futurePRIMITIVE

Welcome to the conversation.

I am revisiting the thoughts I sought to share in living liturgy, as I prepare to offer a short message on Sunday in the first worship event of a new church.  I begin with the readings:

‘A wandering Aramean was my father, he went down to Egypt and sojourned there, he and just a handful of his brothers at first, but soon they became a great nation, mighty and many.  The Egyptians bruised and battered us, in a cruel and savage slavery.  We cried out to GOD, the God-of-Our-Fathers […] He listened to our voice […] And God took us out of Egypt,’ (Deuteronomy 26:5-9).

‘Write these commandments that I’ve given to you today on your hearts.  Get them inside of you and then get them inside your children.  Talk about them wherever you are, sitting at home, or walking in the street, talk about them from the time you get up in the morning to when you fall into bed at night.’ (Deuteronomy 6:6-9)

‘This will be a brand-new covenant that I will make with Israel when the time comes.  I will put my law within them - write it on their hearts! - and be their God.  And they will be my people.  They will no longer go around setting up schools to teach each other about GOD.   They’ll know me firsthand, the dull and the bright, the smart and the slow.’ (Jeremiah 31:34)

‘So here’s what I want you to do.  When you gather for worship, each one of you be prepared with something that will be useful for all.  Sing a hymn, teach a lesson, tell a story, lead a prayer, provide an insight.’  (1 Corinthians 14:26)

‘So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you.  Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering.’ (Romans 12:1)

‘[Christ] handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor-teacher to train Christians in skilled servant work, working within Christ’s body, the church, until we’re all moving rhythmically  and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.’ (Ephesians 4:11-13)

Liturgy is most known to us and experienced by us as a form of worship service, written out for us to follow together.  But that isn’t how it has always been.

Originally, the term referred to acts of public service that Greek upper classes were required to perform.  As it came into the life of the early church it meant “the work of the people of God.”

I want to think of liturgy in a far more positive and creative way - as a living story, as our living story.

The Israelites would retell their story: ‘A wandering Aramean was my father …’.  The Law was a part of this living-story and they were encouraged to talk about God’s commands with their children wherever they were, ’sitting at home, or walking in the street,’ from when they got up in ‘the morning to when you fall into bed at night.’

Liturgy is more than words in books, it is the pattern and rhythm of life for an entire community; it is first of all relational and only secondly structural. I suggest that what we are going to do is nothing less than to create a living liturgy of lives found in God and one another.

Robert Mulholland defines a kairos community as a ‘new order of being’ centred in Jesus Christ.  He goes on to say: ‘Liturgy […] becomes the lifestyle of the kairotic community […] Liturgy is the life-breath of kairotic existence, the heartbeat of kairotic community.’ (Robert Mulholland in Shaped By the Word)

Jeremiah spoke of a time when we would not be schooled in God but our knowledge of God will rise up from within us.  So, the liturgy of a faith-community is in the activities of the people which proceed out of this full-of-Christ-life: creative expressions of this life-in-Christ in rhythms of authenticity and relevancy.  American, Methodist bishop Robert Schnase captures this well in his description of how people offer the “absolute utmost of
themselves.”

When a community forgets this connection to Christ then liturgy is an emptiness - and the community ends up borrowing the words and patterns that others provide from some-other experience some-where else.

But Paul encouraged his listeners to bring treasures from their lives to their communal times of worship: a song, a reading, a word, a prayer, a something.

A living-liturgy flows from real lives collaborating in a particular life-context.

This cannot be grown in a hurry.  The life of a community is found not in the destination but in the journey towards the liturgy - indeed, the journey is the liturgy in which community (communitas) is being formed. This may (and should) be enhanced by the experience of others from without - we remember we belong to a larger church - but if it is only from without then this will be to expansive, expressive, living-liturgy, what painting by numbers is to a painting by Van Gogh.  Liturgies from elsewhere may inspire but must not replace.

The more we depend on form and structure that is pre-formed and pre-structured, the less we depend on the important work of growing and deepening and strengthening relationships - the gardens of a living liturgy.

As I have suggested, our living liturgy will be found in our journey together: our personal journeys with God gathering into something new. It will be real and gritty and relevant, and at the same time, full of hope and heaven and beauty and wonder.  Paul reminded his listeners that, in this way, they were to see their ‘everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life.’ 

