The Distillery Church

I didn’t want to come to gathering yesterday

I didn’t want to come to gathering yesterday.
I didn’t want to face up to my pain in community.
I didn’t want to explain.
But I came.

If I’d had a chance I’d have made an excuse.
I’d have stayed at home. I’d have hidden away.
I’d have looked after myself.
But I came.

I didn’t have to explain, but when I did
I shared the pain and found it lessened.
I didn’t have to come.
But I came.

I’m glad I did.

Community time

We had some snacks, cupcakes and conversation in place of our usual gathering on Sunday. It was great. We were celebrating Father’s Day, Miriam and Beth’s birthdays and our community life together.

I am a great believer in community – not just this little community at The Distillery, but that too! Let’s start with a definition of community (adapted from Kathy Escobar of The Refuge in Colorado who a couple of our community were visiting while we were eating cupcakes!):

Community is learning to love God, love one another and love ourselves. Allowing ourselves to be loved by God, be loved by one another and to accept that we are lovable.

Of course, in other contexts, the ‘God’ clauses might disappear or change, but I suspect in some way the rest of it would stand. I have a sense that if we embrace true community in this way and open it to include as many as we possibly can, we will do more to bring God’s kingdom as Jesus intended it than any amount of arguing about theology or worrying about what is or is not sin or about who is in or out of the kingdom.

I read somewhere recently that if you pray without seeking to be the answer to your own prayer, you are not truly praying as a Christian. That was a challenge to me. It reminded me of a conversation I had at college. I was a proudly evangelical Christian with all the answers talking to the relatively liberal chaplain of our college chapel. He dismissed the idea that prayer could change what God did. My reaction on the inside was “What’s the point of praying if it doesn’t change anything?” but also, deeper inside, ‘Now you mention it, it does seem strange that my prayer could change God’s intentions.’

I suppose the polarized sides of this debate boil down to “What’s the point of a God who is swayed by mere human desires?” vs “What’s the point of praying if God has already made up his mind?” So, shall we argue until we all agree (or fall out) or shall we get on with praying, having faith and acting in love? These principles of Jesus transcend theological arguments.

We don’t have to agree on all the theology to be in community together. We just have to get on with it. In love.

Everything you know is…

…the sum of a combination of factors including what you have been taught, what you have read, what you think you have been taught, superstitions you developed in your youth, …

Not to say that it is wrong of course.

In our discussion on Sunday, we read the gospel reading from the lectionary: John 14 v8-17. In fact, we read to the end of the chapter, because that’s the kind of folk we are! I was challenged when I read it by how much I am tempted to read it through the lens of what I believe rather than allowing what I read to inform, challenge and shape what I believe. So, I passed the challenge on, asking us all to pause and discuss which of a series of simple statements were supported by this particular passage. We did not ask which we agreed with, nor which were actually correct – but allowed this particular passage to speak to us about what Jesus said about the Holy Spirit.

These are the statements we used (one at a time) for our little exercise:

Some of these caused a fair deal of discussion as we tried to separate difference of intent from simple semantics. The last two took the conversation in an interesting direction as we decided that saying anything is ‘the key’ jarred with our approach to our faith. I hope it was a healthy exercise in seeing how our background and our world-view influence our interpretation of the Bible. After that, we watched the Nooma video Rhythm – in this Rob Bell suggests that we should not look for the intervention of a God who is elsewhere ‘helping one person find things on sale and another a parking space’ but rather to see the living God as in all things and we can choose to act in harmony with him – in love and justice for example – or not.

We ended by reading the passage again – one participant likened it to having a pair of tinted shades taken off his eyes as he saw Jesus’ words in a new light.

For me, this exercise in re-examining well-rehearsed beliefs – sometimes dismantling them or putting them aside altogether, is a microcosm of my life over the last few years. I hope and pray that we all will become stronger, more whole and more faithful followers of Jesus as we engage openly with his teaching.

The other closet

I wonder who else is in here with me – it’s hard to tell because it’s so dark. Maybe if I step outside…

Could it be that ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ is as accepting as you will expect me to be – unless I say something that is?

I was extremely moved by Rich McCullen‘s session called ‘The Big Pink Elephant in the Church’ at the TransFORM East Coast Gathering last weekend. The things that struck me the hardest while listening to him tell his story were the pain inflicted on our gay brothers and sisters by a belief system that insists that they can never be whole unless they are healed of their sexual identity or settle for a life of celibacy and the redemptive power of words in the coming-out experiences.

