Learn - December 11, 2018

Photo by Bill Burkhart

I’ve been in school for the last 6 years. Occasionally I try to convince myself that it would be better (easier, more fun, less controversial) to return to being spiritual but not religious rather than a practicing Christian. I have failed miserably. Entering into a tradition of prayer, Bible reading, church-going and communion has changed not only me but the very context of my life. It has changed what frames my life in ways that simply being open and available for spontaneous spiritual experience could not. (Come to think of it, I should re-center myself around a regular yoga practice. I really should. I know I’d be happier, healthier, more in tune with myself and spiritually revitalized if I did. But Christianity is something else again.)  Practicing Christianity has given me not just a newly refurbished or reinforced center but a new story.  Who I am and who I am meant to be is re-shaped by this story and yet, oddly I feel more like myself as a result. I am not simply re-centered but reframed in something greater than myself that simultaneously makes me more available.

Participating in this story requires first of all a suspension of disbelief. This is the open attitude Aristotle recommended for appreciating a play. And guess what: I’m good at that. I like plays! But it turns out, I am not just watching this play. I am in it. This requires an act of the imagination and an embrace of risk more than an act of faith. To tell the truth, it’s more like my experiences in improv dance and comedy than my childhood experiences of “going to church”.  I have chosen to live my life within the framework of a passion play whose story I won’t ever completely understand and whose ending I can’t control. My particular lines have not yet been written. I will have to figure them out as I go along but they require that I be authentic. Playing my part makes meaning for me and other people so it is important that I tell the truth. Other texts and other plays are always involved. Christianity isn’t the only drama that matters. But it is the story I have chosen and that has chosen me.

I suppose in a way I am still spiritual but not religious in the sense that being religious is not my goal. Living in the story of Jesus is. If anything, this commitment has made my critique of religion much sharper.

My participation is a choice.  After all, I could always leave the stage. The play is the thing.  But it is my job to make it matter that I stay.

*

What story shapes your life?

How are you shaped by the stories you tell yourself or the stories other people tell about you?

Do you think of yourself as smart and successful?

As lost and confused?

As victim or victimizer?

As privileged or oppressed?

Take a moment.

Tell the truth.

Pause

         *

Now, consider this: would you be interested in backing up and finding yourself in a larger story?

A story where it is revealed that you are always both?

     *

I kill Jesus every day.

And I await his resurrection.

This is the story of hope because it is true.

                            *

Learn (for the practically inclined)

Open your BCP.

Don’t have one?

Borrow one from church next week and bring it home with you.

(If asked what you are doing with a BCP under your arm, you can blame me.)

Or find it online here: https://www.bcponline.org

Find Daily Office Lectionary in sidebar menu and click on it

(p. 937 in actual Book)

Now Click on Advent

Scroll down to week of 2 Advent, Year 1

That’s today.

Find Tuesday

Read one of these

Psalm 26 and 28

Isaiah 5:13-17

I Thessalonians 5:1-11

Luke 21:29-38

A link to the Bible is right there!

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=4782437

Ponder, wander, free associate.

There is no official interpretation.

Just a doorway to reflection.

The BCP is a tool for prayer and faith exploration FOR YOU at home alone

not just a means of making community in church

or a complicated service manual for priests.

This is what I have learned.

Steal this book.

Make it yours.

Amen.

Post by Mary Barnett

Time to Wake Up

View image | gettyimages.com

December 9, 2015
Reflection by Phil Bjornberg

In her book on the spirituality of time, Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time, Dorothy Bass invites us into a way of living in time that is alert to both contemporary pressures and rooted in ancient wisdom.  She encourages us to reevaluate our understanding of our earthly lives and to participate fully in the Christian practice of knowing time as a gift from God.  Embraced in this way, time need not be wrestled with each day.  Instead, time becomes the habitation of blessing.

Properly ordering our day constitutes a faithful practice, not merely a logistical strategy to alleviate pressure; and time is not finally an avenger or an enemy but a holy gift,

"a meeting place, a point of rendezvous with God."

For anxious humanity, time is a terror. We stand on the vanishing point of an unstable and constantly eroding present, our past irretrievable and only faintly remembered and our future uncertain and full of peril. We have the unshakable dread that we are running out of time. We feel a desperate need to seize time, to fight time, to control time, to exploit time….to fill time to the bursting, and ultimately to kill time.

The assurance of the gospel is that God "has time" for humanity. God gives time back to humanity not as a threat but as a treasure, and with Christ, the Lord of time, there is time enough to do what we have been given to do. This understanding knows time as a godly gift that sings in every present moment of every today.

Mindful of our tendency to keep the frenzy going "day and night," we unite as one in noting that the book of Genesis insists on reversing human ordering of time to "night and day"—“In the beginning…darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light…and there was evening and there was morning - the first day."  First, there was evening and then there was morning. In God’s creation, the day begins at dusk, and we begin with sleep, with rest, and with the clear sign that the rhythms of God's time do not depend upon our anxious labors.

Awaken to sleep, arise afresh.

This Advent and Christmas, wake up and take up God’s invitation to view every day as this day, as God’s precious gift of life to you day, as you and me and us day, as the whole divine humankind, kind and loving humanity shalom day, "this day that God has made."