A Page from Vitaljournal - Matthew 25

Some of us have been reading through Matthew's Gospel using You Version's Lent for Everyone  reading program.  In the reading for today Jesus tells the  parable of The Ten Virgins.

The Ten Virgins is always an odd one for me.  Not only because of the rather archaic use of "virgins", but because ... well it's just odd and old and on the surface unrelatable to most anything else in our culture.  Be that as it may, something new that came up for me was how I (and I think lots) tend to focus on a the "tarrying" of the bridegroom (God in the parable).  We get hung up on that and miss the point.  My mistake is to make the bridegroom, and therefore, God the focal point of the parable.  But in fact Jesus tees up the parable by likening the kingdom of God to ten virgins.  Jesus draws our eyes and ears to the ten virgins and their preparation (or lack thereof).

Jesus' point is not to shut down the honest questioning of God's absence that many good people raise, good Christians notwithstanding.  Jesus tells this parable to his disciples who have only just before asked him to tell them what will be the sign of your coming, and of the close of the age. (24:3).  I'm open to the thought that this can refer to any great day of the Lord's coming - such as the end of an illness, or the end of a period of suffering, or the end of a conflicted relationship.  I'm open to that because I have experienced such great days, where at "the close of the age", God's redemption comes.  The disciples will experience their walk with Jesus after the resurrection in part as a long and difficult hope that isn't realized in their lifetime.  Jesus prepares them for that period with this parable.

Jesus' point is not to shut down honest questions, but to - on this occasion - point his disciples to living life prepared.  As human beings we have a burning need sometimes to know.  But sometimes, maybe often, we have to walk without knowing.  I imagine that the journey for Abraham and Sarah to a place God would show them (Genesis 12) was long not only because of the number of days, but because of the not knowing.

Jesus tells his disciples that some things simply lie in God's hands.  And that as disciples we make sure that we have enough oil to see in the dark.

A Page from Vitaljournal - Psalm 23

Let me be honest with you.  I've missed several days now of my Bible reading, the daily workout I committed to do for the season of Lent.  This is a clear integrity gap - not doing what I said I would do, when I said I would do it, in the manner in which it was intended.  I want to acknowledge this and say that it has had an impact on me.  Most of the impact has come in the form of feeling less connected to God and to others.  In Faithwalking, I've learned to be honest about my habitual disobedience and do that without self-condemnation and judgment.  But it doesn't end with that;  I am recommitting to this daily workout.  Thanks for the grace and room.

And so as I re-engaged my daily spiritual workout, YouVersion's reading plan through Matthew's Gospel called Lent for Everyone with a commentary by N.T Wright, I wasn't expecting that today's reading would be from Psalm 23.  I was expecting a passage from Matthew.  When I saw it, I was thinking "boring!" and I know this Scripture already and can quote it by heart. Anyone else?  I had just shared this with a family at the memorial service of their loved one.  But in reading NT Wright's comments in the additional material, I found something I'd never heard before: 

"And now, many generations of Christians have prayed the Psalm in the same way, in the light of the many passages where Jesus picks up the shepherd-promise and applies it to himself. In fact, the gospel story is not unlike the picture of the shepherd and the sheep: Jesus leading his disciples around Galilee, teaching them, healing people as he goes. And as the story moves us forwards towards the valley of the shadow of death, we look on in awe and wonder as the Good Shepherd goes ahead of us into the darkness. His rod and his staff, two poles of wood, come together in a new pattern, a shape which will etch itself on the heart of the world. We look at the cross and we are comforted."

That insight gives me a different line of sight to the cross - one I've needed and am delighted to add.  Just goes to show...

Lent Wednesdays with Sister Roselle

This Wednesday we were blessed to have Sister Roselle from the Catholic Retreat Center The Cenacle.  We have invited Sister Roselle to share with us about spiritual practices in light of our community's deep commitment to engage spiritual practices as a way of life.  Sister Roselle had us explore our earliest memories about and experiences with prayer.

She also gave us two very nice definitions of prayer;  one very succinct and the other a bit longer, but both quite enlightening and life-giving.  The first is that prayer is "anything that helps you pay attention to God."  For lots of people nature does this.  For others it may be a piece of music, or a conversation.  Even tragic things like disasters can draw from us an awareness of God as we are drawn out from a place of compassion.

