It's time...: Contentment

Nobody made it to Canterbury@ULM today except me! That's okay. Bound to happen occasionally! So... in the meantime, here's another Lenten message from the Brothers of St. John the Evangelist that is, indeed, quite relevant to our study of the prophets, and in particular the segment we will watch next week.

Question: Are you content right now?
Write your Answer - click here
Share: #ssjetime #contentment

Transcript of Video:

One of the ancient words in the monastic vocabulary is contentment, which is incredibly counter-cultural. Contentment: from the Latin contentus, which means enough, it means sufficient. It’s the opposite of a kind of appetite of acquisition. But it’s rather saying: now is what is most important, not what is new but what is now. One of the downsides of this capacity we have to be virtually present all over the globe is distraction actually pulling us away from where we really are now. But the Psalm says, "Be still and know that I am God." And the Psalm says, "My boundaries enclose a pleasant land." Contentment is about staying where you are, looking at it more deeply and realizing with deep gratitude that this is enough, and for this I am thankful.

-Br. Curtis Almquist

Embracing the Prophets: Grief

             
                

What do the prophets mean when they say, "Woe unto you...?" Do you ever feel "woeful"? When? About what? How would you feel if someone would say to you, "Woe unto you if you __________." (Fill in the blank with something you have rationalized to be okay, even though at some level you know it isn't.)

Today we are more likely to say, "Woe is me," somewhat in jest. But... given the use of this word, not only by the OT prophets but by Jesus, perhaps we should take it seriously!

Tomorrow's lesson with Walter Brueggemann is "The Grief of Loss as Divine Judgement." We will gather as usual in Walker 1-113 and I'll have Lent-appropriate snacks.

If you can possibly make it by 11:30, do. We'll get business out of the way, do noonday prayer and start the video a little earlier.

See you tomorrow!

It's time... for liberation

Question: What taskmasters do you need to be liberated from to reclaim your dignity? Write your Answer - click here Share: #ssjetime #liberation Transcript of Video: When God invites the people to have a day of rest each week, he reminds them that they have come out of a system of slavery and oppression in Egypt, and now they are to be a different people. In Egypt they were oppressed and under a system that demanded constant effort, constant productivity, a constant kind of restlessness, a constant pressure to perform and to achieve certain quotas. And Pharaoh pushed harder and harder because he had bigger dreams of accumulating more and more wealth. So we see the wealth moving up to the top, where Pharaoh is at the top of the pyramid as it were, and the people of Israel are in the bottom. Their ceaseless labor and productivity feeds Pharaoh’s insatiable hunger for wealth and for power. And now God delivers the people out of that system and he tells them in the new system, “Yes, you’ll have work, but work is meant to be meaningful, it’s meant to be an integrated part of life.” We are not meant to be driven by constant productivity. And yet we find ourselves often in that place today where people say, “I have to work 60 or 70 hours a week in order to fulfill my employer’s expectations.” Or, “My employer expects to have contact with me through e-mail or phone 24/7 and I can be asked at any time to drop what I’m doing to take care of what he thinks is urgent.” This takes away the dignity of people, and it makes them just objects, which are driven to achieve the ends of the taskmaster who is over them. And God’s liberation of people says that this type of rest is important. It’s important for the dignity of the person. So if you’re an employer, you have a responsibility to make sure that the people that are working for you have sufficient rest and have a chance to stop their labors and to be with their families, to have time to think and to live and to enjoy life, and not to demand ceaseless labor from them. And if you’re an employee, try to create in your week Sabbath times, times for stopping, for ceasing work, and for living into the fullness of your life. We’re not meant to just be tools of productivity. -Br. David Vryhof

