the time we wrestled with forgiveness

These days I am privileged to be a mentor for a group of seven lay worship leaders who are students in the Lay Worship Leaders Training program of the United Church. We meet online - two are in Ontario, three in Manitoba and two are in British Columbia. It is a remarkable group. This semester is focussed on prayer and music in worship. Tonight we discussed confession and forgiveness. It was a rich conversation.

I was reminded of the time at University Hill Congregation when we wrestled with the call to forgive that lies at the heart of the New Testament. It was seven years ago. At the time I posted an outline of those conversations. Here are links to those posts ...

Forgiven, Forgiving (1)

Forgiven, Forgiving (2)

Forgiven, Forgiving (3)

Forgiven, Forgiving - a sample of biblical texts

Forgiven, Forgiving (4)

Forgiven, Forgiving (5)

Forgiven, Forgiving (6)

god's own gift: glimpsing tomorrow's church today

"But now thus says the LORD, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you" (Isa. 43:1-2).

“Do not fear.” “You are mine.” “I will be with you.” This is the surprising news that God—through the prophet Isaiah—speaks into the despairing souls of congregations that find energies dwindling, numbers depleting and doors closing. Exiled far from their familiar home, they no longer know how to navigate the cultural map of a strange new twenty-first century world. The evidence suggests that it is only a matter of time before this people is no more, subsumed into the culture of consumption in which it now swims. But the prophet sees otherwise. There is a future for the people God has brought into being.

baptismal preaching

It was Will Willimon who taught me that all preaching is baptismal preaching. Either the preacher is talking about what life is like because you are among the baptized or the sermon is a description of what it would mean to decide to be baptized. Suddenly every sermon is about baptism. What, then, of the Sundays when the service includes baptism? On those occasions I decided to address the sermon directly to those who were baptized on that day. I would invite the congregation to overhear the sermon. In the cases where the baptized were young children I gave a copy of the manuscript to the parents and asked them to include it with the baptism certificate and photos of the day so that their child might read it in the years to come. I imagined the scripture readings of the day as a gift to them. In this way the congregation was encouraged to see the baptism as the most important event in its life on this day. Some examples of sermons preached on a baptismal Sunday are posted here at "Benedictus", We went through fire and water, yet ...", "Lamb and Shepherd" and "Tested". Here is another, titled "When You Pass Through the Waters" (from 2007), that hosts Isaiah 43:1-7 and Luke 3:15-22 ...

Today we are witnesses to the baptism of Jakob. It is particularly appropriate that Jakob is baptized on the Sunday when we mark the baptism of Jesus, since it was young Jakob who took the part of the newborn Jesus here on Christmas Eve. With all the festivity of Christmas it is easy to forget that in the early church the baptism of Jesus was more celebrated than his birth. In the third century there were three major Christian festivals - Easter, Pentecost and Epiphany. Then Epiphany was not a celebration of the arrival of the magi but of the baptism of Jesus. Imagine our life built on a threefold rhythm that marked Jesus’ Baptism, the Resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit. That is how it was in the church in the second, third and fourth centuries. Today we are back at the beginning. Back at the river. And we are here as witnesses of young Jakob’s immersion in the water.

cruciformity - life as a gospel rabbi "the video"

In April I had the privilege of speaking at the annual gathering of "Cruxifusion". At the time I posted some notes about that presentation here - "Life as a Gospel Rabbi (1)" and "Life as a Gospel Rabbi (2)". Recently a video of that presentation has been posted on the Cruxifusion website. In many ways this sums up what I learned in my life as a pastor. You can view the video at "Cruciformity - Life as a Gospel Rabbi".

cruciformity - life as a gospel rabbi (2)

Here are some background notes that outline the shape of the presentation I made at the gathering of Cruxifusion in Toronto last week. The theme of the conference was "Equip" with a focus on equipping the saints for the work of the ministry. I offered my thoughts on what will best equip pastors to equip their congregations to be faithful disciples of Jesus in our time and place ...

cruciformity - life as a gospel rabbi (1)

I am in Toronto, a guest of Cruxifusion where I am speaking on the topic "Cruciformity - Life as a Gospel Rabbi." I intend to post some notes from my talk in the next few days. In the meantime, I am posting links to the books that I will be mentioning so that they are easily accessible for those at the gathering who want to follow up on them ...

