Category

Weekly Update

HOPE IN HELPLESS TIMES

Their lives will be like a lush garden; they will grieve no more. Then the young women will dance for joy; the young and old men will join in. – Jeremiah 31:12-13

 

With each passing day, another round of headlines the likes of which we’ve never seen. The pandemic losses are staggering. Struggles for racial equality give rise to panic as America’s white supremacist systems of power erode in real time. Economic hardship eats away at our peace of mind and our society becomes more and more fragmented.

You can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, they say. But there’s more than breakfast at stake and many of us are edging into traumatized responses and behaviors. We keep talking about being “in this together.” But we’re clearly not together. (We can’t even agree to mask up for the sake of otherfs.) We keep hearing about a “new normal,” although the prospects of what that might be aren’t terribly inviting—at least not from where we are at present.

In many ways, we feel off-kilter, displaced. This is not the life we know. It’s not a world we wanted to make. All of that contributes to feelings of helplessness. Many of us feel like we’re being held hostage to ideologies that bear us no good. Forget morale—many of us are experiencing what ethicists and psychologists call “moral injury.”

What we’re experiencing right now is not too far off from the Babylonian captivity of the 6th century BCE, when many of Israel’s best and brightest were displaced and the nation’s proudest achievements fell into ruin. The prophet Jeremiah was horrified to watch his beloved country come apart at the seams. The trauma his people suffered grieved him deeply. He was able to connect the dots too, as the people had abandoned godly principles to pursue futile ambitions. And here they were, helpless and hopeless. Yet right in the middle of Jeremiah’s bleak dispatches of divine discontent a stream of bright oracles appears. There will be refreshing and restoration. Hope will be honored. Desolation will give way to lush life—complete with dancing and joy and abundance.

Can we apply these promises to our distress? Walter Brueggemann writes, “It is striking and odd that while the notion of promise is enormously inconvenient in the midst of modernity, those who are marginalized by modernity—the poor, the oppressed, and the disadvantaged—find [God’s promises] to be credible speech” (A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming). Where we are affects how firmly we cling to God’s promises. There’s hope in these helpless times. We will be refreshed, renewed, and restored. The new normal will be an improved normal. We will find a way to be in this together. Let’s cling to that. And if we struggle with our hope, let’s give it time, because we may find ourselves reaching for it sooner than we expect.

Don’t miss “Refresh,” a special online service this coming Sunday at 5pm CDT. You can join us on our YouTube channel, Gather Austin Oak-Park Church. See you there!

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

RESCUED

What’s On the Other Side?

In his recent book That All Shall Be Saved, the Christian philosopher David Bentley Hart asks some probing questions about salvation and its presumptive benefit, escaping eternal punishment. Bringing all of his brilliance to bear on one of our faith’s most sacrosanct topics—the afterlife—Hart begins at the beginning. Rather than ask, “What happens after we die?” he wonders how our faith ancestors understood salvation.

Hart is adamant that the original story of salvation was all about rescue. Our mortality enslaves us. Death is the thing we fear most, the eventuality no one escapes, the ultimate interruption that ends everything. And since, as followers of the Risen Christ, our faith rests on belief that death has no hold on us, we are free from inhibiting fears, fatalism, and defeatist mentalities. We are rescued from terror of the unknown and threats of torment.

How easily we forget that! How quickly we reach for beliefs we’re told we must believe despite our inability to reconcile them with who we know God to be. There’s something in us (especially us 21st-century capitalist Americans) who cling to a narrative of winners and losers. It’s not enough to be loved by a merciful Creator. Our joy, it seems, must be framed by another’s suffering. Even those of us who devote our lives to taking everyone to heaven with us, there’s still a perverse satisfaction hidden in the belief that those who don’t join our merry band will pay a severe price for their error.

