Maundy Thursday, Holy Week - 2017

Tonight celebrates the Passover Meal at which Jesus also "initiates" the Lord's Supper / Communion / Eucharist (according to Matthew, Mark and Luke) and at which Jesus washes his disciples' feet (according to John). Below is a service that comes from the United Methodist Book of Worship. May it be a moving event for you.

For a reflection upon Holy Week in general, and Maundy Thursday in particular, here is a past post in which my reflection includes the scriptures and some historical context from Saving Paradise (Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker. Beacon Press. 2008).

Blessing on this Maundy Thursday.
Joel

       (Hymn numbers refer to the United Methodist Hymnal)

A Maundy Thursday Service

Greeting:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you

And also with you.

Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.

Christ has prepared a Feast of Love.

Hymn What Wondrous Love Is This ....................................... #292

Opening Prayer

O God; by the example of your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, you taught us the greatness of true humility, and call us to watch with him in his passion. Give us grace to serve one another in all lowliness, and to enter into the fellowship of his suffering; in his name and for his suffering; in his name and for his sake. Amen.

(W.E. Ochard, England, 20^th Cent. Alt)

Confession and Pardon

My sisters and brothers, Christ shows us his love by becoming a humble servant. Let us draw near to God and confess our sin in the truth of God’s Spirit.

Most merciful God, we your Church confess that often our spirit has not been that of Christ. Where we have failed to love one another as he loves us, where we have pledged loyalty to him with our lips and then betrayed, deserted, or denied him, forgive us, we pray; and by our Spirit make us faithful in every time of trail; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Who is in a position to condemn? Only Christ. But Christ suffered and died for us, was raised form the dad and ascended into heaven for us, and continues to interceded for us. Believe the good news: In the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven!

In the name of Jesus Christ you are forgiven!

Glory to God. Amen.

Scripture Lessons:

Exodus 12:1-14 ; Psalm 116 ; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 ; John 13:1-17; 31b-35

Prayers and the Lord’s Prayer / Our Father

Our Father in heaven,

Hallowed be your name,

Your kingdom come

Your will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins

As we forgive those who sin against us.

Save us from the time of trail,

And deliver us from evil.

For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours.

Now and for ever. Amen.

Communion / Eucharist / Love Feast

(Now is the time to celebrate the Eucharist. If you don’t have a clergy person present, one could celebrate a Love Feast instead.)

Hymn  Jesu, Jesu  .......................................................   # 432

Footwashing

(The first person comes forward and washes the feet of the next person, who turns and washes the feet of the next person, the last person will wash the feet of the first.)

Stripping the Church (or alter area on your boat, if you so desire)

Benediction

Go in peace. May Jesus Christ, who for our sake became obedient unto death, even death on a cross, keep you and strengthen you this night and for ever. Amen.

Depart in Silence

Holy Week - Christ as Savior ... of How Much?

This Lent we have been looking at the relationships between the Three (the Trinity). Today's post reflects a bit more on one of the Three: Christ. This being Holy Week, I thought it appropriate to then look at Jesus the Christ (Christ being a title, remember) and the issue of Salvation. Personally, I become a little nervous when the theological conversation moves to personal salvation. I'm not so much uncomfortable discussing my own salvation: that I understand. I'm quite aware of the places I still need to grown and allow God's grace to help shape me. Frankly, I often find that what I really need "saving" from is myself, and these types of discussions don't help me reduce my own "ego." Maybe its is because of the environments I have lived in for many years (seeing the stars at night, for instance) that I'm reminded of how small I really am. It is the nature of what is left out of the "salvation" discussions that I find difficult, namely all of creation. Yet, Paul especially, constantly writes about how nature is groaning in birth pains at this sense of salvation, in essence, the entire world/cosmos benefits.

 Richard Rohr's post from last week struck me, as I found he deals with this quite elegantly. So, I've decided to share his post with you.

May it give us somethings to reflect upon as we contemplate and celebrate Holy Week to Easter.

Blessed be,

Joel

[By the way, I just discovered that CAC's Daily Meditations are Archived Here.]