When Joseph Myers writes ‘Story is the measure of community. Story emerges from life‘ (Organic Community), he is saying the same thing. The only story we can live is our story - with God and with one another - coming together in a form that we can join in and live out. Along the way of the journey the story inspires words and music and movement around relationships, and maybe even buildings.

But we must remember that the story is never complete - and in this way we can never say it is only our story.  As it is woven from real people living real lives, even when one new person enters our story everything changes.  We become something different. It is a living-story, allowing others to bring treasures from out of their lives, and this, always for the sake of even more.

In the past the life of the church has been shaped by the systematic theologian, but the future will be increasingly shaped by the poet.  Indeed, the wonder to behold will be the theologian and the poet dancing and singing together towards the future.

There are far too many faith-communities unable to write their own stories because the members of these churches are not encouraged or allowed to know themselves and each other, the spoken or unspoken message is “Fit in”.  No more.  Such churches do not know their story, and, being unable to create their own liturgy, borrow from somewhere else.

The liturgy expressed in the larger story of a community can only be created if we each know the smaller stories of our own lives and begin to be open to those of others, when people are identifying their ’skilled, servant work,’ as Paul named it. Here is a critical part of our journey.

And some of you are doers, some thinkers, some feelers; some are poets, some are artists, some are listeners, some are carers; some give, some encourage, some story-tell, some smile, some help; some repair, some heal, some bake, some organise, some invite; some weep, some hold hands, some fight, some laugh; some are creators, some are collectors, some do what you are really good at.

Will you bring your story and join it with the stories of others as we seek not to do the liturgy but to be a living liturgy - co-creators of songs and prayers and reflections and spaces and places, … and lives.

What do you think?

Welcome to the conversation.

Recently I have been receiving - directly or indirectly - comments about the worship services of a new church community which I’ve been helping to form out of four existing churches.

I knew the task of bringing these communities together would be a difficult one but these comments bring more detail to the size of the challenge.

Many of these comments focus on people’s preferences, including how they want the services to be more like the kind of worship which they knew in their old congregation.

Here is the thought that is emerging for me in all of this: The way so many churches go about and express their worship of God is messing people up.

They ought to have been encouraged to worship God out of who they are, and this brought within “an adventure” (a collective name I use for a church) of exploring how lots of different people can come together in their diversity and focus their common life on God.

I am deeply troubled.

I am concerned because I wonder if some people will ever recover from the damage churches have done to them - they will never recover to become fully-devoted worshippers.

What do you think?

Welcome to the conversation.

I’ve been putting together my thoughts for a message for Sunday; I offer them here, beginning with the Scriptures:

‘But seek first [God’s] kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.’ (Matthew 6:33)

‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; those who seek, find; and to those who knock, the door will be opened.  Which of you if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake?  If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!  So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and Prophets.  Enter through the narrow gate.  For wide is the gate and narrow the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.  But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.’ (Matthew 7:7-14)

As I read these words I thought that they’d be a great mission statement for a church to use: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you!”

What would happen if a church community determined to make itself available to its neighbours along these lines?

I have to confess though, that I think most churches would struggle with such an open understanding of being a servant-community - which is kind-of-odd when you think about it because we have the scriptures telling us that this is what it means to live in the kingdom of God.  There is now a disconnection  - developed over centuries - and we need to reconnect with what Jesus is telling the disciples about what the life of a kingdom-dweller looks like.

The context for all of this is Jesus’ message on a hillside (Matthew 5-7), which he begins by setting out kinds of people who’ll discover this kingdom-life, amongst whom are the hopeful, hopeless, naive, and dreaming people, (Matthew 5:1-12).  We might summarise the list by saying these are people who hadn’t realised their hopes and dreams.

As I read Jesus’ words, I found myself taken back to when my son Luke, who was around the age of five, would follow me around the garden asking question after question about what we were doing.  Children do this really well, exploring a world which is so new to them.  Somewhere, somehow, this inquisitiveness recedes, but Jesus here suggests that kingdom people are marked by these childlike qualities, of being enquiring people, searching people, persistent people, who realise that the way of the disciple is to ask, seek, knock.

