Wild World
Yesterday AndyMac sang for us and this was one of the songs he chose. He talked about how sometimes God lets us make our decisions - he lets us go our own way, even when he knows the outcome is not what his heart desires. Sometimes, AndyMac said, God lets us go, and this song expresses what he must be feeling at such times. I was deeply affected by what he said and by the songs he chose. I’ll never hear this song the same way again.
Imagine what could happen if…
“Dance your bones” may be the best advice I get all year. Your best advice of the year is probably in this post from Rae at Blackbird Studio as well.
New Year’s Benediction
we have this day - today - and we have none other.
these hands, these lips, these feet,
this breath, this spirit, this song:
we have none other.
how full of mystery our world becomes,
how full of wonder, awe, majesty, silence, beauty and
wild joy our world becomes
when we are fully present in it.
let this now be the year we find
the endless wonder of a child-like faith,
let this now be the year we find
the staggering awe that comes in god’s presence,
let this now be the year we find
that majesty is the child of humility, wisdom and peace,
let this now be the year we find
that silence is the language of worship,
let this now be the year we find that beauty is within us all,
and everyone we meet,
and let this now be the year we know the wild joy
that cascades, splashes, bursts, pours, charges and foams
like a wilderness of river rapids through
all those channels that
life has cut into our souls.
and in this, more than any other year,
may you be fully present in all that god desires;
and may you know - really know -
that you are the child he loves best.
God, Incognito
Our worship time on Sunday morning was a written response to a specific question. We all sat down with a piece of paper on which had been written only, “Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.” And then, neatly lettered below was one word: therefore…
This single word, ‘therefore, is where our worship - our response to what God has done - begins. But sitting down with a piece of paper and writing doesn’t look like worship to everyone. That someone might not see this as worship is difficult to grasp for those of us who are familiar with Third Space. In another conversation on Sunday morning I said that we begin our ’service’ at 11:30 and was immediately reminded of something I knew but had simply forgotten - we begin at 11 AM, but we begin in community. People start arriving at 11 or shortly after and, before you know it, there’s a hub-bub of conversation in the room. It’s a great chance to catch up with our friends and it’s a real pleasure to introduce visitors and invite them into a conversation around the coffee pot. At 11:30 we continue through the rest of our Sunday morning. Standing in a circle with coffee in hand may not look like worship either, but I really think it is. The very fact that we’re in church on Sunday morning, and feel some kinship to those we meet with, is also a response to what God has done in our lives.
And our Sunday morning, amidst all the business and stress of the Christmas season, was a quiet, calm, reflective time. We decorated our Christmas tree together, we sang a few Christmas carols a cappella. We worshiped, gently, but powerfully, through our writing exercise, with some lovely music playing softly in the background. The scripture was read. We talked about what we had written. We prayed together. It doesn’t get any better than that - it really doesn’t. It doesn’t look like any big thing. What we do is underwhelming. It takes time to see the beauty of Third Space. It takes time to get past all of our ‘churchey’ expectations to see what is really going on here on a typical Sunday morning. (It took me the better part of a year). Everything about us goes against the norm of a typical evangelical church experience. Our small size allows us to do some really interesting things but there are challenges to being a small church as well - not the least of which is financial.
Why am I talking about all this? Well… this afternoon I was reading the Christmas story in Matthew. I began to wonder what it was like for the shepherds, when they found the stable with Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus. What did they see as they entered the scene? My guess is that they saw a weary young mother, an anxious father, a baby that looked like any other baby. But this wasn’t just any baby - this was the Christ Child, this was the incarnation. But here’s the question.. at that moment, do you think the Baby Jesus met or exceeded their expectations? An angelic choir announcing that the Son of God is born - that’s a lot of hype. Did they walk away from the stable that night, scratching their heads, wondering what all that commotion was about? Maybe that’s something like us. Maybe there isn’t anything immediately and obviously ’special’ about us here at Third Space. Maybe the extraordinary work of God is unfolding here in a way that is simply understated, gentle, quiet and unassuming, that frustrates our expectations of what church should be. And yet, though it may be difficult to recognize him, here Christ is, among us once again.
I’m not trying to suggest that we’re better than anyone else. What I’m trying to say is just this - I love being a part of this community. In the beginning I was like one of those shepherds. I encountered Third Space and said, “hey, let’s go see what this is about.” Now? There’s nowhere else I’d rather be. Third Space is Peterborough’s best-kept secret. I’d like to see that change. I’d like to share this experience with a lot more people. In the incarnation we see Jesus born as a fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies, and in reading Matthew’s genealogy this morning I really got a sense that the birth of Christ is a continuation of something God has been doing for a very long time. But there’s also a sense that God is doing something new with the birth of Christ. I hope that in the months ahead we see God creating something new in Third Space. But I hope that the story God’s been telling here doesn’t change either. And my heart’s desire, as I look beyond Christmas into the New Year, is that everything here will change… and everything will remain the same.
And I don’t think that’s too tall an order for God. After all, he’s done it before.
God in the Diner
There’s a diner in my neighbourhood that I enjoy visiting. Red vinyl booths. Formica table tops. A chrome quarter jukebox at every booth. I have breakfast there on Friday mornings with a couple of old codgers like me. We’re like the old guys in the balcony on the Muppets Show - perpetually enamored with our own cleverness. We get sass from the wait staff and love it. For some inexplicable reason we talked - briefly - about funerals last Friday morning. I mentioned a time when I attended four funerals in five weeks. I realized, somewhat sarcastically, that people only ever talk about the good things at a funeral. By the time I had been through five eulogies, however, I thought there might be something else going on. You have to pay attention at funerals, I said to my breakfast buddies. They teach you about what matters most to those who love you. They teach you how to live.