From Richard Rohr: Universal Salvation: April 7, 2017

A universal notion of Christ takes mysticism beyond the mere individual and private level that has been seen as mysticism’s weakness. If authentic God experience overcomes the primary false split between yourself and the divine, then it should also overcome the equally false split between yourself and the rest of creation.
For some of us, the first split is overcome personally in an experience of Jesus, but for many others (maybe even most!), union with the divine is first experienced through the Christ: in nature, in moments of pure love, silence, inner or outer music, with animals, awe before beauty, or some kind of “Brother Sun and Sister Moon” experience. Why? Because creation itself is the first incarnation of Christ, the primary and foundational “Bible” that reveals the path to God. The first incarnation of the Christ Mystery started about 13.8 billion years ago at “The Big Bang.” So some start with Jesus, but many who began with the Christ Mystery did not have that experience validated by the Church. They looked secular, humanistic, or like mere “nature mystics.” But God uses and honors all starting points!
Pre-Christian and pre-Jewish people already had access to God. This is the ecclesia ab Abel (“the church that existed since Abel”) that has been spoken of so often by the early church Fathers and in the documents of Vatican II. From the first righteous victim (Genesis 4:10; Matthew 23:35) until now, all suffering cries out to God and elicits divine compassion and community. This is a momentous and universal truth. We are indeed “saved” inside the Christ Mystery since the beginning of consciousness. Only in eventual time did this community take the form of “church.”
So we are called to love both Jesus and Christ. You can begin with either Jesus or Christ, but eventually it is easiest to love both. Too many Christians have started and stopped with Jesus, never knowing the universal Christ. Many non-Christians have started with loving the Christ by another name. I have met Hindus, Muslims, and Jews who live in this hidden mystery of oneness; and I have met many Roman Catholics and Protestants who are running away from the Christ Mystery, as either practical materialists or pious spiritualists.
Tertullian (160–225), who is called “the father of Western theology,” rightly taught that “the flesh is the hinge of salvation” (Caro salutis est cardo). [1] The incarnation of flesh and Spirit is Christianity’s most important contribution to spirituality, and this is the meaning of “The Christ,” although you do not need to name it as such.
Now “the world, life and death, the present and the future are all your servants, for you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God” (1 Corinthians 3:22-23). Full salvation is finally universal belonging and universal connecting. Our Christian word for that is “heaven.” This is why Jesus can say to a man dying in time, “This day you are with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). The Christ is now, here, everywhere, and always.
Gateway to Silence:
In Christ, with Christ, through Christ
References:
[1] Tertullian, De resurrectione carnis (Treatise on the Resurrection), 8, 2.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 223-226.

Trinity as Relationship

This morning I'm with one of my kids experiencing a college campus. It is hard to believe I've gotten to this point in parenting, but there we are. What strikes me walking around this morning are the relationships. Of course we humans are relational creatures. I have even read social scientists who posit that the reason we look back at our "college" days with such fondness, is because that is the way we are supposed to live. That we humans are supposed to live in connection with one another (and the cosmos, and the divine!). It is often in college that we "find" our life work, or passion. There is a sense of excited beginnings.
Isn't that what the Trinity is about, too? The excited relationships between the Three call us into relationship, too. These Three aren't done with the creating yet either. I'll leave you with these quotes:
John 3:17; John 5:17; and John 14:26
"God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved."
"My Father goes on working, and so do I."
"The Holy Spirit ... will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you."

Blessed be,
Joel

Welcome Home

[Sorry I didn't post something yesterday. I just realized that today is Thursday. It has been a week of fullness. Hopefully this finds your week blessed, too.]

I've been pondering how easy it is to become disconnected from nature when we humans now are considered urban creatures. (I believe it has been in the last ten years that somewhere a few more humans in the world wandered into a city to live that pushed us, as a species, over the border, as it were, from a rural to an urban population.) When we don't experience any wildness, how does that effect our understanding of ourselves, our place in the universe, who God is, our relation to the natural world ... ?

And yet, we long for wildness, in some carefully crafted safe way, because we add parks to our cities. There is a deep seated longing for the wild.

If we are disconnected from nature (or at least are unaware of our connection) how does that impact our countries' policies toward preserving natural "resources" (a biased word?); our companies' policies of extraction; our citizens' choices regarding climate change; or our religions' beliefs about salvation?

"In God we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28) implies that the entire cosmos somehow exists within God. Ephesians puts this a little differently: "There is one God and Creator of all, who is over all, who works through all, and is within all" (Ephesians 4:6).

What if we took this seriously in a deep trinitarian way: celebrating the relationships (or the "web of being") that connect us all?

The crazy thing is that such an idea is in no way new within Christianity. Listen to how Richard Rohr speaks about Bonaventure  (1221 - 1274):

Bonaventure took Francis of Assisi’s lay intuitive genius and spelled it out in an entire philosophy and theology. He wrote: “The magnitude of things . . . clearly manifests . . . the wisdom and goodness of the triune God, who by power, presence and essence exists uncircumscribed in all things.” [1] God is “within all things but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased.” [2] Bonaventure spoke of God as one “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” [3] Therefore the origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, fullness, activity, and order of all created things are the very “footprints” and “fingerprints” (vestigia) of God. Now that is quite a lovely and very safe universe to live in. Welcome home!

Are you ready to celebrate being home? 

Blessed be,
Joel

_____________
Quote is from Rohr's Daily Meditations for 30 March 2017.

[1] Bonaventure, Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey to God, I, 14, trans. Ewert Cousins (Paulist Press: 1978), 65.
[2] Ibid., 5, 8, 100-101.
[3] Ibid., 5, 8, 100.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “The Great Chain of Being,” Radical Grace, Vol 20 No 2 (CAC: 2007).

Joining the Creative Dance of the Universe

Over this last week I've been reflecting upon Cynthia Bourgeault's notion of the Law of Three  (or the ternary workings of the universe). In particular I've been pondering those times in my life where I have felt the most alive and "connected" to that Great Source of Being.