The kingdom is not about arriving or being passive.  It is more often marked by having more questions then answers, about being more lost than found, and being frustrated more than we succeed or make it.

Is this how we feel, but we don’t dare say it?

One of the things I am fascinated by is how God has placed amazing potential in every human being, including strengths (talents to which skills and knowledge have been added.  When I read these words from school principal Jenifer Fox, ‘It is in a child’s interest that his strengths are observed.  Ask, listen, watch, and wonder.  Children are full of surprises’ (Your Child’s Strengths), then I have to wonder where the ask-seek-knock has gone to for adults.

An example of this has just appeared in my email-box in the form of some feedback from a church in which some of the people are saying they don’t like the new kinds of service because they don’t know what to expect in them - and clearly, they want to know exactly what to expect.  Again, I have to wonder how we have lost the sense of adventure that kingdom people are meant to have, how we have replaced this with some kind of understanding that we ought to know exactly what is going to happen and we know exactly where to put this in our lives (often so we can control it).

We have to rediscover the disciple’s way of asking-seeking-knocking.  Take the whole worship-service as an example.  Worship-attendees often say that worship is something they offer to God.  Kingdom people will say that worship is God’s gift to us so that we can give up idolising ourselves and focus on him.

The average Sunday service is seen by many worship-attendees to be a way we can make ourselves more like Jesus.  Kingdom people know that we cannot make ourselves more like Jesus - this is the work of the Holy Spirit as we offer the elements of worship as practices or disciplines of faith to him.  We must be God must do: we ask, we seek, we knock; God answers, God finds, God opens.The question is right there: How do we do that, when the comments we usually hear on worship services are more often about tell us that people think they are for them (they didn’t like the songs, or the number of songs, or the number of people involved, or the length of the prayers, or the length of time taken)?

Or take the Scriptures as one of these elements: the Word of God is first of all that Word that came to those who wrote the scriptures rather than the scriptures themselves, and God wants for his living Word to come to us alive and to re-form as we allow the scriptures to move deeply through our lives.  (Also, check out John Wesley’s thoughts on scripture-reading as Robert Mulholland includes them in his book: pp. 123-130.)

It seems so often that we take the broad way Jesus warns us about, the way of least resistance: it’s easy to find the gate to it; it doesn’t involve any enquiring or seeking or persistence.

I hope that you think “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you!” is a pretty good mission statement.  The thing is, we must live the message, we must be the message as Kingdom people.

Where to begin?

Ask … Seek … Knock.

Small steps.  One question.  One look.  One knock. … And then another.

But it all begins with a decision, for whilst we know what we must do, and if we believe Jesus is right we know we can, then the decision is about wanting to.

What do you think?

Welcome to the conversation.

‘And don’t be wishing you were someplace else or with someone else. Where you are right now is God’s place for you. Live and obey and love right there.’ (1 Corinthians 7:17; The Message)

These words of Paul really caught my attention this morning. They appear to be a bridge between advice given by the apostle on marriage and singleness, and the circumstances/situations in life that people were in when they began to follow Christ. He is concerned that they live out their faith where they are.

I found myself asking again: Am I more concerned with where I am and what I am doing, or, am I focusing on who I am in the lives of others?

Robert Mulholland throws down a challenge: ‘This Word [of God] will penetrate to those depths of our lives where we are a hindrance to what God speaks us forth to be in the world’ (Shaped By the Word).

In yesterday’s blog I passed on something of Mulholland’s concept of kairotic living and kairotic community. This way of living - living in Christ - is firstly and foremostly relational and formational, rather than being functional and informational.

I am thinking that who I am where I am is a far more creative possibility then wondering about what it would be like to be in a different place where I might well lack the cutting edge of the ‘call for the death of the false self, the life characterized by the primacy of informational, functional doing’ (Mulholland).

(Last night I had to lead an informational, functional meeting and this reinforced the feelings and questions I raise above but I couldn’t get this post on my blog before going out for a couple of “conversations with purpose” this afternoon.  These were quite something - relational and formational - and I returned energised, encouraged to focus on who I am in the lives of others.)

What is it like for you?

Welcome to the conversation.

