nocc@nocckc.org
| phone | | 816 . 734 . 8515 |
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| address | | 9900 North Oak Trafficway |
| city/zip | | Kansas City, MO 64155 |
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We are Disciples of Christ,
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"Shalom"
October 2008
In days to comeThe mountain of the Lord’s house
Shall be set over all other mountains
Lifted high above the hills
All the nations shall come streaming to it.
And many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us climb up onto the mountain of the Lord
To the house of the God of Jacob
That he may teach us his ways
And we may walk in his paths.”
For instruction issues from Zion
And out of Jerusalem comes the word of the Lord
He will judge between nations
Arbiter among many peoples
They shall beat their swords into plowshares
And their spears into pruning hooks
Nation shall not lift sword against nation
Nor ever again be trained for war.
Isaiah 2: 2-4
I often say to myself that, in our religion, God must feel very much alone; for is there anyone besides God who believes in the salvation of the world? God seeks among us sons and daughters who resemble him enough, who love the world enough so that he could send them into the world to save it.
Louis Evely In the Christian Spririt. Image Books; Image book ed edition, 1975.Great social forces are the mere accumulation of individual actions. Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to heal the world.
Jeffrey Sachs The End of Poverty. Penguin (Non-Classics), February 28, 2006.
"Around Christ’s Table"
September 2008
Despite what many people think, within the Christian family and outside it, the point of Christianity isn’t “to go to heaven when you die”.
The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights. Earth and heaven were made to overlap with one another, not fitfully, mysteriously and partially as they do at the moment, but completely, gloriously and utterly. “The earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.” That is the promise which resonates throughout the Bible story, from Isaiah all the way through to Paul’s greatest visionary moments and the final chapters of the book of Revelation. The great drama will end, not with “saved souls” being snatched up to heaven, away from the wicked earth and the mortal bodies which have dragged them down into sin but with the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth so that, “the dwelling of God is with humans.”
In this new world Jesus himself will be the central figure. That’s why from the very beginning the Church has always spoken of his “second coming,” though in terms of the overlap of heaven and earth it would be more appropriate to speak, as some early Christians also did, of the “reappearing” of Jesus. He is, at the moment, present with us but hidden behind that invisible veil which keeps heaven and earth apart, and which we pierce in those moments, such as prayer, the reading of Scripture, sharing in the sacraments, our work with the poor, when the veil seems particularly thin. But one day the veil will be lifted, earth and heaven will be one, the creation will be renewed…and God’s new world will at last be in place. This is what the Christian vision of salvation is all about.
This is the launch pad for the specifically Christian way of life…a new way of being human. It is the way which anticipates, in the present, the full, rich, glad human existence which will one day be ours when God makes all things new. It is about practicing, in the present, the tunes we will sing in God’s new world.
On the cross the Living God took the fury and violence of the world onto Godself, suffering massive injustice and yet refusing to lash out with threats or curses. Part of what Christians have called “atonement” is the belief that in some sense or other Jesus exhausted the underlying power of evil when he died under its weight, refusing to pass it on or keep it in circulation. Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of a world in which a new type of justice is possible.
To work for a healing, restorative justice-whether in individual relationships, in international relations, or anywhere in between, is therefore a primary Christian calling. It determines a whole sphere of Christian behavior---violence and personal vengeance are ruled out, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear. Every Christian is called to work, at every level of life, for a world in which reconciliation and restoration are put into practice and so to anticipate and hasten that day when God will put everything to rights.
N.T. Wright Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.
"Cultivating Prayer -
Eyes to see - Ears to hear
"
August 2008
Look hard at Jesus, especially as he goes to his death, and you will discover more about God than you could ever have guessed from studying the infinite shining heavens or the moral law within your own conscience.
You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship……When you gaze in love and gratitude at the God in whose image you were made, you do indeed grow. You discover more of what it means to be fully alive.
N.T. Wright Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.Participants in the first century church did not ask what Jesus would be saying if he were present. They asked what he IS saying because he IS present.
