To dance?

When we do our Beats 4 BEAT (2) concert on Sunday, August 17th it isn't a negation of the horror and tragedy of the world. Nor is it a diversion or a distraction from the pain and suffering of others. That will never change. No, when we play - and celebrate - and have fun together, we do it as a part of the sacred whole. Just as there is day, there is night. Just as there is pain, there is joy. Just as there is war, there is peace. I have come to believe that in the midst of anguish, perhaps the most faithful form of resistance and renewal is... to dance (and sing!) 

How did Elie Wiesel put it: we are born with a MAD desire to dance? What does the wise old preacher of Ecclesiastes say: there is a time for everything under heaven... including a time to mourn and a time to dance? What did the boss in Zorba the Greek, after all the tragedies of life, including the loss of love, wealth, status and his beloved's life, say to his old peasant friend at the close of the film?
I used to think it was sacrilege to celebrate while others suffered. But now I know that to ignore their suffering is the sin, never the dance. Indeed, some times the only thing we can do is to dance. We have to wail and protest and mourn, too. But without the dance, we become cynical and defined by the evil rather than the blessings. In times such as our own, when human brokenness is trumpeted all day and all night as reality, it is a moral imperative to reclaim the song and dance with all the madness in our soul.

Compared to what...

What a wonderfully creative and diverse summer this is turning out to be! It totally blows me away. It began with our friends, Peter and Joyce, from Thunder Bay, Ontario joining us for a week and sharing their profound and challenging experiences from Palestine. Prior to their arrival, I began a conversation with a colleague from one of our synagogues about how we might partner and study this hard reality together - and that, too, is coming to pass. Right after Peter and Joyce returned to Canada, we hosted a guest from Palestine who shared another set of experiences. And right before we departed for the Montreal Jazz Festival, we hosted a planning meeting with two community leaders about new ways of building partnerships with the city.

Two weeks away - one in Montreal and one at home - were heavenly. The Jazz Festival was stunning in every way and cracked open our creativity in ways that I am still celebrating. Upon return, however, Di injured her back and was out of the loop for nearly 2 full weeks. So while she has been recovering - and is now on the mend and back at work - I have been engaged in another blast of fascinating projects including:

+ Planning our August 17th Beats 4 BEAT (2) concert. We're gathering some of our favorite musical friends to raise money for the Berkshire Environmental Action Team. Seven years ago we discerned that we should partner with them to do our part in caring for Mother Earth and it has been a rich and rewarding experience. Currently they are working hard on grass roots opposition to the proposed natural gas pipeline - BEAT helped us make connection with the Climate Summer interns currently staying at the church, too - so we want to really kick up the fun for this gig as it is their 10th Anniversary.  NOTE: it is also the 45th anniversary of Woodstock and the 45th anniversary of the US landing on the moon! So we're going to start with some "wooden music" a la Crosby, Stills and Nash at Woodstock and then kick it into overdrive with our "electric rock and soul" sounds. There will be horns and guest artists and a ton of fun - with refreshments to follow.

+ My sabbatical team has secured our first choice in clergy replacement for me during the summer of 2015! What a blessing to bring back to the area one of the finest local ministers - and a colleague and friend. We've worked out the financial details and now are awaiting word from the Lily Foundation re: our grant proposal. Hard to believe that a year from now I will be AWAY and working on jazz liturgy and upright bass in Montreal for four months!

+ As noted, our Climate Summer interns are here for the next 10 days - camping in our Fellowship Hall - and meeting with local folk as they enlist opposition to the natural gas pipeline. Next Monday we'll hold a potluck and jam session with these great young adults @ 6 pm and you are all welcome to join us.

+ And our friends from the Live Out Loud Youth Group are back in action and

hope to host a LGBT youth film night at church in early August. Additionally we're exploring new ideas about how to transform our Sanctuary, planning for the Season of Creation in September, rehearsing new music and thinking about jazz liturgies in the fall. What's more, my colleague and friend in music ministry is getting married in early October - just after we celebrate the birthday of grandbaby, Louie - and reprise the blessing of our pets ceremony on St. Francis Day. 

What's more, we're redesigning the church website to be both more current and user friendly.  Here's one of the tunes we'll be doing on August 17th: "Compared to What" by the great Les McCann and Eddie Harris.

Climate summer interns share their stories...

