Day 6 -- It IS Practice for Eternity

"On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, 'Behold this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.'" Isaiah 25:6-9

Love and forgiveness. Sure. God in Jesus commands us to these things. But do you know that there is a logic to it...a relational rationale that makes sense long term? If the nature of God is love, and that love undergirds all the created order, and if that love is drawing us to a single inexorable conclusion, that will ABOUND in love, then paying attention to it now makes absolute sense.

In Isaiah's vision for the end of this world, and the beginning of God's new creation, all the nations of the world are drawn to God's holy mountain...the physical symbol of God's earthly power and presence where there will be FEAST that is unsurpassed in all of history. This FEAST is important. In the ancient mideaster cultures that surrounded the author and the cultural imagery that shaped how they saw and interacted with the world, the table and the breaking of bread was a sign of shalom, of peace between neighbors, even if they be strangers. When enemies broke bread together they became family. When bread was broken between conflicted clans, a new truce and peace were struck.

The table, biblically, is a SIGN of God's love and forgiveness. It is how you and I interact with God's shalom for creation. This is why we do communion on a weekly basis. It's not because we individually need forgiveness. It's because we as God's people need to be reminded that the outcome of our broken world IS NOT a nuclear holocaust, but a world reconciled in peace and forgiveness, where the forces of death and shame will no longer have the last word.

So we forgive today, and we love today because it matters. It matters for our relationships and our community today. And it matters for our relationships and our community in eternity. The enemies that we have? We will be breaking bread with them on that holy mountain. The death we fear? It will be swallowed up for them just as surely as it will be swallowed up for you or me.

It turns out that our God really IS in the business of restoration. Which is just another way of saying that he's in the business of love.

And you and I are his people...formed in community by the love of his son Jesus in a cross and alkali tomb.

Today, may you find the power of Christ's love flowing through you and into your relationships and world!

Pastor Nathan

Day 5 -- Faith Family: It's Caught, Not Taught

"And his mother and brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him (Jesus) and called him. And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, 'Your mother and and your brothers are outside, seeking you.' And he answered them, 'Who are my mother and my brothers?' And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, 'Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother." Mark 3:31-35

Family is complicated. Family is reeeeeeaaallllyyyyy complicated. It's complicated because it involves broken, sinful, self-centered human beings who don't own relationship owners manuals or other sorts of guidance for the difficulties of human communication and relationship. And yet it is so necessary because it gives us practice in the "choice" of love.

Church family does this for us too. I tell the parents of the children I baptize that their parental vocation is to hold their child in a holy trust, raising the child not as their own, but as God's. In waters of baptism, in the following of Jesus, in the journey of his kingdom mission, we are invited into a new family...new relationships that form us not as Swedish Americans, a midwestern farm family, or a privileged family from the upper East side. No, this family will have characteristics that reflect the ethics of God's kingdom--his never failing love for humanity, his unilateral decision FOR us, his insistence that forgiveness be central in our relationships, that love for neighbor (and ENEMY) might abound.

Like learning to handle a shovel, drive a combine at harvest, or care for the cattle on the family farm, the stuff above isn't necessarily taught; rather, these things are caught. They're caught while we participate in what the family is doing, in where the family is going, and in the day to day work of the life of the family. They are caught in relationship, and conversation, in modeling what works and what doesn't...and everyone learns and grows together.

This is why Christian community, and our deep openness to it is essential to the life of discipleship. In Jesus we become a part of a new family and a new body. It's values, priorities, and hopes will often seem foreign to us...but as we spend time with the family we learn to see and think and dream in new ways.

My prayer for all of you is that as you journey in your small groups over this next six weeks, that you might discover that deep, authentic, real community is like pure oxygen for the soul. It builds and supports life, and encourages ever greater devotion to the source of all life -- Jesus.

Blessings on you all as you gather this first week in your small groups. May you find deeper community and greater life in your "families!"

Pastor Nathan

Day 4 -- The Proof is in God: NOT us...

