Wednesday, October 15

Today’s Readings: Psalm 56; Numbers 12:1-16; Luke 23:44-56a; Ephesians 4:7-16; Psalm 10

Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I saw a lot of Seattle Seahawk games as a child. It's not something that I'm proud of - just something that I've learned to accept over the years :) Anyway, one thing that fascinated me about their games was the crowd’s propensity to do something called “The Wave”. For those unfamiliar with the concept, “The Wave” looks like a ripple of water that worked itself around the Kingdome. When the ripple reached your section of the stadium, you were expected to stand and raise your arms. Once you do that, you immediately sat down and let the folks in the next section stand up and raise their arms and then sit down. It goes like this - section after section - until “The Wave” has made it around the stadium several times. It was an amazing thing to see over 50,000 people move in perfect rhythm with each another. While they didn’t have “The Wave” back in the First Century, they did have their own sense of what it would be like to move in rhythm with thousand of others. The only difference was that that rhythm wasn’t driven by watching other people in a stadium; their rhythm was driven by something else. That something else was identified by Paul in today’s passage from Ephesians where he wrote: “He handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor-teacher to train Christ’s followers in skilled servant work, working within Christ’s body, the church, until we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ” (Ephesians 4:12-13 from The Message). Today, I would ask you to consider what it is in your life that sets the rhythm which you follow. Is it your career, is it your family, is it your hobbies/passion, or is it the God revealed in Jesus Christ? Spend some time observing the rhythm of your day and see what moves you along if you need help answering that question. Til next time…

Tuesday, October 14

Today’s Readings: Psalm 69:1-36; Numbers 11:24-35; Luke 23:32-43; Ephesians 4:1-6

I’m in the process of reading a new book by Phyllis Tickle titled “The Great Emergence”. The book is an exploration of the changes going on in and around the church these days. While changes in faith communities occur all the time to small degrees, Tickle’s thesis is that the changes we are facing today aren’t superficial. Every 500 years the church goes through a process whereby it fundamentally redefines itself. We are living in just such a period of re-definition. Nearly everyone I’ve met who serves a local church these days would agree with Tickle’s thesis, for you can’t help but feel the seismic shifts beginning to take place. One of the areas in which I particularly feel this change taking place is in how we organize ourselves as churches. For most of the last 100 years, people in faith communities have organized themselves as if they were mechanistic institution. Pre-existing structures were set up and the primary way people related to each other was in terms of how they served the institution. If they served on a committee or task force, then individuals were more valued; if they didn’t, they were less valued. Today, faith communities are starting to move away from structures that exist simply to feed the mechanistic institution and toward organic structures that exist to spiritually feed individuals. In order to make it through this transition from the mechanistic to organic, more and more churches are working with the notion of spiritual gifts in order to help them better understand the individual and how to help the individual develop his or her spiritual gifts. Having said all of this, today’s passage from Numbers gives us important words of caution about how a person living in community receives the spiritual gifts of others. In the passage, Moses had taken 70 leaders away with him to a Tent. These 70 received the spiritual gift of prophesy during their time together. Two of the group, however, decided not to go with Moses; consequently, they received their spiritual gift in the midst of the people. The part that’s particularly interesting to me is how the people in the camp received this spiritual gift from the two individuals: they freaked out and tried to put an end to it. Why is that? I suppose there are lots of reasons for that. One reason was probably because – since they didn’t have that particular spiritual gift – they didn’t understand it; and one of the very first tendencies we human beings have is to try to stop those things we don’t understand. Another reason was lifted up by Moses himself: the others were jealous. Whatever the reason, today’s story gives us the opportunity to pause for a moment and ask ourself, “How do I receive spiritual gifts from those who have different gifts than I have? Am I prone to being threatened by those gifts and try to put an end to them, or do I open myself to learning (and experiencing) more about God through the gifts of others? Til next time…

Monday, October 13

Today’s Readings: Psalm 144; Numbers 11:1-23; Luke 23:26-31; Ephesians 3:14-21; Psalm 22:22-31

People have various ideas of what it means to have strength or be strong. That is especially apparent during this election season when candidates jockey with one another to prove to the American public that they are stronger than the other candidate when it comes to a variety of issues such as defense. Most of the secular understandings of what it means to be strong have to do with having lots of muscle and being able to impose your will on another person or country. They also tend to be predicated on things outside yourself (i.e. you’re strong if you have a big bank account, lots of friends or allies, or access to a gym). Today’s reading from Ephesians, however, gives us another picture of what strength is all about. Paul writes these words to the community at Ephesus: “I ask him to strengthen you by his Spirit – not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength – that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in” (Ephesians 3:15 from The Message). As you face a variety of challenges these days that demand a great deal of strength, how do you understanding what it means to be strong? Do you strength as something that is created by you using elements from the outside, or do you see strength as something that comes from your relationship with God that emanates from the inside? Til next time…

Sunday, October 12

Today’s Readings: Psalm 106; Exodus 32:1-14; Matthew 22:1-14; Philippians 4:1-9

As a pastor, I spend a lot of time dealing with folks who have been damaged by one thing: clichés that people have used with them at the time of a tragedy. They were at a funeral of a loved one who died unexpectedly, for instance, when someone tries to comfort them by saying, “Well, I guess God needed them with him more than we needed him.” Even worse, when the loved one left behind expresses their grief by asking the most natural question of all – “Why?!” - the other person nervously responds by saying, “Well, we shouldn’t question God.” While those questions might make the person saying them feel better by deflecting the raw emotions, they often do tremendous damage to the person on the receiving end. They often fuel people’s frustration, sadness and rage. Some people think today’s passage from Philippians is simply about clichés – especially the part in verse 8 where Paul tells us to keep our minds on positive things. I don’t view the text that way at all. For Paul isn’t telling us to deal with the difficulties of life by taking the equivalent of a spiritual prozac and humming Bobby McFerrin’s song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. Instead, Paul is simply inviting us to keep our eyes on the bigger picture. The values he points us toward in no way are intended to ignore or negate the challenges we face – instead, they are meant to put those challenges into perspective. So where does your focus lie? Have you become so overwhelmed by the challenges that you can only see the hurt and pain; or have you been able to lift your eyes and see some of those things that Paul pointed us toward – things that can help us emotionally and spiritually rise above those challenges? Til next time…