On the New Sabbath: Weaving a Life of Wonder

Image by Chris Neufeld-Erdman, Wastwater, with a view toward Scafell Pike, Lake District, UK

Image by Chris Neufeld-Erdman, Wastwater, with a view toward Scafell Pike, Lake District, UK

On November 12, Davis Community Church began a three week series last week called, "The Three Practics: Sabbath and Self-Care and Service". Here's is a link to my sermon on Sabbath. 

And here's a tidy summary: 

Sabbath is not so much about rest but about a way of life that is woven with wonder and awe. By practicing some kind of sabbath regularly we find our bodies and souls opened to a sense of the Eternal--the "intimations of immortality" that come to us through wonder. Sabbath is about creating space-in-time . . . about living in time differently, weaving a tapestry of time that is life-giving, that unites us with the rhythms of nature, and that is health-giving to ourselves and naturally, then, to others and to the Earth itself.

Abraham Joshua Heschel's remarkable and thin little book, Sabbath, takes pride of place in reflections on the practice of Sabbath.  Find it here.

 

 

Easter for a New Century: A Sermon

Easter for a New Century: A Sermon

Here's the text of my Easter 2017 sermon on Matthew 28.1-10.  I'm trying to honestly make some kind of sense of the Resurrection for real life, here and now.  And I don't want to fall into banal cliches, hackneyed phrases, and worn out dogmas that assume we can just repeat "Christ is Risen" and feel in any real way that we've engaged honestly with the ancient religious truth proclaimed at Easter, the modern world as we've come to know it, and a spirituality that helps us flourish in these challenging times. 

Matthew’s account of the Resurrection is not history as we understand it.  It doesn’t pretend to report the facts; but it does intend to proclaim the truth.  There can be a world of difference between the two.  Too often we focus on the facts and ignore the truth.

Here’s what I mean—

An Easter Acclamation: Cosmic and Evolutionary

After searching for an opening Easter Acclamation that is progressive and cosmic in nature, and finding nothing that went where I'd like to take the congregation this Easter, I decided I'd just have to write one.  

So, here's an acclamation/invocation that draws on themes found in the high Christology of Saint Paul (Colossians) and well as the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas; it's also drawn from the medieval mystics Meister Eckhart and Hildegard von Bingen, and the modern evolutionary theologians, Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry.  I also hope it has some of the poetic flare of that great earth mystic, Saint John (Muir) of the Mountains.  

O Radiant Light, 
O Flame Divine, 
as shines the light of Easter’s dawn—
Come, bless the embers of the earth,
sparks flung from our eternal birth.

O Word of God, 
the Source of Life, 
you rouse us from the night of fears
to open souls and minds and ears
and hear the music of the spheres.

You are the Fire that birth’d all things,
the Force that spins the galaxies;
you are the Flame within all flames,
the Hidden Power that knows no name.
From you all things that are were sent,
and into you does all extend.
Peel back the bark of any tree,
lift up a stone—they blaze with Thee!

O Risen Christ,
you shine in us,
the radiance of your holiness;
despite the sting of death and strife,
we rise to dance this Dance of Life.

 

The spiritual life, the downward path, and the values wisdom brings

Down is the way into the soul

Thomas Merton once wrote: “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

It's also true that most of us spend our time climbing the wrong direction; one friend recently told me, "I climbed to the top of the pinnacle only to sit down and realized how much it hurt."

Every spiritual tradition, at its heart, offers a downward pathway into the temple of the soul.  If we cooperate with the life-journey, we may well learn the values of true wisdom: 

depth rather than acquiring

awareness rather than ambition

wisdom rather than being right

humility not arrogance

gentleness not force

love not security

growth not comfort

relinquishment instead of clinging

A different, but wholly transforming way of being in the world.

And frankly, these are values not often learned until we travel the second half of life--a downward journey into limitation, physical decline, suffering, and eventually the final letting go, death.

"There is a crack in everything": Hope for activists entering a new political era

Despair is an energy, a negative energy that is born of the stuff that can rattle around in our heads, unchecked.  Despair’s the sour fruit of the cranky stories we often tell ourselves, the bad-tempered tales we can inflict on others.

We live and die by the stories we tell—inside our heads and outside our bodies.

“The destiny of the world,” Shakespeare scholar, Harold Goddard tells us, “is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories [we] love and believe in.”

Today, we’ve gathered in this circles, not to wring our hands or shake our heads or pound our fists and inflict our despair on others.

No, we’ve gathered together to stir ourselves, to wake up, to find some traction.  Whether we realize it or not, we’ve gathered together to tell ourselves stories, ordinary stories that come from ordinary people—stories that can become the source of our hope . . . our creative, courageous action on behalf of the wellbeing of our world.

“Hope,” says Rebecca Solnit (who is for me a contemporary writer and dissident whose voice is on par with the voice of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that feisty Russian dissent who challenged the Soviet behemoth in the second half of the last century)—