It is my joy to share that this group of young people from Climate Summer are "camping" at our church this week. They joined us this morning for worship and afterwards about 25+ people hung around to hear their stories.
On Monday, July 28th @ 6 pm we'll regroup for a potluck and jam session to hear of their adventures in Western Massachusetts. They are deeply committed, articulate and inspirational young women and men who know they have been called to give something back to the wider community. If anyone ever feels cynical again, spend some time speaking with this crew and they will fix your head for good! I was blessed beyond my imagination as they are FREAKIN' awesome!

Put this on your calendars...

praying the reality of the Times...

In this morning's NY Times, three different articles captured my attention:
1) Mark Oppenheimer's "Examining the Growth of Spiritual but not Religious" (check it out: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/us/examining-the-growth-of-the-spiritual-but-not-religious.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0); 2) the Editorial Board's "Israel's War in Gaza" (read it here: http://www.nytimes.com /2014/07/19/us/examining-the-growth-of-the-spiritual-but-not-religious.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0); and 3) Michael White's "After a 19 Year Run, Passing the Baton" (check it out: http://www.nytimes.com/ 2014/07/19/arts/ music/ david-zinman-ends-his-tenure-with-tonhalle-in-zurich.html?ref=todayspaper) Each items speaks to the complicated, joyous, confusing, terrifying and all together anxious times we live in; taken as a whole, they also point us towards the hard work and trust necessary to move faithfully in this realm of brokenness and beauty. 

Meister Eckhart, the 12th century mystical Dominican priest, once wrote that: "There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence." A popularized restatement of this insight puts it like this: "Reality is the will of God - it can always be better - but we must always start with what is real." I rather like Reinhold Niebuhr's take on this in the Serenity Prayer: God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. Here's how I see the connections:

+ First, 7% of the American population self-identify themselves as SBNR - spiritual but not religious - a body of people exploring a host of spiritual paths that is larger than either the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Jewish tradition in the USA or Islam. Where I live, in New England, this is true in spades - as it is in the Pacific North west, too - and has been so with increasing vigor over the past 30+ years. Visible signs are everywhere, from the boarded up sanctuaries of the once mainstream churches to the proliferation of yoga studios, arts and spirituality workshops and Zen meditation groups. As Paul Simon still sings: 

These are the days of miracle and wonder

This is the long-distance call

The way the camera follows us in slo-mo

The way we look to us all, oh yeah

The way we look to a distant constellation

That’s dying in a corner of the sky

These are the days of miracle and wonder

And don’t cry baby don’t cry...

Many of my colleagues are crying, however, as we lament and despair our shared reality. We ache for a former time when traditional religious institutions were at the center of our common life. We blame ourselves, search for magic bullets to solve our declining congregations, cast aspersions on both New Age practitioners and participants alike while trying to hold on by our finger nails for retirement as best we can. It is hard work with precious few rewards. Most of us have not been trained for this new reality - countless studies and books document our bewilderment - and note that a morose cloud of discouragement hangs over many of our congregations today. A low grade depression that is palpable shapes many of our clergy as we struggle with a reality we never expected.

Jaco Hamman's book, When Steeples Cry, offers the best advice I have found for those of us stuck in such sadness. Like anyone approaching grief, we have some hard work to do - hard work that includes reality and surrender and acceptance - for without it we will remain hopeless. "Reality is the will of God - and while it can always be better - we must start with what is real."

As a leader in your congregation you facilitate growth and bring change. You are called to empower your congregation to be the body of Christ. Inevitably, your call includes not only being with those who grieve and mourn, but introducing loss to your congregation. The face of change-as-loss is varied and always morphing into a new image: a congregation is thriving with rapid membership growth; a pastor leaves; a congregation commits to a building project; a church member dies; programs are introduced and then disappear; a congregation becomes an island in a sea of societal change. Your effectiveness and creativeness as an agent of growth and vitality for your congregation depends on your ability to facilitate the work of mourning.

