The World Where It Happens, again

This Sunday, October 27, we will have a Congregational Meeting at the conclusion of the Sunday morning worship service (around 10:30am). The purpose of this meeting is to elect new Elders and Deacons, to elect persons to serve on the Nominating Commission for 2020, and to approve the 2020 Terms of Call for Associate Pastor Hayes Noble and Pastor Mark Davis.

I have received a lot of tremendous response about our October theme, “The World Where It Happens.” (Perhaps we should take a moment and be thankful that I didn’t go with the other theme I was thinking about for October. “Pumpkin Spice Jesus” just doesn’t have the same potential.)  We will conclude our series this weekend with a final story about the church in Antioch from Acts 11. You do not want to miss it. 

That upstart community in Antioch had some wonderful qualities: They were willing to bend religious traditions in order to allow the religious truth behind them to emerge. They were open to accountability and the one sent to check on them ended up joining them. And last week we saw how they really stepped into loving an enemy, by welcoming Saul of Tarsus – a force of persecution against the church before his transforming experience – as a resident teacher for a year. That way of living into the gospel may be why the narrator of Acts was able to say, “The disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.” 

I’m trying to imagine what the absolute, unique, central quality of a community must be in order to take the kind of radical steps that the community in Antioch took. Of course, we have to say it was the work of the Holy Spirit – that’s the central theme of the book of Acts. But, even so, the question remains: What is the central quality of a community when the Holy Sprit is at work? I don’t want to pretend that there’s only one answer to that question – that would be a Spirit-quenching sort of thing to do. But an answer, it seems to me, would be this: A community, where the Holy Spirit is at work, would be a people who are able to as moved by the experience of someone outside of their narrative as they are moved by experiences within their own narrative. This quality is perhaps nothing more than another way of expressing “love your neighbor as yourself,” but let me explain how I’m thinking about it. 

I’ve known a number of folks who were incredibly anti-gay, ostensibly based on their faith. (I happen to think there’s a deeper psychological motive that causes them to gravitate toward a particular way of expressing their faith, or to embrace it with a particular kind of fury. But, I need to let people tell their own story.) And I’ve known a number of those incredibly anti-gay folks who have changed their tune dramatically, usually because they have either come to terms with their own sexuality or because someone in their family whom they love dearly has come out. The journey from ‘virulently anti-gay’ to ‘open and affirming’ is hard, serious, and very courageous. I just wonder why so often it takes someone we know and love, before we can be open and affirming. The person that a virulently anti-gay person condemns with the harshest of words is somebody’s loved one. A church where the Holy Spirit is at work will not limit its empathy to their own relatives, but to recognize that everyone is someone’s beloved child, sibling, parent, or friend. It is that ability to regard the stranger as favorably as we regard our own that demonstrates the meaning of loving one’s neighbor as ourselves. 

That is why it is so important for us to invest time, energy, attention, and money in prophetic and compassionate outreach ministries. That is why we need our Deacons to lead us into our relationships with Glenn Martin elementary school, the Irvine Adult Transition Program, Project Hope Alliance, and so forth. It is why we need the Peace and Justice Commission to lead us in our advocacy on Gun Violence, Human Trafficking, Immigration, and the plight of Farm Workers. It is why we study the world in our Great Decisions program. It is why we need our Mission Commission to guide our investments into CEPAD, AMOS, and the Orange County Alliance for Just Change. It is why our Adult Discipleship and Nurture Commission leads us in a panel discussion on Transgender Issues and Bible Studies on the depth and meaning of our faith. It is why our Youth and Children’s Ministry provides opportunities for our younger church to learn the faith and, in turn, to teach us the faith. And it is why we need our Worship Commission to provide us with weekly worship services, designed to allow us to worship God as well as to come before God with hearts open for transformation.  

In the end, it’s all about being a church so full of the Holy Spirit that we love God by loving our neighbors, even our enemies, in ways that are as natural to us as loving our closest family and friends. By God’s grace, let’s be that church.

Mark of St. Mark

The World Where It Happens, pt.2

This weekend we have a lot going on at St. Mark. In addition to continuing our October theme “The World Where It Happens,” we will be welcoming new members and meeting our new Parish Nurse Beth Schwarz during our Saturday and Sunday worship, following Saturday worship with “Meet Me at Muldoon’s,” and following Sunday worship with a workshop on Parenting as well as a study of the Gnostic gospels. If you think that was a very long compound sentence, just imagine what the weekend is going to be like. Jump in and enjoy! 

Speaking of #TheWorldWhereItHappens, I invited everyone in worship last week to use their cameras of every sort in order to look for and to try to capture images of where the Reign of God is taking place in the world. When you do so, please send them to stmark@stmarkpresbyterian.org and we will collage them, post them on social media, etc. And please feel free to post them to your own social media sites, using the hashtag #TheWorldWhereItHappens. The primary goal of our month-long theme is to live into our faith by participating in what God is doing in the world. In order to do that, we are training our eyes to see glimpses of where God is at work, particularly in moments of resistance and liberated, or when walls of prejudice and bigotry come crashing down. We are taking our cue from the church in Antioch, which was established when some of the believers broke with the habit of speaking only to people like them and began to share the joy and justice of the gospel to people they perceived as ‘others.’ 

