Pentecost: Divine Imagination vs. Idealism

There are no glass slippers or alternate realities.  The divine imagination allows us to see things as they really are – to engage reality in the way Jesus desired when he announced a new kingdom and a new way of life.  Embracing God’s imagination for us and our communities connects to our longings in very practical ways.  Whereas idealism often remains disconnected and disembodied from reality, living out of our divine imagination is living out the reality of the kingdom in the here and now.  It is taking on the eyes through which we were created to see all along.  Some may call this discerning and living out God’s will for your individual and communal lives.

Jon Huckins with Rob Yackley, “Thin Places: 6 Postures for Creating and Practicing Missional Communities.” 115,116.

The celebration of Pentecost is one of my favourite moments on the church calendar.  The down pouring of the Holy Spirit on a community of Jesus followers in Acts 2 is beautiful, distinctly missional, and fully empowering, transcending the barrier of difference in the name of a diverse, God ordained unity.  (For some great thoughts on this see this post by Geoff Holsclaw and this one by Christina Cleveland).

All the coolness of Acts 2 is a glimpse into the divine imagination of God.  One of my favourite words in the Bible is “Ruach,” Hebrew for “breath of God.”  It shows up in Acts 2, when Peter is quoting the book of Joel to describe the events that were taking place in the upper room where the Holy Spirit was showing up!

It was the Ruach that was moving on the formless earth in Genesis 1:1.  It was the Ruach, the ‘breath of God’ which gave life to the lifeless dust/clay of the earth in Genesis 2:7.  That breath gave life to humanity.  In most places where the Hebrew word Ruach is used, it is connected with the creative work of God.

Imagination and creativity go hand-in-hand.

This breath of God, this spirit given to all at Pentecost empowers a creativity that intimately connects us to our Trinitarian God.  It is intimate because the Holy Spirit is God.  God is the Trinity.  And, in Acts 2, we see the Holy Spirit at work in community, creating unity by way of a dynamic reconciliation of diversity that our world, to this day, so desperately needs.

When we find ourselves, as individuals or communities, living in our heads and/or disconnected from the world around us, we may be drowning in the emptiness of our own ideals.  Divine imagination, God’s imagination is the ordained participation between a creative God and a broken people seeking to reconcile a broken world.

So when you find yourselves entrenched within the bleakness of nitty gritty reconciliation, stand firm, for you stand with God in the depths of divine imagination.  Interestingly, that is where you may find resistance in those who are grounded in their own ideals.

Where do you see opportunity for reconciliation in your place and time?  How can you move past ideals and into the dynamic imagination of God?

Structures are Theological Statements

Structures are theological statements. If our structures mirror “the way of the world,” they will shape us powerfully and unknowingly.  Structures must be developed with the theological intent to be a sign of God’s coming Kingdom.  I’m not saying that we are unable to learn from organizational dynamics in other fields of study.  But we must scrutinize our methods, realizing that the means are just as important as the ends, for the means shape us to a particular end.  It has been said that Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship, moved to Greece and became a philosophy, went to Rome and became an institution, spread to Europe and became a government, and finally crossed the Atlantic where it became and enterprise.  What will it take for us to return to fellowship?

JR Woodward, “Creating a Missional Culture,” page 94.

Often our structures were put in place for life giving reasons.  Yet things change.  Often as things change, or as people become more and more grounded in God’s movement in a particular time and place, structures can become a hindrance to activity if they are solely anchored in the past.  Structures end up becoming fused with tradition just because ‘that is always the way things have been done.’  Part of missional activity becomes ‘scrutinizing our methods and realizing that the means are just as important as the ends, for the means shape us to a particular end.’ 

The unfortunate reality is, that when our missional practitioners, based in praxis, engage the impotence of some of these ‘fused with tradition’ structures the practitioner becomes marginalized… laid to waste on the outskirts of traditions and communities.  All this because they dare ‘challenge’ structure that may not be functional anymore.

Our structures are theological statements!!  The way we navigate them as community is intimately linked with our faithfulness to God and to one another.

What are some healthy ways in community to scrutinize structures?  Have you seen some successful ways in which this has happened?

Leonardo Boff on The Eucharist and Love of Neighbour

Forgive me, the language in this quote is a bit more academic ‘like’ than I am usually comfortable sharing on anabaptistly, but the gist of it is well worth it… and Boff is awesome!

There is a deep connection between love of God and love of neighbour.  Jesus explicitly speaks love God, love neighbour as the greatest commandment.  Boff wonderfully interprets the importance and functionality of the Eucharist (communion) in light of this divine reality.

We must love our neighbour with the same sweeping movement with which we love God.  After all, there is really only one commandment: the commandment of love.  Love of God is ‘veri-fied’ – ‘made true’ in love of neighbour.  Any celebration pretending to center on God, to the exclusion of mending broken relationships will fail in its quest for God. After all, it has effectively blocked the road that infallibly leads to God: the path of love of neighbour.  Camilo Torres, the priest who lived the searing truth of the Gospel to the hilt and then died that that truth might live in history, exhorted his friends as follows, on June 24, 1965, in an effort to create the necessary concrete conditions for an authentic Eucharistic worship: ‘The Christian community cannot offer the sacrifice in an authentic form if it has not first fulfilled in an effective manner the precept of ‘love thy neighbour.’  In terms of exigencies of the Gospel, in order to guarantee the Christian authenticity of the Eucharist, it will not be enough that the Eucharist be put together according to dogmatic principles and ritualized according to the disciplinary and liturgical canons.  In all respect for ecclesial value of dogmatic determinations and canonical discipline, the church must still honour and observe the spirit of Jesus. In the spirit of Jesus, true worship of God is realized more in the concretization of Justice and the building of a community of sisters and brothers than in the formalities of a symbolic celebration.

Leonardo Boff, “When Theology Listens to the Poor” page 97

How does this way of thinking impact the manner in which you take communion?  In what ways to you experience communion as personal?  In what ways do you experience communion as communal?

Richard Twiss on Indigenous Liturgy

As Mennonite Church Canada works toward reconciliation with the Indigenous people of Canada in light of the Residential School brutality, these words by Richard Twiss are all too important.  This video is 4:30 long and well worth your time! 

Click on the link below.

http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/indigenous-liturgy (sorry, it appears that wordpress doesn’t like this embed code… annoying, but the consequence of free blog hosting I guess).

Here is another important video to take a look at in light of the above, it’s about 3 minutes long.

What a great man, and a gift to our generation.

What is unique about your culture, and how your community worships?  What could it look like for multiple cultures to participate in worship together?

Eugene Peterson on North American Religion

Yes! *Fist pump*

North American religion is basically a consumer religion.  Americans see God as a product that will help them to live well, or to live better.  Having seen that, they do what consumers do, shop for the best deal.  Pastors, hardly realizing what we are doing, start making deals, packaging the God-product so that people will be attracted to it and then presenting it in ways that will beat out the competition.  Religion has never been so taken up with public relations, image building, salesmanship, marketing techniques, and the competitive spirit.  Pastors who grow up in this atmosphere have no awareness that there is anything out of the way in such practices.  It is the good old free enterprise system that works so well for everyone except the poor and a few minorities.

Eugene Peterson, “Under the Unpredictable Plant,” page 35,36

As a pastor, I find myself living in this tension every single day!

Where do you see consumerist tendencies integrated within your church community?  What would it look like to re-imagine our consumerist church structures?