In our gathering on Sunday night I found myself challenging our community to bring the reality of pain and emptiness into worship – not to leave them at the door and become an idealized worshiper, socially acceptable but fundamentally dishonest in the way we present ourselves. It is natural for us to try to hide our true selves – so natural that we can lose sight of the fact we are doing it at all. But how can we allow God to heal our brokenness or fill our emptiness if we have left them at the door? Only by being vulnerable enough to bring our pain and hunger into worship in community can we really take our place in God’s economy and allow ourselves to be healed.

Last Saturday, I watched as a whole room full of people was moved as we shared in Rich’s joy as he related telling first his friends and fellow-pastors and then his whole church community about his sexuality and for the first time to be able to stand with his community in worship as a whole being – including his sexual identity. I watched the redemptive power of that moment multiply in strength as it touched the hearts of gay and straight alike in that room at the conference – empowering us to take courage and to take our faith in our hands and be willing to step out of the shadows of apparent safety into the light of truth.

So, where am I going with all these
fragments of thought?

If there is a figurative closet where gay people hide from their sexual identity or hide their sexuality from polite society and polite church then I believe there is another closet in which those of us who believe in accepting our brothers and sisters with open arms into a full experience of community as followers of Jesus hide our ‘deviant Bible-interpretations’ and ‘lack of willingness to tackle sin head-on with tough-love’ from the gaze of the vocal elements in the church. As long as we stay inside we can ride along the surface of being socially-acceptable by allowing the vocally orthodox people to imagine they know what we believe. However, we will also allow everyone else to guess what we believe and probably come to the same conclusion.

I am ready to open the door and step out. I’m happy to say that I can’t speak for everyone in my community when I say that I no longer consider homosexual orientation or practice to be a sin – that is one of the joys of our community, that all can take their place without some illusion of agreement on every issue or interpretation – but I can say that we will welcome you, whoever you are and whatever your sexuality to allow you to find wholeness and help us to find wholeness, to be healed and to heal, to love and be loved, to be our community and to be yourself before us and with us before God. We are all broken and I will not place our differences ahead of our similarities or my social fears ahead of the opportunity for us to find real life in community together.

If I’m right – does that mean you’re wrong?

We spent our discussion time thinking about how we relate to people who believe differently from us (probably everyone) including those who adhere to other faiths and belief systems and thinking about what that means for our faith.

We watched this short video addressing this issue and then asked whether we can respect other people’s beliefs while being true to our own and what it looks like when we do.

Christianity® from Recycle Your Faith on Vimeo.

Our conversation started with a lot of common ground – we all agreed that we can respect people and be in community with them without approving of or subscribing to their beliefs. We also agreed that it is God’s work to change people’s minds not ours, so there was no need to feel a responsibility for convincing others that our beliefs are right.

From there, things got a little more complicated. Should we hope for everyone to believe what we believe? Should we work towards that? Should we be happy with letting everyone believe whatever they want to?

What did Jesus mean when he told his followers to go and make disciples of all nations? What did he mean when he said that no-one comes to the Father except through him? How can we reconcile a belief in a loving and just God with the common story that anyone who does not accept Jesus as their savior will die or go to hell?

As usual, we did not attempt to find easy answers to these questions but were content to wrestle with them together in community. I shared my difficulty in believing that a just and loving God would give a much better chance of salvation to my son because of his environment in growing up in our home than a child born at the same time into a different family or community. I’m sure many would say that these moments when our beliefs do not make sense is the time we need to lean on faith, but I believe in facing these issues directly, allowing them to change our beliefs if that is the result.

The story of our faith is important – it gives us a framework to understand the world and our place in it, but like any story it cannot tell the whole truth – especially about an infinite God. When the story conflicts with the central truths about God – that he is just or loving for example – I believe we need to give the story a second look, rather than making an exception or an excuse for an apparent lapse in love or judgement on God’s part. I know that I have changed my mind or adapted the story many times in the past and that it is only reasonable to suppose that I will change it again in the future, so I don’t want people to believe what I believe or to behave like I behave – I want them to shape and challenge me and, I would hope, allow me to to the same for them.