It's time... to set priorities

Question: How do you set priorities in your life? Write your Answer - click here Share: #ssjetime #priorities Transcript of Video: In this five-week series we Brothers are inviting you to participate with us in a conversation around time. Time is a gift from God, but very often we experience it as something that brings stress and an anxiety into our life. We don’t feel we have enough time or we’re trying to fit everything into the time that we have and we find ourselves pushed by time and pulled by time. So we’d like to look in this series at ways of reordering our time, of rethinking how we engage with time, and we’re going to do that under five categories. In the first week we’ll just talk about stopping. There are certain times when we’re called to stop what we’re doing, to rest or to reflect. We’ll also talk about prayer. How does prayer fit into our lives, and where do we find the time to pray and stay connected with God? We want to talk about work, because many of us have a disordered relationship to time and work, and work drives us and consumes our time in ways that we experience as unhealthy and unwholesome. We want to talk about play, because very few of us take time to play, and play is actually very important in – has an important role to play in the balance of our life. Then we want to talk about taking time to love, taking time to listen to others, time to be with others, time to live into the fullness of our relationships. So we hope that you’ll join us and that you’ll think with us on these topics and that you’ll consider the place of time in your own life. -Br. David Vryhof

The Prophets: Shrill Rhetoric that Breaks Denial

 What if, some Sunday, instead of thoughtlessly, habitually saying "Thanks be to God" or "Praise to you Lord Christ" after a reading, we would instead just sit quietly for a time and allow the words to fully penetrate our consciousness.

And when we could not bear it any longer, what if we would turn to each other and say what we actually, deeply feel in response. I can imagine hearing/saying things like, "OMG, did you hear that?" "Wow, what if Jesus actually meant that?" "Holy smokes, I can't imagine a world like that."

Canterbury@ULM continues "embracing the prophets" with the help of Walter Brueggemann. We'll meet tomorrow (Friday, 2/20) at 11:45 a.m. in Walker 1-113.

We will follow our traditional Lenten discipline of fasting. Pick up a beverage and bring it with you if you want and I will have some small Lent-appropriate snacks of some kind in case anyone really needs to munch a bit.

Lent: It's Time....

Question: What is your relationship to time? Write your Answer - click here Share: #ssjetime #time Transcript of Video: The gift of time is one of God’s greatest gifts to us. The Book of Genesis describes how God created the heavens and the earth and this beautiful world in which we inhabit. It then goes on to say that on the seventh day God rested, and it’s the seventh day that God called holy. Now you might think that the first thing that God calls holy might be perhaps a holy mountain or a holy lake. But no, the first thing God calls holy is time. Time is a precious holy gift. Well, these days I think we know only too well how we have sadly damaged and polluted the gift of God’s Creation. And I think we’re perhaps less aware of how much we have also damaged and, one could say, polluted the gift of time. For many of us, time is experienced no longer as a precious gift, but almost like an enemy. We haven’t got enough time. “I can never get everything done that I want to do. Oh, if only I could have more time.” Or on the other hand we waste time and we fritter it away and kill time. All of these things I think – which bear witness to a sense of disorderedness, a disordered relationship with this precious gift. So how might we redeem time? I hope that over this series we can together explore ways in which, in our own personal lives, we can reorder that gift in our own lives. We can perhaps ask the question: how I might reorder time in my own life, so that my life can begin to be more abundant and that in my life I may use the gift of time in such a way as to be much happier and to glorify God? Perhaps we can ask that question in the words which I love, the beautiful words from the poet Mary Oliver: “What is it that you plan to do with this one wild and precious life?” - Br. Geoffrey Tristram It's time to...Stop, Pray, Work, Play and Love

Prophets: Self Critical Thinking

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation 

The biblical tradition hopes to reveal that whenever the prophetic function is lacking in any group or religion, such a group will very soon be self-serving, self-maintaining, self-perpetuating, and self- promoting. When the prophets are kicked out of any group, it's a very short time until that group is circling the wagons around itself, and all sense of mission and message is lost. I am afraid this is the natural movement of any institution. Establishments of any kind usually move toward their own self-perpetuation, rather than "What are we doing for others?" In fact, the question is not even asked because self-perpetuation is presumed to be a high level necessity. Thus the prophetic and Pauline words for institutions were "thrones or dominions or principalities or powers" (Colossians 1:16). They consider themselves "too big to fail," usually because they are protecting their own privilege--which is too important to question.

