prayer as a fulcrom

I wrote this during my two days of solitude/retreat last week. It is not one of my best but here it is. It was inspired by a phrase in Eugene Peterson's book Where Your Treasure Is: Psalms That Summon You from Self to Community

Prayer

The stone hefty and huge
immovable, inflexible, impenetrable
for centuries and generations
just there
people and nations
children, parents, and grandparents
all
seeking and striving to
move it, destroy it,
for it is...
obtrusive and intrusive
an impediment
to progress and production
committees formed
strategies laid
technologies invented
days, weeks, months, and years
have past
sweat, blood and tears
flowed like rivers
still...
immovable, inflexible, impenetrable
obtrusive and intrusive

one day a young boy comes upon this stone
he stands still
watching...
listening...
discerning...
awareness deepening...
simultaneously...
a group of men are laboring
muscles bulging,
perspiration profusely pouring
and the b o a r d is b e n d i n g
the men stretching and groaning
lifting and laboring
arguing and fighting
striving to catapult this stone
out of their way

amidst all the sweating, striving and strife
the boy sees...
a simple small stone
insignificant in comparison
to the obtuse obtrusion
he... quietly and unassumingly
sticks the simple, small, stone under the board
fashioning a fulcrum
silently slips

amidst pushing shoving, shouting
one man falls on the board –
the stone is lifted
SILENCE!!!!
suddenly the stone is removed
burdens are bursting
celebrations commence
progress promoted
enemies erased
all by a simple, small, silent
point of leverage

Howard Thurman - praxis prayer

I am reading Howard Thurman's Meditations of the Heart for an Advent devotional. I read Jesus of the Disinherited in seminary and was really impacted by the book. Thurman (1899-1981) was the co-founder of the first inter-racially pastored, intercultural church in the US. He was a mentor and significant influence on the life and ministry of MLK Jr; and in my opinion he is dreadfully under-read by most Christians; for he is an amazingly insightful theologian, mystic and social critique who was way ahead of his time. I am continually struck by how similar African American/Black theology is to the theology emerging from emergent folks. Why is it then that more African Americans are not engaged in the emerging church conversation? For some great insight into this questions check Anthony Smith's blog, and his chapter, Practicing Pentecost in Emergent Manifesto of Hope. Anyway my main reason for writing is to share with you a section of Howard Thurman on prayer that is typical of African American theology. It is a model of what I will call, praxis prayer which is holistic, active and rooted in a Hebraic understanding of knowing - that if you know, you act and if you do not act then maybe you do not really know; knowledge cannot be separated from action. Thurman, reflectively outlines the natural movement of ones prayer to God which he says ends in the...

"...sharing of one's desires and hopes for others, and one's sense of need which the whole human family shares - the need for peace, for health, for justice and for decency...one must share with God in the whole task of redeeming human life. It is never quite sufficient to place all the needs of mankind before God and leave them there. The efficacy of prayer is often measured by the degree to which the individual is willing to become involved in actually working in the world to meet these needs. A man may share his prayer concern fore peace in the world and yet in his own little world, be unwilling to change his private attitude of antagonism or prejudice toward his fellows."

May we be willing to participate in the activity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in the world - which may be the answer to our own prayers and the prayers of others!!!!

Coming out of Hiding

I am re-reading Abba's Child by Brennan Manning with some guys from the Open Door. This book changed my life 8 years ago and after the first chapter it is once agian rearranging mental and heart furniture in my life. Thanks be to God for a transparent, wise and borken man like Maning. Thanks be to God for the guys I am gathering with to read and their transparency this past week in coming out of hiding. Here is some quotes that kicked my ass this week.

“God is relentlessly tender and compassionate towards us just as we are – not in spite of our sins and faults (that would not be acceptance), but with them. Though God does not condone or sanction evil. He does not withhold his love because there is evil in us. God calls us to come out of hiding and come openly to him. God weeps over us when shame and self-hatred immobilize us. Thomas Merton said, 'the reason we never enter into the deepest reality of our relationship with God is that we so seldom acknowledge our utter nothingness before him.' God not only forgives and forgets our shameful deeds but even turns their darkness into light. All things work together for those who love God, 'even,' Augustine of Hippo added 'our sins.' Christians who remain in hiding continue to live a lie. We deny the reality of our sin... If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can nither be illuminated nor become light for others.” Abba’s Child pg 19, 20, 22, 29, 29

May God grant us courage and grace to receive his love and come out of hiding!

story

I have been thinking about story latley and how story captures nuances, details and the ethos of life like nothing else. In particualr I have been thining about how story can help us measure. I dove into anew book by Joe Meyer called Organic Community and in the 4th chapter of the book he talks about moving from bottom line measurements of statistics and numbers to that of story. He is not advocating the elimination of statistical analisys but in order to gain a fuller picture of the activit of a community or organization story adds depth, and dimension to asessing the life of a community. He says stories are the measure of the journey and community and they naturally emerge from life. "Stores share and shape, inform and instruct, motivate and memorialize." I want to capture and tell more stories of the work of God among us!