+ Cut to the third story in the Times re: Daniel Zinman's transformation of the Zurich Orchestra. Here is a man who honored his musical tradition - and that of the venerable city of song - but also had the patience, persistence and inspiration to claim a vision greater than maintenance - and bring it to birth within the orchestra. Commenting on the recent release of a 50 CD box set of his work in Zurich, the White writes in the NY Times:

The achievement is evident, and you can hear it in a 50-CD boxed set just released by Sony to commemorate his music making with the Tonhalle. It documents a journey from the ordinary to the exceptional, which tallies with the orchestra’s trajectory. “It wasn’t that I arrived 19 seasons ago thinking, ‘This is a second-tier orchestra I’m going to raise to the first.’ It was good from the start,” Mr. Zinman said recently in an interview during a London stopover. “But it was kind of bored with its existence and seemed to function with a civil-servant mentality that lacked inspiration and self-confidence. Exactly how we turned that around I’m not sure, except we decided nothing succeeds like success, so let’s go for it. And we started hiring more ambitious players. That fed on itself.”

My experience in congregations mirrors that of Mr. Zinman: to bring renewal and hope to the once mainstream, but now side-lined, church involves creativity as well as a commitment to excellence. We need to grieve, to be sure, and at the same time bring in "more ambitious players." Without creative and ambitious musicians and support staff, our congregations will slowly limp along towards death. Without greater expectations - as well as compassionate Christian formation for our laity - we will slog through yet another season of expectations formed by the lowest common denominator. And, as Christopher Smith and John Patterson state so well in their new book, Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, without a profound trust in God's gracious guidance and presence in the midst of our work we will lose our way to workaholicism and collapse.

All around us we see the "huge spontaneous upheaval of the entire human race" that Thomas Merton talked about, a revolution he rightly predicted would be manifested in desperation, cynicism, violence, self-contradiction, fear and hope, doubt and belief, creation and destruction, and "obsessive attachments to idols, images, slogans, programs that only dull the general anguish for a moment until it bursts out everywhere." In the midst of the frantic, churning, disturbing and roiling shallow waters of post-modernity, Slow Church seeks to anchor itself in the deep, still waters of a remarkable patient yet radically immanent God. This isn't escapism. Rather it is part and parcel of living as the peculiar people of God. Someone once said, we're in the world but not of the world, so that we can be for the world.

Without high expectations of ourselves, our congregations and the Living God - without taking bold chances that call into question the status quo of our congregations - and without a radical trust that God's grace always trumps karma, nothing will really change for the better.

+ Jump to the editorial about Palestine and Israel: the ugly political and theological truths that are working themselves out in Gaza are reality. God knows it can always be better, but for now death and moral intransigence

define the hour no matter how deep our grief. The Times editors note with sobering sadness: "After 10 days of aerial bombardment, Israel sent tanks and ground troopsinto Gaza to keep Hamas from pummeling Israeli cities with rockets and carrying out terrorist attacks via underground tunnels. The tragedy is that innocent civilians on both sides of the border are paying the price, once again, and that military action will not guarantee long-term stability or peace."

Hamas can’t defeat Israelis, so it tries to terrorize them. Innocent Palestinians are being killed and brutalized: four Palestinians boys playing on a beach; four children playing on a rooftop; a rehabilitation hospital, all destroyed by Israeli firepower. The United Nations says that of the more than 260 Palestinians killed, three-quarters were civilians, including more than 50 children. Hamas leaders deserve condemnation for storing and launching rockets in heavily populated areas, cynically knowing they will draw Israeli fire to places where civilians live and play. Still, in a call with Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Obama was right to express concern about the “risks of further escalation and the loss of more innocent life.”

Military action, however, is not a long-term solution, as Israeli operations in 2012 and 2008-9 showed. Israel seized Gaza in 1967 and withdrew in 2005. It is hard to see how re-occupation would serve Israel’s interests...

The best solution remains a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, headed by the Fatah faction, which operates in the West Bank American-mediated negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority failed in April. After that, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, reached a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, which has lost support in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. That moment could have been a chance to erode Hamas’s political standing further and boost Palestinian moderates like Mr. Abbas.

The agreement created a government that had no Hamas members, reaffirmed the Palestinian Authority’s longstanding commitment to living in peace with Israel, and would have given the authority a foothold in Gaza. But Israel opposed the reconciliation agreement and, according to Nathan Thral lof the International Crisis Group, the United States and Europe undermined it, which led to the current crisis.Without a political strategy, another cease-fire may be the most anyone can hope for at this moment. But Hamas leaders have rejected one proposed in the past week by Egypt and are demanding better terms. Meanwhile, Palestinian civilians suffer the consequences.