on being a catholic church

On a recent Sunday in worship I could not help but notice how very catholic our singing has become. A gathering song by Fanny Crosby, blind author of over eight thousand gospel hymns and songs was followed by an opening hymn of praise from Ambrose of Milan, the fourth century doctor of the church who introduced hymnody to the western church. The Singers (our choir) offered the contemporary hymn “In the Quiet Curve of Evening” as a haunting and inviting choral introit. There was a sung Kyrie from the intentional Christian community at Iona and the “Asithi Amen” from Africa. The chorus of the traditional French carol “Angels We Have Heard on High” provided the Gloria. A hymn by Joachim Neander rooted us in the Protestant Reformation while a setting of Psalm 91 by Michael Joncas connected us with twentieth century liturgical renewal in the Roman Catholic church sparked by Vatican II. Our children led us in singing the Lord’s Prayer with embodied actions. The text for the day from Isaiah 40:31 brought to mind a popular chorus – “Those who wait upon the Lord” – and when it was sung we told the story of its author, Stuart Hamblen, the once famous singing cowboy, among the first of Billy Graham’s converts, whose transformed life surprised and confounded many in his time.

filled with the holy spirit

At Pentecost the church is scripted into its startling identity. Here the miracle of our existence as a people is retold with wonder. As Peter says: “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people” (I Peter 2:10). To our continuing surprise the life of the church is not a product of human ingenuity. It is, instead, the gift of God whose divine energy inspires a new community into being. The power of God to reconcile and make new, to bring life out of death and to form a people who live to God’s glory is what we name the Holy Spirit. This is not just any spirit. When we describe the Spirit as “holy” we are saying that it is the odd, unique, powerful Spirit of the God who is met in Jesus.

It is the Holy Spirit that sweeps over the primordial waters of chaos, giving life to a world that is very good (Genesis 1). It is the Holy Spirit of the Lord that brings “good news to the poor and release to the captives” (Isaiah 61:1-2; Luke 4:18-19). At Pentecost, it is the Holy Spirit that fills the entire congregation with the capacity to proclaim God’s “deeds of power” in every human language.

The Holy Spirit is central to the life of the church. Yet, at times, we shy away from naming the truth that we owe our existence as a people to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. It is as if we are content to let others in the Christian family make this their focus, leaving us to other pursuits. Perhaps we are not confident that we, too, are filled with the Holy Spirit.

2015 lenten daily devotional online

The season of Lent is just around the corner. Ash Wednesday, that marks the beginning of Lent, is on February 18 this year (Lent's dates change from year to year since Easter is a lunar festival and, therefore, varies each year). Once again this year University Hill Congregation has created an online daily devotional and invites us to join in the daily discipline of hosting scripture in our lives and life together.

Here is the introduction to this year's Lenten Devotional ...

"Welcome to University Hill Congregation’s fourteenth annual Lenten Devotional. Here you will find forty-seven daily scripture readings, each accompanied by a response offered by a member of our community. We invite one another to welcome scripture as a holy guest, offering each text hospitality in our midst, listening with curiosity for a living Word from God to our life here and now.

We find that this annual practice is one of the ways in which we are recovering our memory as a Christian community. The youngest contributors in this year’s devotional are in their first decade of life, the eldest contributor is in her tenth decade. Some live close to our worshipping home on campus at the University of British Columbia, others have moved as far as Sweden and Taiwan. We include university students and professors, retirees and workers of all sorts, some new to Christianity and some steeped in the faith. We share in common the hope that, through scripture, God is re-scripting our lives and life together so that the strange, new world of the Bible becomes the real world in which we live.

The forty-seven texts included in this year’s devotional are derived from two sources. First, we have included all of the lectionary texts from the six Sundays of Lent and from Easter Sunday along with lectionary texts from Ash Wednesday and nearly all of the lectionary texts from Holy Week. Second, as the Lenten Bible study at University Hill this year is an invitation to host the First Letter of Peter, we have included a number of passages from this formative letter.

We invite you to join us in the daily practice of hosting scripture and, in doing so, in listening for God’s living Word today. We encourage you to consider developing this practice in your own congregation. We have found this to be a rich experience in which we rediscover scripture and one another. We wish the same for you."

an oath of allegiance

(This year Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of the season of Lent, falls on February 18. At University Hill Congregation we are actively preparing our fourteenth annual online Lenten Devotional with forty-seven daily reflections on scripture to take us through to Easter Sunday on April 5. Following are some thoughts about the role of the sacraments in Lent.) 

The season of Lent has its roots in the preparation of candidates for baptism. Lent culminates at the Easter Vigil and on Easter morning when these apprentices in the Way of the Cross and Resurrection die to their former life and rise to new life in Christ. Over time Lent has become a season in which the whole congregation, baptised and not yet baptised, renews its communal baptismal identity.

