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The other woman said, “If I can’t have him, neither will you. Cut the child in half.” Then the king answered, “Give the first woman the living newborn. Don’t kill him. She is his mother.” – 1 Kings 3:26-27

Dear Gatherers,

Every time we witness horrific beat-downs of black bodies—like we’ve just seen with Tyre Nichols’ murder in Memphis—there are always pundits who wonder how much more we must endure to put an end to state-sanctioned violence. Then there are others who express valid concerns that abusive authority has become so normalized we’re numb to its harmfulness.

As followers of Christ, we can’t submit to either thought stream. It is not by mistake that God chose to enter our story at a time of backbreaking political oppression and violence. It was essential that we see God in those contexts to know that God is present always. It’s never too much for God to be with us, despite the horrors we create for ourselves through our sins of violence and greed and power.

It’s also important to remember that Jesus of Nazareth was steeped in a religious tradition that told gruesome stories of nearly unimaginable human depravity. A father takes his only son up a mountain intent on killing the boy in a misguided effort to please God (Genesis 22). Another father makes a vow that if God grants him victory over his enemies, he’ll sacrifice the first person to greet him when he returns home—who turns out to be his daughter (Judges 11). Civil war breaks out after a horde of xenophobic men gang-rapes an outsider’s companion (Judges 19). And in 1 Kings, two sex workers fight over maternity rights to one child. When the king suggests they slice the baby in two, the true mother pleads for her child’s life. It’s a Solomonic maternity test that proves right.

We call these stories “Texts of Terror,” because they expose cruelties that a hyper-masculine, nationalistic culture can visit on women, children, and outsiders. It should grieve us that our daily news runs rampant with similar texts of terror. Children are regularly sacrificed in these tales: sons and daughters, classmates, and neighborhood play companions. Not only do we inflict physical violence on their bodies. We inflict tremendous spiritual violence on those who survive. The brutality knows no bounds.

As scripture shows, these stories aren’t new. Jesus knew them and no doubt saw them play out in his own community. That may be why he pointed to child wellbeing as a mandate for faithful people. He healed children. He held them close. He warned against misleading and abusing them. And he taught us to value children’s lives (including grown sons and daughters) above all regard for power and control and “law and order.” Child wellbeing is our responsibility. When we make it a cultural norm, what happened in Memphis and so many other places in recent memory will become inconceivable. Let’s make it our cultural norm at Gather.

God help us.

Peace, with much love,

Pastor Tim

In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young will see visions. Your elders will dream dreams. — Acts 2:17

Dear Gatherers,

We’ve always prided ourselves on our Pentecostal heritage—not in the denominational sense, but rather in our Early Church roots and their emphatic promise of inclusion. “I will pour out my Spirit on all people,” Peter preaches, quoting the ancestral prophet Joel. “All means all,” we like to say, often adding, “Anything less than all means nothing at all.” That’s what being Pentecostal means in its truest sense.

What interests me is how Peter’s message didn’t come with a process for establishing a community’s intention of being radically hospitable. That was safely assumed. We likewise have no record of policies and procedures. No paperwork—if there was any—has been discovered in clay jars in the desert. No organizational documents exist. Instead, the how-to of ecstatic inclusion is characterized by two behaviors: young folks having visions and older folks dreaming dreams. That, by itself, is unusual. In Peter’s day, the reverse was more typical. Young people were dreamers. Their elders were the visionaries. Right off the bat, the Pentecostal movement in Acts flips the paradigm.

Embracing youthful visions and experience-based dreams is how we live the Pentecostal promise. What is the Spirit urging us to envision? What dreams are being brought to life in our community? If we do our vision work like young people, we’ll believe anything can be done. If we dare to dream like seasoned elders, we’ll recognize commitment and effort make dreams come true.

This Thursday at 7:30pm CST, we’re coming together to do some visioning and dreaming about the next 12 months. There are so many wonderful things coming into focus it’s breathtaking. Please make time to be with us for this conversation. It will take all of us to bring Gather’s 2023 vision to life and turn our dreams into reality. See you on Thursday!