We cannot make God any greater than God is. We cannot “magnify” God. We can only make God a greater part of our own inner hope and love, expanding toward God.
Garry Wills----What the Gospels MeantLives shaped by God’s Spirit become the nucleus for congregations with extraordinary warmth, graciousness and belonging. People are searching for worship that is authentic, alive, creative, and comprehensible, where they experience the life changing presence of God in the presence of others.
All churches offer some form of hospitality, but radical hospitality is what is offered by fruitful congregations who strive without ceasing to exceed expectations to accommodate and include others…….such congregations surprise their guests and newcomers with a glimpse of the unmerited gracious love of God that they see in Christ.
Many times we unconsciously enter worship in the evaluative posture of someone preparing a movie critique…however we are not at worship to observe and evaluate but to receive what God offers and offer our best in response. “What is God saying to me through the words of Scripture, even if they are read imperfectly, through the sermon, even if the illustrations are weak, through the music, even if the pace drags a little? Am I allowing God’s Spirit to form me, change me, transform me through these experiences, or am I evaluating the quality of entertainment?”
Robert Schnase----Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations
"In the Silence"
July 2008
Being swallowed into the heart of God’s abundant grace doesn’t come easily to us humans.
Suzanne Seaton
Silence is God’s first language. Everything else is a poor translation.
Thomas Keating.
Reporter: Mother Teresa, when you pray, what do you say to God?
Mother: I don’t say anything. I just listen.
Reporter: And what does God say?
Mother: God doesn’t say anything. God just listens.
I love words, the sight of them on the page, the vibration of them in the air, the delicious feel of them as they roll out of my mouth, their power to describe and delight. I love water too, but I try not to forget that I can drown in it as well as delight in it. And the truth is, most of us are drowning in words.
The sound of silence can be both deafening and disturbing. Being still in silence can also feel like a colossal waste of time. The offering of myself as an empty (but willing) container was the toughest discipline I ever tried. I viewed silence as an enemy, something to be defeated and conquered. As an extrovert who feeds on the energy of group process and conversation, I was drawn to the instant feedback of stimulating discussion, the affirming eye contact of others and lively voices engaged in an exchange of ideas.
Befriending the silence is more about yielding than controlling, more about loosing than grasping, more about participating than directing, more about allowing than managing.
As a wise mentor once told me, the silence of God is not the silence of a graveyard but the silence of a garden growing. Everything may appear dead and lifeless as we stand in the midst of a garden in winter but elementary biology tells us that bustling activity is going on underground where we can’t see it or control it. Emptying ourselves and letting go of our control frees us to trust that unseen seeds, already planted by the Divine, will ultimately yield the fruit of the Spirit in unexpected ways. When we finally believe and trust in this process, we can begin to befriend the silence rather than see it as an enemy.
Linda Douty From “Rhythm and Fire” edited by Jerry Hass
"Seeing with Risen Eyes"
June 2008
For lack of attention, a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.Evelyn Underhil l
The universe is in the habit of making beauty. There are flowers and songs, snowflakes and smiles, acts of great courage, laughter between friends, a job well done, fresh-baked bread. Beauty is everywhere.
Matthew Fox
The human soul needs beauty even more than it needs bread.
D.H. Lawrence
Wherever you live is your temple if you treat it like one.
Buddha
All of us are born mystics, for the capacity to experience wonder and a primal sense of connection with all life is our birthright.
Ann Gordon
Adoration is nothing less than the oxygen of survival.
Andrew Harvey
My profession is always to be alert, to find God in nature, to know God’s lurking places, to attend to all the oratorios and the operas in nature.
Henry David Thoreau
Every creature is full of God and a book about God.
Meister Eckhart
I believe in a new world. I do. Yes I do. And I live in this trust, that although everything I see may turn to dust, we are moving inexorably, inexorably toward a new world.
Al Carmines
selections from:
Brussat, Frederic and Mary Ann Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life . Scribner, 1998.
