Tag: Community

Luke 22:24-46  The Urgency of Hope

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

It is hard to read this portion of the Gospel without tears coming into my eyes. I think it’s Jesus saying, “Simon, Simon, listen!” that gets to me – it’s so urgent, so full of passion and hope. Jesus knows that he only has a few hours left, and that if his disciples are going to truly hear and understand, he must prepare them. They don’t understand him, not in this moment, but they try to interpret his urgency. Peter thinks that it’s about the coming trial, so he tries to reassure, to comfort. “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death!” But Jesus’ urgency isn’t about the crucifixion. It’s about the community that will come after, and how people must behave to each other if his death is going to have practical meaning in their lives.  

I feel this same urgency when I think of my daughter. When I suffer, I don’t want her to suffer also. I don’t need her company as I go to my own cross. What I need is the hope that what I’ve tried to teach her will stick, that, despite my many foolish mistakes, I’ve raised her right, in the love and perseverance that will make her a good person and strengthen her relationship with God. If I were in Jesus’ place, and she and I were sharing our own last supper, I would do what he does, and try to get in a few last pieces of advice. I like to think that my prime concern would be for her, a concern born of love, and not for my own suffering, not for my own fear. I am probably wrong about my capacity for this, but it’s what I hope for, and that hope has its own spirit, its own way of forming and leading me.

Jesus’ hope is not for an individual, but for the community he’s been trying to build, a community that is fit to live in the Kingdom of God. He’s already described this community, multiple times. Now he, and the narrative, focus on three things that this community will have to embrace. It will have to be a community of servanthood, where people set aside their own needs and agendas to serve each other with love. It will be a community that is misunderstood and reviled, but also a community that won’t spend time trying to prove its worth to a world that doesn’t understand it, a world that sees it as a community of bandits. And it will have to be a community that stays awake, that doesn’t hide or turn away from suffering, but accepts suffering with the same clear eyes and open heart with which is also accepts joy.

 

Luke 22:1-23 The Last Supper

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The disciples knew, of course, what was coming. For weeks and weeks Jesus had been talking about Jerusalem, and how he would be arrested, tortured, and killed there. He also told them that he would rise from the dead, but that was so strange and mysterious that their minds couldn’t rest on it, but instead focused on the pain and death. Then, when they arrived in Jerusalem, they sat with him in the Temple grounds, and the anger that he caused, the long-simmering conflicts that his presence brought to the surface, were palpable. So they knew. They knew that suffering was coming, and they were afraid.

When I say the words of the Institution Narrative on a Sunday morning, when I lift the bread and say “This is my body, given for you, eat this in remembrance of me,” and when I lift the cup and say, “This is my blood, given for you, whenever you drink this, do this in remembrance of me,” I know that I am speaking into an atmosphere of fear. And I know that those words that I say are the great reassurance. The disciples were afraid that they were going to lose Jesus. And Jesus told them that he couldn’t be lost, that he is present in what we eat and what we drink, in the simplest daily actions of our lives. He offered them a glimpse into his continual presence, but not all of them could see it.

I wonder if Judas had really been listening when Jesus talked about God’s love, and attentiveness, and the possibility of banishing fear. It is clear he never repented, if repentance means being of a new mind. His is the old mind, the mind that believes that it has only itself to rely on, and that it must protect itself by controlling others. His actions make this clear. And they are often our actions. We often choose the silver over the reassurance, security over hope. Yet Jesus eagerly desires to sit and eat with us, and participating in this meal is incredibly simple. Just look for him in your daily bread, in the simple, sustaining actions of your daily life.

 

Luke 17:1-10 We Will Find Ourselves in Communities of Forgiveness and Grace

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Jesus issues a duo warning in this passage. First, when you fail (and we are all bound to fail), don’t lead anyone after you in your failure. Second, the surest guard against failure is the encouragement and forgiveness of community. If we are to accept the schema of self that I’ve talked about previously in these posts, we must ask what role community plays in our efforts to strip away ego and grow close to God. And it must be admitted that identity is not necessarily bad, just as its not necessarily good. We saw, in the parable of the heavenly banquet, that clinging too strongly to our identities prevents us from joining in the banquet that God is preparing for us. But it isn’t really possible to be part of a community without taking on an identity. As soon as you say “I belong,” you are necessarily claiming an identity in the group that you belong to. Identity cannot be entirely wrong or bad. As long as we hold it lightly, and don’t confuse our identities with our souls, we are helped by it, because we are helped by the communities we belong to.