Peace, with much love,

Pastor Tim

Arise! Shine! Your light has come; the Lord’s glory has shone upon you. Though darkness covers the earth and gloom the nations, the Lord will shine upon you; God’s glory will appear over you. – Isaiah 60:1-2

Dear Gatherers,

We’re approaching the halfway point in our Advent journey. To get to its true value, we must dive beneath the high-contrast dark/light, waiting/receiving, seeking/finding symbols to locate them in our own contexts. And the journey between Advent’s extremes can be very different for each one of us, depending on when, where, and how we find our way.

Isaiah’s wake-up call to Jerusalem—coming out of a 70-year nightmare of foreign captivity—resonates with anyone who loves Christmas hymns about angel choirs rousing a weary world out of its slumber. What Isaiah and the carols don’t mention, however, is how unsettling being awakened by bright light can be. The Advent call to rise and shine is a kind of “glory alarm” that startles. It may take time to adjust our sight and get our minds clear before the promises of hope, love, joy, and peace come into view.

One my favorite Advent companions, the 20^th-century mystic and pastor Howard Thurman, captures this sensation. “There are times when the light burns, when it is too bright, or when it is too revealing. Somehow I must accustom myself to the light and learn to look with steadiness on all that it discloses. I will not yield to the temptation to regard the light in me as being all the light there is… Even in darkness I will learn to wait for the light, confident that it will come to cast its shaft across my path at the point of my greatest and most tragic need” (“I Seek Truth and Light,” Meditations of the Heart).

Advent’s wake-up call is a very specific promise to each of us in our respective contexts. Let us arise to the light, peer into its brilliance, and patiently wait for our eyes adjust to new sights around us, knowing the light we possess is not all the light there is. Light often breaks into our lives from unusual places and unexpected sources in unpredictable ways—kind of like the God of Creation showing up in a borrowed cow crib surrounded by perfectly imperfect strangers. The glory alarm is shining. Our light has come. Time to open our eyes!

With much love,

Pastor Tim

The wolf will live with the lamb and the leopard will lie down with the young goat; the calf and the young lion will feed together, and a little child will lead them. – Isaiah 11:6

Dear Gatherers,

It’s just about that time of year when the History Channel lights up with specials about “what really happened at Christmas.” How do you explain Mary’s pregnancy? What’s up with the Star of Bethlehem? How do we reconcile the historical anomalies? It seems our post-modern minds only grant truth to “factual” events and rational “reality.” When did imagination leave the life of faith?

In Isaiah 11, the prophet imagines a time of serene cohabitation, when lambs feel unthreatened around wolves, leopards and kid goats nap in the sun, calves graze beside cubs. This is the divine vision often referred to as “The Peaceable Kingdom.” And of course, it’s more than domesticated wildlife. In fact, it’s probably not about predators and livestock at all.

The prophet wants to shock the system of a people that has suffered relentless turmoil and become heartlessly enthralled in predatory, psychopathic behaviors. While they chafe under foreign occupation, they fixate on “survival of the fittest” fatalism. (As Billie Holliday famously summarized Matthew 25:29, “Them that’s got shall get, them that’s not shall lose…”) God longs for the day when wolves and wildcats stop pouncing, when lambs and kids no longer feel threatened, when walls and fences come down because danger is no more. And a child shall lead them.

Many turn the child reference into a Messianic oracle, saying, “This is all about Jesus!” But that alters the prophet’s intended meaning. The world needs children simply because they can imagine what God envisions. Is that so far-fetched we put it on the shelf beside all the other biological contradictions in this picture? Have we become so “adult” we only see young people as “adults in the making”? In elevating the text to mean something mystical we lose the common sense it wants to convey, especially in an hour when imaginative thinking is scarce.