Yet, as Hart points out, in John 12:32, Jesus declares he will draw (actually, drag) all people to himself. This is the same God Incarnate who nine chapters earlier explains his presence as a divine gift of love for the world—not to condemn it but to rescue it (John 3:16-17). The language never rests with eternal punishment and torment; abandonment and destruction are always upended by unconditional love and bottomless grace. Yet, somehow, we’ve got things flipped, terrifying folks with grisly tales of torment instead of drawing them to Pure Love made real in flesh and spirit. What the hell?

As Hart puts it, we have become slaves to the belief that we must believe in a God who destroys what God creates, who gives us freedom and then tortures us if we don’t do as we’re told, who endows us with choice and then abandons us if we don’t meet demands placed on us. Something is woefully askew in this proposition. But dare we question it? Absolutely not! We simply must believe it. Or else!

Maybe it’s time we look more closely at how the afterlife has been commoditized (and commercialized) to manipulate us. Then we must ask, if we’re under the influence of control mechanisms that mean us no good, can we be rescued from them? Could that be what salvation is really about?

This week we finish our “Origins” series with a hard look at afterlife issues. How much of what we’ve been told is genuinely based in scripture and how much is embroidery? What would our faith look like if there weren’t implicit promises of reward and/or threats of punishment attach? Join us this Thursday at 7:30pm CDT, using the information below.

 

Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85212231523?pwd=MC85VzJBVHF2MWYvVXRZcVFLdzJEdz09

Meeting ID: 852 1223 1523, Password: 072524

Dial-in: 1-312-626-6799, using the same ID and password

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

FALL FRESH

Spirit and Community

Early in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus returns to Nazareth after his first ministry tour. Reports of great exploits precede him and everyone packs the synagogue to get a look at the local Boy Wonder. He opens Isaiah and reads these words: The Lord God’s spirit is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me  to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim release for captives, and liberation for prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

All preachers make decisions about the opening and closing lines of their texts. And I’ve often wondered why doesn’t Jesus read on? The prophet extends the message of comfort for those in despair, widening the circle to include people who’ve lost their sense of belonging. In today’s vernacular they would be folks who feel disoriented after a devastating event has destroyed their sense of place. The prophet says the Spirit comes to “comfort all who mourn… to give them a crown in place of ashes, oil of joy in place of mourning, a mantle of praise in place of discouragement” (Is. 61:2-3).

Perhaps Jesus didn’t continue because he wanted his friends and neighbors to focus on the liberation message in the opening lines. Perhaps he was citing this text to explain his work, as in, “This is what I’ve been up to and what I’m called to do.” If I were preaching from Isaiah 61 these days, however, I’d keep reading because grief and mourning have been our constant companions these past few months.

We are all, to some degree, struggling with pandemic and political fatigue. While other countries have managed to keep the two apart (to their benefit), in America we can’t stop inflating everything into a political nightmare. If it’s not face masks in July, it’s how we offer season’s greetings in December. If it’s not stock car races in Alabama, it’s peaceful protests in Chicago. A day at the beach is nobody’s “day at the beach” and that’s not only because of obvious health risks; it’s also because going to the beach is now a political issue.

Isaiah reminds us the Spirit comes to heal and restore community, to bring us back to ourselves, to rebuild what we’ve destroyed and renew what has died in us. Our prayer must be, “Spirit of the living God fall fresh on us.” We need comfort. We need revival. We need hope that one day the glory we used to know—the sun that warmed our hearts and hands and faces—will be ours again. Fall fresh. Amen.

Don’t miss this week’s Origins study where we’ll explore the relationship between the Holy Spirit and community. As always, it will be a rich and rewarding time together. Study begins at 7:30p CDT. See you there!

 

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85212231523?pwd=MC85VzJBVHF2MWYvVXRZcVFLdzJEdz09

Meeting ID: 852 1223 1523; Password: 072524

Or you can participate via phone at 1-312-626-6799 (same ID and password).

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

THE DARK SIDE

What’s the Deal with Evil?

