discomfort with wealthy people—that may be at the root of the problem for Luther. (It’s unmistakably one of the reasons others have argued against James’s inclusion in the biblical canon.) Elsa Tamez, the Latinx liberation theologian, hits the nail on the head when she titles her commentary on this short letter buried near the end of the New Testament The Scandalous Message of James. James is scandalous because its author makes no effort to hide his (or her) contempt for privilege that inevitably affixes itself to wealth.

Luther, like most of his Reformation contemporaries, was very conscious of the power of wealth, because it also carried political power, which he and his fellow Reformers needed. Without the backing of rich and powerful people, the changes they sought to effect on Western Christianity didn’t stand a chance. So Luther tempered his fondness for scripture (which was epic) with a pragmatic view that his biggest patrons might not take kindly to hearing James preached fervently, which was how Luther and his pals typically approached their sermonizing.

James doesn’t mince words. “Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?” (James 2:5-7) The rich are blasphemers, James says. It would take a mighty deft preacher to dance around that!

So, for many years in many places, the strategy has been simple: ignore James. Pull a favorite bit from here or there—because James’s writer is an excellent wordsmith—but don’t dig into the guts of this powerful letter aimed at shaping the community life of the Early Church.

Yet James refuses to be ignored. And he’s never been more relevant than in our time, when the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent own a frighteningly disproportionate slice of American wealth while, in many rural and blighted urban communities, children don’t have shoes or glasses or know where breakfast is coming from. We need to listen to James, both as a corrective for our own warped sense of success and security, but also for guidance on how to do life together.

That’s what we’re focusing on this month in our Bible study series: “The Scandalous Message of James: Faith, Works, and Doing Life Together.” Don’t miss one week in this blended series, with some lessons taught in person and others online

Join us this Thursday at 7:30p as we conclude our series “Words & Music”—a look at worship from the Early Church to today. We meet in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park. Or you can join online via FB Live.

Worship in America: The Gospel Church

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been catching bits and pieces of Ken Burn’s PBS documentary, “Country Music.” As with so many of his explorations of American history, one of the things Burns does best is connect the story he’s telling to a larger story, often finding surprising tendrils that would otherwise get overlooked. In this current piece, I’m surprised at how often he goes back to church—not in the capital-C “Church” sense, but rather in the little-g-and-c “gospel church” sense. Repeatedly, Burns will frame a discussion about the origins of country music with a montage of images that intertwines worship in southern white churches with similar scenes in southern black ones. The soundtrack will often cross-fade between audio of a white church and then a black one singing a hymn like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”.

The seamless marriage of sound and images makes its point. For all practical purposes, the gospel church is the American church. Whereas other worship streams—mainstream Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox—are rooted in European traditions, the gospel church is as much a homegrown phenomenon as jazz and blues and country and bluegrass.

How we do church in the US—even in more traditional Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox settings—is important, because it represents many things that American culture as a whole has refused to resolve about class and color and shared history. The gospel church’s influence spreads into the “high church” in ways that, quite possibly, its constituents may not recognize. (In fact, it seeps into faiths beyond Christianity. Flavors of the gospel church can be depicted many American Judaic, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and New Thought congregations.) And all of this springs from an accidental mash-up of 19^th century revivalism, slave religion, and a very American recognition that entertainment and worship are not adversaries.

Purity is not something we do very well on our side of the pond. Yet our eagerness to experience, embrace, adapt, and invent has resulted in a worship style that now dominates evangelical religion and is surging ahead in other streams of Christianity.

So what makes the gospel church indubitably American? What spurred its innovations and adaptations of Christian worship? What do we need to understand in order to recognize why all of this matters? That’s our focus at this week’s Gather. Don’t miss it!

Join us this Thursday at 7:30p as we conclude our series “Words & Music”—a look at worship from the Early Church to today. We meet in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park. Or you can join online via FB Live.

How Technology Reshapes Worship

In the mid-15^th century, a German blacksmith named Johann Gutenberg had a fascinating idea. What would happen if he forged a set of alphanumeric characters that enabled him  to mechanically reproduce text? (We now call this concept “moveable type.”)

What did happen was nothing short of revolutionary. When Gutenberg’s Bible rolled off his printing press, he not only started a new industry—publishing—but he radically altered every aspect of human life as we know it, including how we worship.

Ready availability of the printed Word opened up a real can of worms! Now laypeople could read the Bible for themselves, which meant they could also interpret and respond according to their own lights. The worship experience was no longer a performance art starring priests and bishops. Now the liturgy could be published for everyone’s participation, and the daily offices—recitations of prayers and psalms consigned to monks and nuns—could be prayed by anyone who owned a prayerbook.