Her second definition ran like this:  It is not what we do;  it's a relationship between the core of me and God's true self, with reflection.  Sister Roselle spent some time talking about how our true selves get layered over by years of different colored "paint."  As we experience hardships from birth to about 5-6 years old, a new layer of "paint" covers over the "diamond" that is the core of us.  Also, our view of God is impacted by lots of other experiences that only give us a partial view of God's true self.  So, prayer is the getting of our core selves connected to God's true self over a lifetime.

Others who were there...add to this things that you heard and thought!

Join us for the remaining Lent Wednesdays - for a light supper and more time with Sister Roselle.  Here's the link to more information

Believing and Following

Here's a page from the Vitaljournal from the reading plan for Lent from Matthew's Gospel.  Today the reading is from Matthew 9:1-13 and includes the calling of Matthew the Tax-Collector:

I'm struck by The Message version's translation of what the religious leaders say when they see Jesus hanging out with Matthew the tax-collector, this Jew who is in league with Empire Rome for his own benefit.  They say, "What kind of example is this from your Teacher, acting cozy with crooks and riff-raff?"  It kind of makes me wonder that if the religiously "in" AREN'T making comments like this about you and the way you live Christ, then you may not be living Christ well. 

I'm struck by another thing:  The fact that Jesus did NOT get Matthew "all cleaned up and turned from his tax-collecting ways" BEFORE he called him to follow.  It really - at least for me - reinforces the notion that we have been focused on in worship;  that Christianity isn't about a system of belief as much as it is about a way of life.  And until Christians rediscover their faith as a way of life, people will continue to leave the church or never have any interest.  What Jesus calls Matthew to - this "disreputable character" as he's described - is not to believe something so much as he calls Matthew to follow a way that Jesus embodies. 

Lord, hear this as my prayer for me and FCC.  Amen!

PS:  If you want to join up on the reading plan and the Facebook Group Vitaljournal, check out the earlier post which gives all the details about how!

53 Days Through Matthew

Lent for Everyone is a YouVersion Scripture reading plan FCC is calling all our congregation to engage. The readings through Matthews Gospel are designed to lead us all together through the same spiritual experience right through Holy Week and Easter. The commentary on the readings should you want to read more are written by a fantastic Biblical scholar named N.T. Wright. His insights are quite literally moving and insightful. If you would like to join a growing group of FCC friends in this spiritual practice all you have to do is go to YouVersion and register. Look for the reading plan entitled Lent for All. You can have the daily readings sent to you each day via email or even on your smart phone.

There is also a Facebook page that has been created if you want read and/or share what the Spirit is stirring up in you. All you have to do here is befriend me, Michael Dunn, with a message that you want to join the FB group called Vitaljournal. I'm posting there a few times a week as I read through Matthew.

Here's a thought: There can be no wholeness in the image of Christ which is not incarnate in our relationships with others, both in the body of Christ and in the world. M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. Invitation to a Journey: A Roadmap for Spiritual Formation.

Erasmus' Heart is Ours as Well

"Make Christ the only goal of your life. Dedicate to Him all your enthusiasm, all your effort, your leisure as well as your business. And don't look upon Christ as a mere word, as an empty expression, but rather as charity, simplicity, patience and purity--in short, in terms of everything he has taught us." For Jesus was "the sole archetype of godliness." Quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture, Yale University Press, 1985, p. 155.

Lenten Devotional Reading 5

So, we have read now the four gospel accounts of the last week of Jesus' life. This has been an opportunity for our congregation to go deep in Spirit in order to go far in Faith. This week the reading will come from 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. Written by the Paul about 20-30 years after Jesus lived, it teaches about the heart of our practice of communion.

Here are some questions to consider as you read it this week: What issue(s) do you think Paul is addressing in the church at Corinth? How does what we do in participating in communion connect with loving your "neighbor"? What does Paul mean when he says for us to examine ourselves so that we don't take the bread and the cup in an unworthy manner? Is he talking about individual sins or something more related to things that affect the wholeness of community? Why do you participate in the Lord's Supper on Sundays?

