Come ToGather (C2G)

Cotton Patch Gospels: Reading, Discussion, & Worship

2012-01-12T22:19:00.000-08:00

On Sunday nights for eight weeks, from mid-January to early-March, C2G will meet to read the Cotton Patch Gospel by Clarence Jordan.

Then, for a few days on Spring Break week (3.7 to 3.11), we will visit the community in Georgia that Clarence Jordan founded: http://www.koinoniapartners.org/; a few spots are still available for the Georgia trip.

Each meeting will include potluck supper, reading, discussion, & communion. When musicians are available, they will join us too.

On Super Bowl Sunday (2.5.12), we will meet at a member's home for worship before the big game.

Prepare Ye The Way (Advent Awaits Us)

2011-11-21T07:48:00.001-08:00

Areading from the Gospel According to Mark, verses 1 through 11. The beginningof the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in theprophet Isaiah,

“See,I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

whowill prepare your way;

thevoice of one crying out in the wilderness:

‘Preparethe way of the Lord,

makehis paths straight.’”

Johnthe baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentancefor the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside andall the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him inthe river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’shair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.

Heproclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am notworthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized youwith water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

Inthose days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in theJordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens tornapart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came fromheaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

This is the word of the Lord

I will bless the LORD at all times: hispraise shall continually be in my mouth.

O magnify the LORD with me, and let usexalt his name together.

Letus pray: Lord God, May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all ourhearts be pleasing unto you, in the name of the resurrected Christ who is ourrock and our redeemer. Amen.

Thetitle of this sermon and this service is “PrepareYe The Way” because….

Accordingto my parents, my preaching and teaching career began at a very young age. Wehad gone to see the musical Godspell in the theater—you may be familiar withthis 1970s rock n roll rendition of the gospel. As we sat in the audience thatnight, I was ready for the opening of this play, which involves John theBaptist coming forward for the invocation, the epic, beautiful refrain “PrepareYe The Way Of The Lord.”

Asthe people in the theater sat quiet and John the Baptist started to sing, aneager young child interrupted the proceedings and shouted at the top of hislungs, “That song is on our record.” And according to my Daddy’s retelling, theentire cast joined the audience in stunned laughter at my spontaneousdisruption. Thus began my preaching career at age four.

EachMonday afternoon before I go to seminary at Vanderbilt, I drive about 80minutes in the car from Cookeville, Tennessee down Interstate 40. I see Johnthe Baptist in the billboard that stares down at me and asks, “If you diedtoday, where would you spend eternity?” AsI arrive at the exit ramp to Broadway, downtown Nashville, I see the same manevery week, selling street sheet called The Contributor, and he’sharkening to us to “prepare ye the way” for new perspectives on homelessnessand homeless folk.

Allacross American today, from California to New York to even little oldCookeville, ragtag bands of first-amendment thumpers continue to proclaim“Occupy” in the name of the poor and the unemployed and disenfranchised. In their signs, in the placards, in theircement campgrounds, we see John the Baptist proclaiming “Prepare Ye The Way”for peace, “Prepare Ye The Way” for hope, “Prepare Ye The Way” for justice. Nowmore than ever, we need to “prepare ye the way” for the Lord of the Poor, thePrince of the Peasants who comes to town on a donkey to confront the powersthat be in an Occupy Jerusalem parade.

Ifwe quiet our hearts long enough to hear the world groaning and moaning forchange, we can hear the voice of John the Baptist issuing aneloquent yet shrill call for collective and relational repentance from withinthe asphalt arteries and alienated cubicles of the American culturalwilderness. Jesus needs John the Baptist. We need John the Baptist. Mark tipsus off to the revolutionary implications of the relationship between John andJesus, Jesus and John. We don’t have a Christ—or a Christology—without firstworking through and with John the Baptist.

MarcusBorg suggests that John was a “teacher” and “mentor” to Jesus. PerhapsChrist followed John to a sort of wilderness training camp to have his callclarified, his mission honed, his ministry discerned. We don’t have a good God movement without a recruiter, withoutan instigator and an agitator. That’s the beatifically brash and rhetoricallyharsh harbinger we find in this passage with John the Baptist—the carnivalbarker of the Jesus movement. He is the wild man wearing the cloak of camel’shair. He is the warning to the rich and powerful to repent.

Jesus needs John theBaptist. Jesus needs John the Baptist like the Beatles needs Elvis Presley.Jesus needs John the Baptist like Elvis Presley needs Sister Rosetta Tharpe.Jesus needs John the Baptist like Eric Clapton needs Muddy Waters. Jesus needsJohn the Baptist like Martin Luther King needs Mahatma Gandhi. Jesus needs Johnthe Baptist like Martin Luther King needs Rosa Parks. Every good movement needsinstigators and agitators to energize, to prepare ye the way.