In other words, technology completely disrupted the worship lives of the Western church, removing an enormous barrier that separated religious practitioners (clergy and monastics) from religious observers (the laity).

It also created a lot of tension that erupted very quickly. Within 50 years, Martin Luther published his 95 theses, calling into question many of the Roman church’s medieval practices and beliefs. Soon after, a veritable raft of protesting (“Protestant”) theologians unleashed their own diatribes against the Church’s elitist practices.

These great thinkers and writers posed questions and ideas that, before Gutenberg’s breakthrough, were quietly discussed and, in many cases, kept out of the public’s hearing. Now they became hotly contested within the community at large. Many of these questions persist.

What is the proper procedure for baptism? What really happens when we take Communion? If we believe, as Luther insisted, “the just shall live by faith,” what is the role of the priest, whose primary function is mediating forgiveness of sin and pardon through penance? Why shouldn’t people be allowed to read and interpret scripture for themselves? Must everything in Christian worship be scripturally mandated? What about ceremony and tradition?

Technology enables progress. Yet it also raises a lot of questions, either by bringing existing quandaries to light or by generating new concerns. We see this writ large in our churches today. (Some folks get nervous if there’s a video screen in the worship space!) What do we do with technology? How do we ensure technology actually improves worship, rather than needlessly complicating it? Do we really need a live Twitter feed during Sunday service?

These questions are all wound up in this week’s “Words & Music: study, as we look at the Reformation and how its effect on how we worship in the 21^st century. Don’t miss this fascinating time together!

Our September series, “Words & Music: Where Our Worship Traditions and Hymns Come From,” continues every Thursday evening at 7:30p CDT. Join us live at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park or online via FB Live.

Fashionable Worship

As we continue our September study series, “Words and Music,” we come to a major turn when Constantine and later Emperors embrace Christianity. Two significant things happen. First, Christian doctrine gets codified in creeds—a number of which are still recited today, e.g., the Apostles Creed and Nicene Creed. Second, the nature of Christian worship moves away from its original, highly diversified home-church model toward something more ritualized and (dare we say it?) imperial.

Christianity’s establishment as the state religion ends Roman persecution of the church. That’s good news. But it also means weekly gatherings become something more than a loose assembly of Jesus followers envisioning a new world. Pageantry takes root. Worship moves from homes into basilicas, which served as Roman courthouses. The simple Eucharistic meal evolves into a distinctively ritualized feast that requires the services of a priest. This is a seismic change, because priests work in temples, and they practice at altars, neither of which are Early Church fixtures.

So Christianity inherits a style of worship that mirrors Roman pageantry and makes it fashionably acceptable to the power elite. It not only restyles easy rites that made Christianity readily acceptable and cross-cultural. It also shifts the typography and reshapes the messaging.

The cross becomes the chief symbol. The message of ready grace moves toward a more legalistic one of atonement that reflects a culture in which the Emperor and his magistrates deed clemency and exact punishment. The hierarchy becomes more elegant. Bishops now take the highest seats in the worship space. (In Latin, these chairs are called “cathedra,” or thrones, from which our word “cathedral” derives.) With all of this human imposition, things most become more regimented. The liturgy—from another Latin word that means “work of the people”—gets inverted; the people become end-users rather than originators of worship. The pulpit becomes a place where doctrine is preached. But it also becomes the top-down platform from which dogma—the unquestioned teachings of state-sanctioned religion—is traditioned, or passed along from generation to generation. Worship now becomes a control mechanism that bears watching, since many dubious theological principles get packaged as worship practices.

Why is this vital to understanding our faith? It helps us recognize how much of what we perceive as “Christianity” is actually a departure from the Early Church’s values and vision. As we continue our “Words and Music” study this week, we’ll look at the Roman influence and its impact on Western Christianity. (The Eastern Church dodged this bullet, which we’ll briefly discuss.) And we’ll talk about how these influences and events have imbedded themselves in what we experience when we go to church. Don’t miss this second part of the September series!

Join us for part two of our “Words and Music” study series. We meet each Thursday evening at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. Study begins at 7:30p CT and if you’re unable to be with us in person, you can catch us via FB Live.

The Adoration Impulse

As we wrapped our “Disorganized Religion” summer tour of Acts, taking a closer look at worship seemed like a natural next step. While some religions emphasize ethical living and others concentrate on spiritual disciplines, Christianity’s most defining feature is its worship-centricity. When people discuss their Christian faith, they almost always begin with worship, whether they’re talking in the past, present, or even future tense.

I grew up going to church.

We attend church pretty regularly.

One of these days I’m going to get to church.