‘Liturgy […] becomes the lifestyle of the kairotic community […] Liturgy is the life-breath of kairotic existence, the heartbeat of kairotic community.’ (Robert Mulholland in Shaped By the Word)

I want to throw around a few ideas about liturgy, a word usually associated with church service books and/or words held onto well beyond their sell-by date.

However, I want to think of liturgy in a far more positive and creative way. Liturgy is more than words in books, it is the pattern and rhythm of the whole life of a church community, which is firstly relational and only secondly material.

For Mulholland (quoted above) a kairotic community is defined by a ‘new order of being’ centred in Jesus Christ. The liturgy of this community are the actions of the people proceeding out of this full-of-Christ-life. A kairotic community creatively expresses this life in Christ in the rhythms of an appropriate (authentic and relevant) liturgy. When a community forgets this connection to Christ then liturgy dies - it ends up simply borrowing the words and patterns provided by others from somewhere else. Meaningful liturgy can only be born out of a particular group of people and their context.

As such, it is not something that can be rushed to, the life of the community being found in the journey towards the liturgy. Only when this is appreciated will it be a fully formed and connected thing. This can (and should) be enhanced by the experience of others from without but if it is only from without then it will never be a real expression of a community’s kairotic experience: liturgies from without can inspire but ought not replace.

Liturgy is found in the journey and the liturgy is the journey - it arises out of the journeys of however many people make up a kairotic community - journeys with God and with one-another. It is real and gritty and relevant, and at the same time it is full of hope and heaven and beauty and wonder. After all, we are humystic.

When Joseph Myers writes ‘Story is the measure of community. Story emerges from life‘ (Organic Community), he is describing this living-liturgy. The story is our story with God and with one another put together in a form that we can join in and live out together. As it is explored together in community the story inspires words and songs, and maybe buildings.

It is important that it never becomes fixed and becomes only “our story” but, being woven from real people living real lives, it also allows others to bring their lives and make their contribution, and this, lived out towards others.

Compare this with many church communities which are unable to write their own stories because the members of the church are not encouraged or allowed to know themselves and each other. Such churches do not know their story, and being unable to create their own liturgy must borrow it from somewhere else. The liturgy of the larger story of a community can only truly be created if we know the smaller stories of ourselves and others.

What do you think?

Welcome to the conversation.

Over twenty five years of being a church leader I have been able to watch many churches in their ways of meeting. My observation is that conventional churches struggle to really meet with one another, focusing more on information and business rather than in the exploration and deepening of interpersonal connections

I believe there is a need for deeper conversations with one another so that we do not miss the ways in which God has designed us for remarkable living. I’ve just read Jenifer Fox’s remarks about how open conversations with our children, about their interests, allows for clues to their strengths to emerge - I think we need to hear this for adults too: ‘Strengths are individual epiphanies that open doors to further understanding about what turns one on to life’ (Your Child’s Strengths).

Here is a different way of thinking about a conversation. Instead of it being a way of receiving information about those we’re meeting with, let’s begin to see a conversation as being a portal to a bigger world, conversations that are more formational than informational. We like information because we can control it but big, open conversations are places in which we can be formed with one another by the Holy Spirit.

When we introduce strengths into this, then to know our strengths is not so much a better way of understanding ourselves, as windows or portals through which we see a bigger world of possibilities.

What do you think?

Welcome to the conversation.

One of the things I have noticed about the institutional church is that it finds it so hard to respond positively to the idea that everything that is within a person conjoins in the direction God wants their life to take, offering purpose. It’s almost as if this is anti-faith rather than being - in truth - the ultimate expression of faith in a human being.

Robert Mulholland writes: ‘Wisdom is bringing all the dynamics of your being into harmony with the word God is speaking you forth to be in the world’ (Shaped By the Word). In other words, God speaks out your life to be one small word within his Word which is active in Creation. Everything we are is intended to be lived in ways that see this word, that God has spoken us to be to be, realised.

I am so very excited by this thought.  I realise now, more than ever, how one of the things I love most of all in this life is to hear people describe the things in their lives that speak of their uniqueness and their potential.

However, I find these things do not often surface without some intentional work on the part of a person to discover and explore and live them out, often helped by others. (I think one of the reasons this may not happen naturally in the church today is the loss of conversation as a means of purposeful exploration, but I will need to return to this in another post.)