According to radicaltheologian Ched Myers, this passage is an induction ceremony into the movementfor Jesus. This is not like our baptisms in some churches today, where baptismis like joining an elite country club of the frozen chosen. This is joining amovement of resistance and revolution; this is joining the rank and file of theGod movement.

So, the story of Christbegins not with the cozy niceties of our Christmas cards, the scrubbed upnativity narratives of made-for-TV specials but with the beckoning baptizer,asking us to repent, repent meaning more than confess your dirty deeds thatwere done dirt cheap, but repent meaning change your heart and mind and turnyour life around, repent meaning transform sin-consciousness into Godconsciousness, selfish consciousness into selfless consciousness. In otherwords, free your mind and the rest will follow. But not only does Christ’sbaptism induct him into the revolutionary subculture of the God movement;Mark’s gospel marks Christ as one of us and embeds him in the fabric of allcreation as card-carrying member of a cosmic community, the inclusive web ofharmonic infinity. Jesus submitted to being more like us, and we need to submitto being more like Jesus.

I think of my own baptism asan infant in the inner city of Chicago at the Church of the Three Crosses inearly 1968, just months before our clergy and lay leaders would take a largewooden cross from our sanctuary into the streets and over to Lincoln Park wherethey tried to prayerfully and peacefully mediate the conflict between policeand protesters outside the Democratic National Convention. The preachers andlaypeople were unsuccessful negotiating a peace between mostly unarmed yippiesand well-armed cops. Our peace delegation was dispersed with the protesters,and the large wooden cross was lost in the process. While some church memberscriticized this action, many members of that congregation saw the crosssymbolizing the sacred interrelating with the secular in the protests in thepark as an extension of Sunday morning ritual into the streets.

Like1968, religious folks are in the streets again, speaking like John the Baptist,joining the occupy movement. In the drastic economic differences between the 1%and the 99%—or as one commentator explained it the 99.8% and the .02%—it’stempting for some of us to employ the prophetic voice as we join the protests,to redress and redistribute, to turn the tables on the moneychangers, to fillthe 99% with good things and send the 1% away empty. But I expect that Christ’sunconditional and radically inclusive love might correct our math and see howGod’s revolutionary reconciliation includes even the powers-that-be and thepowerful that can’t see, making no percentage but 100%. Even the powerful canexperience powerlessness in the presence of God and might be empowered byrelinquishing the power that harms in favor of solidarity with the power thatheals.

So we’re called to be Johnin order know Jesus. If we don’t prepare the way, we can’t bring the kingdomcome. But admit it—some days we just don’t want to do the work. Lest we lose ourfirst world creature comforts, we don’t want to go to the real or imaginedwilderness and as Shane Claiborne suggests “purge ourselves of empire.” Wedon’t want to join John the Baptist at radical activist wilderness boot camp orhang out with men wearing wild clothing and living off foraged food. Heck, many of us wouldn’t even want to takean Advent or Lenten fast from our Facebook accounts. But God, grant us the serenityto accept the fact that we might not change the world and the courage to tryanyway. God, grant us the courage to Prepare Ye The Way.

Somewhere right now, addictsand alcoholics are getting clean and sober and are preparing the way torestoring their lives. Somewhere right now, divorcees are getting counseled andare preparing the way to reclaiming their lives. Somewhere right now, victimsand veterans are getting comforted and are preparing the way to rebuildingtheir lives. Somewhere right now, underpaid and underemployed workers aregetting organized and are preparing the way for fighting for their lives andlivelihoods.

To be baptized is not to privatize your salvation. Don’trationalize or believe the lies of the comfortably civilized! In the GodmanJesus, divinity gets democratized, and in Christ’s body the church, His workgets collectivized. To repent is to realize and accept God’s surprise. Theredeemed will self-actualize and keep our eyes on the prize. Of course Jesuswill submit to be baptized in the dirty water of the Jordan River. But From thewater as from the tomb, he will also rise. And we will see Him with our veryown eyes and hear a song: Can’t No Grave Hold My Body Down.

Somewhere right now,someplace like right here, we’re experiencing a revival of the revolutionaryspirit of the New Testament. When we submit to Jesus, we submit to others. Whenwe empower the voice in the wilderness against power and for peace and economicjustice, we invoke John the Baptist. When we repent, we change our attitude anduse our gratitude to make a change in the lives of others. Advent awaits us.Are you ready? Prepare ye the way!

9.11.11 4 Peace @ C2G

2011-09-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

We had a deeply moving worship experience on 9.11.11 as we remembered September 11th, as we prayed for, sang for, & preached about Peace.

