Join us this Thursday at 7:30 as we conclude our Advent study series, Hopeward Bound, a hope-peace-joy-love sequence of conversations in tandem with Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. We meet in the Chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park, Illinois. If you’re unable to get there in person, find us online at Facebook Live. 

Turn It Up!

Tim: In her essay “Humans 101,” Anne Lamott says we’re designed for joy. Assuming you agree with her, what do you think she means?

Shea: I do agree and, based on how she discusses joy, I believe she’s connecting joy with wholeness, a kind of deep contentment we sometimes refer to as “shalom.”

Tim: Are you saying our joy is contingent on having that kind of wholeness? If so, there would be plenty of days when joy would be impossible for me because shalom doesn’t always show up on my daily menu. There are plenty of days when I’m depleted, disjointed, cracked open in ways I didn’t see coming. But, rather oddly, on many of those days I still find joy.

Shea: Exactly. Joy is not contingent on wholeness, because there’s a discipline to it. We practice joy, particularly when feeling joyful seems beyond our reach. I think that’s what Lamott is talking about when she recommends going back and redoing the “joy training.”

Tim: Advent, of course, is the perfect season for contemplating joy, in part because it’s so central to the tradition and story. This coming Sunday churches around the world will light the “joy” candle and, of course, the texts and hymns and sermons will point toward rejoicing.

Shea: Yes, but I also think we need to take care not confuse Advent joy with “Yuletide cheer.” There’s a lot of sentiment wound into the holidays—the festivities and movies and decorations and songs playing nonstop wherever you go. That’s all part of the cheer. Joy runs deeper. Joy abides.

Tim: My mind keeps racing toward Jesus’s last conversation with his followers, where he assures them they are loved and then tells them, “I’ve told you these things so that your joy might be complete” (John 15:11).

Shea: And then he commands them to love one another, to the degree that they would be willing to die for one another. So there is a connection between profound joy and the deepest kind of love.

Tim: I couldn’t agree more. And that connection can unlock the mystery of abiding joy. The “joy training” Lamott talks about is actually closer to learning to love as fully as possible.

Shea: And if we want to turn up the joy this season, we’ll have to fire up our love lights and keep them burning at full brightness as well.

Tim: Yes! This Advent let us go back into the joy training and turn it up to full volume! Lamott is right. We are designed for joy!

Join us this Thursday at 7:30 as we continue our Advent study series, Hopeward Bound, a hope-peace-joy-love sequence of conversations in tandem with Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. We meet in the Chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park, Illinois. If you’re unable to get there in person, find us online at Facebook Live. 

A Letting Go 

Tim: This week our attention to turns to peace, which traditionally becomes the focus of Advent’s second Sunday.

Shea: But we’re looking at peace in a slightly different light, thanks to Anne Lamott.

Tim: In her book Almost Everything, she reminds us that peace is something we must find for ourselves.

Shea: What’s more she lets us know we can’t give peace to anyone else, even those we love dearly who may be desperate to find it.

Tim: Lamott calls peace “an inside job”—it’s very intense, personal, and hopefully enduring, work.

Shea: What interests me is how she sees peace as a result of letting go the shame and frustration—even sometimes the sense of failure—that we inherit from social demands and family expectations. And I’m wondering how that connects with Advent’s longing for peace. How does that work into this pattern Lamott draws for us?

Tim: It’s an interesting question. So often we take the Advent “peace” texts for granted. The child will be a Ruler of Peace, Isaiah promises. The lion and lamb will rest beside one another. High places will be brought low, depressed places will be lifted up. This poetry is in our bones. We’ve heard it for as long as we can remember. So long, in fact, that we don’t really think about these familiar verses very much.

Shea: What should we be thinking?

Tim: That’s what we’ll explore in this Thursday’s study. Onething I’d encourage us to consider is that the Gospels tell us Jesus was not born into peaceful circumstances. Both in Bethlehem and in the foretelling of Christ’s return, Advent actually disturbs the peace. Now why would that be?

Shea: Because the presence of Christ brings something new and powerful into the being. It requires us to let go of so much of what we rely on: our understanding of what is “normal” and “acceptable,” our belief that we are self-sufficient—

Tim: Our nagging worries that we don’t measure up—

Shea: And in the end our fear of losing control. That’s really how the coming of Christ disturbs the peace. And yet it’s also how peace comes to us.