 

I form light and create darkness, make prosperity and create doom; I am the Lord, who does all these things. – Isaiah 45:7

 

The assignment sounded simple enough for a novice seminarian: a brief paper describing your assumptions about God. Why, this paper could write itself! God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-present. The omni “everything” God. The paper came back with a note: See me. In the subsequent conversation my professor said, “If God is all of these things all of the time, explain suffering.” It felt like a kick in the stomach. Then she said something I’ll never forget. “We have to stop burdening God and start taking responsibility for ourselves.” Wow. Do we really do that to God? Two weeks later a new assignment: explain sin and evil—this time with a caveat: “Don’t leave God out.”

These seemingly innocuous exercises (easy enough for a Sunday school kid!) unearthed a challenge most of us avoid. What we say and think about God matters. And if God is who we say God is, there might a dark side to all the omni-ness. Might be.

The ancients wrestled with this problem constantly and learned to make peace with its harder edges. If God is the source of everything—the Unmoved Mover, as Socrates put it—then there are pieces of “everything” that aren’t so wonderful. Evil exists because God allows it. Indeed, as the Creator, we must allow that evil originates with God, either intentionally or as a deficiency—an absence of qualities we “omni-fy” as God’s supreme power: omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and so on.

In Isaiah, God says flat-out, “I form light and create darkness, make prosperity and create doom.” The presumed readers of that text understood and accepted a God with all power could do anything. It all comes from God—light and darkness, prosperity and doom. (The Hebrew reads, “peace and evil,” and translators’ reluctance to go there shows how easily we try to help God out, which is more of a problem for us than God.)

Evil exists. We don’t need a divinity degree to know that. Why it exists is also obvious if somewhat jarring: because God lets it. But questions about God’s role also obscure more questions about us. If we know evil exists, why do we submit to it? Why, for instance, are so many of us willing to risk others’ lives because we’d rather not mask up during a pandemic? Why do we chase wealth at all costs, knowing, as Paul warned, all kinds of evil grows from greed (1 Tim. 6:10)? Why do we persist in our love of war-making and gun-play and drug-taking and race-hating and other deadly pursuits? And how come we’re so adept at dressing evil up to look and sound like righteousness? (Patriotism, prosperity, personal freedom all get pulled into the mix without concealing the underlying evil.)

Clearly there are some issues between God and us. A clearer understanding our role in perpetuating evil is how we ease the burden it levies on our world, its people, and our own lives. And in the process, we can ease the burden on God too.

Join our weekly study as we continue our “Origins” series with a blunt discussion of evil and its mismatched twin, sin. We meet each Thursday at 7:30p CDT via Zoom.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85212231523?pwd=MC85VzJBVHF2MWYvVXRZcVFLdzJEdz09 

Meeting ID: 852 1223 1523

Password: 072524

Or you can call in at 1-312-626-6799, using the same Meeting ID and Password.

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

BUILT FOR FREEDOM

Human Kind

 

The words “free,” “freedom,” “freely,” and “liberty” ring out 31 times in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The same themes course through the archive of Early American documents, the teachings of every great philosopher and religious leader, and biblical texts from Genesis to Revelation. Freedom is so basic to human experience we assume it’s as natural as breathing. The quest to find and protect freedom is so primal it’s imprinted in our DNA. When threatened with its loss, either we fight for it or we take flight to escape its loss.

If you ask a lot of people what it means to be human, they’ll say, “We’re all sinners… we all make mistakes…” You seldom hear, “We’re made to be free.” So many of us have been conditioned to believe sinfulness is our native state that, given a choice between self-destructive behavior and living freely, we naturally choose what enslaves and corrupts us.

Early Christians recognized how easily freedom can be sacrificed or stolen. They understood slave mentality, because they lived in a slaveholding culture and many were actual slaves. Yet the Good News of Jesus upended the idea that enslavement of any kind—even to sin—is a natural state. Indeed, Early Christians believed Jesus restored our freedom and relieved us of sin’s burdens. In Galatians 5:13 we read, “You were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only don’t let this freedom be an opportunity to indulge your selfish impulses, but serve each other through love.”