Walking Home

2011-08-08T03:35:00.000-07:00

The following short story was performed by Jonathan Frank at C2G's 'Liturgical Performance Festival' on April 17, 2011. When we return to First Pres Cookeville on August 28, 2011, our first event will be an Open Mic For The Soul, & we invite everyone to come & anyone to perform.

Justin West nervously drummed the pen on his desk as he sifted through a backlog of emails on his laptop. This one was from yet another student in the church facing an unplanned pregnancy. He grabbed the church pictorial directory and thumbed through the pages so he could put a face with the name on the email. There she was. He touched his hand to the page and whispered her name. The phone number for the crisis pregnancy center was written on a post-it note somewhere amid the piles of papers on his desk. Now if he could only find it.

Justin could feel himself becoming numb to these scenarios. This was, after all, pretty standard fare for a youth pastor in a large church. For him, it was another day at work, but somewhere a scared, 16-year-old girl’s world was coming undone.

The weight of everyone else’s problems had depleted Justin of the strength he needed to face his own. The very nature of the job seemingly disallowed being real. He had to always be “on,” always be strong, project a certain image and message. And whenever he needed a cigarette, as he did right now, he had to walk to the far corner of the parking lot, behind the shed, lest he cause anyone to stumble . . . or worse, the senior pastor find out.

“Why did I ever become a youth pastor anyway?” Justin wondered in silence. He wanted to help people. He so desired to be an honest, vulnerable human being, sharing openly about his imperfections and weaknesses, and reaching out to those hurting people, disenfranchised with religion and tired of trying to be good enough. Instead he was pushed into the insulated, Christian bubble. He was tired of the game, the pious religious power brokers, the hypocrisy, the arbitrary human scale of sins that welcomed, if not encouraged, the gluttons and gossips but assigned scarlet letters to the homosexuals and divorcées, and the deacons that successfully lobbied to end the homeless ministry out of concern for its possible effects on the newly reupholstered pews.

Justin’s mind flashed back to the present, where a handful of new emails had suddenly emerged in his inbox. He didn’t have time to think about his grievances. Not today. As soon as he was done solving everyone else’s problems, he figured he should try to make an appearance at home and work on some of the many simmering there.

Then the phone rang and everything else in the world stopped. Justin’s past had decided to come back for a visit.

“I’m calling about your friend, Kurt,” came the voice on the other end of the line. She identified herself as a nurse at the General Hospital across town. “He’s very sick and he would really like to see you before . . . ” her voice trailed off. She didn’t want to finish her thought and she didn’t have to. Justin knew what she meant.

Justin clenched his teeth and then finally let out a deep breath. Memories he had spent years trying to block out quickly came flooding back. Kurt was one of Justin’s best friends growing up, but life would take them in very different directions. While Justin faced his own private battles and rebelled in his own ways, Kurt threw himself headfirst into the trappings of the young adult world, and Justin had resented him deeply for it. So many phone calls had gone unanswered. So many times when he needed the support of his old friend he was left feeling alone. He wanted someone to stand alongside him, to join him in his efforts to escape the years of life with some shred of innocence left and to help him be strong in the face of so many other shiny distractions. Without ever knowing it or even meaning to, Kurt had refused to be that person in Justin’s life.

Just as Kurt was emerging from the muddied haze that was his youth and starting to reassemble the pieces of his life into something that made sense, Kurt received devastating news. He tested HIV positive.

Kurt successfully hid his condition from everyone around him for years, but the truth was forced out of him on the day of his car wreck. He walked away from the scene of the accident, but was a bloodied mess. An acquaintance that saw the accident unfold pulled his car over and ran to Kurt to offer assistance. “Don’t touch me,” Kurt pleaded as the man approached him. “You can’t.”

News travels fast in a small town. Stereotypes were made, assumptions abounded, and one by one the church doors quickly shut to this modern day leper.

“I have children and I do not feel like explaining this to them!” exclaimed one of the deacons at Justin’s church during a conversation about the newly discovered social pariah’s involvement in their congregation. “I want someone keeping a close eye on him,” added the children’s pastor. Normally Justin would feel compelled to speak out, but many wounds had yet to heal, and though he knew his church’s rejection of Kurt was wrong, he couldn’t bring himself to say anything in his defense. He never expressed agreement with the decision that was made, but instead sat by in silence, which ultimately had the very same effect.

That was fifteen years ago, and that is exactly where Justin wished to leave those memories. But with news of Kurt’s deteriorating condition, a Pandora’s box was opened and every painful remembrance reentered his mind. The ways that Kurt had betrayed him, and worse—the ways that he had betrayed Kurt, were thrown back in his face. Could he really revisit that world?