"The Power of Prayer"
May 2008
In caregiving situations we always pray for God’s intervention as though God were blissfully
unaware of the crisis or need and required our supplications. However, our faith assures us that God is already active in the heart and life of both care-receiver and caregiver long before the faintest whisper of need and longing. Our prayers should not be an alarm for God’s attention
but a request to participate in God’s healing process. Indeed, we function best as caregivers when we recognize that we are a part of a process greater than our efforts, which is the healing that God has initiated.
Sarah Butler
The failure of our efforts to serve teaches us how to serve: that is----with complete dependence on Divine inspiration. This is what changes the world.
Thomas Keating
How can we gain a new spirit? How can we break loose from our fears and suspicions and from the grip of complacent materialism and face the issues of our time with new faith in God and humanity? The answer is: Only by a fresh sense of the presence and character of God. I am convinced that this is the right answer and key to success in the work which we want to do. The living Christ is a tincture---not added to life but transmuting life wherever he enters it. And therefore we must seek to bring under that influence not only the souls of individuals but the corporate soul too and so effect its transmutation. It is this change, not the imposition of a new moral code, which we should mean by the Christianization of society. Such a Christianization of society involves ultimately the complete interpenetration of God and human life, the drenching of life on all its levels with the Divine charity, its complete irradiation by the spirit of goodness, beauty and love. Efforts to Christianize our social conduct are foredoomed unless those who undertake them give themselves time to look steadily at Christ.
Evelyn Underhill.
The 16th century saint Theresa of Avila emphasizes that the purpose of a life deeply resting in God is not rest and delight but to be joined to the sufferings of Christ and to spend oneself on behalf of souls. She describes the typical condition of such a person as consisting of deep interior peace while enduring extremes of exterior persecution, struggle, and hard work for the Sake of the Gospel. She wants to make sure her readers do not just have the impression that if they reach spiritual depth and maturity all their troubles and sufferings are over. The soul is united to God in an extraordinary way but the reason for this is so that it may serve its Lord more effectively. Then fact that is it at peace enables it to endure trials all the more.
Murchadh O’Madagain
"God's Gracious Agenda"
April 2008
Spiritual reading of scripture entails an awareness that in some profoundly relevant way we are deeply related to the God who is proclaimed and portrayed in scripture. God who breaks into human history in the Bible is also deeply involved in our own personal history and the history of our own time.
The realm of God the scripture reveals is an order of being of such wholeness that it is totally destructive to anything that does not resonate with its wholeness…We must come to the scripture therefore with an awareness that our entire order of being will be brought into the presence of an order of Being that will ultimately challenge anything and everything in our being and doing that is not consistent with its wholeness and life.
Our reading of scripture should be conceived as an encounter with the living Word, a means to God's shaping of our lives. If this encounter and shaping is to take place, then our reading must be an activity we offer up to God consistently as a loving discipline, released to God for God's use, on God's terms, in God's time. We cannot view our spiritual reading of scripture as a means to any goal of our own devising. It must be a steady, consistent discipline we offer to God with no strings attached, no demands made, no expectations fixed, no limits set.
We are not, by the discipline of spiritual reading, transforming our own being or doing in our own power. We are offering ourselves to God to be transformed by God's power.
Keep asking yourself, "What is God seeking to say to me in all of this?" By adopting this posture toward the text, you will begin the process of reversing the learning mode that establishes YOU as the controlling power who seeks to master a body of information. Instead, you will allow the scripture to become an instrument of God's grace in your life. You will begin to open yourself to the possibility of God setting the agenda.
The expectation of instant gratification in our culture is a by-product of our grasping, controlling, manipulative way of living. It is feedback we require to affirm for ourselves that we are effective persons. If what we do doesn't provide such gratification, it might mean we are not capable, effective controllers of what is "out there." We have extreme difficulty in abiding, in waiting patiently, trustingly, perseveringly to be shaped by God according to God's agenda.
excerpt from:
Mulholland, Robert Shaped by the Word: The Power of Scripture in Spiritual Formation . Upper Room Books, 2001.