Watching innocent children die on the beach is reality. Watching both Israel and Hamas posture for political advantage is also sadly reality. Watching and waiting is the reality of this moment no matter how profound our sorrow and frustration. Most of us are ill-prepared to watch and wait and grieve. We are utilitarian people who want to get things done! But until all parties involved are truly sick and tired of grief and death - until the partners of both Israel and Palestine are able to broker a more creative and hopeful solution with more ambitious players - it is clear that more "Palestinian civilians will suffer the consequences" and more Israelis will have run towards bomb shelters in terror.

This tragedy is supposed to break our hearts - and make us angry - and move us towards solutions. We are not meant to remain trapped in sorrow and fear. But nothing will change without honestly feeling the depth of this horror and grieving it.  And so we pray again as Niebuhr taught us:

 God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, Courage to change the things which should be changed, and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. 

More ramblings on the Sabbath...

Amazing but yet another Sabbath day has arrived. I am grateful. Given my on-going "Sabbath jag" - professionally and personally - I've been listening for, and reading and thinking about, the various ways contemporary people both understand and practice hallowing the Sabbath. And what I am learning is that our connection to Sabbath as 21st century Americans falls into these broad categories:

+ Some of us acknowledge our obsession with work and bottom lines, we lament it and even resent it, but are unwilling to do much about making changes. We complain, we find passive-aggressive ways to resist, we sometimes sleep in and skip worship because we're too damn tired to do much of anything else and we talk about cutting some things out of our lives in order to free up more time for rest. But mostly we continue to live as if no alternatives to our exhaustion really exist. For this cadre, regardless of age or faith tradition, the status quo seems to be the only reality imaginable.

+ Others among us, while recognizing the need to slow down, choose changes that actually shrink their connections to creativity. Altering or challenging our relationship to work rarely seems to be part of the equation - it simply cannot or will not be addressed - so everything else is up for grabs. We cut back on our volunteer activity, eliminate regular participation in worship or forsake any form of exercise because "something has got to give!" We feel the pressures and act to do something about them, but in the process seem to diminish our lives rather than enrich them.

+ Still others make a conscious decision to wrestle with ways to balance work, family life and self-care. We know that Sabbath is crucial even if we are uncertain about how to live into its blessings. And while we are just as bound to the bondage of the status quo as the other two groups, we intentionally explore new ways to feel our soul and break open our connections so that joy and hope emerge from our quest for rest.

As you might guess, while I hold all three groups close to my heart and prayer - and understand the plight of each - I find myself most attracted to and in solidarity with group number three. In my theological imagination, the Exodus story resonates here: the first group is in bondage like the slaves of Egypt who have no idea what to do except endure and suffer; the second group resembles the children of Israel wandering in the desert after liberation - they are clueless and stumbling - and keep slipping back into their old ways after God has offered an alternative. Group number three is no more holy or wise than the other two, but they are faithful to a vision that promises hope and renewal. They move towards the sacred rather than the stultifying and this makes all the difference in the world.

It is a major distinction - intentionally and consciously seeking the sacred promise of Sabbath rather than surrendering to suffering and/or stumbling in ignorance - for it creates a possibility of a new life. In an upcoming post I will share some of the practical ways people are currently practicing Sabbath in families, in congregations and in the wider world. One group, having written a modern Sabbath Manifesto, summarize their practices like this in their quest to find a measure of rest in a hectic world:

+ Avoid technology

+ Connect with loved ones

+ Nurture your health

+ Get outside

+ Avoid commerce

+ Light candles

+ Drink wine

+ Eat bread

+ Find silence

+ Give back

This is a good foundational summary of practical ways to refresh and renew. There is nothing dogmatic or overtly theological in their Manifesto, just simple options that tune our humanity to the holy so that our bodies become a living prayer. For those who want to go deeper, check out the Sabbath Manifesto @ http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/about.  Now it is time to take a long walk with the dog out in the woods...

Beats 4 BEAT (2): Rock and Soul Concert, Sunday, August 17th @ 3 pm

On Sunday, August 17, 2014 at 3 pm we're putting on a benefit rock and soul concert for our friends at BEAT (Berkshire Environmental Action Team.) And talk about synchronicity: this is BEAT's 10th anniversary AND it is the 45th anniversary of Woodstock. Not everybody is as pumped about the second celebration as I am, but I love the idea of doing a wild and wonderful show for our partners in mission who are so committed to caring for Mother Earth. (For more information about BEAT, go to:  http://www.thebeatnews. org/)

There are two genuinely sweet truths about doing this kind of mission work:

+ First, they define how the action needs to take place. We are simply partners. Working cooperatively with those in the know is not only the right way to do contemporary mission, but it also gets us out of our head and buildings into the streets, rivers and city council meetings.