I think that as we pursue these things something astonishing happens in our lives, something that we need to use words like wholeness and shalom and communion to describe. We begin to see more possibilities then we have ever seen before for how we might love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and to love our neighbours as we love ourselves.

Isn’t that worth exploring?

What do you think?

Welcome to the conversation.

If you have read some of the other things I have written about how amazing God has made people to be you will know this is a passion for me.  I am energised when I think of what people can contribute to making the world more human.

At the same time I can be disheartened by the numbers of people I meet who do not think they have anything to offer and as a result have become passive.  Jenifer Fox writes of the American educational system: ‘The alarming message it presents is that there is not enough to go around for everyone to be successful’ (Your Child’s Strengths).  These words stood out for me.  In the British culture there is an assumption that only some will succeed and the rest will have to put up and serve.

The thinking is that there is only so much success to go around, that it is a scarce commodity, and this way of seeing things is found in the culture-at-large and in the churches.  We have such a limited formula for measuring success - probably formulated by people who are good at the things that are included in it.  But what if success isn’t scarce?

What if the truth is that we just don’t know what it would be like to live in a world in which everyone succeeds?  What if such a world is possible?  What if this has always been a significant part of the mission of the church … restoring humanity as the living image of God?  What if the church is God’s R&D department, a picture of what success ought to look like to the world?

The unfortunate truth is that the church more often reflects the culture in which it finds itself, which in a 1,001 ways - more implicitly than explicitly - is saying there is scarcity and only a few succeed … and it begins early in life: ‘We’re unwittingly sending disapproving messages to children all the time.  In general we do this through the systems we have in place, and specifically with the conversations we have, or do not have, about the expectations and requirements we have laid out for their future success.  I call this focusing on weakness’ (Jenifer Fox).

That some wake up to wanting more comes out in what can be unhealthy ways.  See the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands, hoping to get the final stages of the X Factor, or  Britain’s Got Talent (insert your own country).  I say unhealthy because there is still only one successful entrant, and whilst others have their few minutes or hours of fame, the truth is that fame is for a lifetime in God’s life-in-all-its-fullness plan.

Of course, it must be added that this kind of fame looks different, as Jesus made clear when he announced that he had not come to be served but to serve, but then he added that he offers life in all its fullness, and completes our joy in life lived for others.

What do you think?  Scarcity?  Or can everyone succeed?

If you want to do something of a bible study through this lens then have a look at 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, asking: Why are the people supporting one or other of the apostles?  Is it possible to conceive that the apostles as celebrities in the eyes of the people?  Why do you think this result s in the kind of bad behaviour Paul mentions?  What would it look like if they all realised that they also were co-workers with God, and identified the part of the work they were meant to be involved in (preparing the ground, sowing seed, keeping the weeds out, watering, etc.)?

Welcome to the conversation.

Here is a message I am working on for Sunday, beginning with the scriptures:

The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good,your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is the darkness. (Matthew 6:22,23)Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? […] first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3,5)

I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you. […] You shall see greater things then that. […] you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. (John 1:48,50,51)

Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. (John 14:9)

 ///

Have you ever seen Fifty First Dates, the romantic comedy with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore?  It’s the story of Lucy, a young woman living in Hawaii who has suffered a head injury in a car accident and has no short-term memory.  To prevent her from being traumatised by changing the last thing she can remember, her father and brother have been creating the same day over and over again for a whole year.  That is until Henry (Sandler) meets Lucy and begins to fall in love.  But, how can someone who forgets everything overnight have a relationship with someone she never knew before the accident?  Enter the comedy and romance.

I won’t spoil the film for you, but fast forward to Lucy waking up in a strange place to first watch the video that has been made to remind her of what has been happening, then she moves to the window and draws back the curtain to stand wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the completely new and unexpected scenery - a beautiful snowbound bay in Alaska.What must it be like to begin a day and to have our eyes opened to the unexpected?  Instead of seeing the same things over and over again (and doing the same things over and over) what would it be like to see something quite new and amazing every day of our lives?

What might make something like that possible?

I was sharing something of this with a group of around fifteen or sixteen people last week and just wanted to check out how many needed some kind of assistance to be able to see - lenses, glasses, reading glasses, monocles - and discovered there was only one person there who didn’t need anything at all!

