Adv-Christm-any Cheat Sheet - A Bible Project Video Plan (part 2)

2nd Week of Advent

Still with me on this cheat sheet for Advent?  How are the wisdom and insights informing how you encounter the texts of the season - both the official ones and the Winter Wonderland variety?  Now we hear about wildernesses, hanging out down by the river, and highways and byways.

This week the lectionary offers a gospel text for the Psalm - because the song of Zechariah is essentially a psalm.  It just isn't a Psalm.  So first a review of the literary styles of the Bible, and then Psalms (which is strange since there isn't a Psalm this week!)   And I repeat my little bit that I don't always agree with their total presentation of some things (David's is most likely an over credited psalm writer). 

In the actual Gospel lesson, we meet John who is baptizing and rabble rousing and challenging the systems down by the riverside.  This video dives more into the larger ongoings: free reconciliation when the Temple is charging, strange bold generosity and other fascinations! 

Lastly, today is a survey of the letter to the Philippians.  This is a season of sharing and an invitation to fresh discipleship. 

There are always three good questions for your lifelong learning in the way of Jesus. Perhaps you want to journal or comment on your responses.

• What leaped out at you? 
• What do you want to know more about?
• How does God speak to your life in these summaries?

12 Days of Christmas Invitational #2: On Being Episodes

In my continuing series of 12 ways to practice a simple but faith shaping 12 days of Christmas, I offer 6 On Being episodes. On Being it is a radio show that is broadcast across the country on public radio.  The host, Krista Tippett has many accolades, yet none quite outline how the work of this show is a holy gift to our common conversation.  Dancing in the intersection of faith, art, culture and science On Being finds truthful and heartfelt reflections on who we are and who we could be.  We have a hard time listening across our categories and arenas of thought, yet we reside here on earth together.  What can we learn from each other when we take the time to listen?

The treasure trove of 40+ minute episodes are available for online listening (at the links below), or for download through any podcast service.  Truly even a random selection might be an Epiphanal experience.   On Being is as if the most amazing sages and artists showed up at your door, and you invited them in for dinner.  These conversations and wonderings with her outstanding guests span the whole spectrum of spiritualities (and un-religiousness).  There are plenty more, however here are 6 to get you started (in no particular order) that leap out for me as special gifts to the season of Christmas.  If you haven't been here before, you may find yourself getting both beautifully lost and inspired.

Old Testament Scholar Walter Bruggemann, December 2013

"It's a very much-used passage. "Do not remember the former things nor consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" And apparently, what he's telling his people is just forget about the Exodus, forget about all the ancient miracles, and pay attention to the new miracles of rebirth and new creation that God is enacting before your very eyes. I often wonder when I read that, what was it like the day the poet got those words and what did it feel like and how did he share that? Of course, we don't know any of that, so it just keeps ringing in our ears."

Poet Mary Oliver, October 2015

"You go back and you’re these little bits of energy and pretty soon you’re something else. Now that’s a continuance. It’s not the one we think of when we’re talking about the golden streets and the angels with how many wings and whatever, the hierarchy of angels. Even angels have a hierarchy. But it’s something quite wonderful.

The world is pretty much — everything is mortal. It dies. But its parts don’t die. Its parts become something else. And we know that when we bury a dog in the garden. And with a rose bush on top of it. We know that there is replenishment. And that’s pretty amazing."

Composer Alice Parker, December 2016

"Each one of us is a walking encyclopedia of all the sounds we’ve ever heard in our lives. And it takes color, or a representational object, or an occurrence, or remembering the first love, all those things. What they call forth, the kind of communication they call forth is music. Trying to get them in words is loads of fun. It’s a marvelous game trying to pin these things down. And the lovely thing with the music is that we don’t have to be limited by the way that words are limited by our rational minds.

StoryCorpss founder David Isay, May 2016

"That's how memory works. You hold onto these images of people. And I guess there’s something about the way these interviews, the 40-minute StoryCorps interviews are structured that it’s almost — in some ways, we think of it as if you had 40 minutes left to live, what would you want to say to someone else? 

What would you want to learn about them? And in some ways, I think it’s maybe the best way to sum up who someone is in 40 minutes, although that’s a very difficult thing to do. But we have everything going for us, because it’s the voice, and it’s intimate, and it’s honest. I think of it as the opposite of reality TV. No one comes to get rich, no one comes to get famous, it’s just about generosity and love."

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, October 2015   

"So you really have this huge problem of diversity. And you then go back and read the Bible and something hits you, which is, we’re very familiar with the two great commands of love: Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might; love your neighbor as yourself. But the one command reiterated more than any other in the mosaic box — 36 times, said the rabbis — is love the stranger. For you were once strangers in the land of Egypt. Or, to put it in a contemporary way, love the stranger because, to him, you’re a stranger. This sense that we are enlarged by the people who are different from us — we are not threatened by them — that needs cultivating, can be cultivated, and would lead us to see the 21st century as full of blessing, not full of fear."