Love not only asks us to set aside our selfish ways; it also demands we honor one another’s freedom and dignity. We are built for freedom and if we believe that, then we’re also made to be kind and forgiving and tolerant. So freedom isn’t reckless. Nor is it selfish. It releases us from a mentality that regards all humans as naturally sinful and unworthy. We are all made in the divine image; we are imperfect beings being made perfect. Any notion of inherent ungodliness is foreign to our faith and perpetuating such an idea generates self-fulfilling prophecy. If we tell people (especially young ones) they’re inherently bad they will behave badly. And they’ll question everyone around them. And they’ll feel guilty and worthless. And… and… and…

But what if we remind people they’re free? What if we focus on empowering folks to thrive in freedom to be free? What if we quit being thought and behavior police and instead become bright avatars of truth. “You were called to freedom,” scripture says. What if we not only answered that call? What if we amplified it in our witness to others?

Freedom sits at the center of this week’s Origins study and its focus on humanity. It also figures prominently in this coming Sunday’s Pride service, “In the Name of Love.” Access the study on Thursday evening, 7:30pm CDT at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85212231523?pwd=MC85VzJBVHF2MWYvVXRZcVFLdzJEdz09

Meeting ID: 852 1223 1523; Password: 072524.

Our Pride service premieres on YoutTube on Sunday, June 28, at 5p CDT. Find it on our YouTube page by clicking below.

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

INHERENT GOODNESS

Come and See

 

Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law and the Prophets: Jesus, Joseph’s son, from Nazareth.” Nathanael responded, “Can anything from Nazareth be good?” Philip said, “Come and see.” – John 1:45-46

 

This famous scene plays out at the start of John’s Gospel, where the writer drops a not-so-subtle hint that things aren’t going to be easy for Jesus. The God who does all things well appears to have made a colossal mistake in terms of time, place, and social location. Jesus is born poor, raised on the wrong side of the tracks in a community not known for producing anything remarkable, among country people with no reputation for intellectual rigor or political influence. Think of the deadest dead-end town you’ve ever visited and you’ll get a sense of how Nazareth was regarded. It makes sense that Nathanael can’t imagine anyone from there doing anything good.

But that’s not the whole of what he’s saying. The “good” Nathanael asks about is inherent goodness. This quality isn’t a result of breeding or race or class or education. Our buddy Nate, good ol’ boy if ever there was one, is saying Jesus can’t possibly be good because, based entirely on where he’s from, there can be no goodness in him!

This is what inequality and prejudice look like. They start with presumed deficiencies that give those who subscribe to such thinking the upper hand. “Can anything from Nazareth be good?” Mighty fine question from Nate, who hails from Bethsaida, a prosperous lakeside village. Mighty fine question about a stranger who comes from hardscrabble farm country where folks live in constant fear of Roman policing. Mighty fine way Nate has of drawing conclusions about someone he’s never met based on details he doesn’t understand.

Most of us would have accused Nate of the kind of ignorant arrogance that plants seeds of racism and other naïve phobias without concern about who gets hurt. How dare someone write off another person based on cultural stereotype or racial profile! Philip may have felt the same kind of indignance. But all he says is, “Come and see.” Jesus doesn’t need Philip’s defense. Philip doesn’t need to prove a point. Nathanael simply needs to meet Jesus and when he does, Philip’s point will be made.

During these times of racial unrest and bright hope, we recognize how many Nathanaels live around us. It’s hard to imagine one white 21st-century American even thinking, “Can anything from communities of color be good?” But many do… all the time. When we encounter people who are mired in their own smug superiority, we might want to argue with them, when we might do better inviting them to alter their view.

“Come and see,” Philip said. Come and see.