What a community Jesus is describing! The community of his disciples is very different from many of the other communities we might belong to. To belong to this community is to be raw and exposed. This is a community that requires one to admit fault and abandon the need to be thought well of. In this community love, as the Apostle Paul puts it, does not insist on having its own way. And because one is exposed, faulty, and repentant, it becomes hard to lead other people astray in such a community.

At Youth Group a week ago, I said that I 95% believed in something. My daughter, who knows me well, and who has lived sixteen years listening to my opinions, asked me what I meant. I said that I always try to hold five percent back from any of my political or moral beliefs, because I always want to keep open the possibility that I might be wrong. I stand by that, even though it might make me seem wishy washy. But being one hundred percent certain is insisting on having things our own way, and I don’t want to lead children into this one hundred percent certainty mindset. When we embrace this mindset, it becomes much harder to admit our faults and ask for forgiveness. It also becomes harder to forgive, as forgiveness becomes associated with winning. “Of course I’ll forgive you, once you admit that I’m right.”

Such thinking is at the root of communities of dominance and exclusion, exactly the kinds of communities that create destructive, self-serving identities. But a community that has an ethic of repentance and forgiveness, and doesn’t misuse that ethic or turn it into a form of control, posits a different kind of identity, one that reduces the controlling needs of the ego and cultivates humility in its members. Living in such a community is easy and joyful. Laughter is heard often in such a community, and people feel free to play. It is in this passage that at least two of the main spiritual themes of Luke are realized, and we see how joy and forgiveness lead to beauty and grace.

Luke 1:57-80 Joy, Community, and Wilderness

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Elizabeth gives birth to John, her neighbors and relatives gather around in joy.  This is the second gang of people we’ve seen in Luke’s Gospel, the first being the crowd at the temple who gathered around Zechariah after he emerged from his encounter with an angel.  I think it’s fair to say that they were a random assembly, not a true community. It’s the true community that comes together after John’s birth, and the true community that responds to his birth with rejoicing.

Anyone who’s lived in a community knows that communities are complex, as full of willful hurting as they are of spontaneous rejoicing.  But with this first real community in Luke, we’re shown what they should be like when they’re authentic. The communities that Luke will portray throughout his two books are often a little awkward, confused, and stumbling.  Sometimes they’re downright funny. And this first community of Elizabeth and Zechariah’s relatives has all of those qualities. They think of themselves as the keepers of tradition, maybe even without realizing it. Of course the boy should be named after his father!  That’s how it’s done. And Zechariah, if he could speak, would say the same. I find it hard not to imagine Elizabeth’s frustration with this, and the frustration of any woman reading this story and remembering those times when what she’s said has been ignored or discounted.  This community of loved ones is stumbling through its joyfulness, getting things wrong. They don’t know that they’re dealing with the Holy Spirit, and that things are about to get weird.

No wonder they’re fearful after Zechariah writes John’s name on a slate, and then begins to prophecy.  It’s obvious that during his nine months of silence, he’s been pondering some things. The Holy Spirit directs his words, and what comes out of his mouth is so rich and profound that it’s become a canticle of the church, said or sung during Morning Prayer or Lauds.  The most surprising thing about Zechariah’s prophecy is that it’s not about things that will come true, but about something that already has come true.  God has already redeemed the people of Israel, has already made good on the divine promise that was given to them.  Zechariah is speaking about Jesus, of course, but Jesus hasn’t even been born yet. It’s as if the very promise of Jesus, the very possibility that God would become human and show us how to approach divinity through our lives and actions, is enough.  And this promise is already working in us. Because of it, we will be able to serve God without fear, in holiness and righteousness all of our days. Because of this promise, our sins are forgiven, and we will know how to walk in the way of peace.

Imagine being part of the community that first heard those words.  Some of what Zechariah’s saying makes sense, you might say to yourself.  We are descended from Abraham, and we have been waiting for certain promises to be redeemed for quite awhile.  And we get that John is going to be a nazirite, like Samuel was, and live in the wilderness and never cut his hair.  It’s a little old-fashioned, but we remember when people used to do that. But what about this new thing, this mighty savior that he’s talking about?  Who is this person? Where will we find him? What will he be like? And why are Elizabeth and Zechariah packing their bags and moving to the wilderness with their baby?