“Sir, are you still there?” asked the voice on the phone. “Yes, yes. I’m sorry,” said Justin, his mind shifting back to reality. “I’ll be glad to come see him sometime soon.”

“I’d hurry,” said the nurse. And with that she hung up the phone. Justin let out another deep breath and then he cried. It was time for that cigarette.

The following afternoon, Justin got in his car and headed to he hospital. Upon arriving there, he said his first prayer in a long time that was not spoken while standing behind a microphone. He gripped the steering wheel of his car and looked to the sky, searching for words. “God, you see the real, broken person behind the mask I wear. I am not good, strong or pure, but you are. I can’t pretend right now. I don’t have words to offer. I am hurting, but I need to bring something sacred, something of worth to a person who is hurting so much more. Help me.” And then he got out of his car and walked in, repeating the last words of his prayer under his breath the whole time.

As he saw that he was getting closer to Kurt’s room, Justin’s footsteps became slower and softer, and his heart began to beat louder and faster. What would he say? His mind had gone totally blank. And then he saw him. If his heart was racing before, it had now all but stopped as he peered through the narrow, glass window on the door. There he was, sitting alone in a sterile, white room, his only company an IV drip and a series of monitors and machines humming along. His body was wasting away. He didn’t have a hair on his head and his face was weak and drained of color. Kurt knew that he didn’t have much time left. His glazed, tired eyes told the story. He understood that AIDS would soon claim his life. In many ways, it already had.

Justin slowly opened the door and walked into the room. Suddenly emerging from his comatose state and aware of his surroundings again, Kurt turned to look towards the door and their eyes met. Justin ran to the bed and clasped Kurt’s frail hand in his. “I’m here,” he whispered. Kurt began to sob. Justin turned towards the nurse that had just entered the room with a look of concern. She gave a knowing half-smile. “You’re okay,” she said. “It’s just that this is the first time anyone that didn’t work here has touched him.” The realization of Kurt’s loneliness and isolation broke Justin’s heart wide open. He buried his head in the side of the bed, crying alongside his friend.

“I’m sorry,” began Justin, wiping away tears. “I’m sorry for the things they said. For the way they hurt you; for the way I hurt you. We walked away when you needed us the most. When you needed love, we only offered judgment. You were never meant to walk this road alone. I’m here now, and I’ll walk with you.”

Kurt strained to speak. Slowly, the words came out in a hoarse whisper. “Where am I going?” Kurt asked, managing a feeble grin. Justin gazed out the open window of the hospital room as the sunlight streamed in on a warm September day. He looked back at Kurt and returned the smile. “Home,” he said.

“I’m scared,” said Kurt, through labored breaths. Justin looked his friend in the eye, and once again took his hand. “Kurt, if only you could only see the roads I’ve snuck down, the shame I’ve known, the dark places I hid. I threw stones, pretending that my mistakes were somehow lesser than yours. But now I see that we’re just the same: imperfect people in need of grace. And God is always ready to offer that, even when Christians aren’t. When everyone else walked away, someone still loved you. He sang over you, he stood beside you, he carried you when you couldn’t stand, and he caught every tear you cried. You are not alone, and you are not unloved. Don’t be afraid.”

Kurt smiled and nodded. He tried to speak, but no sound was made. He had already spoken his last. Justin could see the life behind his eyes starting to fade, and then they closed. Kurt mustered up all of the energy in his body to squeeze Justin’s hand one last time. Moments later the heart monitor beside Kurt’s bed switched from short, pulsating beeps, to one long, steady tone. A lifeless body remained on the hospital bed, but Kurt was no longer there.

Kurt had held on for so long, afraid of what would come next if he finally let go and allowed himself to embrace the mystery of his acceptance and fall on the grace and love of someone bigger and stronger than him. With Justin’s gentle words of truth, Kurt could finally let go. He had made it home, freed from the prison walls of his illness and dancing alongside the one who had loved him all along.

“Save a place for me,” whispered Justin. “I’ll be there soon.”

Easter Parade & Potluck Picnic!

2011-04-19T07:06:00.000-07:00

“Resurrection Now! Out of the churches & into the streets & parks!”