Join our weekly Bible study as we continue our “Origins” series examining the life, ministry, and meaning of Jesus of Nazareth. We meet each Thursday at 7:30p CDT via Zoom.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85212231523?pwd=MC85VzJBVHF2MWYvVXRZcVFLdzJEdz09 

Meeting ID: 852 1223 1523

Password: 072524

Or you can call in at 1-312-626-6799, using the same Meeting ID and Password.

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

KEEPERS

Killing God

In the Hebrew scriptures, it doesn’t take long for the beautiful story of Creation to go sideways. After God breathes life into the clay and animates humanity, the newly formed creatures—notable for their resemblance to their Maker—make some major mistakes. The possibility of judging good and evil is too tempting to resist and succumbing to the temptation opens Adam and Eve’s eyes too wide. They become ashamed of their nakedness and their broken trust with God ends with a dual curse of hard labor. Adam must toil until he sweats to feed his family. Eve must endure the painful ordeal of childbirth. They’re no longer fit for Eden. Fade out.

It’s what happens in the next generation that merits our attention today. Two sons become embroiled in sibling rivalry. One of them—Cain—is so unhinged by deep fears of inadequacy he murders his brother, Abel. Homicide is the first sin one human commits against another and it’s terrifying, not only for its moral bankruptcy and violence. This notion of killing is abhorrent because it completely flies in the face of everything we understand about God and us.

If God is the Source of life and if we are, by divine intention, made in the image of our Creator, then the murder of a living, breathing, conscious and moving human being amounts to killing God. If our purpose is to do the work and will of God, then removing a human being from this plane before his/her/their work is done defies the very purpose of Creation. If, as we like to say, we are God’s hands and feet, God’s temple, and so on, one person’s knee on another person’s neck is not only criminal. It’s sacrilegious. It amounts to one human depriving another human of God’s greatest gift: breath.

I can’t breathe! George Floyd cried out until the presence of God left his body. Eric Garner cried the same thing. So did Javier Ambler while being arrested in a fatal 2019 police encounter. I can’t breathe! Something in us begs to breathe because when breath is gone God goes with it. Murdering a human made in in the divine image, animated and sustained with divine breath, essentially kills God. And reckoning that one image of God is somehow superior to another—that the life inside a pink-skinned shell matters more than life contained in a black-, brown-, or red- or yellow-skinned body—isn’t just sacrilege. It’s heresy.

When God confronted Cain about Abel’s disappearance, Cain got arrogant. This is common among people who try to erase God’s image by stealing the breath of God’s creatures. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asked. Yes, Cain, you are. Yes, we all are keepers of those around us. We are called upon to protect them, suffer with them, keep them breathing. “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground,” God told Cain. Abel. George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. Javier Ambler. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Philando Castile. Laquan McDonald. Sandra Bland. Trayvon Martin. And on and on and on. This God-killing must stop.

Join us this week as our “Origins” study series continues with a closer look at God and what knowledge of God demands of us. We meet via Zoom at:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85212231523?pwd=MC85VzJBVHF2MWYvVXRZcVFLdzJEdz09 

Meeting ID: 852 1223 1523

Password: 072524

Or you can call in at 1-312-626-6799, using the same Meeting ID and Password.

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

NOT A PROP

Nor an Idol

While imprisoned for his role in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, the theologian and activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.”

The turmoil of 2020 America validates Bonhoeffer’s conclusion. The trick behind Christian nationalism’s unusual success comes with its ability to mask evil in a cloak of religion. Seizing control of the hearts and minds of many sincerely faithful, mostly conservative believers, the current Administration has made a mockery of every sacred institution and belief our nation once valued. As each assault on reason grows more egregious, it’s easy to become cynical about faith and Christian expression.