Tonight I stopped in to the same diner, for no particular reason at all. I sipped on a vanilla milkshake, reading a book. The author quoted one of the beatitudes, as interpreted by Eugene Peterson in the Message. “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. I put the book down and thought about this for a few minutes. I’ve been trying to understand this little nugget of wisdom for about ten years “Blessed are those who mourn”, Jesus said, “for they will be comforted.” Really? Comforted? How? Tell me again, Jesus? How does that work, exactly? I was stunned by the way Peterson interpreted this Beatitude. It seemed like I was so close to the truth - the huge, infinite, terrifying and beautiful truth but, somehow, I wasn’t quite there. I couldn’t quite break through the darkness and fog into the light.
As I was thinking about this the waitress slid into the booth across from me. The place was almost empty, and we had been having a conversation as she went about her work. She will soon be sharing an apartment with her sister and I wanted to give her a bit of wisdom. I wanted to say that the key to living with someone you love is to figure out what matters and what doesn’t. But I didn’t say it, because it sounded trite, and I didn’t want to intrude, and I really didn’t want to intrude with triteness. But the conversation soon changed tack, so the opportunity was lost, and then she told me about her first love, who tragically died. “I loved him like crazy”, she said. “I’ll never love anyone like that again.”
And the universe went, ‘click’. Suddenly I understood. It may not be the whole story - and it may not be your story - but tonight, while my French fries went cold and my milkshake melted, I saw the fog slip away and the light breaking through the darkness. I finally understood why people only talk about the good things at a funeral. I understood how mourning is a blessing. I understood that comfort might not be felt in the moment of our pain and loss but that it will come, and that maybe until we lose the thing that matters most we’ll never know what it is that matters most, and what doesn’t matter at all, and that there’s really nothing in between. Maybe the comfort that Jesus promises is in the fact that once we lose what matters most we’re finally able to live by what really matters and, in so doing, know the comfort of living a life from the wellsprings of our heart. What Jesus might be promising here is the comfort of knowing that we are living, perhaps for the first time, our real life.
She went back to work and I tried to continue reading but couldn’t. As I was about to leave I wanted to ask if I could share a ‘Jesus thing’ and tell her what I had just learned. But she was already saying good-bye, and it somehow seemed so very important and yet I just couldn’t tell her. A moment later I was outside, in the dark, late autumn night and then it really was too late. So I walked home from the diner, lost in my thoughts, carrying the infinitely dark and heavy weight of a beautiful mystery in my heart, repeating the name of her lost love over and over, like a mantra, like the chorus of a hymn to worship the one who longs to comfort us all.
Thoughts on Advent
“To prepare our hearts to welcome the Lord who, as we say in the Creed, will come one day to judge the living and the dead, we must learn to recognize his presence in the events of daily life. Advent is then a period of intense training that directs us decisively to the One who has already come, who will come and who continuously comes.”
Pope John Paul II
Once again we are entering an advent Journey here at Third Space. Our lives are so busy, and fragmented, and so full of competing stresses that Advent becomes even more important with each passing year. It’s a time when we stop and recognize that this extraordinary thing has happened - that God has entered the world, that God became one of us. And we have to stop to remember this, because we so easily forget just how powerful this story is. We go to church on Sunday and talk about Jesus, and God, and the Holy Spirit, and us, and how we’re all somehow mixed up in this world together. We read from our bible. We pray. We worship. We continue these practices throughout the week, some of us fervently, some of us casually. And then the phone rings, the baby cries, the boss taps his clipboard, the bills arrive in the mail and life comes rushing back in on us once again. Yes, we want to follow Jesus, but we also live in the real world.
And this is precisely why Advent matters so much. The birth of Christ - as a baby, like any other baby, with tiny fingers and tiny toes, needing to be fed and changed and held - is the event that melds our spiritual desires with our real world. Christ and child, Spirit and flesh becoming one: God With Us. Immanuel. God is no longer a distant lawmaker, waiting to be placated with sacrifices and prayers of contrition. God became one of us. And as Advent brings us to this realization we must, as Pope John Paul said, make a decision. We can accept this wild and improbable story as a thing of ferocious beauty and truth, or we can deny it. And with the birth of Jesus begins a trajectory through a thousand decisions we must face - what Christ’s parables mean, or if his teachings or sound, or the miracles were real, or the tomb was empty. Each one of these will grasp us from the gospel accounts and confront us with a reality that is wholly other than our own. We will be faced with the reality of God in the world - our world - and must come to a decision about the divinity of Christ. There will be no in-between for us. And each one of those decisions will be thrust upon us because Christ was born.
At the end of our Advent journey we will celebrate that Christ has come. Yet, even as we do so we seek out the Spirit of Christ to hold us, keep us, lead us and shape us. Christ has indeed come, and as we long for him in our world, continues to come, meeting us once again. All the while we look forward to the day of his final and ultimate return. When he arrives, as Pope John Paul reminds us, he will come to judge the living and the dead. How we fare on that fateful day will be determined by the decisions we make about Jesus Christ today - and that’s part of the Christmas story as well. It may, in fact, be the most hopeful part of the story, for Christ being born in human flesh means that it is now possible for us to know God in a very real, intimate and personal way. It is possible to know his love and to experience eternal life through him. Our story and Jesus’ story can be joined and that, too, begins in the Advent journey.
Call to Worship
This Sunday’s video Call to Worship - click on the title to see the video.
Call To Worship
Click on the title for this week’s video.
Call to Worship
Click on the title for this week’s video.