+ Second, what WE do best - besides educate our people - is CELEBRATE the presence of holy love in the world. Our concerts raise funds and awareness in a way that allows all types of people to participate: they can sing, they can dance, they can contribute, they can make connections all in a groove with NO pressure and NO guilt.

Last night the band met to lay out some of the tunes we'll work on - and explore others - and we agreed on a neo-Woodstock set-up that comes both from the actual festival as well as the early days of CSNY.  The first set will be "wooden" music (acoustic) and the second will be "electric" music (rock and soul and who knows what else!) So, dear friends, if you are in the area on the 45th anniversary of Woodstock - and the 10th anniversary of BEAT - please come on down to the party at First Church. It will be a total gas!

Worship notes: sabbath as resistance to anxiety (part 2)

Here are my worship notes for the second in a summer series using Sabbath As Resistance: Saying NO to the Culture of NOW by Walter Brueggemann.

Introduction

“Keeping Sabbath,” writes the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann, “is a bodily act of testimony” to both the alternative values of human respect and rest as well as an active act of resistance to a culture addicted to work and obsessed with acquisitions.  Sounds about right to me even if it is a mouthful to proclaim, so let’s start this conversation by breaking it down.

·   Sabbath keeping is a body prayer – an embodied act of devotion – that honors the Lord of the Sabbath by acting like we were created in God’s image.

·   Do you remember the opening story of creation in the Bible?  As it unfolds it tells us that on the sixth day the Lord our God said, “Let us make humankind in our very imagine – according to our likeness – so God made human beings in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them… and God blessed them… and when God saw everything that he had created – and saw that it was indeed very good – there was evening and there was morning as the sixth day.”

·   And then the story concludes like this:  On the seventh day, when God had finished the work that had to be done, God rested on the seventh day from all the work that had to be done. And God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it – set it apart and called it holy – because on the seventh day God rested from all the work that had to done in all creation.

To honor the Lord – and to live as people who celebrate being created in God’s image – means that we, too, know how to rest.  Keeping Sabbath in one way or another and hallowing it, you see, is a way of using our living, breathing bodies as a prayer. And while our mystical and devout Jewish cousins in faith remember this truth far better than we, from the very beginning of Christianity both Jesus and St. Paul have urged us to pray with our bodies by honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy.

·   St. Paul, in Romans 12, was blunt: I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual^* worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.

·   As some of you know I sometimes think that Eugene Peterson’s reworking of the sacred texts helps us get closer to their blessings in our culture, so listen to how he renders Romans 12:  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. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

And let’s be clear that Jesus was just as much an advocate of Sabbath body prayer as any of his later disciples. We may not always grasp his radical commitment to Sabbath because, when he speaks, it is to a people saturated in honoring and hallowing the Sabbath – it is both assumed and implied – and even if we miss it, it is always there.

·   Take one of my favorite texts – Matthew 11: 28-30 – where Jesus says: Come unto me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you… rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

·   Same is true for today’s gospel lesson from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:  I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

Running through the totality of Christ’s wisdom – and the message of the early church – is a call to embrace trusting God’s grace by using our bodies and our time as a prayer – prayers that practice taking on the image of the Lord through Sabbath rest.  That is what Brueggemann is asking us to consider – so before I go any further let’s check in – are you with me on this?  Any questions or concerns?

Insights

Now there are two other implications to practicing loving God in Sabbath that I want to consider with you and they both have to do with the remaining five commandments.  You may recall from last week, or already know, that the first four commandments have to do with loving God:

·  You shall worship NO other gods except the LORD your God.

·  You shall not bow down or create idols.

·  You shall not disrespect or trivialize the promises you make in God’s

    name.

·   And you shall honor the God who rests by keeping the Sabbath and making it a time set apart – that is, holy.

Those first four commandments are all about God – they have to do with a unique and life-changing way of living that treats life like a prayer – a way of being that is rest-full rather than rest-less. The other six commandments are about extending our love of God to our neighbors and worshiping God by how we treat one another.  And they are all about sharing respect and rest with those we live with just as God has shared respect and rest with us:

Honor your father and your mother - Commit no murder - Commit no adultery - Do not steal - Do not lie or bear false witness against your neighbors - Do not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor; their house, their spouse, their pets, tools, resources or status.