Cynicism is a ready-made companion to what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace,” or “grace we bestow on ourselves.” In other words, cheap grace focuses entirely on my wellbeing, my salvation, and my gratification. Bonhoeffer saw cheap grace everywhere in Third Reich Germany—not only in the Nazi Party, but in the fallen state of the Christian community. When Hitler perverted the teachings of Jesus to advance a false doctrine of racial and moral “purity,” the vast majority of German Christians said nothing. And despite warnings from all sides, they followed their Führer straight into the abyss.

When we see the American Head of State stage a photo shoot in front of a church (after gassing and firing on nearby protesters), holding a Bible aloft like a box of Tide, we should be alarmed, whatever our politics may be.

The Bible is not a prop. Neither is it an idol—a material god whose power is revealed in incantations we recite to make things happen. The Bible is a timeless source of wisdom that calls us to accountability for every aspect of our lives, including how we use our power as citizens to defend the defenseless, care for the needy, and welcome the stranger. What we’re seeing is blatant exploitation of religious ignorance among millions of people with no idea where the Bible came from, what its writers intended, or why the accountability it calls us to begins with interpretive responsibility.

Too many Americans consume their Christianity like a box of Tide. They use it to feel clean and like how easily it washes away their guilt. But neither our faith nor our texts are consumer goods. They are our sacred inheritance and I for one don’t appreciate watching anyone commoditizing them for political gain.

Starting this week we return to our roots in a study series we call “Origins”. And we begin with a look at the Bible. Where do our sacred texts come from? What compelled its authors to record their stories and ideas? Why should we be mindful of scripture’s history as a means of clarifying how we understand what it’s saying to us today? Join us this Thursday at 7:30pm CDT:

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85212231523?pwd=MC85VzJBVHF2MWYvVXRZcVFLdzJEdz09

Meeting ID: 852 1223 1523
Password: 072524

Or you can call in at 1-312-626-6799, using the same Meeting ID and Password.

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

Praying the Psalms

Many people respond to scripture in confrontational ways. Either they proof-text its content, citing chapter-and-verse “evidence” to prove they’re right. Or they come to the texts ready to fight. (Often folks in the latter group have spent a lot of time with the first group.) To be fair, scripture has plenty of confrontational material—enough to please both sides. But confrontation leads to negative ways of being: pride, fear, delusion, bullying, and so on, all of which the Bible guides us away from.

Instead, scripture calls us into meaningful engagement, opening new doors to divine understanding. Gaelic Christians called these experiences “liminal” or “thin places” where we straddle the literal and ephemeral. Such close encounters are illuminating and welcoming, if occasionally mystifying and even unnerving.

It’s in the thin places that our prayers resound most forcefully because they come directly from us and flow directly to God without a lot of logical and material interference. In classic Christian parlance, this is intercessory prayer, where we bridge the gap between known and unknown, praying for people we’ve never met or things we may never fully know. These thin places are extraordinarily creative spaces where we tell God all about it, even if we’re not altogether sure what “all” of it is.

The Psalms teach us to pray in this manner, because they instruct us in the power of metaphor. Bono, U2’s lead singer, says, “God can only be approached through metaphor—and that’s art.” So the Psalms teach us to pray artfully, pushing our imaginations and vocabularies to say what can’t be articulated, to describe what can’t be explained.

Classic example: The psalmists call God a “rock,” knowing God is not a rock. Yet the metaphor says much about a God who is reliable and solid and steadfast, a summit to climb atop when trouble engulfs us, a foundation to build on when everything else fails. Calling God a rock brings God into sharper focus. It expresses a way knowing God that defies precise language. Now we’re in a thin place, where the literal falls away and the material becomes meaningless. God is a rock because God is so much more than a rock.

To pray the Psalms, then, is to discover how to pray like a psalmist. We turn prayer into a creative act where imagination is a blessing and freedom prevails. Scripture calls us into close encounter rather than polarizing confrontation. The psalmists provide words until we can summon our own. We follow them into their thin places in search of ways into thin places for ourselves.

Join us this Thursday at 7:30 CDT as we wrap our series, “Praying the Psalms.”