C2G Presents an Easter Parade & Potluck Picnic 4.24.11 @ 5pm
Gather at the TTU Quad
Walk Together to Dogwood Park for Picnic Supper & Communion!
Dress Festive! Bring Musical Instruments!
(In case of rain, we will meet in the First Presbyterian Church Fellowship Hall)

“A Kind of Holy Lightning”: A Sermon About Jack Kerouac

2011-03-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

The Spirituality Of Jack Kerouac & the Tragedy of Addiction

~Andrew William Smith, 30 January 2011, Backdoor Playhouse

“I want you to get out there & walk—better yet, run!—on the road God called you to travel. I don’t want any of you sitting around on your hands.” –Paul, early in Ephesians 4 (from The Message, itals mine)

“Don’t waste your time on useless work, mere busywork, the barren pursuits of darkness. Expose these things for the sham they are.” –Paul, Ephesians 5:11 (from The Message)

“He commissioned them to preach the news of God's kingdom and heal the sick. He said, "Don't load yourselves up with equipment. Keep it simple; you are the equipment. And no luxury inns—get a modest place and be content there until you leave. If you're not welcomed, leave town. Don't make a scene. Shrug your shoulders and move on." Commissioned, they left. They traveled from town to town telling the latest news of God, the Message, and curing people everywhere they went.” –Luke 9:1-6 (from The Message)

‎"Once in a while you get shown the light/In the strangest of places if you look at it right" –Grateful Dead, “Scarlet Begonias”

Since I was in my late teens, I’ve been drawn to the spiritual lessons of poems & novels & literary movements, especially the sizzling insights & buzzing beatitudes of the writers & thinkers known as the Beat Generation. Many writers have remarked on the importance of literary movements—what I’d call the magic of community & call to collaboration—&the Beats were deeply influential on our popular imaginations the way great groups are, in a properly mythic manner, too, like Robin Hood & his Merry Men, like King Arthur & the Knights of the Round Table, like Jesus and his 12 disciples.

Tonight, I’m deeply indebted to the 21^st century insight, scholarship, & reflection of Nance M. Grace from the College of Wooster who shows us that the complete works of Kerouac—often called the “Duluoz Legend”—comprise a contemporary “wisdom literature,” sacred texts of a sympathetically American, broadly Buddhist, & distinctly Christian nature, embodying “the voice of the prophet, sage, teacher, & seer expressed as a classical pastiche of sermon, analogy, proverb, aphorism, song, parable, prayer, catechism, & confession to create a personal cosmology.”

In The Beat Face of God: The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides, the Rev. Stephen D. Edington sees the collected Beat works as sacred literature as well, calling it “the gospel of an alternative spirituality and an alternative religion” where spiritual rebels or misfits seek after the “Life Force” or “Torch of Life,” occasionally getting too close to the light & burning up & flaming out too soon.

Grace & Edington nail with a deeper eloquence & precision what I intuitively imagined was always already going on with Kerouac & Ginsberg & their peers—it’s all about the adventure, the quest, the pilgrimage, the seeking after God. With the Beats, with Kerouac & Ginsberg especially, it’s always about God even when they pretend it’s not about God—either through nontheistic rants or a preoccupation with what’s in one’s pants.

The strictly dualistic & more fundamentalist among us might protest: how could it possibly be all about God when it so obviously was all about sin? Even when the harsh critics of the Beat Generation complained that it could never be about God because it was obviously about cars, sex, booze, weed, & anti-American communism—even and especially then, it was definitely about God, because it was about a deeply human yearning, a seemingly insatiable hunger & thirst—a hunger for thrills, kicks, & chills, yes, but also for salvation, righteousness, & revelation.

Studying Kerouac & Ginsberg through a distinctly spiritual lens at a grassroots Christian fellowship taps into & plays out one of the primary premises of Come ToGather’s mission—that’s it possible to follow Jesus as our friend, teacher, & savior & deepen our appreciation of the Jesus teachings as we travel down the road of life with an awareness of religious diversity & an honest questioning, which for some of us includes an interspiritual perspective. As we tentatively explore the spiritual Kerouac through a brief look at his life & his works, & the relationship of his Buddhism to his Christianity, we can be aware that mixing Christianity with other religions has a long legacy, a wide & vast worldwide history of holy hybrids, the many Christian syncretics who still claim Jesus as Lord.

From reading Nancy M. Grace’s excellent interpretation of how Kerouac’s Christianity & Buddhism interweave, it’s clear to me I’m not currently qualified or inclined to make an extended exposition on the many layers & intricacies of this particular American Buddhist Christianity. Put plainly though, my novice reading of nontheistic Buddhism reveals concepts entirely compatible with Christianity: egolessness & emptiness, acceptance of impermanence & suffering, freedom through humble & harmonic acts of simplicity & generosity, grounded in practicing daily meditation & finding mysticism & the marvelous in even the most mundane aspects of everyday life.