Tim: To find peace means letting go, surrendering the idea that we’re in control, that we ever were or could be in control. It’s what pushes us to rely on the saving and keeping power of divine grace.

Shea: The coming of Christ teaches us peace is an inside job, something we have to wrestle out with ourselves.

Tim: This week’s look at peace is going to challenge us in a lot ways!

Shea: It will be a gift, that’s for sure.

Enter the Paradox

Shea: We’re going into our first Advent at Gather. It feels important somehow.

Tim: It is important. As a new faith community we have to establish Advent’s meaning for us. It’s like we’re setting up housekeeping, deciding what goes where and how it works.

Shea: Especially for those of us who may come from traditions that aren’t so big on Advent, understanding what it’s all about and why it’s important is, well, important.

Tim: It’s such a blessed season to walk through together, because it opens up so many questions and challenges us to reconsider so many things we take for granted.

Shea: Such as…

Tim: The Incarnation is the big one, this paradox of a fully human, fully divine God manifested in the company of ancient peasants and forever present in the world. Then there’s the paradox of how it all works, because the concept is very clear—the Word Made Flesh dwelling among us. But living into this idea is often a very messy proposition, mostly because it requires us to draw comfort from our own frailty even as we draw strength from the God who abides with us. Just considering Advent in this context can be a real mind bender when you really think about it.

Shea: Let’s talk about the Anne Lamott book we’re reading as part of our Advent study.

Tim: Yes, it’s a great read for the season. It’s not Christmasy in any way—not even overtly “religious.” But it’s messy in ways that mirror our current situation. The title really captures what Lamott has done: Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. It’s a little bit of this and a little of that. As she rummages through many thoughts that ricochet in our minds during these strange times, Lamott keeps turning us back to big ideas that belong in Advent—hope, certainly, but also love and joy and peace and faith and truth.

Shea: This week’s study focuses on hope and we’re revisiting some of the famous Advent prophecies in partnership with Lamott’s chapter called “Puzzles.”

Tim: That’s right. The essay is about finding hope in contradictory emotions, learning how to enter paradox, to draw life and hope from it, to recognize that, as she writes, sometimes the opposite of truth is another truth. I truly believe one of the Christ Child’s most pressing concerns was showing us how to deal with that.

Shea: Enter the paradox. This will be a very rich Advent!

Tim: That’s the prayer behind the hope.

Join us this Thursday at 7:30 as we begin our four-week Advent study series, Hopeward Bound, a hope-peace-joy-love sequence of conversations in tandem with Anne Lamott’s Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. We will meet in the Chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, in Oak Park, Illinois. If you’re unable to get there in person, find us online at Facebook Live. 

Shea: We’re wrapping up the “Feast!” series in a unique and exciting way.

Tim: Yes! For our final study we’re going to have “dinner church,” which is part of a new kind of liturgical movement that harkens back to the Early Church, when the first Christians worshiped around the table.

Shea: So it will be worship and study?

Tim: Sure will—we’ll enjoy a simple meal while we sing and pray and hear a brief message. “They shared all things in common,” the Book of Acts tells us as it describes what community life was like for the first Christians. So we’ll do something similar.

Shea: Any tip on the message? What are you thinking about there?

Tim: We’ll look at the harvest feasts that the Early Church observed: Pentecost, or the spring harvest festival, and Sukkot, the autumn festival. Both celebrations fire the imagination and invite us to think about our own faith tradition in fuller ways.

Shea: Pentecost gets our attention because we think of it as the Church’s birthdate. It’s when that great moment happens. The Holy Spirit descends on the believers, a great manifestation of power takes place, and Peter preaches his stunning message of radical inclusion: God said, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.”

Tim: You know what we say around Gather…

Shea: All means all, y’all!

Tim: Amen to that! If folks doubted what the Spirit was up to at Pentecost, it was because they had no idea what the harvest feast was all about. Pentecost’s main purpose was to celebrate the first great in-gathering of the season. The early wheat constituted a bounty that guaranteed folks would be nourished during the longer season, when they needed strength and stamina to bring in the autumn harvest.

Shea: So the Pentecostal “all means all” in-gathering was necessary to nurture the Church’s future growth.