You can access the study group here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/564427274?pwd=WnhETHQ2Rzltc1A2SXFmTnU0ODkwUT09

Meeting ID: 564 427 274
Password: 318652

You can also phone in at 1-312-626-6799, using the same meeting ID and password.

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.

WISE WORDS

Happiness and the Avid Learner

Around 500 BCE, when Israel’s priests compiled the anthology we now know as the Book of Psalms, they were very intentional about its organization. Based solely on content, it’s apparent the editors considered how the poems conversed with one another—how one psalm’s placement before or after another added dimension to both. We don’t know exactly how the collection was used in worship or daily devotion. But a through-line is clearly detectable, a certain way of seeing and engaging the world and its Creator that the editors sought to instill in the hearts and minds of Israel.

Psalm 1 offers a wonderful contrast of parallels that launches wisdom as one of the book’s crucial themes. It paints the portrait of a contented individual and explains why that person does so well. First, it explains he or she avoids foolish company. “The truly happy person doesn’t follow wicked advice, doesn’t stand on the road of sinners, and doesn’t sit with the disrespectful,” the poet tells us. Instead, happy people “love the Lord’s instruction and they recite [it] day and night!” (Ps. 1:1-3).

That is to say, the person who can discern foolishness and not be lured into its trap is someone who’s hungry for wisdom. The happy person loves God’s instruction so intensely he or she can (and does) recite it at all hours. Thus the Book of Psalms begins with a fascinating idea: enthusiastic learning is foundational to wisdom. More than that, according Psalm 1, it’s key to success. Everything the avid learner does prospers.

Scholars frequently observe that the “B” side of Psalm 1’s ringing endorsement of the commoner’s learning and wisdom is Psalm 2’s warning to rulers. (These pairings are a recurring trait in the collection) The privileged class’s rants and imaginings baffle the writer. Their behavior is decidedly unwise and the abuses that result from their villainy lead to trouble. “Wise up!” verse 10 says, lest the Lord “become angry, and your way will be destroyed” (Ps. 2:12). Taken together, the two psalms paint a powerful picture of the benefits derived from loving wisdom versus the penalties levied against those who foolishly rely on unrighteous counsel.

The Psalms’ wisdom couldn’t be more timely, as each day’s “breaking news” breaks our hearts and hurts our heads. With each day, our leaders’ mental health seems increasingly questionable. Their eagerness to attend to conspiracy theorists and gonzo sensationalists paints a grim picture of hardship that lay ahead for our country. These folks who brag about all their business savvy and powerful connections should know better! The good news is wisdom isn’t a precious gift that only the privileged classes can afford. It’s a simple thing to gain, provided you have the clarity of mind and integrity of intention to reach for it. The Psalms begin by portraying ordinary people who know how to gain obtain extraordinary insight that rewards them bountifully. It’s wise to seek wisdom. That’s the headline in today’s psalms.

Join us this Thursday evening as we continue our look at the psalms with a special focus on the wisdom poems. We meet online at 7:30p CDT via Zoom. See the info below to find out how to access the study.

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/564427274?pwd=WnhETHQ2Rzltc1A2SXFmTnU0ODkwUT09

Meeting ID: 564 427 274
Password: 318652

You can also phone in at 1-312-626-6799, using the same meeting ID and password.

We need your help!

As we think about the future of Gather, please let us know what gifts you bring and would like to share with the community. There are many roles that have to come together to make Gather happen every week. This includes setup, technical support, worship, managing handouts and information, coordinating drinks, and teardown. We need your help. Please let us know what type of service you’d be interested in!

Watch God Work,
Tim & Shea

As we prepare to become a vibrant worshipping community, we invite you to enjoy a Spotify playlist that captures the kind of worship we hope to embrace. Give it a spin while you’re driving. Make it your workout jam. Add it to your devotional time. Most of all, feel yourself becoming part of a sacred village of believers who love their God and one another!
Check out the Gather Worship Playlist here.