Grace describes this Kerouacian relationship between Buddha & Jesus affectionately & intimately, in terms of fusion & embrace, finally finding “a religion in which an individual values one’s own gifts & talents, believes in the inherent goodness of life, frees oneself from dogmatic dualism, seeks a better life, & retains faith in the words of the sage. As such, Kerouac’s Christian Buddhism is distinctly American, the human presence embodied in the words ‘Jesus’ & ‘Buddha’ rooting wisdom, progress, & divinity in the individual who resides in a New World where the vision of human goodness flourishes & seeds itself.”

Like Kerouac (& enhanced by Grace’s reading of Kerouac), I see the nondogmatic depth of Buddhist insight as a sympathetic supplement to my theistic side that seeks a compassion & forgiveness via a cosmic Creator & a personal Jesus. Put simply, Buddhism and Christianity can be experienced in a complementary manner, and for the Buddhist-Christian, a Buddhist practice like walking meditation does not contradict a faith rooted in a relationship with Jesus. I like the way Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh puts it: “When you are a truly happy Christian, you are also a Buddhist.”

Kerouac’s true classic, a coming-of-age & rite-of-passage breakout novel called On The Road has been called “the bible of the Beat Generation,” & I choose to read it mythopoetically with a sympathetic biblical lens. (If anyone is unversed in this kind of reading strategy, you might be more familiar how we do this all the time with films like Star Wars —or with films based on books like Harry Potter & Lord Of the Rings.)

Borrowing again from & adding to what I got from reading Nancy Grace’s Kerouac analysis, it’s possible to frame On The Road as Buddy “Bookmovie” meets Sacred American-Christian-Buddhist Vision Quest. On this adventure, where the protagonists go everywhere & noplace, it really is, as cliché as it sounds, more about the journey than it is about the destination. Many purposes, though, to this reckless partying & pathblazing emerge; it’s the universal human search of & after: A Social Consciousness of celebration & repudiation; Individualism of the maligned & self-reliant; Psychic Wholeness (vs. questions, alienation, emptiness); Spiritual Enlightenment.

The book portrays real-life pilgrims Jack Kerouac & Neal Cassady as Sal Paradise & Dean Moriarity. Although my lit-crit training teaches me not to do this, my reading of Kerouac’s life leads me to speak of the characters that inhabit the novels & the persons they represent rather interchangeably. With Sal as apprentice & Dean as Master, I conjure the notion of a cosmically commissioned but controversial bond not unlike Sam & Frodo, Anakin & Obi Wan, Judas & Jesus.

For Jack & the entire Beat Generation & for many of the hippies that would come after, Neal Cassady was the muse, the mythic man, the unofficial leader, the disrespected teacher, the priestly hedonist, the sensuous sage. On the opening page of On The Road, Kerouac notes that “Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he was actually born on the road.” His parents were passing through Salt Lake City like Mary & Joseph were passing through Bethlemen, & Sal will end up following Dean like disciples follow Jesus.

It’s as if the holy scripture simply said, “Blessed are the crazy fools. Blessed are the criminals on parole. Blessed are the pool sharks. Blessed are the people who spend their whole day in the public library.” Just as Cassady admires Kerouac the writer, Kerouac admires Cassady the man. The unschooled intellectual Kerouac wants to be the over-the-top outlaw intellectual Cassady with his perfect shining mind. When they hit the road, they become the prophets of horsepower, high priests of the gas pedal, pirates of the automobile era.

The Bible of the Beat Generation preaches “Drop Out & Follow Me,” renouncing the middle-class world of American post-war conformity, taking up the cross of pleasure-principled, counterculture rebellion, & spreading the news of a sentimental, romantic, sympathetic, nomadic, naturalistic, earthy American authenticity—the allure of which still teases, taunts, tempts, & attracts young people, especially those stuck on the nonstop trajectory from school-to-work without taking a moment’s pause to contemplate the meaning of life, see the world, & find themselves.

Rather than just serving & loving the least of these—which Kerouac as “everyman” so passionately & eloquently does—he becomes one of the least of these. One of my favorite sections in On The Road comes in skid row Detroit at an all-night movie theater, where Kerouac catalogs the dregs of Detroit as if they’d been dumped there to give Kerouac his litany of the modern-day “least of these”: “Beat Negroes who’d come up from Alabama to work in car factories on a rumor; old white bums; young longhaired hipsters who’d reached the end of the road & were drinking wine; whores, ordinary couples, & housewives with nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to believe in. If you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs couldn’t be better gathered.”