That last question is the most immediately important one to Luke’s narrative.  This portion of his Gospel, that starts with a community coming together to rejoice, ends with Zechariah and Elizabeth choosing isolation from community.  And this points to one of the things that Luke wants to say about community in general. Community is a good and important thing. But it’s not the most important thing.  Sometimes it will hurt and betray you. Sometimes you will need to leave it behind. In fact, if a new community, full of holiness and righteousness and hope is to be born, it’s necessary that the old community scatter so that bad habits will be broken, good habits regathered, and new practices ushered in.

How do we form pilgrim communities?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

When Greg Hitzhusen was a student at Yale Divinity School, he and a few others started an Outing Club, which took students out onto the campus for weekly meditations, and also took a spring break hiking trip every year. One day, while they were hiking in North Carolina, they came out onto Shining Rock at sunset and saw forested land spreading before them for miles. They had what Greg describes as a collective spiritual experience. This experience was the fruit of the group’s deep investment in their exploration of nature spirituality, and their acceptance of the hard work of being in the wild.

It was a high point of Greg’s many years spent exploring nature spirituality, during which he found many profound teachers. A few years before, he’s taken part in the Yitziah Jewish Outdoor Leadership Training Course, and become fascinated by the spiritual communities that can spring up in the midst of wilderness programs. He concentrated his academic research on similar outdoor environmental ministries, delving into how they thought about their work, both practically and theologically. He found that they all emphasized spiritual growth and renewal, often tying participants’ experiences to the wilderness stories of the Jewish and Christian traditions. His research made him conversant with a number of writers on creation spirituality, such as Stephen Kellert, Ursula Goodenough, and Bron Taylor.

We’d invited him to the Ministerium because we wanted to explore the idea of pilgrim communities, groups of people who come together for a set religious purpose, for a limited amount of time, and then disperse when that purpose is accomplished. Could these outdoor ministries serve as an example of such pilgrim communities, we wondered, and if so, what could we learn from them? Part of our concern was over their accessibility. Is there a way participate in pilgrim communities that are based around nature spirituality, even if one isn’t physically able to go on long hiking trips. or prevented from doing so by family or work responsibilities? Yes, Greg told us, all you need is a group that is intentional about going outside. He told us about the square foot exercise, in which one spends an hour simply meditating on a square foot of ground. Even such a simple thing can lead one to state of wonder and awe, since every small patch of ground is so amazingly various.

But the best practices for forming a pilgrim community in nature do require immersion in the natural world, which is best accomplished through multi-day excursions. Greg said that groups of twelve to fifteen people are best, since they allow for intimacy and variety without becoming unmanageable. A lot of very intentional planning needs to go into a successful trip. It’s a good idea to ground the trip in worship, maybe starting and ending with liturgies within a home trip. This, indeed, is one place where he nuanced our idea of pilgrim communities, since many of the groups that head out on these trips do so from a synagogue or church, a base community which supports them and which they benefit through their pilgrimage.

Once the group has started out on the trail, it’s important to engage them in what Greg calls a “portal” exercise. These are exercises that are meant to mark the liminality of beginnings, where pre-existing concerns and worries are named and then left behind. Through these exercises, a group begins to know itself as a group. Part of a group’s formation is its coming to understand the importance of mutual leadership. Sometimes groups of people assume that, regardless of any rhetoric around learning to trust one’s own leadership, there will, at the end of the day, always be someone there to bail them out. Experienced trail guides know that the only way to counter this assumption is to let group leaders fail, even if it means that they take people for miles in the wrong direction. Through such an experience, they come to understand that their leadership really belongs to them, and isn’t merely a hollow rhetorical device.

During these journeys, participants learn to value something other than peak-chasing. Sometimes the most profound moment doesn’t come on a mountain top, but while wading through weeds and bracken. And on all of these journeys, participants learn what their Jewish and Christian spiritual forerunners always knew – that the wilderness has the capacity of clearing away the distractions of our lives, and helping us notice the presence of God all around us.

Towards the end of his talk, Greg paraphrased Thomas Aquinas, who said that no one thing can adequately reflect the goodness of God, which is why God made all things. Often our faith communities become inward focused, and fall into thinking that they, somehow, know all there is to say about God. But creation is saying something more. Can we, as pilgrim communities, open the book of nature and learn from it?