Rick Warren insists that love, how it is we love each other, is proof of our salvation. This is where I as a Lutheran Christian part company with this brother in Christ, a Southern Baptist. As if working towards love and contriving it in our lives could rescue us from the pit of self (sin) that rests at the core of each of us. Of course Rick bases what he says on a single verse, 1 John 3:14. But if you go back to the beginning of this particular chapter, this is what the author of 1 John has to say.

"See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are."

Our identity as God's children is grounded in his "election" of us...his insistent, ongoing, never-failing love for us. This is then the foundation of the work of our salvation, a thing accomplished not by our capacity to love God or each other...but the demonstration of GOD'S capacity to love us through a cross and empty tomb, DESPITE our inability to love God or each other.

When we choose war, God still chooses us.

When we choose hate, God still chooses us.

When we choose despair, God still chooses us.

When we choose our own self-centered needs over God and neighbor, God still chooses us.

This is the Gospel: "God chooses us. God will ALWAYS choose us, because God will unfailingly always love us."

As we live our lives not getting the beauty and power of this, God will still continue to give his life for us, to us, freely, abundantly, ALWAYS. As I say at the end of the communion liturgy...God's gifts are FREE!

And it's from these free gifts of grace...the freely given love and life of God for the very world that he created, that begins to altar and change our hearts and consciousness, sanctifying us by renewing our minds so that they will come to reflect the mind of Christ.

Which is another way of saying that as our lives increasingly flow from God's grace and life, we increasingly love each other as God loves us. So that even our capacity to love begins, and ends, in God, and not ourselves.

As St. Paul says in Ephesians chapter 2, "For by grace you have been save through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them."

Friend, you ARE God's workmanship, a creation of his grace and love. If today you find the capacity to love flowing out of you, it is because God created it in you. And you may, if you would like, pray for an even deeper connection with and expression of the love that formed you in the mind and heart of God, that the very expression of your life might manifest the glory of the God that made you.

Today, I pray for your formation in love. That you would know how deeply and powerfully the God revealed to us in Jesus loves you, and that you would know that love in your expression of it in the community that holds you.

Blessings through Christ, who has raised us all in his own resurrection.

Pastor Nathan

Day 3 -- Bonus Blog: Sara Groves and "Add to the Beauty"

Friends,

Just thought it would be cool for you to watch/hear the song I referenced in the Day 3 Blog. Blessings and the love of Christ on you!

Pastor Nathan

Day 3 -- Extravagant, Exhorbatant, Overflowing Love

"Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and annointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was to betray him), said, 'Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor?' This he said, not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief, and as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it. Jesus said, 'Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you will always have with you, but you do not always have me." John 11 and 12 (RSV)

It was philosopher Rene Descartes who made the statement, "I think therefore I am." Though profound, the statement betrays a deeply isolationist and individualistic bent. In light of the God who creates our human community in the likeness of the God who is "community," I wonder if the key philosophical statement of human being shouldn't be, "I love therefore I am."

Warren's assertion today is that we actually love God by loving each other. I think he's nailed it. Obviously there's biblical support for this. Jesus' distillation of the commandments to "love God with the entirety of who you are," and "love your neighbor as yourself," are as Jesus puts it, "alike." Loving God and loving neighbor are acts that are fundamentally intertwined. The mystery of our communion with God and with each other is that we can't really do one without the other.

And at the end of the day, loving itself is not a fickle emotion -- a fleeting feeling. It's a choice. A decision to "add to the beauty" of another's life, even when the existance of the other looks utterly ugly. But in this way, in the extravagant, exhorbatant, overflowing ACT of love we choose to affirm God's most fundamental affirmation of his creation: that it's good. That it's beautiful, not because of anything it does, but simply because God made it and he said that it was good.

Sara Groves sings in her song "Add to the Beautfy":

It comes in loving community
It comes in helping a soul find its worth.

Redemption comes in strange places, small spaces,
calling out the best of who we are....

I want to add to the beauty
to tell a better story
shine in the light
that's burning up inside.