For the past few months, Gather has been working with the Children’s Defense Fund and Lilly Endowment to create a culture of child wellbeing in our community. It’s a three-year program out of which we’ll offer transformative opportunities to young people. In our conversations we keep coming back to one fact: we’re missing the Y factor at Gather. We need young folx to lead us. That’s why, as your pastor, I’m declaring 2023 as Gather’s Year of Youth. I challenge us to go through our friends and family lists to find young people for Gather. As they come into the community, we’ll figure out how best to provide what they need. In the meantime, we must figure out why we need them to lead. And for that I give you one word: imagination.

Grateful for vision and youth,

Pastor Tim

(Above: Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks, c. 1834, oil on canvas.)

God sets the solitary in families. – Psalm 68:6 (NKJV)

Last Sunday I had the pleasure of preaching at Congregational UCC in Arlington Heights. I spoke about “Excessive Love,” based on Luke 6:27: “Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who abuse you.” I told the church Jesus calls for a love so over-the-top that it overshoots the haters and abusers it targets. And that makes a whole lot of sense because its real objective is enabling us to get over and around hatred, scorn, and emotional violence we may suffer for the sake of believing God is big enough and powerful enough to love everyone without condition.

Excessive love started making sense as I thought about civil rights icons who took this notion to glorious extremes and then I scaled it down further, using Gather as an example of how excessive love works in faith communities. I talked about how often we hear from people who’ve been “wounded by traditions and congregations… by pastors who were supposed to be shepherding them but instead beat them out of the fold… of families who would rather hold on to their religion than their own kin and blood.” (Catch the sermon here: https://youtu.be/CZeeHaq9t5Q.)

I felt the congregation lean in. They recognized what we understand all too well at Gather: too, too often spiritual trauma hangs a neon DO NOT ENTER sign over church doors. The horrors of previous abuses advise against ever taking that kind of risk again. Just stepping into a space that feels “churchy” can trigger unwelcome emotions and memories. (The late great bell hooks called the lovelessness that creates these sensations “soul murder,” and she’s right.)

Yet an avoidance strategy only works so long because it doesn’t address the primal issue: our soul needs a home. The God in us craves the company of God in others. Spirituality is—has always been—a group project, despite trendy attempts to work out an eccentric solo variety. Our soul needs a home. The souls of others we love need a home. We all long to sit at table surrounded by eagerly loving family… to know a place where home-cooked flavors are tasty yet free of toxins and dogma we recall from past kitchens… a home where we show up exactly as we are, with whomever we invite, confident there will be no cold shoulders or drama or backlash.

This Sunday, Gather invites you to come on home. Don’t come alone, either. Find someone whose soul is looking for a home. We’ll be serving up some old-school home cooking with some fresh, life-giving flavors. There will be plenty good room at the table. We’re going to do all the things we think of when families get together: we’re going to rejoice, tell stories, think about the future, eat and laugh and dance and love on one another. Come home for the holidays. You’ve been away far too long.

With all my love,

Pastor Tim

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love. – Ephesians 4:14-16

Dear Gatherers,

One of my first jobs out of undergrad was teaching high school English, back when kids learned how to diagram sentences. While I haven’t thought about diagramming in years, it all came back while reading Ephesians 4, where one sentence runs a total of 81 words (see above.) I couldn’t begin to diagram it. But the message is hard to miss. Here’s the Tim translation: “We need to leave deceitful foolishness alone and tell the truth in love, growing in Christ, so we can mature into a high-functioning, healthy community grounded in love.”

This is not to suggest Gather is not a loving, healthy community. We’re all of that. What brings this text to mind is how floridly Paul describes windbags who spew doctrinal gusts to trick and deceive and promote hatefulness. Once he sets that scene, Paul uses the rest of this elegant, runaway sentence to effectively say, “Yeah, we can’t grow if we keep falling for their baloney.”