But On The Road isn’t all about the dowlow on the lowdown: its ecstasies & epiphanies are too many to name, but one worth mentioning is the tribute to the African-American music scene, to its new song, its new tune, its new way to “raise men’s souls to joy.” It’s in On The Road’s innocent & optimistic appraisal of American-open-endedness typified by the vastness of our landscape & the vision of our musicians —as in his writer’s teachings on the importance of spontaneity as “belief & technique”—that we see Kerouac’s best. His “List of Essentials” includes thirty jewels of aphorism & advice, such as

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

4. Be in love with yr life

16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

19. Accept loss forever

20. Believe in the holy contour of life

23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

29. You're a Genius all the time

30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

When looking at the complete Kerouac against the backdrop of his life, the problem of these problematic texts as prophetic-teaching texts is their “don’t-try-this-at-home-element,” their elements of slumming & bumming, of sexism & substance abuse.

In preaching the Beat gospel, Rev. Edington addresses both the blessings & excesses of the simultaneously divine & demonic Cassady Christ. First, in our Holy Goof, we can honor his be-here-now “mystical madness of the moment”; Edington explains it this way: “But for Neal the madness of the moment doesn’t need to lead anywhere. The madness of the moment yield timelessness, & that was the state Neal was reaching for.”

Kerouac celebrates Neal in biblical prosody, sainting him “Western Kinsmen of The Sun,” a lighthearted lover who learned his lessons from the lilies of the field, an embodied emissary of the wisdom teachings of Ecclesiastes who hungers for nothing more than bread & love.

But Cassady’s contagious beauty begs a dark side, too. Edington elaborates, “In this man’s life & way of being we see both the divine & the demonic, as well as the glorious & the desperate, dimensions of living in the Now.”

Sadly, history recounts what happens the Super Sage of On The Road. He leaves the wife & kids & joins the Merry Pranksters. For a while, he tutors—& is tutored by the likes of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, & The Grateful Dead—all true Professors of Profuse Insight & Indulgence, of Intense & Incessant 1960s Prodigality. Like many addicts, Neal Cassady bought suicide on the installment plan—imbibing & ingesting his way to the other side. In early February 1968, days shy of his 42^nd birthday, the former railroad worker & living legend of the modern nomads Neal Cassady collapsed on some traintracks in Mexico, traveling by foot the night after a wedding party from one town to the next. He was found in a coma and taken to the hospital where he died. While the exact cause of Cassady’s death is unknown & much legend & speculation have accumulated around it, overdose from the combination of barbituates and alcohol is one of the many possibilities.

About a year before his death, Cassady apparently told a young friend “Don't do what I have done.” Edington accurately assesses the “awe & wonder on the one hand” & the “disgust & anger on the other” that society brings to its holy fools, concluding his remarks about Cassady with a tone of both reverence & warning: “In living the life that he did Neal Cassady made himself the target for both sets of reactions. He died for our fantasies as well as for our self-righteousness. We yearn to be like him & righteously thank God we’re not like him all in the same thought or sensation.”

For better and for worse, Cassady’s free spirit, immortalized in lyrics by the Grateful Dead a “child of countless trees” & a “child of boundless seas,” attains a mythic & messianic quality in relation to the hippy counterculture of the 1960s. To speak of Cassady the man in Christ-like terms is largely a poetic gesture of allegiance to the uncommon life-force that resonated from him. Because of his countless walks on the wild side, Neal Cassady learned of the historical Jesus Christ’s greatest gifts the hard way.

The book of letters he wrote while in prison in the late 1950s on a marijuana bust was published under the pithy & perfect title Grace Beats Karma. In her foreward to the published version of this book, Carolyn Cassidy comments at some length about Neal’s connection to Jesus “as the last in a long line of gurus to enlighten the planet” who brings us closer to the spirit & love available to all. Carolyn suggests that the spirit “cannot judge, condemn, punish, or play favorites,” suggesting that most of our misery is of our making. “Heaven & hell are within us,” she writes.

Sadly, Sal Paradise did not fare much better than Dean Moriarty. In On The Road, Kerouac already fears fame, writing “anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven.” By the time On The Road makes Kerouac famous—the unofficial spokesman for the Beat Generation—he’s already tumbling quickly towards death as he drowns himself in alcohol. Facing the intersection of fame & full-blown alcoholism, his early 1960s book Big Sur is both beautiful & ugly, both hopeful & utterly heartbreaking.

Throughout Big Sur, Jesus & Buddha were always right there, somehow inside Kerouac but always out of reach. We know that a deep spirituality is one of the best known treatments for alcoholism, but Kerouac proves that spiritual inclinations alone are not enough to propel some to recovery. In Big Sur in particular but throughout the 1960s, Kerouac heads toward his final bottom but never gets there, living perpetually in Step Zero, the moment of clearly acknowledging a problem with drugs or alcohol but not taking that next leap into recovery.

Kerouac drank when he said he wouldn’t drink, when talking about not drinking was still talking about drinking: & the drinking thinking as thinking drinking permeated the art of his prose. In drinking, Kerouac drowned his desperation but also his mysticism, until drunk felt more real than not-drunk, where drunk obliterated & obviated the obvious truth that anything other than drunk ever existed. Kerouac drunk was morning drunk, evening drunk, always drunk, delicate drunk, manslut drunk.