In the early church the very name given to the community identified its members as those who had pledged their lives and their deaths to Jesus. According to the book of Acts followers of Jesus were first called “Christians” in Antioch (Acts 11:26). In Greek it means “belonging to Christ” in the same way that a slave belongs to an owner. The name Christian connotes not so much choosing to be a follower of Jesus as it does being called - drafted - into the service of the Anointed One - the King in the coming reign of God.

why worship?

Prayer in the Church of Reconciliation at Taizé

Why do Christians gather to worship? In a time when gathering in public to worship God is increasingly out of fashion in North America it is worth considering why this communal practice is crucial to Christian life. For, if we are not careful, we can easily begin to imagine that worship is meant to serve those who show up. We are such well-schooled consumers that, without realizing it, we begin to assume that worship exists to meet our needs. Then our worship planning focuses on the consuming congregation, aiming to send home satisfied “Sunday shoppers.”

hosting the word

Whenever it gathers to worship the church gives the Holy Bible (literally, the “Book set apart for God”) a place of prominence. For us it is scripture.  In other words, it is the church’s script.  In the Bible we discover the plot that is God’s saving mission in the world. Scripture provides us with parts to perform as actors in the great drama called “Gospel.” The Bible is our source book, the deep, thick memory that reminds the church of its peculiar identity in every cultural context. Reading the world through the lens of the cruciform biblical narrative gives us new eyes to see (II Corinthians 5:16-20).

why living in the christian year is crucial to missional identity

At University Hill Congregation we have come to realize that keeping the Christian Year is much more than a way of keeping track of the worship life of the congregation. We have come to see that living out of an alternate calendar constantly reminds us that we are living in an alternative story. As one of those who recently ordered the Christian Seasons Calendar says of it: "I absolutely love your calendars. They turn time upside-down, which is delightful and just right." In our desire to rediscover the missional nature of the church (which is to say that the church is, at its essence, sent out to participate in God's mission of redeeming the creation) we are learning that re-discovering Jesus' odd, salty, holy way of life requires our immersion in a whole new/old way of telling time - time lived in a gospelled world. Here is an earlier post that reflects on this further - telling time.

diakonia - commanded to love

The mark of Diakonia is the root word for our terms “deacon” and “deaconess”. In the world of the New Testament it refers to the role of a slave or a servant (in Latin the word slave is “minister” and slavery is “ministry”). Diakonia exhibits the ways in which the church, as a slave of Christ, is obedient to Jesus who, after washing his disciples’ feet, says: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also ought to love one another” (John 13:34). When the church wonders where the boundaries of such extravagant love might be found it is reminded of the parables of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) and of the Sheep and the Goats (Matthew 25:31-46). These explosive parables announce that God’s love ignores the boundaries to care and concern that we have erected and accepted. They alert the church to the news that Jesus is unexpectedly present incognito in the hungry other, the imprisoned outcast, the forgotten invalid and the lonely stranger. Surprising hospitality to the other, the outcast, the forgotten and the stranger is a hallmark of God’s glory. Its emergence in community is a crucial sign that God is calling the church into being once more.

koinonia - the coinage of community

The mark of Koinonia translates into words like “community”, “fellowship” and “participation”. It is the root word for “coin” which refers to coinage as everyday currency in common usage. Christian communal life – Christian koinonia – is every day community in Jesus Christ. It is the place where we practice loving neighbour and loving enemy. In the fellowship of fellow Christians we hurt and are hurt, learn to forgive and be forgiven. Sin and brokenness are no stranger to Christian life. This is no zone of perfection. Rather it is a flawed human community being saved by the amazing grace of God, not by our capacity to get life right. In Christian community we are invited to un-learn our proud independence and to re-learn the humility of mutual dependence. When Christian koinonia is in bountiful supply the church’s common currency includes the bearing of one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2). The mark of koinonia is a reminder that the Christian life is necessarily social. For if God – the Three in One – is, by definition, a community then the glory of God is always shaping, forming, creating, intending and building koinonia. In a culture of increasing social isolation the church lives a counter-cultural alternative in which God calls into being a people being taught to love God and to love neighbour, a community called the church.