The worship experience is central to the life of most Christians, regardless what creed they follow or tradition they come out of. The weekly trek to service is still a family ritual in many homes. And for a lot of people, the best part of their week happens during those 90 minutes on Sunday mornings. All the other stuff somehow feeds back into the weekly worship time. No, worship isn’t all we do; but it may be what we do best. (We certainly seem to put a whole lot time and effort into it.)

I wonder how early Christians would respond to that. We forget Jesus founded a social movement, not a religious one. The first believers had a religion (Judaism) and a worship space (the Temple). It took a while for an identifiably “Christian” worship style to emerge, and the first gatherings weren’t recognizable to outsiders as any kind of religious rites at all.

The first Christian worship experiences happened at table. Attendees said a prayer or two, sang a couple of songs, listened to storyteller, and shared their dinner with one another. These gatherings happened in people’s homes, which limited their attendance to a handful of folks.

But things we now associate with worship—recitations and readings, trained musicians and hymn repertoires, carefully constructed sermons and prayers, etc.—took a long time to work their way into the Christian worship vernacular. (There wasn’t even a “Gospel” for the preacher to read from, because Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John weren’t yet written!)

Yet what we retain from those early years is timeless: the adoration impulse is imbedded in the Christian DNA, marked by a longing to be with other believers, to tell our stories, give our Maker worthy praise and offer up thanksgiving divine for goodness, even as we pray for mercy and guidance. We worship because something compels us to join in song and word and gesture in reverent joy before our God.

That’s a great thing—a life-changing thing. And that’s why we’re spending September looking at worship and some of the stories behind favorite hymns and customs. Our worship has changed dramatically over the centuries. But our love of it is as strong as ever! – Pastor Tim

Join us every Thursday in September for our worship study series: “Words and Music.” We meet at 7:30 CT at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park. Or you can join us virtually via FB Live.

Required Listening

Tim: Last stop on our “Disorganized Religion” tour of Acts—I’m going to miss hanging with Paul and Peter and everyone else we met along The Way. See what I did there? The Way… get it?

Shea: Yeah… Not to change the subject, but it interests me how, after all these epic events, the book simply ends. Paul meets with Jews in Rome. Some believe his message. Others don’t. Next we read that he lived under house arrest for two years and kept preaching. The End. An unfinished finish, wouldn’t you say?

Tim: Very modern, but not terribly satisfying. Scholars have a lot of opinions about why Luke chose to conclude his two-book saga this way. Some think he’s telling us the movement grew to be bigger than any one person. So the curtain falls without any attention to how their lives ended.

Shea: Because they’re part of a greater, never-ending story!

Tim: Precisely! Others assume Luke’s writing before Paul’s execution and intends to write more, but doesn’t get around to it. Lots of speculation…

Shea: Still, it’s a powerful close!

Tim: Oh yes, because it ends with a very telling final conversation that echoes all of Luke’s favorite themes and techniques. After a miserable voyage to Rome—

Shea: Terrible weather and shipwreck and snakebite—

Tim: After all that, Paul introduces himself to the local synagogue leaders, as was his custom. He talks about how he came to be in Rome and his appeal to Caesar.

Shea: Naturally, he does a little missionary work in the process.

Tim: Naturally. But in a direct echo of the Pentecost event, Paul ends his meeting with a prophetic citation. This time, it’s not a promise like the one Peter quoted.

Shea: “I will pour out my spirit on all people” from Joel’s prophecy…

Tim: Paul goes into early Isaiah, where the prophet scolds the people, saying they’ll hear, but won’t understand. They’ll see but won’t recognize what they’re looking at. They’ve closed their minds; their senses are calloused. Luke’s placement of this at the very end serves as a warning to those who might question the “all people” quote from Joel.

Shea: In other words, self-imposed ignorance is what stops people from seeing that God’s Spirit is poured out on everyone, without condition, regardless where they come from and how they identify.

Tim: That’s the big theme of Acts, isn’t it? It’s as though Luke is saying, “If can’t accept what’s going on, the problem is with you, not anyone else.” I find myself wanting to say taht to people who try to make faith an insider-outsider thing. They’re closed-minded and callous and, well, you just have to let them be, kind of like Paul and Luke do in Acts.

Shea: So it’s a big, bold, timely finish after all!

Tim: Yes it is and we’ll dig into all of this at Thursday’s study. I hope everyone makes it!

Join us for our final summer outing in Acts as the “Disorganized Religion” tour makes its final stop in Rome. We begin at 7:30p CDT and meet at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park. If you’re unable to join us in person, you can catch the study via FB Live.

Experience as Prime Witness

Shea: This week’s episode in our summer “Disorganized Religion” tour of Acts reads like a movie script. Paul keeps getting called on to account for himself—before the Jerusalem church’s leaders, before his adversaries, before the Roman Governor Felix, before the Judean King Herod Agrippa. He keeps telling his story. Sometimes that strategy works in his favor, and sometimes it enflames his enemies even more.