Like Bart Campolo in the video I really believe that following Jesus and seeing God’s nature in his example is the right way to live, but I also believe that the story of the God’s interaction with the world may be much larger than I have imagined.

Rest in his promise

Tonight we spent time thinking about rest.

We read three Bible passages to help us understand what rest looks like in the Kingdom of God and what it means: Exodus 20:8-11, Hebrews :1-11 and Matthew 11:28-30

Rest is important, important enough that God modeled it for us and included it in the commandments he gave his people. We have been created with an inbuilt need to rest.

In Exodus 20, we are set an example by God of work followed by rest. Amongst other things, that rest allows time to look back and find satisfaction in what has been accomplished, just as God looked at what he created and saw that it was good. In this passage we also see a community being encouraged to rest together.

In the Hebrews passage, however, we see a deeper meaning to the rest we are promised. This rest is about being at peace with God. We no longer have to work to earn God’s favor. We can rest in the salvation he has given us.

Also, we can rest because we can come home. We do not need to keep wandering and searching just as the Israelites did in the desert. Rest is available to us. However, we are reminded that it is a choice and we need to “make every effort to enter that rest”. For, as St Augustine puts it, “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you”.

In the passage from Matthew, Jesus offers rest to the weary and promises that his yoke is easy and his burden is light if we will walk alongside him.

God has given us eternal rest but as we continue to live in the “now”, we still need to remember to stop, rest and be restored.

Worrying about Simplicity

We read the second half of Matthew Chapter 6 as the focus of our discussion about simplicity yesterday. We were asking ourselves and each other whether the amount of stuff we have or wish we had is contributing to our worry and getting in the way of our seeking first the kingdom of God.

I wonder how different our lives would be if we were better at living in the moment – not so focussed on future possibilities (whether good or bad) that we miss the wonder of our existence, God’s bountiful goodness to us and the world around us. We reflected on the wasted hours and energy put into things outside our control – whether some earlier carelessness had already caused unseen damage to some property, whether we would be picked for a promotion or a new job after our part in the process was finished. We thought about the times we have been concerned not for the reality of our need or situation, but for others perception of it – image, status and power.

The difficulty is, of course, finding the line between care for ourselves, others and the world around us that can lead to positive action and the wholly destructive worrying when nothing can be done. Whichever side of that line we are Jesus’ message is clear: first – before acting or worrying or losing sleep – seek the kingdom and righteousness. Seek it – not wish, hope or wait for it, but seek it out, find out how God kingship over the community of believers can transform the situation.

Finally, we looked at the list of suggestions made by Richard Foster in the chapter on simplicity in his book A Celebration of Discipline. Many of us resonated with the idea of buying things for usefulness instead of status and we wrestled with the practicality of rejecting anything that breeds the oppression of others. As Westerners, our whole economy is built on the oppression of others to some extent – can we realistically reject it all? Maybe not, but we agreed that we can consume less that we do not need, be aware of the issues surrounding the things that we buy and the places we buy them and proceed carefully – not seeking first to get the best bargain or to have latest and greatest – but seeking first God’s kingdom in our lives and our world.

Suffering – why?

With the recent earthquake in Haiti in our minds and recent discussions about why God allows bad things happen to good people, we turned our thoughts to the question of suffering this evening.

We started by remembering that easy answers are rarely what we find when we look at issues such as this and I shared the cartoon graph from nakedpastor. So is that to say that we cannot have anything to say on this topic? Next we shared some of the ways we or others have, in the past, explained away the apparent inaction of a powerful and loving God when people are suffering. In this we touched on the beliefs of many that all suffering is punishment from God – and reflected on the way the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis is used as a basis for believing this can apply to whole communities or nations as well as to individuals. Then we turned, with the help of Nooma 24: Whirlwind to the story of Job. Although we acknowledged that the story has many different elements and paints a curious picture of God at times, I – along with Rob Bell on the video – encouraged us all to look at the story from Job’s perspective. He was a good man, bad – apparently random – things happened to him. He asked God for an explanation and God just said (in a nutshell) I am God, you are not, who are you to think you could understand or make the decisions I make?

We ended with a reminder that these issues only come to life when we apply them to reality in our lives – many of us can testify to God being with us, alongside us in suffering, most of us have been able to support or comfort others by doing the same. Words are easy to throw around, but as God teaches Job, sometimes we need to be quiet and accept that we are not the ones in control.