On Sunday night we had five people tell their stories of how they discipline themseleves to remain in the vine (the theme of worship that night). It was great because people narrated differnt practices that have been purposeful and meaningful to staying connected with Jesus. It was descriptive of their journies with Christ but as people listen I am sure they were thinking about their own story. the power of story

Last night I was then having a beer with my firend Carl who is moving soon to Atlanta and as we were discussing story and he asked, " where and how can we record and tell the stories of the journey Open Door or our lives?" I then began to think about that. We have some journals that are always out at our worship gathering that have some sense of the journey that people go through and we tell stories often in worship. But that is not enough. We need spaces and places for people to tell their stories. For it is in the telling of story that the tradition of a people can be kept alive (Richard Jenson).

Recently we have been continuing to wrestle with how to stay committed to intergenrational worship and honor family in what we do together. My same friend Carl sent me a story about his expreince with his kids in worship. Here is what he said:

"One of the thing that has so endeared us to the Open Door is the intergenerational aspect. This has a profound effect on both parents and children. Evy is excited to go to church. And to be completely honest, there are some Sundays when its Evy who inspires us to put our work away and come to church. I think this is wonderful. Church has truly become a familial experience rather than something the kids feel “we drag them to”."

Great story ehy?

advent after Christmas

I am almost finished with Kester Brewin's book, The Complex Christ, Signs of emergence in the urban church. It just came out in the US under the title, Signs of Emergence. Kester is from the UK and writing in and from the UK experience but reflecting upon trends he sees as crucial for churches emerging in a post-Christendom and postmodern culture. (Not Emergent churches that have been typecast but churches that are emerging out of this unique cultural shit and time.) He uses James Fowlers stages of development to talk about how the church needs to develop or evolve past its enlightenment, rationalism of naive simplicity (Stage 3), characterized by Fowler as "loyalists with deep convictions, yet critically unexamined". Many Christians and churches never move beyond this stage of development. He is calling the church to move into Stage 4 where we realize that faith and truth is more complex than previously understood. This stage often leads to "dark night of the soul" kind of experiences where doubt and uncertainty reign. Many churches since they themselves have not moved through this stage, often cannot handle others within their community who are going through it. Brewin sees the church as a whole moving into Stage 4, due to the cultural shift from modern to postmodern and the shift from a centralized Christendom church status to a mariginalized post-Christendom status. Our place in the world is not what it has been and were are experiencing dislocation. The hope is obviously that one 9and the church) moves through Stage 4 to Stage 5. This according to Brewin and Fowler this is a place of deep simplicity, a place where one realizes the richness, ambiguity and multidimensionality of truth and faith. This conjunctive stage (5) allows one to hold opposites together in a single frame, it is what some call a dialectical tension. Though we cannot force people or churches to move from one phase to another we must create space for that movement and allow for diverse developmental stages within our churches. If we allow for this it will necessarily change the organization of our churches which Brewin sees to be essential for our missional context of postmodernism and post-Christendom.

And here is the beauty that drew me into this book. The first chapter is about a hopeful waiting - Advent. It is incredibly rich. He calls the church to wait. I love this because it as an activist doer it challenges me to my core!! Listen:

"We will be required to wait. To be acted upon gently and gracefully and peacefully. Shaped, not crushed; guided not dragged... The task is urgent but if our response is to be anything more than another flash in the pan or botched attempt to become culturally aware then we must avoid haste... Genuine change cannot be about haste, or about playing for time. It must involve the depth of us, and must have something of us in it... In other words, for our own health, we need change to occur not at revolutionary speeds demanded by power-wielding dictators or company board rooms, but at the evolutionary speeds of the empowered human body... If we are to transform the whole [church] and truly alter the very nature of things for good, then the mode of change can not be revolution, but evolution. A gradual development over a long period of time... The perception of the new step will come to those brave enough to stop dancing the old... We fear that if we stopped for a week, a month, a service, a moment we might appear forgotten, or lose our momentum... We must be brave enough to stop if we are to see change... In other words our structures must serve us not us serve our structures... We must bear fruit, Christ tells us. But outside our genetically modified globalized supermarkets, fruit trees only bear fruit once a year and then their branches are stripped of leaves in the cold winter of advent... The Church is destined to live in a perpetual advent as we wait for Christ's return... No matter how impatient we get as a society, with processing speeds rising and our whole cultural velocity increasing ever faster, we cannot speed up pregnancy... We must have the courage to stop. To prepare the ground for the new and wait."

What a breathe of fresh air!!!!!

What is hard about the waiting of this advent?
What are you seeing and hearing in this period of waiting?