Now this is hard for many of us hear because some of these blowhards (forgive the pun) raised us and prayed with us and taught us the Bible. Yet, in retrospect, we can see how—for good or bad—they used scripture to manipulate and demean and clobber us, often with such craftiness we don’t want anything to do with faith or the gospel or even God. And that’s understandable. But is it viable?

Paul doesn’t think so. And I have to say I’m on his side. Allowing the schemers and deceivers to stunt our spiritual growth hands leaves us deprived. The way we overcome deceitful doctrines and tricky translations is by de-weaponizing the Word, knowing scripture for ourselves—not only what it says, but why it says what it says, and what it was originally meant to achieve. We start there and then we grow into deeper love for God, for scripture, for one another, and for others like us who’ve not yet found their way home.

That’s why our current series, Queer Theology 101, is so vital. It goes right back to the source and tests what’s there against everything we’ve been told was there. Once we sort through the misleading, often flat-out incorrect doctrines used to demean and deceive, we can move on to “speaking the truth in love.” Get some of that good word in your system and I promise you’ll grow!

Join us this Thursday as we work through more of the so-called clobber texts that have been abused to shame and condemn LGBTQ folks. You’ll discover going back to unlearn some of this stuff is how we find our way forward. The conversation starts at 7:30pm CDT. I look forward to seeing you!

Peace,

Pastor Tim

See to it that nobody enslaves you with philosophy and foolish deception, which conform to human traditions and the way the world thinks and acts rather than Christ. All the fullness of deity lives in Christ’s body. – Colossians 2:8-9

Dear Gatherers,

In an infamous April 1823 letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson went off on Christian theology, saying belief that God’s existence is revealed in Jesus amounts to “Atheism” since it ignores sufficient proof of God found elsewhere. (Jefferson was a devout deist with no use for Christian dogma.) The Incarnation was especially prickly for him. He called it it a “fancy absolutely incomprehensible” and hoped “the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away all this artificial scaffolding” to focus solely on the teachings of his hero, a first-century Jewish philosopher from Nazareth.

Despite boundless respect for the man who crafted so many unforgettable American ideals (that many Americans have lately forgot), I have to say, “Pres. J, you missed the point.” The fully embodied expression of God is necessary because it models an alternative way of being that achieves the ideal. We are created to house something too great to fashion on our own. We embody love more powerful than any ability we possess. We embrace life that defies labels and transcends boundaries. That is our divine birthright. As the Psalmist famously confessed, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high I cannot attain it” (Ps. 139:6).

That’s why incarnation matters. Our Maker took on human flesh to demonstrate what lived-in divinity looks like and how it behaves. We are flesh-and-blood organisms living in a material world with flesh-and-blood needs. And when we cynically ignore this (getting all skeptical or super-spiritual—they’re essentially the same thing) the most pathetically pious among us turn against bodies. Look at the Far Right’s obsession with bodies, not as holy habitations, but as political fodder that scoffs at God’s undeniable presence in bodies of women and queer folx and immigrants and differently abled people and people of color and anyone else who doesn’t conform to a white supremacist, patriarchal norm. The odiousness of this stuff is plenty wrong. But there’s a fundamentally faithless confession in it as well. To denigrate or oppress “other” bodies exposes an atheistic belief there’s no God inside them. I have a real problem with that.

Dear Mr. Jefferson, you may be correct when you see atheistic bankruptcy gift-wrapped in pseudo-Christian nonsense. It wasn’t only in your time. Lots of that on display these days. But the incomprehensible “fancy” you despise at the core of Christian thought? It’s not that hard to comprehend. It’s not even that fancy. God dwells in us fully in the same way God fully dwelt in Jesus. That makes our bodies sacred. Our choices sacred. Our lives sacred. And when we learn to love our bodies and the bodies around us—even disagreeable ones—we’ll get much closer to the divine inside.

Join us every Thursday through November, for a compelling Queer Theology 101 conversation that challenges all kinds of presumptions. We meet at 7:30pm CDT via Zoom.

Peace,

Pastor Tim

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