The Psalms are our prayers because they are, first and foremost, the prayers of the Beloved Son, who embodies our exile before the Father. Jesus was a part of the exiled Jewish community living under Roman occupation; The Psalms were His prayer book. They were the communal prayers that taught Him how to speak to His Father praise and sorrow, without any masks. If the psalms are the prayers of Jesus bringing His whole self before our Father, then they — in all their grief, joy, and violent rage — must be the prayers that lead us to Him as well.
Everything about our faith flows first from sharing in divine love with Jesus through prayer. Often the story of Mary and Martha is reduced to “don’t do stuff, just sit,” but there is something deeper at work. Jesus is not critical of Martha’s activity itself, but her motive. She is anxious because she finds her value in her good behavior and she is projecting her frustration upon her sister. Action and contemplation actually go hand-in-hand - to “pray without ceasing” is to merge our communion with God and our daily activity. Without contemplation, our activity burns us out and we become filled with contempt.
The wisdom of the Spirit does not fit inside the wisdom of the world; it transcends all our political ideologies and philosophies. We are spiritual babies when we try to use Jesus just justify our preferred party in the political binary in this country. Sometimes we keep God’s wisdom out of our thinking about politics; sometimes we believe that we can use political power and control to bring about the Kingdom. A life of the Spirit means we having a different foundation that teaches us to live creatively, maintaining our integrity in the public sphere. As we mature in God’s sacrificial love, we cling less tightly to the wisdom of the world and find our home in the wisdom of the Spirit.
To live in the name of Jesus is to develop the courage and imagination to live peaceably in a violent world. We so often want to immediately find the loopholes to what Jesus is saying about loving our enemies and not resisting evil, before sitting in awe at his vision for his people. Nonviolence is not passivity, but a struggle to find alternatives to violence - our weapons become kindness, forgiveness, and peaceful resistance.
This is a short liturgy intended to help us become more tender-hearted before God and one another.
Recently I have been sitting under the heavy weight of these confusing times - the pandemic disorienting our rhythms and the moments we take for granted, the mass exodus from church among young Christians, and more. It has caused me to feel despair, anger, and powerlessness to do much about it. Yet even as my mind spins in place out of frustration and my heart breaks from the weight of change, my soul is still seeking out the face of God.
We wrapped up LISTENING TO THE HEARTBEAT OF GOD by weaving some of the major themes into our prayer for approaching the Lord’s Table. This liturgy is a combination of texts from the Book of Common Prayer, call-and-response reading of scripture, and custom-written words that connect to our series… Read More
Our culture is in something of an emotional renaissance. There is an interest in emotional health and integration that has not been seen for several generations; one only needs to peruse social media to see the meteoric rise in conversation and resources directed towards better knowing our own hearts… Read More
This week we learned the process of Lectio Divina, or “sacred reading” of the scriptures as a way to listen to God speaking to us... Read More