Some of the responses that I’ve heard since we began this week’s journey is, “It is hard to see where God is at work when the world is torn by violence and genocide and separation walls and glass ceilings and environmental destruction and constant divisiveness.” Indeed that is a valid response. If our goal were to pretend none of those things is taking place and only to focus on sunsets and kittens, then we would be reducing our faith a comforting illusion or even a distraction. So, allow me to offer three responses to the real difficulty of the task before us. 

First, as difficult as it may seem, our task of looking for signs of God’s reign is vital to really living into the rhetoric of our faith. The familiar expression, “May your will be done on earth as in heaven,” shows that our faith is built on trusting in God’s real presence in our world. And, frankly, it is tempting to assume a kind of baptized atheism, which more or less sees “God’s will” as a good aspiration, but does not expect Godself to have anything to do with it. It is hard to see where God is at work in our world, but I suspect that developing that kind of vision comes through being a lifelong disciple, who practices the skills again and again day after day, and only achieves the skill after failing at it over and over. Think of a beginning dancer, a student of martial arts, or an aspiring writer. It is a trained eye, not a simple glance. 

Second, the Christian faith has long sought a way to name how the reality of God’s reign is here, and yet the fullness of it is not. Theologians speak of God’s reign as a “Yet, but not yet” reality. Liturgists have shaped the season of Advent as pointing toward the “first Advent,” the first coming of Jesus, and anticipating the “second Advent,” when the reign of God comes in all of its glory. Biblical scholars focus on “the Word” that “became flesh and dwelt among us”; as well as the invocation, “Come, Lord Jesus.” Pastoral Caregivers have spoken of God as “a present help in times of trouble” and “our only comfort in life and in death.”  When we look for signs of God’s reign and struggle to see them, we are not alone. The paradox that God’s reign is here and that God’s reign is yet to be fulfilled has always been a challenging part of the church’s entire ecosystem. 

Finally, I want to lean on the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr for a moment – at least as far as I think I understand him. Niebuhr spoke often of achieving the “proximate good” as opposed to “ultimate good.” Any language about the “ultimate good” here and now in our lifetime is arrogant and blasphemous. At best, until the Reign of God comes in its fullness, even our best efforts are tainted by human sin, human finitude, our failure to see future consequences fully, etc. If our greatest achievements are, at best, proximate goods, then we can continue to find hope, encouragement, and purpose in doing justice, even if injustice is rampant around us. And for those of us who say at times, “The World Where It Happens” and are tempted to say at other times, “The World Where $#!& Happens” – here is small ray of hope. Injustice is also proximate, never ultimate. That is the point of our longing for the “second Advent,” the fullness of God’s reign. The “real world” has an arc that bends toward justice, even when injustice is rampant. 

To live into the fullness of God’s reign, to discipline ourselves to see it, to name it, to capture it, and to share it – no matter how awkwardly we do so – is a way of resisting evil and living in faith. 

#TheWorldWhereItHappens

Mark of St. Mark 

The World Where It Happens, Pt. 1

We're up to something during the month of October. I’ll start with a nod to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s song “The Room Where It Happens,” from his brilliant musical “Hamilton.” (You can listen to it here.) Our theme for October is “The World Where It Happens.” By studying the brief history of a church in Antioch (Acts 11), we will set out each week looking for where the “kin-dom” of God is taking place in the world. While it is good to be ‘the church gathered’ on Saturday or Sunday, to worship, regroup, share our stories, encourage one another, etc., our real focus is what happens when we are ‘the church scattered’ throughout the rest of the week. Our faith proclaims a God who is always redemptively present in the world, transforming life, changing practices, challenging injustice, practicing compassion, and living into the Good News of the Gospel. That’s where we want to be. Much of what we do when we are the church gathered is to prepare us to participate in “the world where it happens.” 

So, come on Saturdays or Sundays during October and re-discover this new church that arose in Antioch and did amazing things. Let’s pray together that God will awaken us to what God is doing in the world. Then, let’s go out together to be active participants in the world, where the kin-dom of God is taking place, the world where it happens. 

And here’s how you can be particularly active for the month of October. Grab your camera, your smartphone, and any other device you have that takes photos. Capture a photo of something that shows the kin-dom of God in the world. It could be two children of different ethnicities playing side-by-side, it could be someone marching with a sign calling attention to climate change, it could be someone caring for a pet or helping a neighbor. Heck, it could even be a sunrise that calls us to worship!  Actions both big and small, presence both radical and supportive – use your theological imagination to see where God is present in our world. Of course, we will have to consider the privacy of others, so please give that consideration before you take someone’s photo.

After you’ve captured the photo, let’s display them. If you send them to stmark@stmarkpresbyterian.org, we will display them on our various forms of social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. (Again, please be sure that you have permission before sending them to us.) We will display them with the hashtag #TheWorldWhereItHappens. In addition, you can display them on your Facebook page, tweet it, or put it on your Instagram timeline. When you do, please use the hashtag #TheWorldWhereItHappens. We will use this month to sharpen our vision to see where God is at work, and to sharpen our message to share where God is at work.

Let’s jump in.

Mark of St. Mark