I believe Jewish religion is archetypal religion because it illustrates the pattern of maturity/immaturity, advancement/regression, best/worst that characterizes all cultures and all religions. Catholicism is a mirror image of Judaism. The Church has made the same mistakes, but we normally cannot see them or acknowledge them. "Jesus is talking about the Jews," some would smugly say! When they read the prophetic passages in the Bible, many do not think it applies to them because most Christians seem to think that Christianity "replaced" Judaism and fully corrected Judaism's mistakes. They are wrong on both counts! You might as well just stop reading the Word of God if you think it only applies to those people who did it wrong, and "thank God we are not like them" (Luke 18:11). The patterns never change.

Once you see Judaism as archetypal religion--that the patterns of ego and transformation and regression are universal--your own reflection in the prophet's mirror becomes very clear. If we do not see Jesus and the prophets speaking to every age, addressing universal themes of illusion and our universal capacity for self-serving religion, I believe we have found a most clever way to honor the prophets into insignificance. They're really harmless when we make their message simply, "They foretold the coming of the Messiah."

Prophets step in to disrupt the usual social consensus--"How wonderful our group is!"--and say, "It's just not entirely true!" So you see why the prophets are all killed (Matthew 23:29-39). Prophets expose and topple each group's idols and blind spots, very often showing that we make things into absolutes that are not absolutes in God's eyes, and we relativize what in fact is central and important. As Jesus so cleverly puts it, "You strain out gnats and you swallow camels" (Matthew 23:24).

This tendency in religion to "absolutize" things comes from a deep psychological need for some solid ground to stand on, and I understand that. But what the prophets keep saying is, "God is the only absolute!" Don't make the fingers pointing to the moon into the moon itself, as it were. Jeremiah said, "The Temple, the Temple, the Temple of Yahweh! Don't you recognize it has become a robber's den?" (7:1-11) and this is the very line that Jesus quotes (Mark 11:17). But of course he was talking about Jerusalem, and surely not our parish church, Salt Lake City, Washington, DC, or much less, St. Peter's in Rome.

With that, perhaps we are ready to begin Lent tomorrow.   

Moral Coherence in a World of Power, Money & Violence

  

Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel;
   for the Lord has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land.
There is no faithfulness or loyalty,
   and no knowledge of God in the land.
Swearing, lying, and murder,
   and stealing and adultery break out;
   bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Therefore the land mourns,
   and all who live in it languish;
together with the wild animals
   and the birds of the air,
   even the fish of the sea are perishing. 

  Hosea 4:1-3

Canterbury@ULM will continue our "Embracing the Prophets" series tomorrow, 2/12/15, at 11:30 a.m. 

I will meet you in Walker 1-113 and am bringing Johnny's Pizza. Bring your own beverage if you want one!

We'll and discuss upcoming events briefly, then have Noonday Prayer, then list to Walter Brueggeman on "Moral Coherence in a World of Power, Money & Violence." Hmmm. Sounds faimiliar.

Oh, and try out your own prophetic voice. Read aloud the passage above. Make yourself sound just like you imagine Hosea might have sounded!

Brother, Give Me a Word - Grow

GROW

We often think of God as changeless. But in Jesus we see a quality of the divine being that is indeed changing: a living God, growing, exploring, experimenting, reaching, striving, absorbing, renewing. God's own being is in some profound way living, breathing, growing.

Bro. Mark Brown

Society of St. John the Evangelist

 

The Prophets: "Uncredentialed Purveyors of Covenant"

How is our time like the time of King Solomon? How have our mainstream churches become like King Solomon's temple? Who are today's prophets?

We'll discuss these questions and more at this week's Canterbury@ULM! I'll be in the Sub at about 11:30 a.m. to buy lunches, which we will then carry over to Walker 1-113, where I'll have the video ready to play.

We'll begin with noonday prayer, then watch Walter Brueggemann's instruction for this week (about 17 minutes), then have our own discussion.

I strongly suggest reading the material in your workbook for this session (pp. 27-38) ahead of time. Brueggemann's teaching on the video is dense and reading ahead of time will facilitate our getting the most out of it.

We will end with Brueggemann's prayer on p. 39.

See you Friday!