Tim: Check this out. If the first-century believers behaved remotely like most Christians today there wouldn’t be a Christianity to speak of. If they got all wrapped up in keeping folks out, they would have never grown the Jesus movement as quickly as they did. The harvest at Pentecost—that first great in-gathering—provided Peter and Paul and all those working beside them with the fortitude and staying power to reap an even greater harvest.

Shea: Is that why there are so many references to harvests in their letters?

Tim: Yes. As bona fide Pentecostals, they identified as harvesters called to bring a new thing into existence. Since they’re our ancestors, we should be harvesters too. And we should embrace the Pentecostal view that “all means all!”

Shea: I say amen to that! I’m really looking forward to Thursday’s feast!

Join us this Thursday, as we conclude our study series, “Feast!” in the Fellowship Hall of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street in Oak Park (Green Line: Ridgeland). Doors open at 7:00p, the worship begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

Fully, Properly Fed

Tim: There are so many feast stories in the Gospels.

Shea: The first thing that comes to mind is the large number of feasting parables. Stories about feasts, preparing for feasts, who gets invited, and how guests behave. Jesus talks about banquets because that was his world. Apart from the parables, nearly every time Jesus steps indoors he’s at a feast of some kind.

Tim: That’s tough for a lot of folks to accept. Jesus was quite the partygoer. He eats with the tightly wound religious set one day and then he upsets them when they see him hanging with folks they regard as “sinners.”

Shea: Jesus’s eagerness to accept any and every invitation caused many folks to view him as a libertine and radical.

Tim: If we were seeing Jesus in a contemporary setting, he’d cover the social landscape, from fancy black-tie events to house parties. It’s not like he’s a social climber, leaving old friends behind to worm his way into the jet set. But he was a social butterfly. He went wherever he wanted to go and took his posse with him. That was radical.

Shea: In Jesus’s day, classes and genders didn’t mix at banquets. Ethnic groups tended to hang together, although the hospitality ethic sometimes required inviting a foreigner into one’s home. There were all kinds of rules and customs in place to keep everyone segregated.

Tim: Just like today. While it’s got a whole lot better, there are still a lot of places I wouldn’t be comfortable walking into, even if I was invited. That’s not only because I would be concerned about not being welcomed. I wouldn’t know how to behave or what to eat.

Shea: It’s the old joke about not knowing what fork to use. It was no better in Jesus’s day, even though they ate with their hands. There were all these subtleties: where you sat, how you dressed, who poured the wine, who washed guests’ hands and feet, what was on the menu. First-century readers caught these nuances and saw what was really going on around the table. It’s a little tougher for us. Without the background info, we’re not getting fully, properly fed when we read the feast stories. That’s what we’ll be looking at this Thursday.

Tim: I couldn’t have set it up better. This week is all about menus and etiquette and social demands, and how all of that became powerful material for Jesus to show us a better way of being.

Join us this Thursday, as we continue our study series, “Feast!” in the Chapel of Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street in Oak Park (Green Line: Ridgeland). Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

“New Birth”-day Parties

Shea: The new “Feast!” series is turning out to be very enjoyable and inspiring! So many details that get lost in translation—it’s good to see them surface in our discussions.

Tim: I agree. We often forget that even as our faith transcends time and place, many of its customs are rooted in times and places very unlike our own. Some things that we hardly think about—like bread, for instance—were loaded with meaning in the early days of the Church. That was the big a-ha in last week’s study. And this week’s will be similar, I think.

Shea: How so? What are we looking at this week?

Tim: It turns out we’ll be meeting on All Saints Day, which creates an invitation that’s too good to turn down. There couldn’t be a better day to talk about the longstanding Christian tradition of feast days.

Shea: And what is that?

Tim: Very early on, the Church embraced a practice of commemorating its martyrs by designating the date of their deaths as feast days. They envisioned their last day on earth as their birthday—or new birth-day—when they were born into everlasting life.

Shea: So these saints’ days are really new birth-day parties.

Tim: Exactly. And as we’ve said all along, in the Christian tradition—well, actually, in all faith traditions—feasts are typically associated with rites of passage: baptisms, weddings, funerals, and other events or rituals that change someone’s status.

Shea: Having your life taken from you because of your beliefs… that certainly qualifies as a change in status!