Priests and Astronomers Guy Consolmagno and George Coyne, September 2015

" Certainly, whoever's responsible for this universe has a great sense of humor, because whenever you're expecting something, you get what you expect, but from a very, very different angle than the way you were expecting it. You know, the center of all humor. We are constantly being surprised and delighted by the surprise. Also, a creator who loves beauty. It's not enough that the universe makes sense and we can come up with equations for them, but the equations themselves are beautiful."

Potatoes are Enough: Arts Camp meets the Good Samaritan

It is a privilege to say that I have had a rock star for a mentor.  Not a musical rock star, but an ecumenical church priest kind of rock star. Jerome Berryman is the name most associated with the Godly Play method, a Montessori-based approach to what we usually call Sunday School.  Perhaps you are familiar with the method.  The core of his gift to the world is that young people learn by playing, and that to invite young people to both know God and about God’s people, we needed to invite children into a setting that is serene and loving, structured and open, and filled with 3-dimensional opportunities to jump into the sacred stories of the Christian traditions.  Jerome first got to know each other over a lunch conversation many years ago.

One of the core values of Godly Play is that the materials offered are all natural materials, that they be of fine quality, perfect and, well, expensive.  I told him how I had been telling all of the parables using his storytelling scripts, yet I had been doing this with a basket full of children’s toys.  The Weeble Wobbles and Little People and Playmobil figurines that inhabit their everyday lives.  At some point in our little dialogue, I said something like, ‘if you really believe in the holiness of these stories, you could tell them with potatoes.’   I still believe that the hope and the invitation of the storyteller, and the life-giving potency of the living word, is more important than the materials.  The word is holy and precious, but so too is the whole creation, so too are all the plastic toys that children imagine with.  We have more than enough materials and hearts to share this good news, we have more than enough without anything being fine or perfect.

Every character in this parable of the Good Samaritan has gifts and talents and treasures.  Gifts that they choose to use, or not use, for healing, for shelter, and for compassion.  There was enough to care, enough to show mercy, from each of the neighbors.  Yet only the despised Samaritan chose to use his gifts, and to use them generously, to rescue an unknown stranger.  A stranger who could be Jesus himself.   

“If there is any ministering to be imitated in the Good Samaritan's example, it is the ministry to Jesus in his passion, as that passion is to be found in the least of his brethren, namely, in the hungry, the thirsty, the outcast, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned in whom he dwells and through whom he invites us to become his neighbors in death and resurrection.”   Robert Farrar Capon

The question of the summer at Camp Cross is: how do we wake the world?  The answer is that we go and do likewise.  We go love, all, all, all.  We go serve, all, all, all.  We seek forgiveness, all the time, and everywhere. We do have enough to wake up, to become the reign of God. 

Making sacred meaning through play doesn’t end in childhood.  We learn to take it inside.  When we are sitting in traffic, and coming up with ideas about how to get out of traffic, we are playing.  We are manipulating what we have to create a new future, in our minds.  So my conversations with Jerome didn’t end with a conversation about potatoes.  He was an important advisor for a paper I wrote about how adult faith formation needs to play, and to play outside of our minds.  That teens and adults need to be invited to use the materials around us to jump into the story, to make it our story in flesh and blood.  This experiment in the first ever Arts Camp is an expression of that proposal.  We have leapt into the parable of the Good Samaritan with our hearts and minds.  We turned it inside out and upside down and let it speak to our lives and our world and the ideas that surround us.  Our campers and volunteers and staff have played with it in amazing new ways that I could not have imagined.

One of our goals for each camper this summer is that they learn this parable well enough to be able to tell it in their own words.  I am pretty sure that we have met that goal, and they will be doing that later in their show (MTV Good Sam!). Our friends have leaped into the parable of the Good Samaritan and play with it, and used only the items and talents and passions we have right here at camp to make a play like none other.  We had everything we needed right here on camp.   The opposite of scarcity is not abundance, the opposite of scarcity is enough.  And we have more than enough to proclaim Good News.  We had the talent and the materials and the energy and the heart to embody Christ’s call that we are to show mercy, to be a neighbor to all neighbors, that our backyard is as large as the whole universe.  So we send you out, to go and do likewise.  Jump into the story, play with the story and make it your own, because only when we live it will we will actually, wake the world in Jesus name.

Camp Cross

July 9, 2016

Parable of the Good Samaritan

Boxes and Butterflies

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky tacky.  Boxes on our calendars, boxes in our attics. We even put critters in boxes: ant farms, fish tanks, and butterfly houses.  These booths for living critters allow us to keep them in one place, to hold a precious un-holdable,  to glimpse the wonder of life itself. 