It turns out that at least two things have been present (and I'm looking for a third): a sense of creativity, and a sense of play. The more I sit in reflection about this, the more I'm becoming convinced that the/a third element is the physical body connection. For the Hebrew Bible/Old Treatment Tradition, the body was a good thing; this wasn't the case for the Platonic Ideals (in which all bodies fell short of the Ideal Body).

What has continued to sit with me are some of the following images: "A ternary system [being] asymmetrical and innovative ... corkscrews its way through time, matter, form—whatever plane is at hand—in a riot of uncertainty and new combinations, the whole of which is the fullness of divine reality";* "For the late theologian Beatrice Bruteau (1930-2014), the Trinity is first and foremost an image of relational unity. The three “God-persons in community,” as she sees it, comprise the prototype and the prerequisite for the expression of agape love—the energy of the Godhead itself. Bruteau builds a detailed case for why threefoldness is the necessary condition for agape love. She goes on to demonstrate why threefoldness is by nature “ecstatic” or, in other words, self-giving and generative. By its very threefoldness, it “breaks symmetry” (a term borrowed from quantum mechanics) and projects the agape love outward, calling new forms of being into existence, each of which bears the imprint of the original symbiotic unity that created it. “It is the presence of the Trinity as a pattern repeated at every scale of the cosmic order,” she believes, “that makes the universe a manifestation of God and itself sacred and holy.”** and "Understood within the context of a universe in motion, and with the Law of Three as its template, the Trinity becomes a dynamic mandala of God’s ongoing creativity in an evolving universe. It becomes, in fact, the evolutionary principle. The Trinity as a symbol of relationship invites us to trust the relationality of nature itself and to reconsider what we understand about the very nature of love. It is no longer a pre-existent “property” of God, but an emergent property of the whole of creation, joined in that divine dance."***

Where and when do you going yourself fully "connected"?

Blessed be,
Joel

____________

*Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Shape of God: Deepening the Mystery of the Trinity, disc 2 (CAC: 2004), CD, DVD, MP3 download; and
The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three (Shambhala Publications, Inc.: 2013), 6, 64-65, 81. (See Richard Rohr's Mediation for 3/15/2017).
**Beatrice Bruteau, God’s Ecstasy: The Creation of a Self-Creating World (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 14. (See Richard Rohr's Mediation for 3/14/2017).
***Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, “Trinity: The Evolutionary Principle of Unfolding Creativity,” The Mendicant, Vol. 7 No. 1 (CAC: 2017), 1, 5. (See Richard Rohr's Mediation for 3/14/2017).

Reality in Nature

     Over this past weekend my daughters celebrated a friend's birthday. Their friend had just put together a Virtual Reality (VR) system. They were amazed at what it could do, and how their bodies were "tricked" by what they saw. As a for instance: one of my daughters enjoyed playing fetch with a virtual dog. However, when she went to walk outside the other side of the house, she noticed she was standing on a porch. Below the porch there was blackness. Did that mean shadow? Did that mean a drop off a cliff? She knew she was in her friend's room, but she couldn't force herself to step off the porch.
     All in all, my daughters were amazed, but also left pondering the uses/misuses of VR. I think they have read too many sci-fi books (i.e. Ender's Game) and may have listened to their Dad's thinking. The friend's Dad jokingly made the comment, "I hope this doesn't mean my child stops going skiing with me because s/he is now Olympic quality on VR!"
     Which brings me to the questions of this post: what is the nature of reality? How do we stay engaged in that Reality? How do our thoughts of reality make a difference in what we see?
     If you haven't been reading Richard Rohr's Meditations over the last few weeks, I think your missing out on some good content. This week Cynthia Bourgeault has been a guest writer continuing to reflect upon the Trinity as a source of Reality. What has particularly caught my attention is Bourgeault's statement that the Trinity is inviting us out of a binary world view and into a creative, invigorating and innovative ternary. "Ternary systems have three independent forces coming together to form something new, a fourth thing."
     Imagine the potentials here? What would it mean if we'd been tricking ourselves all along (like a good VR game) about the binary nature of reality. What if Realty was really ternary?
     Enjoy your ponderings.

Blessed be,
Joel

Micro and Macro Ponderings

I've started reading Richard Rohr's new book on the Trinity (Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (Whitaker House: 2016).

Did your eyes glaze over? Sorry, that wasn't the response I was hoping for. I don't mean to engage you in a long theological argument, but rather draw your attention into both the microscopic and macroscopic worlds (and everything in between).

The Trinity has to deal with these worlds because the one reflects the other. The Trinity is ultimately about relationship: the three persons are in interaction with one another; they outpour love one to another; they depend upon the others to fill them back up again, only so they can outpour once more;  they are diverse, yet cherish that very diversity; ... On a microscopic level isn't this what happens within atoms and between molecules? What about on the macroscopic level? Aren't we discovering that universe operates in relation with other universes?

It definitely happens on the human level: we are retational beings.

But what does this say about the church; about how we are to relate to the world?

So this week in Lent I marvel and ponder the implications, all the while relating. May it be so with you also.

Blessed be,
Joel