Posts Tagged ‘Service’

A Jumping Off Place

Sunday, February 5th, 2012

New Church theology holds many simply precious truths. One that struck me when I read it last week is the idea that salvation is “an ongoing act of creation.” Many see salvation as an act avoiding damnation. Salvation then is not about creating anything but far more about avoiding punishment.

But lets just think for a moment what that might mean to see salvation as a creative act – if that was our “jumping off place.”  Creation itself is about growth, reproduction, change, even adventure. Imagine those being the antonyms for “salvation”!

I feel in many ways my eyes opening wider and wider.  Now that is not about some grand pastoral insight – because we all know that is in short supply.  It is about eyes widening as I witness more and more people living into a church that is in itself a creative endeavor.  Just this week ….

Baseball: Angel gave Angela 3 Philly baseballs from the NLCS for me to give Brayden Walsh and his parents.  Brayden, as many of you are aware, is a young man battling some serious health issues.  Brayden’s comments to his mom, on receiving the gifts, was that he was never going to wash his hands again.  Beautiful stuff.  That gift was a a gift creation.

Roofs: Sam wanted to know the name of a pastor I referenced in a service, a pastor who moved from the Main Line to Kensington because that is where he felt could best use him.  Sam wants to get in touch with him so he can offer to repairs roofs for those in need for free.  Beautiful stuff.  That gift was a gift of creation.

Cleaning: Elizabeth would like to get a group together to help clean the office.  I am not sure how she knew it needed cleaning – alright actually I do know – because it is dirty.  Our office serves small groups, as well as a being our “home base” during the week.   So that helps all of us.  Beautiful stuff.  That gift was a gift of creation.

Tithing: From an online viewer in Canada, “We are committed to modeling a tithe and beyond….The Vision of sharing these beautiful truths through meaningful contacts with a world that so desperately needs them is just as compelling as the day we signed on to help build a better distribution network to share these precious truths with the world. With this in mind, we are committed to placing our modest gifts with those parts of our worldly organization dedicating themselves to expanding efforts to reach out to others.”   Beautiful stuff.  That gift was a gift creation.

So yes, salvation is an act of creation.  In our own way, lets be an act of creation as we join that wider project singing into our hearts.   What a great place to jump off from!

 

 

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The Singing Started at 5:45

Wednesday, January 18th, 2012

The singing started at 5:45.  It went through the set up for the meal.  It lasted as we served the guests – a group of homeless families and individuals in Pottstown. The singing ended as we broke for clean up.  I find myself singing, waiting for a woman in charge of salad to dole out a blob of Italian dressing onto the styrphome plate I held, a plate filed with lettuce and shaved carrots.  She sings too.   The plate from her, to me, to the guest.

That was last night.  Just one night.

The Adkins, Scott, Karl, Angela, Pat, Bryn, Tom. Others.  Other Pastors.  Other churches.  A mom, Penn State class of ’89. with two teen age sons.  She cried.  One person I did not net meet.

The instruction. Pastor Abu Bradley with his son and daughter in tow: “Lets pray.  These are guests.  Do not eat until they eat.  Clear their plates.  Ask them if they want seconds.  Children get served first.  Sit with guests.  Smile.  Free flu shots in the other room.  Who wants to watch the restrooms?  I want to make sure our guests even have a good experience there. Thank you.  Lets pray.”  A buffet line, serve-yourself, makes so much more sense but it doesn’t.  Life is not serve-yourself.

Heaven as the grand banquet to which all are invited.    Jordan, 7, loves the Steelers.  So do I.  Lynne worries about her son.  So do I.  ”We” – a bunch of “beautiful fools” – I love that line Ray.  There is grace in all things.

 

 

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Allowing the Work to Gather Us

Sunday, January 1st, 2012

Writing here on the first day of 2012, I am thinking of the blessing in allowing the work to gather us.  Maybe our corporate New Year’s Resolution?

Much of life is the pivot toward gathering around the Work, written eloquently of here by Richard Rohr:

The Christian life is a matter of becoming who we already are, and allthat we truly are! Can you imagine that? Is the seed already within you—of all that God wants you to be? Do you already know at some level who you authentically are? Are you willing to pay the price? Even the mistrust of others? Could that be what we mean by having a unique “soul”? Most saints thus described the path as much more unlearningthan learning. There are so many illusions and lies that we must all unlearn. And one of the last illusions to die is that we are that different or that separate, and finally we are all one and amazingly the same. Differentiation seems to precede union and communion, for some strange reason.

As he notes, it is the True Self in God coming alive.  And there is a cost.  Are we willing to pay the price?  In a culture that worships the private, the individual, and the inviolate sanctity of personal thoughts and opinions – which are very good, to a point – the price is obvious.  We may in the end be called to give up those vary things that got to that point, to the “pivot.”  ”Unlearning” carries a cost.