liturgia - a public works project

The mark of Liturgia literally means “ a work of the people”. In the ancient Roman world aqueducts were liturgical structures, that is, public works. Christian worship is a public work that is intended to benefit the world that the church inhabits. Christian worship is not a consumer activity meant to meet the needs of those who gather to worship. Those who worship gather to offer themselves to God on behalf of the world and to be sent into the world as Jesus’ servants on behalf of God. The early Christian community renamed Sunday as the Lord’s Day (often calling it the Eighth Day of Creation – an entirely new day of the week) as a constant reminder that Christian worship is the praise and response of a people whose life together is rooted in the startling, transforming Resurrection news of Easter Sunday. On Sunday the church brings with it the harsh truth about the world’s Good Friday ache and grief as well as its Holy Saturday longing and despair. Then, in Word and Sacrament, it meets the Easter God who, in Jesus Christ, brings to birth a new creation (II Corinthians 5:17). Here the gospel is revealed to be both intensely personal and radically social. Nothing and no one is beyond God’s power to raise from the dead. God’s glory is revealed when the liturgy is a performance of this gospel drama and when the gathered congregation are its actors.

didache - training in the way

The mark of Didache (pronounced “did-a-kay”) means “teaching”, “formation”, “training”.  It is a mark of Christian community because the church is a school. In it we are taught the Way of Jesus Christ in the same manner that apprentices are taught a trade – through lifelong practice in repentance and confession, in forgiveness and reconciliation, in servanthood and sacrifice, in pastoral care and in social witness. Didache is less about learning a body of knowledge and more about becoming a new people. A congregation that bears the mark of didache is not a “come as you are, stay as you are” church. Resistance to the notion of conversion is dwindling in such places for these are communities in which people increasingly long to be converted from the anxiety-producing ways of the world to the peaceable Way of God’s kingdom come. In their desire to learn a new way of life – to “learn Christ” (Ephesians 4:20) – such congregations evoke memories of the name claimed by the early Christian community: “The Way” (Acts 9:2). Here Christian education is not simply a matter of teaching children to become belief-ful adults. Here the whole congregation is made up of disciples – students – who are learning a new life as adopted children in the household of God. Here it is clear that once we have heard the kerygma – the good news – nothing can stay the same.

kerygma - the message

Kerygma, one of five marks of the church, is at the heart of the church’s life. Kerygma means “proclaiming”, “announcing”, “preaching”. A congregation lacking kerygma is a community without the extraordinary news – “The Message” – that is the church’s reason for being. The kerygma is not simply a neighbourly commitment to generic values of hope, faith and love or to peace and justice. The gospel is not the best of humankind’s attempts to reach out to God. It is, instead, the incredible announcement that, in Jesus Christ, God has broken into history to save and redeem the Creation. The good news is a cruciform story of God’s capacity to bear the world’s suffering and to overcome the powers of death. A kerygmatic congregation is learning that the glory of the God it meets in Jesus Christ is, paradoxically, revealed in weakness. To paraphrase Paul, believers long for proof that God is real (signs) while unbelievers expect a reasonable contemporary spirituality (wisdom) but the church announces Christ murdered (crucified), a scandal to believers and idiocy to unbelievers (I Corinthians 1:22-23). The church that God grows springs from the seed of the cross and resurrection. Where this message takes root and comes to flower one finds a people undeterred by hardship, unsurprised by tragic loss, unprepared to give up on the least and the last because it is coming to trust in the power of God to make new.

2013 online daily lenten devotional

Today is Ash Wednesday. It is the day when Christians begin the season of Lent, a forty day preparation for Easter. Those who take the time to count the days from now until Easter Sunday will note that it actually totals forty-seven days in all. That is because the Lenten season of preparation and fasting does not count the Sundays. Sundays, for us, are always mini-Easter celebrations. For University Hill Congregation this is the twelfth year in which we have marked Lent by creating our own home-made Lenten daily devotional book. In the early years it was a hard-copy printed booklet for use within our congregation. Now it is an online resource used by our congregation and others who join us in the practice of reading, hosting and praying scripture as a means of continuing our formation as faithful witnesses to God's grace revealed in Jesus. You are most welcome to join us in this practice and are invited to spread the word to others who may be interested. Here is the introduction to this year's devotional, along with a link that will take you to it ...

marks of the church god is calling into being

An eye opening moment for us in University Hill Congregation came when we were introduced to five marks of Christian communal life. We discovered them in Maria Harris’ book “Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church”. In it Harris testifies that the creation of educational curriculum in congregational life involves a holy participation in God’s fashioning of a people. She posits that the medium which is the material of God’s artistic endeavour in forming the church are a set of forms – or marks – of Christian community that are first named in the book of Acts (Acts 2:42, 44-47): “There we find in one place the most detailed description of the first Christian community doing what will in time become the classical activities of ecclesial ministry: kerygma, proclaiming the word of Jesus’ resurrection; didache, the activity of teaching; liturgia, coming together to pray and re-present Jesus in the breaking of bread; koinonia, or community; and diakonia, caring for those in need”(p. 16).