Why? Because if you do, you will return to a form of slavery – addiction – obsession – and the Lord our God heard the cries of our first family when they were in slavery back in Egypt – and God’s mercy and justice empowered Moses to lead them into freedom and hope. So never willingly go back into slavery of ANY form. Back in Egypt, there was only relentless work saturated with threats and fear. But the way of the Lord is different: the way of the Lord is Sabbath.

Now here’s the first challenge and concern: it is damn hard for us in 21^st century America to get our heads around actually practicing Sabbath. And I suspect that there are two reasons: First of all, the very structure of our economy, educational systems and family life is built around busyness.

·   We are a people on the go with things to do and accomplishments to satisfy. And very honestly almost NONE of us are willing or able to set aside a full day for rest and renewal, right?

What are some of the impediments or conflicts that you can think of to setting aside one whole day to honor and hallow the Sabbath with rest?

So what that tells me is that if we are to honor the heart of the Sabbath we’re going to have to find new and creative ways to unplug ourselves from doing in a disciplined and accountable way. It is clearly unrealistic for most of us to take a full day for Sabbath rest, but unless we find a way a new way to regularly replicate the ancient practice of holy resting with our bodies, minds and time, we won’t be able to experience the blessings and grace that God promises us when we honor and keep the Sabbath.  Like my friends in AA say all the time: if we always do what we’ve always done, we’ll always get what we’ve always got – and most Americans are too stressed-out, sleep-deprived and anxious to be bearers of blessings to our family, friends and neighbors in a consistent manner.

·   Another way of saying that is that most of us are often too frazzled to be able to put into practice the 10 Commandments. You see I don’t really believe that people of the 21^st century are any more sinful or evil – greedy or selfish – than our relatives in Israel 4000 years ago. Truth be told, we haven’t changed or evolved all that much. What is different is that for too much of our time we’re just too exhausted and anxious to do more than we’re already doing.  Many of us are stretched to the max.

So I think the call to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy needs some new thinking and creativity so that our generation can start to reclaim the deep blessings that God promises will be ours when our very bodies become a prayer.  And let me be clear that this does NOT mean a return to the old New England Puritan form of Sabbath keeping! OMG I wouldn’t want that humorless, sanctimonious and pleasure-fearing type of Sabbath to be imposed on anyone again!

·   You know that is the second reason so many Americans are resistant to honoring the Sabbath: we thoroughly screwed it up with our blue laws, legalisms and self-righteous morality that were so life-denying and harsh that they clashed with our freedom loving American hearts.

·   Who CARES if you go to a movie – or play cards – or have a drink on Sunday!  Give me a break!

Exploring and practicing life-giving, realistic and satisfying new forms of Sabbath keeping is one of the challenges we’re going to have to explore – and over the next few weeks we’re going to talk about what that might look like here at First Church. 

+  What are some new/old ways that we can reclaim and renew that might help us make a living commitment to the spirit of Sabbath keeping?

+  What changes can we embrace that will lead us into the unforced rhythms of God’s grace in our very bodies?

Because without new ways of honoring the Sabbath that bring blessings to 21^st century people, it just isn’t going to happen – and that is one of the challenges to hallowing the Sabbath for us.

The other is that so much of our culture, our economy, our habits, our politics, our entertainment and our worldview is now shaped by the so-called divine pursuit of happiness, that we have lost touch with what used to be known as caring for the common good. The six commandments that have to do with caring for our neighbors, you see, are all about nourishing the common good.

+  They call out to us to honor our elderly, to disengage from crimes of passion, to respect one another’s property and loved one by crafting a culture of respect not competition. How did our forbearers put it:  in order to create a more perfect union…?

+  We in the Bay State know something about caring for the common good because our very institutional construct is called the commonwealth, right? We, along with Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Virginia have at least an historic sense that one of the commitments our more perfect union must work at is caring for the common good.

But for the last 35 years caring for the common good has not been held in high regard – in fact, some of the key commitments we once made to caring for our neighbor have been dismantled and degraded. Think of changes recently made to the Voting Rights Act or the incredulous Supreme Court decision extending to corporations the same political rights as individuals. As we used to sing not all that long ago, “the times they are a’changin...” but these times don’t look so good for many of us with a commitment to the commonwealth.