As the New Church theologian Emanuel Swedenborg put it, our task then is straightforward in this great “unlearning.”

Abstain from evil, and do what is good, and believe in the Lord with your whole heart and your whole soul, and the Lord will love you and give you love for what you do and faith in what you believe. Then you will do what is good because of love, and you will believe because you have faith, which is confidence.  And if you persevere like this a reciprocal partnership [with God and others] will develop and become permanent.  That is salvation itself and eternal life.   

To get our selves out of the way, we need to allow the Work to gather us.  What is the Work?  It is the work of compassion, love, service, sharing, teaching, reaching, stretching.  If you put that all into one word it would be “church”, not in an institution of orthodoxy but as a living, breathing universal BEING.

So for 2012, lets allow the work to gather us!

 

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Moving Beyond a Church of Personal Salvation and Traveling to Reading Pennsylvania

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

“The Church of Personal Salvation” represents the Siren song of religious endeavor.  The focus centers on the individual – on my view, my perspective, my need to “feel” spiritual.   Very easy to do and a trap I believe most if not all people interested in the spiritual journey can quickly fall into.  I certainly have on more than one occasion.

The religious experience can intoxicate.  It readily lifts us to heights of beauty and grandeur.  And there lies the temptation.  The mountaintop experience, in isolation, may well be important as a centering, a grounding, a moment of inspiration but it is NOT the Christian life.   If we fall prey to seeing the mountaintop experience as the Christian life we readily turn to a “Church of Personal Salvation.”  We will then search for churches that fill that self absorbed need to feel good versus churches that call all of us to do good.  From a Biblical perspective, this may well explain that just as the crowds form and grow, and adulation swells we find Jesus in the New Testament often simply moving along, going on His way.

Are you aware the poorest city in the entire country, as measured by the percentage of citizens living beneath the poverty line exists approximately an hour from where NewChurch LIVE is headquartered?   Read the article.  Reading Pennsylvania just surpassed Flint Michigan.

So the question, is who will hear a call?  How can we serve?  Are you the person who wants to organize a coat drive, food drive, dinner at a homeless shelter?   Maybe you are.  God needs us and He needs us to get it is not about us.   Show us the way!  chuck.blair@newchurchlive.tv

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A New Church View of Leadership

Tuesday, September 6th, 2011

What kind of leadership should we exercise?

From a Christian New Church perspective it begins with a first-things-first approach.  That means a focus on service, plain and simple.  Leadership is not about self engradizement, self esteem, self discovery.  It instead centers on serving God through serving others.

As we step out in service and step into leadership roles as a way to accomplish that end what will we find over time?  Simply put – joy.  As the New Church theologian Emanuel Swedenborg phrased it, that joy grows from “shared experiences with others.”  As we serve into those service oriented “activities we love, our love for them grows, and along with that love comes wisdom about how to involve others.” (True Christianity pg. 192)  A little taste of heaven!

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We Do Care

Friday, November 19th, 2010

We do care.  People tend to have a deeply seeded sense of love and compassion.  Deep within, all of us – ALL of us -  lies a divine spark, a God given piece that remains with us through all eternity.  That piece reflects God – a God that, “… has compassion on everybody, loves everyone, and wishes to make everyone eternally happy.” (Heavenly Secrets, # 904).

Aligning our lives with that love is where challenges arise.  Likewise, when we do it, it is where life most breaks open.  I most enjoyed a TED talk by Jessica Jackley as she spoke about her journey from the Sunday School lessons of taking care of the poor to something far deeper – organized steps to do that in a way that aligned love and money.  She definitely lives that “spark”!

What she learned in the process of organizing her non-profit, Kiva, is that we do care and we do love.  Fear keeps many of us from always living into that care and love – fear of failure, fear of doing it wrong, fear of being taken advantage of.  What moves us through that fear are stories.

Stories – a point so true.  We thrive on stories.  As Rachel Naomi Remen noted in an NPR interview – at times we need them more than food.  Watching God settle into peoples’ souls, including mine, is known by story.  There is no other experience of it, no other communication of it.  And those stories move us beyond fear.  The fact is there are mechanics of growing a church, a church focused on service.  There are budgets, perspectives that at times challenge, projections not met, personality clashes – aka “the mess” that is life.  And there are the stories.  Stories upon story that speaks to the need to reach out, to connect, to find meaning.  The best of those are the ones that pull us in and then push us out.

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What If?

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Views of church evolve.

For many of us church begins as the bastion of law, order, tradition.  Religion then plays out as morality, as codes, as creeds, and as attendance.  What if though church, like our faith, was designed to evolve?