For me the truth follows that most of us need help when it comes to seeing things in an amazingly different way … and more than contact lenses or specs.

Annie Dillard is someone who sees far more than I do; listen to this: ‘In flat country I watch every sunset in the hope of seeing the green ray. The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears,’ concluding: ‘One more reason for keeping my eyes open.’

For Dillard, ‘The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price,’ and she gives this advice: ‘The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.’

How do we do that?

One day a man, going about his work, saw a most amazing sight. It was a bush that seemed to be on fire and yet wasn’t consumed by the flames. I have to wonder if one of the things Moses had discovered in the desert was the art, or ability, of seeing what others miss.

I think Jesus had also developed this art of seeing. When he spoke about sparrows or flowers in the fields he wasn’t simply reflecting living in a largely agrarian society, and he certainly wasn’t being “cute”, rather he noticed things, he really saw the details we so often miss. And whilst he noticed far more than many of us do in nature and what it has to say about the relationship of God with us, he also noticed people - an old woman giving everything she had in an offering, a tax-collector in a tree, the heart of a woman washing his feet with her tears (that no-one else wanted to see, but he did).

Seeing is part of the JesusLife we are invited into, part of the mystery of life in which the invisible becomes visible, and the closer we live to Jesus Christ, it seems to me, the more we see the invisible, the more we see in quite a new way, the sharper my life-sight becomes (though I admit right now it feels as if I can only get down to the “second line on the optician’s chart”).

At the end of leading a group of church leaders through exploring their strengths (talents and abilities honed by skill and knowledge), Edward “Chip” Anderson gave everyone a pair of foldaway reading glasses. His final request was a simple one, it was for everyone to wear the glasses for five minutes each day for the following week: half the time was to be spent looking at themselves, the rest of the time to look upon the people around. His message was simple: from now on they would see themselves and others differently.

He was right. I was part of the group Chip had led, and not because of wearing the glasses, he had helped me to see a day quite differently.

The art of seeing begins in the secret place with God, the place Jesus hurried to at the beginning of each day. I have described this as the first “table” of the day God invites us to - see the meal … another serving.

This breakfast table invitation is something we all receive, coming to us, as it does, with the first-breaths of our new day. It looks quite different for each of us, and it is for us to creatively weave prayer and scripture and solitude through it, but, for each of us it is a place of deepening connection with God, who helps us to see … more.

What does it look like for you? I ask this because it is very important, if we are to become people who see, that we accept who we are as shaped by God. We will not see very well if we are trying to be like someone else or to be the kind of people others want us to be.  Who God has made you to be will shape how and what you see.

In his excellent book Finding Our Way Again Brian McLaren shares how part of connecting with God ‘is that we join God in seeing.’

This thought from McLaren made me open my eyes wide.  Jesus suggests the eyes are the lamp of the body, that, as it were, what or who we look upon lights our eyes and sheds light (or darkness) into our lives.  This simple sentence though from McLaren expressed for me my growing desire to live this day as one who sees things differently.

Life with God is not about living a different kind of day, but to live the day I already have, differently, beginning with God. The days the disciples woke up to were just the same ordinary kind of days as we wake up to - sun, rain, winds, joys, troubles, etc. - but because they were spending time with Jesus they increasingly looked upon their days through “seeing” eyes.

Carrie Newcomer offers these wonderful lyrics: ‘holy is the place i stand/ to give whatever small good i can/ and the empty page and the empty book redemption everywhere I look/ unknowingly we slow our pace/ in the shade of unexpected grace/ and with grateful smiles and sad laments/ as holy as a day is spent/ and morning light sings “providence”/ as holy as a day is spent,’ (as holy as a day is spent).

All these thoughts wrap themselves around a phrase of just three words for me - from Dr Elizabeth Julian, a Catholic nun - instead of talking about practicing our faith, we must explore ‘faithing our practices.’

This is quite simply what Jesus did. On a hillside, with his disciples and a growing crowd, he taught how a deeper life is not a to-do list of great things to be done by great people, rather, the ordinary things of life being carried out with love and goodness and kindness brought out from deep within people. These included: how we speak to one another; relationships between husbands and wives; business relationships; and, friendships. Jesus invites those who would follow him to see all these differently.