Tim: You’ve just preached a whole sermon about evangelism right there. Our stories are the raw material of our witness. Without them, everything we have to say about our faith is pure conjecture.

Shea: Paul is a brilliant theologian and religious lawyer. He can split the finest doctrinal hairs to make a brilliantly nuanced point. But when the rubber meets the road—even in his letters—Paul skips the doctrine to tell own story. His personal transformation is where the legitimacy of his faith stands tallest.

Tim: That’s where so many of us miss the boat. We believe we don’t know the Bible well enough to discuss our faith. Or we’ve not got our theology sufficiently worked out to explain our belief.

Shea: In this week’s study, we find Paul telling folks, “Something amazing happened to me. I was going down one path and suddenly I got turned in another direction.

Tim: Exactly. Although I can hear folks say, “Well, Paul’s experience is unique. He gets knocked to the ground and blinded. I don’t have that kind of story. I just felt drawn to follow Jesus. Or, I was taught to be a Christian before I even understood what it meant.”

Shea: I get that. You and I were both reared in homes where it was assumed we would follow Jesus. It was all we knew, pretty much all our parents talked about. Yet both of our stories have moments when we realized we weren’t walking in the way God intended, that God’s desire for us exceeded our tradition. These transformative moments happen in big and small ways. We may not get bowled over. But I believe we all have experiences that turn us around.”

Tim: I agree one hundred percent. When I describe my faith journey with people, I consistently see their faces light up when I tell them how I knew God was calling me to minister to the margins, how my own experience of being trapped in a religious ideology that conflicted with my making opened my heart to so many others who suffered similar experiences.

Shea: Paul’s repeated testimony in Acts and throughout his letters reminds us that experience is our prime witness material. Our stories matter because they explain how God works. And that makes them theological, because theology is simply “talking about God.” There’s some powerful stuff in this week’s lesson!

We’re wrapping up our summer tour of Acts, “Disorganized Religion,” with the final chapters in Paul’s ministry. Don’t miss these last two sessions! We meet on Thursday evenings at 7:30p CDT at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park. Or you can join us online via FB Live.

Who Are You?

Tim: Our “Disorganized Religion” tour of Acts goes into high gear for its final episodes.

Shea: It sure does. Paul is traveling all over the Mediterranean and everywhere he goes he meets hard opposition.

Tim: Other than his disciples, no one seems happy with him. Traditional Jews are angry because they believe he’s goading folks into heresy. Gentile power brokers don’t like how he’s disrupting their cities.

Shea: Conspiracies are forming to kill him. The constant pressure would crack a lesser person. But Paul perseveres. And Luke helps out with the occasional dash of humor or entertaining detail.

Tim: An example, please! Most of this final stretch of Acts reads like a broken record: Paul gets into a controversy, he’s brought before the magistrate, the magistrate decides there’s nothing to be done, and they send Paul somewhere else, where another court appearance yields similar results. Humor is a welcome element.

Shea: Here’s a funny moment I always enjoy. In chapter 19, there are some exorcists tramping around—seven sons of a Jewish priest. Now, mind you, they have no connection with Paul but they want to cash in on his notoriety. So they invoke the name of Jesus in their exorcism rites.

Tim: That’s gutsy! What happens?

Shea: Well, they meet up with a violent spirit who barks back at them, saying, “I know Jesus and I’m familiar with Paul, but who are you?” Then the possessed man attacks them!

Tim: Another one of those rather strange serves-‘em-right moments in Acts. And it is funny. But I think there’s also an important lesson there.

Shea: I can guess what you’re going to say, but go right ahead.

Tim: During these trying times, there are plenty of folks running around, doing things in Jesus’s name and they have no business doing so. Just a few days ago, Slate ran an article called “The New Hate Pastors” about self-appointed shepherds who abuse their pulpits to preach extremist hatred. As I read it, shaking my head, I kept hearing echoes from Acts: “Yep, I know Jesus and Paul, but who are you?”

Shea: And that speaks to us: folks will know we’re authentic Christians when our words and actions reflect the One we follow. Jesus has to be recognizable in us as people of love and justice and generosity. The answer to “Who are you?” should be obvious—so obvious the question doesn’t even need to be asked!

Tim: Yes! That’s it. This week as our Acts tour continues, we’ll contemplate the characteristics that Paul portrays as he goes through his trials. I think we can learn a lot from him!

Don’t miss this week’s outing in our “Disorganized Religion” summer tour of Acts. We meet in person at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park each Thursday evening at 7:30p CDT. If you can’t get out to the OP, you can join us online via FB Live. See you this week!