Conclusion

Cut to Jesus teaching his disciples the ethics of Sabbath living as it pertains to our neighbors: God’s plan for your life is embedded in the heart of creation!  And God’s plan is all about trust rather than anxiety:

+  Look at the birds and the lilies: they are a sign that from the very beginning of creation the way of the Lord works!  The birds and the lilies don’t manifest anxiety, do they?

+  No, they organically trust the Lord – embrace God’s way – blossom and fly according to the goodness of God’s grace.  So why don’t you knowing that you are even more beloved than the flowers and the birds? What keeps your locked in anxiety rather than bountiful in trust?

If we are paying close attention to the message of Sabbath in Christ’s words, we cannot help but realize that our anxiety is connected to our restlessness and lack of trust in God’s grace. We are enslaved to other gods and idols who oppose the God who rests.  We are enmeshed in habits and institutions that denigrate the common good and exaggerate our worst fears and addictions.

To which Jesus says, “Beloved, look at the birds of the air… and the lilies of the field.  Spend some time watching how much God loves them and you will know that you too are loved and cared for and cherished by the Lord.” Did you hear that? Jesus asks us to slow down for a bit and smell the roses – to take a moment for contemplation – quiet watching and waiting – because it will lead us to a sense that we are cherished by the Lord.

+  Practicing Sabbath, you see, however we figure out how to do it together is not only a way of honoring God by letting our bodies become a living prayer, it is also a form of resistance to anxiety.

+  Whenever we stop to pray – or meditate – or walk the labyrinth – or receive Eucharist – or call time out so that we can feast with our loved ones and friends “we stand alongside the creator in whose image we are made.”

Remember that the commandments tell us that by the end of “six days God had done all that was necessary for creation… and so have we!” (Brueggemann.)

Celebrating the sacred at church council...

Tonight is church council night: in some congregations this is a dreaded event - or boring necessity - or even an encounter that is understood to be organizationally necessary but mostly a nasty waste of time - but not so with us. Rather, church council has become a place of study, song and prayer in the spirit of Jesus where the necessary business of the congregation is addressed but most of our time is given to going deeper in faith. 

Not long ago I mentioned this reality to a few friends and they were stunned. All too often clergy get hammered at council meetings - and lay leaders discover that they don't care about most of what takes place. Worse still are those meetings where there isn't really any point except to jump through yet another institutional hoop. Our evolution towards spiritual formation goes back to my work in Tucson almost 15 years ago. 

Under the guidance of a very supportive moderator (who continues to be a dear friend) we crafted a year that turned traditional meetings on their head: all our committees started with someone telling their faith journey because we discovered that most people had been in the church for generations but had never once been asked how they had encountered God in their lives. After 20 minutes of conversation and sharing we prayed for the story-teller. That left about 30 minutes to address whatever "business" was necessary. Each meeting lasted just an hour and then the council was convened. After a time for opening prayer, we then spent the next 30 minutes reading/discussing Henri Nouwen's book, The Life of the Beloved, before any "business" was considered.  

That Arizona experiment showed me how important it is for church leaders to study and pray together. When we arrived in Pittsfield I was ready to take this to a deeper level. At first we started with reading a few shared books that included Graham Standish's Becoming a Blessed Church. For special projects, we committed ourselves to Saturday study/prayer retreats. (This is how we crafted both our general mission statement for ministry as well as our unique calling into the Open and Affirming commitment we made five years later.) And from time to time, when genuinely complicated problems were before us, we met weekly in one an other's homes for an evening meal before gathering for prayer and conversation.

Each of the moderators who have worked with me over the past seven years have not only embraced this process, but they have each offered their unique gifts and skills to this process, too. Consequently, we continue to go deeper. In fact, we now have an adult Christian Education commitment based on the real needs, questions and concerns of those in key leadership roles. Every month a new question or concern is lifted up - and I am charged with finding some resources for our common study and conversation. I get those out to the council members in a timely fashion so that when we gather on the second Monday evening of each month we are ready to talk through some tough stuff. 

This year, the person who picks the question also opens the meeting with prayer and a hymn or song of their own choosing. As one of the younger council members has said a few times, "These gatherings are sometimes the BEST thing that has happened in the whole day." Another put it like this: I was dreading our meeting but left feeling inspired and encouraged. 

I cannot commend this process too highly:  councils and clergy must be allies - they must love and trust one another - and this isn't always the case. But it can be with prayer, time and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.