Leonard Sweet has correctly said: ‘The spiritual life has earthly dimension - it is a life you can taste, and smell, and touch, and see, and hear. It is reality.’ (The Gospel According to Starbucks).

We are amongst those who realise there is no greater calling in life than to take time - and to use our time - so that we might see God and see people differently. We become helpers of one another and helpers of others, as John Wesley encouraged his people to: “build them up in that holiness without which they cannot see the Lord”.

I understand that the words miracle and mirror come from the same Latin root (miro - to wonder, and mirus - wonderful). What do we see, who do we see, as we look into this mirror? What do we see, who do we see, as we put on those new glasses that help us to see God, to see others, even as we see ourselves … differently?

Leonard Sweet asks, ‘do you wonder and admire the one-of-a-kind miracle you are?’ I would add whether we see this in the lives of the people around us? And perhaps we gasp, because we have seen something more clearly.

Do you see what I mean?  There is more to see than you wake up to now.  God is waiting to meet with us, so that he might touch our eyes so we look upon a day with wide-open eyes, and perhaps with wide-mouthed wonder.

“Look where you’re going!” may then be less of a warning and more of a promise.

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Here are some questions you might find helpful to think through:

• How did the words of Carrie Newcomer help you to look upon your day differently?
• I suggested that Moses was someone who had learned to use his time to see more. Do you agree? What might have contributed to forming this seeing ability in him?
• Do we tend to value or undervalue people like this?
• Annie Dillard says the secret of being sensitive to all that is around us is to ‘Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail’. Is this your experience? What are some of the practices you employ to be more sensitive?
• Brian McLaren suggests there is a link between connecting with God and seeing more. Is this your experience? What other things have helped you to see more?
• Do you feel comfortable with seeing yourself as something wonderful? Why did you answer as you did?

Welcome to the conversation.

Once more I have written down some of the thoughts I have been working through towards Sunday.

I love food but I love it most of all when I get to share it with others. I guess I am seeing more and more how I need to receive mealtimes as a wonderfully necessary interruption to the other activities of a day.

At the moment my reading at the end-of-the-day is John Grisham’s Playing for Pizza, which I’m really enjoying because it’s set in Italy and I’ve just been there on holiday. Grisham’s novel, like our own experience of Italy, is overflowing with food. Rather than laying out in the sun as human barbecues, my wife and I loved to sit in the local cafes, looking out on a lake - sunshine, sweet breezes, with a slice of torte and a drink … and a good book to read.

Something I had decided to weave through the holiday was the reading through of Luke’s Gospel. I was prompted to do this by something I read in N T Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus just before my holiday began, a suggestion that there are eight meals in Luke - so I thought I’d see if I could spot just what they were.

What I found were many food and meal references in Luke’s Gospel, but here’s my best effort at listing the eight: 1) Matthew’s Party (5:27-39); 2) Simon the Pharisee’s invitation (7:36-50); 3) Feeding more than 5,000 (9:12-17); 4) Pharisees and washing hands (11:37-41); 5) A Pharisee’s invitation and the announcement of the Great Banquet (14:1-24); 6) At Zacchaeus’ place (intimated - 19:1-10); 7) The Passover (22:1-23); and, the meal in Emmaus.

Wright asks us to particularly notice the seventh and eighth meals, pointing to a link between the “week” of Genesis creation and the new creation in Luke: ‘the week of the first creation is over, and Easter is the beginning of the new creation. God’s new world order has arrived.’

Meals are big in the Gospels and the reason for their significance comes into sharper view when we follow Wright’s argument that Jesus replaced the position of the temple in the life of Israel with a meal, his ‘own alternative symbol, the kingdom-feast, the new exodus feast,’ and that ‘Those who shared the meal with him were the people of the renewed covenant, […] Grouped around him, they constituted the true eschatological Israel.’

I reason I share these things is because I have been preparing a message for Sunday and thought I’d do some reflecting through my blog. The worship service I’m involved in is the beginning of something new for a church facing a new beginning - a shorter service followed by a communal meal - and I have more than an inkling that it is something important for the congregation to the extent of shaping its future. I think the meal is going to be lunch for this congregation in more than one way and I’ll tell you why.