Tim: While the first Christians no doubt grieved the losses within their beloved faith communities they adamantly chose to celebrate those who were preceding them in death. So they designated the anniversaries of their executions as feast days in their honor. That’s how we get St. Stephen’s Day and St. Teresa’s Day and so on.

Shea: And this tradition continues.

Tim: Yes, it does. All of these thousands of years later we continue to beatify and commemorate folks who’ve literally or effectively given their lives for the gospel of Christ. So new saints are added to the list all the time. For instance, earlier this month the Catholic Church designated one of my personal heroes, Archbishop Oscar Romero, a saint.

Shea: Deservedly so, since he was a leader in liberation theology and assassinated while standing at the altar following a sermon in which he pleaded for soldiers refuse to participate in the wholesale violence and repression of the El Salvadoran regime. His courage and conviction knew no limits.

Tim: And his feast day will be March 24, the anniversary of his murder—or in Christian terms, the celebration of his entrance to new life.

Shea: I want to say, “Tell me more.” But we’ll have to wait until Thursday night.

Tim: Yes. It will be the perfect study for All Saints Day!

Join us this Thursday, as we continue our study series, “Feast!” at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

O Taste and See!

Tim: We have a new harvest-season series we’re calling “Feast!”

Shea: We’re going to look at food-related topics in scripture and get better grounding in why biblical writers placed so much value on flavor and meals and eating rituals.

Tim: All of that is important in scripture.

Shea: In the Judeo-Christian framework, food is a cultural and religious anchor. Both the Hebrew and Christian texts spill a lot of ink about food. And the central ritual in both faiths occurs weekly at the table. In Judaism there’s the Shabbat meal on Friday evenings, when family and friends gather to begin the Sabbath. Christians do something similar on Sunday mornings, when we gather at the Communion table at church. These sacred meals reclaim our collective past and recommit to a shared future and purpose.

Tim: We can’t overlook our Muslim, Hindu, and other friends who also participate in sacred feasts and food-based rituals.

Shea: Yes, the combination of food and worship is universal, in part because food is an extremely reliable and enjoyable way to experience the sacred. For instance, bread and wine rest at the center of the Shabbat and Eucharistic meals. Yet there’s much more going on.

Tim: Such as?

Shea: Both feasts engage all five senses. In Jewish homes, the week begins with a kind of multisensory reawakening: the sight and smell of lighted candles, the sound of prayers and songs, the feel of bread shared across the table, the taste of bread and wine and other dishes spread before the guests. Having inherited those sensibilities from our Jewish ancestors, the same thing happens during Christian Communion.

Tim: Both rituals refer to the ancient past in some way, with Jewish families recalling the Creation and the Exodus, while Christians remember the promises made real in the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus. But they are also very immediate in the claims they make on those who gather. At the table, with all of our senses enlivened, we become highly aware that God is with us, in us, and for us.

Shea: Exactly! That’s why the Christian Communion liturgy includes the Great Thanksgiving, a lengthy prayer that offers gratitude for the work of Christ and evidence of God’s goodness in the world. As our senses come alive to the table’s sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and touches, our spirits also come alive to our Maker. How did the psalmist put it? “O taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Ps. 34:8)

Tim: This is going to be a marvelous series—a true feast!

Join us this Thursday, as we begin a new study series, “Feast!” at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

The Gratitude Impulse

Shea: This week we’re wrapping up the Spiritual Disciplines for Undisciplined Times series. How do you think it went?

Tim: It’s always hard to assess right off the bat. It takes time to find out how much impact a series or specific lesson or idea has. But it’s been an invigorating study, that much I’ll say. And we were especially blessed by the contributions of Bishop Pennese and Rev. Hughes as each of them led one of the discussions. For a new church, we are really blessed to have some tremendous support!

Shea:  Yes, we are. Now our final lesson focuses on Thankfulness. I get why we’d want to include gratitude as a spiritual discipline and why we would close on this topic. But the narrative we’re looking at really interests me. Why Miriam?

Tim: I don’t think enough gets said about Miriam. We tend to push her into deep background when we tell the Exodus story. Either she’s Baby Moses’s big sister who looks out for him when he’s floating in the Nile. Or, as we see in this week’s text, she’s the grown sibling who dances after Pharaoh and his army drown in the Sea of Reeds.