A page from my journal: John 19:1-16
Pilate is the classic case of a person caught between a rock and a hard place. His indecision really points out the fact that he was a moral man, whose heart is to do good and decide right. I need to say that to myself because I have been guilty of "demonizing" Pilate. That's not to say that Pilate doesn't make a bad decision; it's just to say that he's human. He's caught between his duty as a Roman governor and the pressure of the religious leaders (who interestingly are in collusion with Rome) and this enigmatic figure of Jesus who has clearly done nothing wrong. Pilate is more human to me, because I sense that there are lots of times in my own life that I too have been caught between a rock and a hard place in my own walk with Jesus. And how often I too have failed.

Devotional Reading 3

This is the third week of the Lenten journey "in the desert with Jesus." Each week many of you have been keeping up with reading a different Gospel account of the last week of Jesus' life. This has been for centuries a common spiritual practice as a way to lead up and prepare one's heart spiritually to receive the gift of Easter.

This week we are reading Luke 19:28 - 24:53 (six chapters).

Pass this along to someone else. And share what God is helping you to see.


A page from my journal this week:
Exactly at the moment that Jesus dies on the cross a centurion, leader of the forces that actually carried out the crucifixion, exclaims, "Truly this man was God's son." He is the first human in Mark's Gospel to call Jesus God's Son. That's huge in part because not even Jesus' own followers speak of him this way in the story. It's also huge because it comes on the lips of a centurion. According the imperial theology only the emperor was considered God's son. Not only that but they consider the emperor a Savior, the only one able to bring peace on earth. Yet, here in this statement made by this centurion is a representative of Rome that says Jesus is Son of God - therefore the emperor is not! In what ways do I live and react that puts other powers more powerful than Jesus, God's son? ~mtd.

Devotional Reading 2

We have called our congregation and friends to spend the 40 days of Lent reading the different Gospel accounts of the last week of Jesus' life. This week we will be reading Mark's version which can be found in Mark 11:1 - 16:8 (six chapters). We made some helpful suggestions for what you could do while you're reading each week in the last entry.

May God add God's blessing to the reading of the Word this week! Amen!

Share what gets stirred up in you...it might benefit someone else.

A page from my journal:

As I was reading the last week of Jesus' life from Matthew's Gospel, I was struck by the manner in which Jesus entered Jerusalem. He road in on a donkey. As much as Jesus, the offering of the crowd also struck me. They shout in praise "Hosanna to the Son of David." That term would have shocked most of the hearers into a recognition that Jesus was challenging the political powers that be. Son of David would have conjured up images of a return to the days of old when the kingdom of Israel was at it's height ~ a condition that would require that the Roman Empire be thrown out of that part of the world! Can you imagine the way that the people are stirred up by an image such as this during the beginning of the Passover celebration? Indeed, Matthew says in verse 10, "And when Jesus entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, "Who is this?" No wonder they take Jesus seriously and want to silence him in the end. Makes me wonder about how sanitized my Jesus often is. I fail to see most of the time that Jesus was down in the nitty gritty aspects of life and that his life and way challenged and changed things. How is Jesus challenging and changing me? How is Jesus working through me to change things in the world? mtd.

Devotional Reading 1

Many people read the account of the last week of Jesus' life in each of the Gospels, each week between now and Easter, as a spiritual practice. The events of Jesus' last week began with Jesus' entry into Jersulem and ended with his crucifixion and resurrection. Each week we are sending out the specific reference and are inviting you to read and go deeper in your spiritual life.

This week we are inviting you to read the last week of Jesus' life from Matthew 21-28 (that's a little over 1 chapter each day)... If you are interested in reading this on line, here's a link to Bible Gateway

Here are some suggestions:

• Set aside a time each day to read a chapter or two - or - one day each week to read the whole section at once.
• Pray before you read a simple prayer: eg., "Lord I want to go deeper in your Spirit, so that I can go farther in my faith."
• Create an effective environment - eg., light a candle, turn down the lights, get quiet...
• Invite your spouse or a good friend or someone you're trying to get to know to join you, and take turns reading
• Read a chapter a day or the whole section many times this week
• Reflect on what you are reading and keep a journal (or laptop) handy to write down insights and stirrings - You'll be amazed later when you read them!
• Share with someone else what insights and stirrings you are having - this keeps the things you see alive and active, and may bless someone.

May the Lord bless your time and open you up to something new!