Christian New Church theology is filled with numerous references to what can be described as “mutual indwelling.”   In the Gospel of John, Jesus offers a wonderful prayer of oneness, or as one theologian phrased it, of “cascading unity” that speak to mutual indwelling – unity with Him and the Father, with us, with those who will know Him in the future.   The unity literally spills out of the prayer.

In our faith system, that very unity spills out again into areas such as marriage, work, service – all areas where the unity can be experienced.  It is also experienced in our connection with the spiritual world, not a connection of soothsayers and swamis, but a connection of heart and thought.  When experienced, “belief” in a dogmatic sense becomes less a priority and caring and the wisdom growing from it gains its rightful seat.  Morality, codes, creeds, and attendance follow a similar path – giving way to compassion, simplicity, intuition, and engagement.  Divinity becomes grounded in our humanity.

What if?  What if church evolved to a celebration of the mutual indwelling we have with God and with one another?  Such a shift is not without pain – I am absolutely convinced that opening to God and to others actually opens us to more synchronicity in terms of pain.  Likewise it opens the joyous space for co-creation.   And such a shift may be just where the Christian church is headed.

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Lord God Savior Jesus Christ? So What.

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

The core of Christian New Church theology is that the Lord God Savior Jesus Christ reigns.  This statement of faith is far more than just a dreary theological construct.  Within it lies a remarkable paradigm – that knowing God is knowing the Man, Jesus.  That walking the path of God is walking the path of Jesus.

Historical Christianity unfortunately warped this message into one of denominational exclusivity – a “club” as it were in which the world is readily cleaved between the saved and dammed.

That was NEVER Jesus’ message.  His message was one of looking out in love, a love powerful enough to hold all experience, including His own unjust execution, without lapsing into anger, hatred or revenge.  It was a love that enabled salvation ranging far beyond belief, far beyond any claims of exclusivity – and thus the consistent warnings about the demonic influence of salvation via faith alone.  Many of those whom Jesus “saved” were far from fitting into any belief paradigm we hold today and of which much of modern Christianity lays claim.

As goes Jesus, so goes God.

The New Church then is about reclaiming that core truth not from the pulpit alone but most importantly within life.  What else is a life of useful service, of loving kindness, of engagement if it is not a life of relationship growing from consequential faith? The relationship to God then is about the relationship with the other in circles that spiral outward ever-larger environs.

God of course is there all along – the omnipresent Father.  We are not separate from Him though we may spend a great part of lives asleep to that most core of connections.  We awaken to it at much the same pace that we awaken to one another, to the connection that is life.  Imagine the disciples awakening to the Divinity of Jesus – to a God who sought to arrive not as the Son of God – the same term used for the Roman Emperor – but as the Son of Humanity – our son.    If God’s highest desire was sacred worship, He would have chosen a far different vehicle than the person of Jesus, a Man who personified relationship, meaning, and connection and who eschewed the sanctimonious, ceremonial puffery of the Pharisees.

The “So What” is pretty big.

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I want to see God but I can’t

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Many people want to “see” God, experience God.  But the “seeing”, the experience, eludes them.  How then do we see God when our best efforts seem to leave us “without”, searching within what appears to b a vacuum?

To start, God simply “is.”  That means that God is something we awaken to vs. journey to.  We can often fall into the belief that certain actions will inevitably lead us to the experience of God.  I have not found that to be true.  My understanding is that we do those “actions’ – be they prayer, reading, meditation, service, worship – so that we are awake when God shows up. They do not create the experience.  They do however ensure that we are awake enough to know when the experience arrives.

Secondly, God’s presence is most often not of the “clouds parting” “trumpet blaring” variety.  The experiences tend to be far more gentle.  One author compared God’s voice to being as quiet as the beating of our own heart  (Try listening to your heart beating to get an idea of what that means).  While some individuals do experience the granduer of God in dramatic fashion – i.e. Martin Luther, Emanuel Swedenborg, Bill Wilson – most of us experience God in more muted yet not any less powerful ways.  That is why perhaps Jesus spoke of the presence of the Divine as the spirit, a word that can be translated “wind.”

One author’s point is one I have been thinking a great deal about recently.  Her perspective grew out of a endless prayers for the experience of Divine.  What she came to realize was that God’s answer to her longing was her longing.  It was that love, that compassion, that “pull” in her heart that bore great fruit in her life, a “pull” that might have moved her more in her life than any dramatic presentation of God.

If the pull to experience God is moving you forward in your life, that might just be the whole point.  That might just be the mercy and compassion of God at work in your life. Stay awake.  Keep doing the work.  God will show Himself in the ways He knows to be most important in light of goals that are eternal, not temporal.  Those are not often the most dramatic but they are the most transformative.

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