Let the little children come to me!

Gospel Reading for 5/21/2005

People were bringing little children to him, for him to touch them. The disciples turned them away, but when Jesus saw this he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. I tell you solemnly, anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ Then he put his arms round them, laid his hands on them and gave them his blessing.
(Mark 10:13-16)

For me, this scripture capped a evening of truly enjoyable fellowship with some friends. Dinner and a birthday celebration for this family's mom. After reading this Gospel Scripture this morning, I thought of my friends' beautiful young children. They are full of life and fun. Their parents do everything they can to encourage them to be happy and developmentally appropriate for their ages. And, their parents truly enjoy them. It struck me the at these two young children also really enjoy their parents, and want to always be with them, asking them questions, relying on them in a knowing way -- as if to say, mom and dad, you are for me!

This is how God enjoys His children, and does everything possible to allow us to be happy (blessed). And Jesus tells us, the Father calls us to welcome the Kingdom of God in us like a child. You know, those two little kids and their parents were today's Gospel for me.

Vespers for December 1, 2004

Among my daily reads is Alan Creech's blog, where today, he posted a very thoughtful piece about the Central Thing we should get down in the Christian Life -- that we are God's beloved children. It is the foundation of all else God's wants to do in us, because of His Tender Mercy and Boundless Love for us. Alan notes: "If you never get that he IS your Father, your Dad, and that you belong with Him, in His House, then you will never be able to step into the Life that is a part of that Family." Thank you, Alan, for the reminder.

In fact, it brought to mind the words of the Psalmist from today's (12/1/2004) Vespers over at Unversalis. In the first Psalm (27), David expresses his one desire:

"One thing I ask of the Lord;
this I seek:
To dwell in the house of the
Lord all the days of my life,
That I may gaze on the loveliness of the Lord
and contemplate His temple."

after he declares, as did Alan, in other words:

"The Lord is my light and my help: whom should I fear?
The Lord protects my
life: what could terrify me?
When they come to do me harm, to consume my
flesh,
my enemies and my persecutors, it is they who stumble and fall.
...
For he will shelter me in his tent in the time of evils.
He will
hide me in the hidden parts of the tabernacle; then raise me up on a rock..."

and, then, knowing God will hear him, David asks what only one who knows his true place in God's Heart can ask:

Show me your ways, Lord, and guide me along the right path ..."

The NT canticle for tonight (Col 1:12-20) drives home this point, that we are God's Beloved Children, for whom Jesus endured the Cross, that we might be in the Family. What Joy!

Dorothy Day on Advent Waiting (from the Daily Dig)

In this brief quote, Dorothy Day captures perfectly the longing for Life to be born. And the wisdom of Silence. Read the whole piece. Use it for Lectio. Remember it while you are waiting for Christ fully to be born in you, again.

Here is a link to a brief biography of Dorothy Day.

Paradoxes of Salvation

After reading Steve Bush's piece on What is Salvation?, I did some checking around for some other stuff, and found this bit by Thomas Merton, in No Man is an Island.

This matter of "salvation" is, when seen intuitively, a very simple thing. But when we analyze it, it turns into a complex tangle of paradoxes. We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we gain everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others; yet at the same time, before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to become truly conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves is to love others; yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves, since it is written, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly, we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. Yet there is a sense in which we must hate others and leave them in order to find God... As for this finding of God, we cannot even look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless He has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace; yet if we wait for grace to move us before beginning to seek Him, we will probably never begin. ...
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

What a relief!!

About Stability

At this entry, Aaron Klinefelter reflects that

"One of my observations of many conversations around 'emerging' things (culture, church, etc...) is the pervasive feeling of liminality. The 'in-between-ness' ... always in transition... never settled.... 'open-ended-ness'....

"Maybe what a watching world that yearns for home and feels the constant pressure of 'the next big thing', really needs is to see a People who make their home in a foreign land. A People who choose for stability in the face of tension and tenuousness."

It got me thinking about stability myself. In the past 5 months, on our small street of 10 houses/homes, 5 have been for sale or have new owners . In the past 2 years, another house traded hands. In half the cases, the former owners had been there only briefly themselves. And we are thinking of moving, too, even though we have already been here nearly 25 years.

So, I read Aaron's reflection, then did some googling myself about stability. One article that leapt out at me was this paper, presented at a Bluffton College conference on"Anabaptism & Postmodernity," (August 6-8, 1998) by Gerald Schlabach, an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Among Schlabach's relevant comments was this:

It is no use rediscovering any of our church's roots, nor discerning innovative ways to be faithful to our church's calling, if we won't slow down, stay longer even if we can't stay put indefinitely, and take something like a vow of stability. Slow down -- because postmodernism may really
be hypermodernism. Stay longer -- because there is no way to discern God's will together without commitment to sit long together in the first place. A vow of stability -- because it is no use discerning appropriate ways to be Christian disciples in our age if we do not embody them through time, testing, and the patience with one another that our good ideas and great ideals need, in order to prove their worth as communal practices.