Firstly, running through all my thinking about meals is an icon alternatively titled The Hospitality of Abraham and The Trinity, by Andrei Rublev (see above). The icon has become very special to me in the seven or eight years since I was introduced to it, representing as it does, the three travellers received as guests by Abram and Sarai in Genesis 18, traditionally thought to be God visiting the elderly couple.

Whenever I look at this image I am reminded of how God is welcoming me to his table in order to spend some time with him - to be.

Notice the space at the table in the foreground. That’s my place, and that’s your place too. Recently, I have been thinking of it as my breakfast table, the place I sit at the beginning of my day. This first “table of God” in a day for me is a personal one.

The second “table of God” I need to sit at in my day is a communal table: when I meet with others who are God’s people, and we enjoy him and enjoy one another. This is lunch - and this is the kind of meal I think the congregation is going to enjoy.

I don’t know about you but I was very much brought up with the idea that it is important to have “three square meals” a day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner (or, breakfast, dinner, and tea, if you come from Yorkshire, as I do). I was not allowed to skip a meal by my mother as a child, and now I am not allowed to skip a meal by my wife - C’est la vie! But they are both right, and you may be agreeing with them.

When the meal becomes a metaphor, or an icon, we begin to see how many people are skipping the meals they are invited to share at the table of God. Jesus ate at these three tables - Henri Nouwen noticed how Jesus lived his life through a rhythm or cycle of solitude, community, and ministry - there is the “breakfast” of personal time with God, there is the “lunchtime” of time together in community, and, there is the “dinnertime” of missional tables with God, something we see in one of the meals Luke records, about the banquet house of God needing to be full (Luke 14:23).

I know I can’t skip any of these meals, no matter what I might come up with as an excuse: I know more now than ever in my life, how I need the personal time, how I need the community time, and how I need the missional time, if I am to live this life with God - if I am to live the life that is God.

The kingdom meals open a larger and more beautiful world to us. As I reflect on the icon and on Luke’s recording of a number of meals, I became aware of disruption. Although Abraham welcomes the three strangers, it is the strangers who become the host in Rublev’s icon. Is this artistic licence on the part of Rublev or did he see something more, perhaps how in a number of Luke’s meals Jesus is the guest invited to the table but who then becomes the host, most strikingly in the eighth meal, in Emmaus.

More disruptive still is the meal at Simon the Pharisee’s home, where it is actually the woman who gatecrashes the meal, who, perhaps unknowingly, becomes the host - until Jesus points out that this is exactly what she is doing.

I wonder if this is disturbing you as it is disturbing me: What kind of kingdom is this, inviting the stranger and then allowing the stranger to become the host?

I wonder what this will mean to the people coming to the service I’ll be at on Sunday; I wonder what it will mean to so many churches.

Dare we welcome strangers and then invite these strangers to become our hosts?

Surely it’s our church?

Doesn’t it take many years to “get our feet under the table” - before something like this can happen?

These meal stories are highly subversive. Jesus appears to have little problem incorporating some of the most significant kingdom business in a meal, including the mystery and glory poured into the Passover meal.

As I was thinking through all of this, I read these words from Rick McKinley: ‘Have you ever received communion from a beautiful eight-year-old girl who looks at you with eyes of wonder? “This is the body of Christ, broken for you,” she says, holding up a piece of bread,’ (This Beautiful Mess).

Whenever God’s people come together, there is a choice: we can eat some food together because it’s expedient to do so, or we can come to the table of God and enter into the mystery - where the lonely share a meal with others, where hurts are laid down and healing is found, where empty people are filled to bursting point, and where joyless people find laughter, and above all, were love is spread thickly and freely by the stranger-God who is the host of the feast of life in all its fullness.

Are we hungry yet?

Brian McLaren shares this thought: ‘I think this is what happens to all of us when we feel a pull toward God. Not many of us, I think, feel really excited about attending church or singing religious songs or stopping snarky comments or disciplining ourselves to pray. What we feel is that some music is missing from our lives, and we need it; we can’t be fully ourselves as we hope to be without it,’ (Finding Our Way Again).

Do we hear the music? Are we hungry yet? Perhaps they are the same thing. It’s not church we want, it’s to be fed at the table of God, an open table, of love and forgiveness and wholeness and purpose.

How do we become this kind of “church”? Now, that’s a really good, a really exciting question.

What do you think?