Gathering In Light

This is the text from the message I gave at Camas Friends Church September 11, 2011. 

The Experience of the Experience

This past week we were at the beach. Searching for rocks. Lily and Mae scooped while Emily and I carefully picked. At first this was frustrating. It felt like an obstacle to us having fun. I found myself continually saying come on, just pick up one special one, not all of them. I want to keep moving! I realized the goal for me was to find really unique rocks, that’s why I was out there, or that was at least why I was feeling frustrated. The girls didn’t understand the point of what we were doing! The girls had an entirely different approach to what was happening there. Their joy was not in thinking about which were the most beautiful and unique rocks, but in the experience of simply being together on the beach, and running their hands through the sand. For me, the realization that what was important was the experience rather than the end product, or my understanding of what we were doing, helped to create an “opening” or a different kind of experience for on the beach. I was able to relax and enjoy what was going on.

Al shared with me yesterday a quote from Thomas Merton: “What is important is to experience the experience, not to understand the experience.” This is the difference between talking about doing something and actually doing it.

It’s like the impulse to have a meeting to plan for our upcoming coming meeting.

This past Wednesday during our Discernment class we talked about how it’s easy to feel frustrated with the how we do business together. We often just want to get it done and over with, we all know the feeling. We’re tired, we’ve had a long day at work, we have a lot other things to do. And if the end goal, that final decision, is really what is most important, then just making the decision and moving on is what we should do. Anything else is just an obstacle that creates frustration. But what if the decision we make is not really the point at all? What if in fact God is not interested in the decision we make as much as in the experience of making that decision? What if discernment isn’t about efficient decision-making, but rather about helping the church become a community? What if the whole point is the experience of becoming the people of God, regardless of what the outcome of the final decision is? Continue Reading…

Here is my message from August 21, 2011 (slides can be found here).

_a birth story

How many of you have given birth or been present at a birth before?

[I told Story about L's birth and the power (for me) of her “being drawn out” of the womb]

This morning we’re going to talk about an ancient birth story, a birth story not just about Moses but of the entire people of Israel. Exodus is a birth story about a lost and oppressed group of people called the “Hebrews” who are then rescued by YHWY, drawn out like a newborn child, and made into an alternative society.

One thing I learned this week while reading is that “Hebrew” actually meant back, in the pre-Exodus days. Back then it “referred to group of marginal people who have no social standing, own no land, and who endlessly disrupt ordered society.” (Brueg. 694). Today we might think of Gypsies, or illegal immigrants.

And in keeping with a birth story about people like the hebrews our heroes in the story this morning are unlikely heroes:

N. Gordon Cosby — “Without the breaking of the empire’s law by the midwives and by Moses’ parents [and the king’s daughter], what is perhaps the greatest deliverance in history would not have occurred. Thus begins one of the great chapters of [our Christian] tradition.”

And then this opening Exodus story closes not with the birth of the baby, but the adoption of a Hebrew baby by the king’s daughter. This is symbolized by her naming the little one, Moses, or Mosheh, whose names in ancient Hebrew means, as the text says here “to be drawn out of the water.” But Mosheh is an Egyptian word, unsurprisingly since the Pharaoh’s daughter was Egyptian, that means “is born.”

So being made a son of the Egyptian princess, this little Hebrew named moses is now the ______fill in the blank________? Moses the drawn out one is now a prince! Continue Reading…

This is the text to the message I gave on July 3, 2011.

_intro: (dis)membership

I was reading in a magazine called the Christian Century the other day and they recently put out an issue that deals with issues related to church membership. The title of the main article is: “The Dismembered Church: Attending Without Joining.”

I was interested in the statistics of the articles, and what the authors saw as national trends in people’s (un)willingness to join churches, largely because we’ve recently done a membership class and have been talking about what it means to belong to the “Resurrection Community.” One of the many things I’ve learned about membership from the article is that it has numbers around membership have not always been very high in the US. There have been two periods of growth in church membership: once in the 19th, and once in the 20th. In the 19th century there were many frontier revivals led by Charles Finney and others who “brought religion to ordinary people. Some historians think that 1 in 3 Americans were members of a church by 1850, which was twice as much as it was in 1800. And the 2nd big membership growth period was during the, post-World War II. For this group “belonging to a church was a primary means of social belonging; church membership marked one’s place in the community.”
Continue Reading…