I think this gospel lesson is sort of funny. I know, I know, it is a big deal. However you might admit it is kind of weird. ,Then it also has the comedic relief of the sleepy disciples coming up with one more bad idea.  However, the part that is really amusing, is in the way that I can see myself reflected in the story.  Oooooh, precious.  Look it is Moses, the premium prophet is standing here, let’s put him in a booth!  And look, Elijah, second only to Moses, is this an all-star game?  We cannot let him fly away again, so yes,  so let’s put him in a box too!  And Jesus, the anointed, the Christ, look at him…so he looks different.   Can we make a little box for him too?  Perhaps with a light blocking curtain?  Little boxes on a hillside, it is easy to see this become a strange attraction, a mini Stonehenge, a living hall of fame.  Let’s take the radical call of God for us   to liberate all people, and let’s tuck it away where we can find it again when we want to.  Prophetic demands for justice, managed.  Holy invitations to leave everything and follow, contained.  One of the most amazing things we have ever seen and do not quite understand; well, we understand things in boxes.

Most of us are familiar with the butterfly life cycle.  Caterpillar crawling around in the dirt on all those legs, eating and eating and eating leaves.  Then a cocoon for a while, and then voila..beautiful butterfly.  The Very Hungry Caterpillar made it all look quite cute and mundane.  Here is the thing.  That cocoon, it doesn’t form around the caterpillar skin.  Nope.  The caterpillar skin rips open with the cocoon material INSIDE!!!  If I were a caterpillar, and my little caterpillar brain could wrap its head around the changes that lay ahead, I would be beyond scared.  I might eat excessively to numb the fear.  I might try to google DIY ways to stay young forever.  I like my caterpillar legs and caterpillar stripes, and, well, no thank you.  I do not want to experience such painful changes.  I will stay here, and nibble on leaves until I get nibbled on myself!

Lent begins on Wednesday, and it is in some ways, a cocoon time.  A frightening journey into the worst of humanity, into the graves we dig for ourselves into our selfishness and meanness,  into the grubby messy reality of lives that are lost and broken and hurt begins on Wednesday, and it is in some ways, a cocoon time.  A frightening journey into the worst of humanity, into the graves we dig for ourselves into our selfishness and meanness,  into the grubby messy reality of lives that are lost and broken and hurt and angry.  

We are about to get broken open, not once, but twice.  Our veil of a caterpillar life will be torn in two, and then after a time,   that precious shell, that will break too.  There is no change without letting go, without naming our discomfort and sorrow, without scrubbing away our dragon skins.  Jesus will suffer, he will die by our terribleness, but that is not the end of the story.  The future that our caterpillar brains cannot imagine, is that wings of love, justice and freedom are already inside of us.  No matter how many ways we try to box God in, love, forgiveness and liberation can always break through.

The venerable Rowan Williams offers us this,

“So the Holy Spirit, who always brings Jesus alive in our midst, is very specially at work in the Eucharist, making it a means of spiritual transformation. Because of this we go from the table to the work of transfiguring the world in God’s power: to seeing the world in a new light, to seeing human beings with new eyes, and to working as best we can to bring God’s purpose nearer to fruition in the world.”  (Being Christian, Eerdmanns)

Perhaps the glow of Christ at the transfiguration is us. Perhaps on that day the disciples saw the world in a new light and they saw a world of disciples reflected in him.  We with our new eyes, living in a fresh light, the world of faithful people turned to Jesus. Following his call to be love, to do justice, to choose wings over boxes.  Perhaps in Jesus that day, they saw the eternal Alleluia,  the brilliance of love, the hope of the saints, and the tears of the martyrs.  Streaming through the past and the present and the future, reflecting back from him.  Or maybe, shining through this one person, this light, this friend, this Holy One who call’s you his beloved.  

Alleluia is our destiny, the resurrection of Easter will be our butterfly wings.  We are called into a brave participation in Jesus’s life, a willingness to risk ourselves beside him in this messy broken world.  To find that brilliant alleluia, we have to practice a stout vulnerability, the kind that leaves the old skin and little legs in the dust.  To live into Alleluia, we will have to be astounded by the breadth and depth of honesty we are capable of.  Ash Wednesday is directly ahead of us.  We are invited to face courageously the shedding of our old selves, to be still , yet not unchanging and not in a box.  Instead a cocoon of prayer, examination and reformation.  Yet..the thing our little caterpillar brains cannot conceive of…we are going to be butterflies!  We can emerge with wings!  Wings!  Can your caterpillar brain even imagine them?  What do your wings look like?  Christ invites us to rise, has made us to soar.  Alleluia.  Thanks Be to God for the grace of wings for which we can hardly ask or imagine.  

Alleluia. Alleluia, Alleluia. Amen.

Last After Epiphany, RCL C

February 7, 2016

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

Walla Walla, Washington