As one Mennonite church leader remarked to me concerning the impact of constant mobility on our congregations: "It's getting so the Abrahamic thing to do is to stay put."3

Postmodernism, however, seems to thrive on the problem of instability, not confront it. If there's any such thing."

Instability, and pursuit of the next best thing? Of course, these are quite related in our culture and in our time, and as these others point out, can get in the way of catching the Grace and Spirit of God as it moves among us, animates us, and moves each and all toward Christ. But, again, the Psalmist has a word of contemplative wisdom:

In God alone there is rest for my soul,
from him comes my safety;
He alone is my rock, my safety, my stronghold so that I stand
unshaken.
Psalm 62: 1-2

Prayers for Alan

Alan Creech has developed a nagging upper respiratory thingie. Prayers for him from here, etc.

Happy Thanksgiving from the DailyDig

Life is a Banquet
Dorothy Day
We cannot love God unless we love each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet, and life is a banquet too - even with a crust - where there is companionship. We have all known loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.
Dorothy Day: "The Long Loneliness"

THEOOZE - The faith of a blind man

This is something I need this week. Thank you, God.

The faith of a blind man, of a beggar, and thief,
Is all that I ask from your hand,
That mustard seed grows to the greatest of trees
And gives rest to the sparrows you feed.

You clothe me in lilies, and pour oil on my head
My wounds you have gently caressed,
When I look at my self in the mirror of life
I see nothing but weak fallen flesh.

How can you love me, pursue me like this?
You know I am not what I seem,
But you formed me, and knew me, in all of my weakness,
And have chosen to be Father to me…

You shatter the mountains by the word of your mouth,
With your nostrils you parted the sea,
You raised your dead Son from the grave unto Life,
And you offer His Spirit to me.

The faith of a blindman, of a beggar, and thief,
Is all that I ask from your hand…
by James Schmidt

Community and the Fruit of the Spirit

This probing piece by Aaron Klinefelter took my breath away. Which is to say, I got all exercised and had to sit down to comment.

My comments:
The possibility of and desire for Community, as I see it, even among "pre-Christians" (Sjorgren) is animated by the Trinitarian nature of all creation. It's not just the desparately needed response to our current "American funk." It is the cry deep within all creation, that only God can satisfy, and embodies His mysterious plan (Col. 1., Eph. 1-3, etc.). The Psalmist, ever the truth teller, proclaims, "How good it is, how pleasant, where the people dwell as one!" (Psalm 133:1 NAB). The western evangelical call for personal salvation mitigates, in some troubling ways, against the formation of Trinitarian relationships (See Steve Bush's essay at What is Salvation). In our brokenness, as Aaron points out, we fall short of allowing God, in His Mercy, to bear the Fruits of of Spirit (Gal. 5:22) in us.

The Fruits of the Spirit transcend culture; they are not Eastern or Western or Occidental or African, or Aboriginal, or even "American", etc. They are universal, and God will grow them anywhere His creation recognizes its utter dependence on God's Grace for its being and purpose, and willfully surrenders to His Love. He grows them in us that we might be fully our true selves, full of Christ, each and all. To the extent a culture convinces itself that the Fruits are its alone, or that the Fruit of the Spirit are primarily for individual growth in the Spirit, it is, again, broken. Why would God grow this Fruit in us if not to nourish us, each and all together, as we grow in likeness to Jesus?

Kevin Rains's Reflection on Luke 19:29-38

Kevin's recent posts are so "it" for me, since I have been there, thanks to longstanding spinal column issues. Unable to walk, unable to do for oneself. God's Grace/Cleveland Clinic/Neurosurgery, now I can walk. Kevin is so right in this latest Lectio reflection, "The Lord needs it". Kevin writes:

"What a vulnerable king we have. A voluntary vulnerability to identify with us in our weakness.A king that needs to borrow a donkey. A king helped onto the donkey by his friends. "The Lord needs it." A Lord with needs. ... It is harder to receive than it is to give. ... I've been a receiver. I've been a dependant. ... I have an acute sense of what it means to be in need. It feels vulnerable. I feel like a burden."

Of course, the big lie the world wants us to believe is that we are not weak, that we shouldn't need anything or anybody, that we are kings and queens of all we survey, and that the whole creation is ours to command. The Big Truth is that our true self, Christ in us, alive in us, is poor and vulnerable, crucifiable, and in need. In his reflection, Kevin canonizes his wife because she is lovingly responding to his current involuntary dependence on her. He also notes that it feels vulnerable and like he is a burden. My guess is that Jesus felt vulnerable, too, that he had to rely on His friends to get up on a borrowed donkey, that they wouldn't get it (no kidding), and that He would be alone. But He was vulnerable in the context of living in the Boundless Love of the Trinity. I am reminded of this little piece, one of my favorite passages of the New Testament, in 1 Cor 1:18-31:

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the learning of the learned I will set aside. "Where is the wise one? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation to save those who have faith. For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast 11 before God. It is due to him that you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, as well as righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, so that, as it is written, "Whoever boasts, should boast in the Lord."

Prayers, unceasingly, for Kevin and his household of faith.