My prayer for you today is that you will "add to the beautfy" of the life you live with the quality of love you choose for those around you. My you find the extravagant love of Mary as you journey through this day...the Lord's day.

Pastor Nathan

Day 2 -- LOVE: It's a choice

So much of what's good and right in me is the result of those people God has placed in my life to love me. I wouldn't be a pastor if my wife Erin hadn't given me the gift of her own authentic faith when I had none of my own. I wouldn't know the bedrock principles of leadership if God hadn't placed a mentor in my life, half way through my seminary training, who saw great potential in me and gave me the gift of doing anything BUT setting the bar too low. I"m a pretty rough piece of turquoise most of the time. But over the years God has surrounded me with a community that sees, expects, demands, and LOVES more out of me than I would ever give or dream I have to give if left to myself.

Many of you related and connected to the turquoise image I used in my sermon on Day 1. The love of a close community is like the friction created in a rock tumbler...tumbling the rough edges and crevasses out of our nature and simultaneously revealing what's most beautiful in us (the polished surface that lets us see into the rock's nature bringing out its native color and character) while also creating a reflective surface that more selflessly mirrors the beauty in others around us.

At the end of the day, I am the product of the choice of others to love me even when they didn't feel like doing so. And so are you. We hear this command from Jesus in John 13:34-5: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another."

Well, there it is. You and I both know that those we live with in community aren't always that easy to love. Perhaps the same thing could just as easily be said about ourselves. But Jesus' commandment asks us to strive for this ethic: that in our choice to love one another the world would see how it is we choose to reflect and draw out what is best in each other rather than what is worst. Our love for each other is what calls us to life. Our love for each other is the vehicle through which the nature of the God of love is made visible to the world.

PRAYER FOR THE DAY: Lord Jesus, today you will place me in situations and circumstances where I may not feel like loving others. But you will still call me to choose to love them. I pray strength for this work today, and pray that as you unleash your love in my life today, I might be a catalyst for what is best in others rather than what is worst, that your beloved human community might reflect the power of your kingdom. I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen

TASK FOR THE DAY: Name the people in your life that bring out the best in you and that have a deep and abiding commitment to love you even when you are unlovable. Then pick up the phone, send an e-card or normal card and tell those people what their love for you and presence in your life has done to build you up and how it has shaped you for the better.

Day 1 - The Energy of Community: LOVE

You will hear me this weekend tie in our life in community to the life of God. Try as we might to make all aspects of life about us, our very being still begins with a life that's outside of our own...that divine Spirit that blows over the waters of chaos in Genesis 1 and causes from that chaos beautiful life and order to emerge where there was none. And then at the end of that first creative act, in Genesis 1:26, God says about you and I, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness..."

This is to say that you as an individual are not necessarily imagio dei...the image of God. Rather, you in community are. And you are especially as certain characteristics flow between you and those you are in community with around you: when love is present -- not the self-serving kind, but the self-giving kind; when there's affirmation; when there's a sense that the sum of who we are together is much greater than who we are individually. This is powerful stuff.

I know that many of us struggle with the same sorts of things. Our circumstances and the particulars of our lives may look different, but we're all DOING life in the same way: by ourselves and on our own steam. It's a recipe for burnout and for hopelessness. You weren't created to live life like this. I wasn't created to live life like this. This is why God designed a universe where there can be no "I" without a "we."

So who's your "we?" Who's in your life that loves you with the love of Christ? That prayers for you daily? That knows the spiritual, mental and physical battles you are working through? Who holds you accountable to a life "walking wet" in the baptismal waters that hold you? Who serves Christ in the world with you? Who you can reciprocate all these things with and through?

My prayer is that as this journey launches you are plugged into a "40 Days of Community" small group so that if you can't answer these questions, you could begin forming the community and relationships that will allow you to begin to answer them in the affirmative.

My exhortation for each of us today? "Reach for each other! And as you do so, discover deeper, more purposeful, more powerful, more hopeful life!"

See you tomorrow here at the Spirit Porch. Peace!

Pastor Nathan