An old friend, far away, posted this on her blog, struggling with the same issue:

…all I know is that I was fully aware of suffering before I became aware of God, and so the two have to live alongside each other. I also know that prayer changes me and hopefully I become more compassionate and reach out to help alleviate or perhaps simply weep over some of the shit that happens.

So, I hope that we can put aside the need to find answers and to embrace our call as children of the God of love to mourn and weep over the suffering we see and help where we can to put broken lives back together wherever we encounter them.

Advent Week 3 – Give more? REALLY??

Last week’s discussion had already touched on tonight’s topic of giving more – not bought gifts, but of ourselves. We all agreed that spending time is an important part of what we can offer each other in love – but do any of us have time to spare? Is this message about making us feel guilty for something else – instead of how many dollars we spend, now how many hours?

No – there is something else here – an opportunity to increase the joy in the world. Giving is not a zero-sum game as game theory would have it – the amount I put in is not the same as the amount someone else gets out. Sometimes it is worse – I spend hours shopping for the perfect gift, spend more than I can afford – and in the end it is not what you wanted. Sometimes it is better – like the time I gave to go sledding with my five year-old daughter today. Whether we give presents or presence there is an opportunity to gain more than we lose, to grow more than we spend and to love more than we knew how to.

I came across these jokes from Dave Barry while I was preparing for today’s discussion. I think they capture the way that consumerism and secularization have stolen the magic from the season.

“Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.”

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it ‘Christmas’ and went to church; the Jews called it ‘Hanukka’ and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Hanukka!’ or (to the atheists) ‘Look out for the wall!’

Our discussion hopefully helped us all to regain some perspective as regards how we can invest in each other in this season, and our meal together allowed us to do just that. We also had a great time of worship songs and Bible readings to give us the opportunity to connect with God as a community and to hear the story of our faith’s beginnings once again.

So, let’s not be satisfied this season to join in the empty consumerism of ‘the Holidays’, but let’s bring real joy into the season by joining to do what our faith requires of us rather than just what society expects of us.

Change Your Mind?

We had a great gathering this evening.  John led some worship made all the more lively by the kids who were really getting involved tonight! After we celebrated communion together and the kids went out to their activities, we had some more worship time singing, ‘Where you lead me Lord, I will go!’ which led nicely into our discussion time.

After two weeks spent in Acts 10, we moved on to the first half of Acts 11 where Peter, fresh from his life-changing Gentile-baptising adventure in the house of Cornelius, returns to face the criticism of the other believers for his ‘unclean’ activities.

The passage (Acts 11 v1-18) goes something like this.  They have already heard something of what he has done and they do not approve. They challenge him.  He tells them exactly what he did and why.  They accept that he has heard from God and accept that God is now working amongst non-Jews to bless them and anoint them with the Holy Spirit and that they can accept them as brothers and sisters and baptise
them.

After reading the passage, we spent a few minutes discussing the events, how the believers dealt with conflict and wondering if it was really as simple as it sounds.  Then we moved on to thinking about whether we are being challenged like the believers in Jerusalem to change our view of God and how he works – or who he works in and for.
Several people shared about groups of people who they would naturally try to avoid or think badly of.  It was a really good time of open and honest discussion.  We also talked about the problem that, of course, the beliefs we have now are what we think is right and only when challenged by word or circumstance will we change them.  We concluded that the best we can do is to try to be open to the challenge when it
comes and cautious about our vehemence when people disagree with us.

The Cobalt Season’s song “Careful Not to  Draw Your Maps in Pen and Ink”was in my mind as we were discussing.  It opens with the line “You are going to change your mind someday…” and warns us as we document our journey to expect change -not to give up on trying to make sense of the landscape, just to draw it knowing it is only one way to look at things – not the final authoritative statement of the way things are.

It is important that we know what we believe and why.  It is why as a church we have some ‘Core Convictions’ on our website – a statement of what we mean by being followers of Jesus, but we welcome all to come with us on our journey, to help us to fill in the blanks on our maps and to correct them as we go.  We know that we are not always right – and we continue to pray that we will be humble enough to recognize
when we get it wrong.

We ended with prayer about some of the issues we had raised and other things on our minds as individuals and as a community and enjoyed conversations over snacks and drinks with regulars and visitors.