Shea: And then there’s the episode where she criticizes Moses because he marries a woman of color and she gets struck with a skin disease.

Tim: Yes, and together that’s about it for Miriam. But scripture is very clear that she’s a prophet. The big piece that gets discounted when we typically talk about Miriam is very important: she’s responsive to her times and the move of God in her situations. And this aspect of her character is writ large in the story we’ll look at this week.

Shea: Hmm. And the connection to thankfulness?

Tim: The outbreak of joy that compels Miriam and the women around her to pick up tambourines and start dancing surely comes from a deep place of thankfulness. Look, these folks are fleeing enslavement and their captor has just been vanquished. The first impulse is “Thank God!” Very often, that impulse leads to singing and shouting and dancing. At least, that’s how it works in my life. But it interests me that Miriam and her friends have their tambourines at the ready. They’re ready to rejoice and I believe that’s because they live in what you might call a state of anticipated thankfulness.

Shea: They’re ready! I like that. And I’m ready to find out what more we can learn from Miriam this Thursday. Meanwhile, do you want to say anything about the new series?

Tim: I’m just going to tease it a bit. All I’m going say is we’re calling it “Feast!” I’ll say more this Thursday night.

Join us this Thursday, as we continue our study series, “Spiritual Disciplines for Undisciplined Times” at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

The Spiritual Discipline of “Standing With”

Tim: This week we’re going to look at what, for me, is one of the greatest stories in the Hebrew Bible, Elijah and the Widow at Zarephath.
Shea: Yes! On the surface it’s a very simple story, but there’s so much going on underneath. There hasn’t been any rain, famine has descended on the region, and God sends the prophet Elijah north into pagan country, where he meets a widow at the city gate. She’s at the end of the road. Her cupboards are bare and she’s gathering sticks so she can make a fire to prepare one last meal before she and her son starve to death. But Elijah stops her and insists that she cook for him first.

Tim: Talk about chutzpah! And we should probably note the famine is the result of a prophecy that Elijah declares against Ahab, the king of Israel. There’s a bit of irony going on: the prophet is instrumental in bringing drought on the land and now he’s turning to a foreign widow for food.
Shea: Added irony: it’s not like he isn’t being provided for. He’s been in the wilderness for some time and God has sent ravens to feed him. And yet he turns to a woman who’s got next to nothing to share with him… who’s concerned about her son… and who has no social or religious obligation to this arrogant holy man from Israel. But she agrees to help and in the process she teaches a powerful lesson about generosity as a spiritual discipline.

Tim: Go on…
Shea: For starters, her own circumstances don’t blind her to others’ needs of others. She doesn’t know that Elijah called for the famine. She doesn’t know that God has already proven faithful to him—he’s not going to go hungry no matter what she does. What she does know is there’s a hungry foreigner at the gate and something inside her can’t be comfortable with that.

Tim: And generosity as a spiritual discipline?
Shea: It’s not charity. Let’s be clear about that. The widow doesn’t give because she can afford it. She’s not writing a check or clicking on a GoFundMe page. She’s showering Elijah with hospitality. She recognizes they’re all hungry. Generosity as a spiritual discipline is rooted in two principles: hospitality and solidarity with the poor, hungry, and marginalized. She is going to stand with him, even though she doesn’t know him.

Tim: So you’re saying Elijah is in worse shape than the widow and her son because he’s an outsider with no one to provide for him.
Shea: Exactly. And she becomes a divine instrument of generosity. There’s more to explore in this story and I can’t wait for us to dig into it this Thursday night!

Tim: I have a strong feeling we’re going to be fed in a very special way this week!

Join us this Thursday, as we continue our study series, “Spiritual Disciplines for Undisciplined Times” at L!VE Café, 163 S. Oak Park Avenue in Oak Park. Doors open at 7:00p, the study begins at 7:30p. If you can’t be with us in person, join us via Facebook Live.

NEW SERIES BEGINS IN SEPTEMBER
What kinds of spiritual practices and habits work best for us? How do we keep our faith life fresh? What do we do when things we’ve always done feel like they’re not working? How do we stay plugged in to God’s work in us and our community? This fall we’ll look at spiritual disciplines as our means of survival in an increasingly chaotic world.
Join us every Thursday through October 11, as we examine Spiritual Disciplines for Undisciplined Times.