Go - December 15, 2017

And He said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.

Mark 16:15

As this Advent season continues, I am finding myself increasingly thirsting for the time and space to slow everything down. At times it seems as though the speed at which the hours, days and weeks are barreling past me with all of the wonders, commitments, bright lights and holiday celebrations that accompany them, makes it exceedingly easy to get caught up in that flurry of excitement and activity and neglect to take the time to reflect on the magnitude of the moment toward which we are all racing. That singular point in time at which the world would change forever.

But even as these thoughts of regret and loss flow through my mind, I am also reflecting this year on the fact that perhaps there is something else that can be learned this Advent. I am struck this year by the fact that as much as I am seeking the peace and quiet reflection that the birth of our Savior commands I am also mindful of the need to seize the opportunity to live into the invitation to GO! We all need time to slow down this Advent and ensure that our hearts and mind are properly positioned so that we might receive the greatest gift of all on Christmas morning. But I believe it is also incumbent upon us not to let that be the end of the story.

As children of God we are not called to sit and wait forever. It is on each of us to live our lives in the manner that Jesus has taught us. To honor Christ, we must lead a life that touches others with that same loving humility that Jesus did. It would be truly a lost opportunity for us to wait in the wings, keeping the wondrous gift of Jesus to ourselves, while at the same time failing to share Jesus’ love and forgiveness with everyone we meet. It is our call as Christians to live into our role as apostles and go out into the world wherever that call may take us to spread the Good News!

So as we wait this Advent, let’s not be merely interested observers. Let’s be the horses in the starting gate. Let’s store the energy of the peace and reflection that Advent affords to all of us so that when the light of Christ shines on Christmas Day we can become the beacons which reflect throughout the world with all the love and mercy that Jesus would have us do.

Let’s GO!!!

Post by Michael Southwick

Darkness has a tangible quality

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For a while at the end of seminary, my husband Nik and I followed a fairly strict routine. Around 8 or so, when it had finally started to get dark in Tennessee, we turned off all the harsh fluorescent lights in our student apartment and lit candles. We called it “candle time,” and we started doing it as a way to spend intentional time together at the end of a long day, to better wind down. There was one evening when my orchestra rehearsal ran long and I biked home in a rush and hurried to the door juggling my French horn, music folder, water bottle, and keys. When I opened the door, instead of more noise, more bright stage lights, more people asking something of me, there was only soft light, warmth, and quiet. And when we finally blew out the candles, some of that warmth remained. Our apartment, rather than being sterile student housing with thin carpeting and ugly cabinets, had been purified somehow. The darkness had been changed.

Darkness is not always empty. Right now, I am rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and there is a point when Meg and the other characters travel to a distant planet by way of a wrinkle in space. While they are traveling, Meg was completely alone. Reflecting back on it after, she realizes: “It was not as simple as darkness, or absence of light. Darkness has a tangible quality; it can be moved through and felt; in darkness you can bark your shins; the world of things still exists around you.”

In Advent, as the days shorten and the nights lengthen, I am finding myself leaning into that darkness, the type of darkness that is full, rather than empty. I am pressing into the penitential Sunday lections and prayers, the apocalyptic Daily Office readings. I am casting around in the dark and realizing I am not alone. The darkness falling in Advent is not the empty darkness of Meg’s travel through space, but a darkness that is full of active waiting, anticipation, and hope. It is the darkness that falls after candle time: holy, refreshing, allowing you to go deeper and deeper, all the while knowing that you are safe.

Post by Carrie Combs

Time to Connect

December 10, 2015

Reflection by Jane Hale

Several years ago, while I was in the midst of leading a church teen group, I got a call from a local food pantry lamenting the recently received news that their major corporate sponsor had backed out of funding holiday meals.  They were short 200 turkeys, and had exhausted their resources. 

 When I shared the news with the curious teens whose joyful conversation the phone call had just interrupted, one of them joined in the lamentation, “That’s so awful. I just wish we could do something.”

“Maybe we can,” I suggested.

“Yah, but what can I do?” a gangly, tousle-haired teen sighed, “I’m just one kid, and there’s a whole world full of hurting, and hunger, and sadness.”  

We sat for a moment, in silence, the evening’s once festive energy now sobered, both by thoughts of so many of our neighbors’ suffering, and by an unsettling feeling of impotence and isolation.

We were roused from our thoughts when a quiet but clear voice emerged from the sea of sighing. “Well, we might just be kids,” she began, “and we might not be able to afford 200 turkeys ourselves, but I’ll bet we each know enough people who could pitch in.”   She had the whole group’s rapt attention.  “What if we were able to connect these families with other families who can help?  What if that call was not for us not to come up with a way to end hunger single-handedly, but to get the word out that we have neighbors who need help, and then make connections between people who care?  Think about what all those people could do together!”

That year, the food pantry received all 200 turkeys, pies, sides, and then some.  But more importantly, through the faithful response of these resourceful teens, folks in the community were able to connect with one another in new and life-giving ways.   Our teen group may not have ended the hurting and hunger and darkness that so often seems to engulf our world, but they sure helped to make a dent in it in our little corner of the world, by bringing a huge number of people together in love and compassionate action.

It seems that, so often these days, in the face of so much suffering, folks are asking the same question my teens asked. “I want to help,” we say, “But what can I do?  I’m just one person and there’s a whole world full of hurting, and hunger, and sadness.”

In this time, as we await the in-breaking of the Love of God into a hurting world, consider what it means that ours is an incarnational faith, a faith of community and communion.    What need or work is God drawing your attention to right now?  How might you use some of the holy gift of Time that God has given you to join God in gathering the community and incarnating the life-giving Love of God in your own context? 

Emmanuel, even as you are with us, you go out into the world before us.  Empower us to notice what you are up to, and to join you in breathing life anew into a suffocating world.  Continue to reveal to us the deep connections that always have existed between all of creation, and remind us, though the healing of the world often seems a daunting task, that when we join hands in compassionate action with our neighbors, we help to incarnate the Love that reconciles and restores all things to you.  Amen.

Video by Nine6teen, Christ Church Pomfret

Time to Wake Up

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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." 

Time is Holy

December 3, 2015
Reflection by Jane Hale

Did you know that, out of all of the goodness of creation, the very first thing to be sanctified and blessed was Time?  The first creation story in Genesis takes us through the broad, sweeping creation of heavens and earth, light and darkness, water, land, and sky, vegetation, sun and stars, animals of all kinds, and even humans, and then, on the seventh day, when the good work was done, God looked back on the time that had passed, and then “blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it, God rested from all the work that [God] had done in creation” (Gen 2:3).  Time is holy.  The question for us, then, is how will we inhabit the holiness of time? Instead of seeking the ever-elusive work-life balance, which assumes that life begins only when work ceases, can we set ourselves to a rhythm of life-giving work and life-giving rest?  Can we join God in God’s holy rhythm of creation, a rhythm that values wholeness and abundance of life, community and communion, mutuality and connection, creation and rest? When we look at our calendars, do they reflect the holiness of time?  If not, what might we do to bring them into sync with what God is up to in the ongoing, sacred process of creation?

Holy and Gracious God,  Thank you for inviting us to participate in your cycle of creation.  Please guide us as we seek to faithfully inhabit your holy time.  Help us to live out our days by your life-giving rhythms of creation and rest.  Amen.