At the beginning of Big Sur, Kerouac heads west to dry out but gets stuck in San Fran before finding his way to Ferlinghetti’s cabin at Big Sur. Although the book is filled with lapses into relief & possibility of a spiritual nature, the tender tone tells of defeat. The early pages of the novel describe an entirely desperate man:

“Wow, I’ve hit the end of the trail & cant even drag my body any more”;

“Drunken visitors puking in my study . . . Me drunk practically all the time” (& this is what he came to California to escape);

“There I am almost 40 years old, bored & jaded”;

“I wake up drunk, sick, disgusted, frightened, in fact terrified by that sad song. . .mingling with the . . . cries of a Salvation Army meeting. . . ‘Satan is the cause of your alcoholism’. . .”;

“ ‘One fast move or I’m, gone,’ I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness which is a spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can’t learn in school . . .”

By the end of the 60s, Kerouac’s drinking caught up with him, & the disease finally killed him.

Many have argued that alcoholism is an occupational hazard of certain careers including rock stars & lawyers, but most definitely writers, spawning studies like Dr. Donald W. Goodwin’s Alcohol & the Writer.

In many ways, Jack Kerouac & Neal Cassady show us the light, but they also get burned by it. On The Road speaks of “a kind of holy lightning” that strikes Neal Cassady in his visions, but it also strikes us down in the consequences for what those visions might bring. Addiction arises from a spiritual hunger that goes back to Adam & Eve in the garden; no fruit, no matter how wise or succulent, can take the place of God in our lives.

Recovering addict and legendary rock star David Crosby, looking back on the late 1960s counterculture, reflects, “We were right about a lot of things: the war, the environment, civil rights & women’s issues. But we were wrong about the drugs.”

Kerouac & Cassady were right about living in the moment, about rejecting the ways of the world, about the complementary teachings of Jesus & Buddha, about the spirituality of everything & the everyman & everyday life, even & especially about the spiritual aspects of travel, of an itinerant lifestyle on the road. Jesus & Paul & many Disciples & Early Church Movement Folk certainly lived “on the road.” But Kerouac & Cassady were wrong about alcohol & drugs & how to treat women.

Jack Kerouac’s response to the madness of the world was to become one with “the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.” Like Kerouac, let our cups overflow with life, with conversation, with saving grace. But let’s not admire the least of these so much that we become prisoners of our own desires; let’s not get too close to light & burnout but rather hold our candles high, pointing to a light that only comes from God & that always already returns to God.

Advent At C2G, 2010

2010-12-22T11:58:00.000-08:00

This past fall, our fledgling new creative worship community met 17 times, & we are looking forward to a spirited 2011.

The four advent services (see the videos below this post) were some of our most special.

Pat Handlson & Andy Smith shared the message most weeks.

Jesse Nance, Emily McCormick, Talitha Valentin, Kory Wheeler, Amelia Tritico, Ashley Cleveland, & others provided the music.

Kat & Dori Bullard led us in lighting candles most week. Josef Bullard & David Koci have helped us run sound & lights at the Backdoor Playhouse. Jeannie Mills always made sure the altar was set up in time for worship & usually provided hot, delicious food for potluck.

Miguel Caprizo worshiped with us on the eve of his departure from Cookeville (it turns out to Knoxville) & donated a beautiful plate & goblet for our Lord's Supper / Eucharist rituals.

Erin Angel & Julia Baker & many others help lead our discussions in response to the message, one of the most moving & spirit-filled parts of our gatherings.

Although our core group has never exceed about a dozen folks, many others have visited & participated.

We give thanks to all who have joined us & wish every one of you a Merry Christmas!

~the C2G crew

Hope, Harvest, Heaven, & Halloween

2010-11-01T17:10:00.000-07:00

Here we are – it’s Halloween.

I’ve loved this holiday for as long as I can remember. I love Halloween for its feeling, for its blend of fantasy & festivity, its feasting & fun.

Something in the human imagination loves to tap the ancient & archetypal impulse to mock the mundane of ordinary time & to masquerade &/or mirror aspects of ourselves that are otherwise latent or sleepy or repressed.

Something in our cultural & culinary DNA crafts with creativity the annual costume & ritual & craves with a healthy appetite: pumpkins & pumpkin seeds & pumpkin pie; apples, candied apples, & apple cider; sugar & more sugar & sweet treats of so many varieties.

Sometime, a long time ago, the ancient Celtic, pre-Christian holiday of Samhain blended with the Christian-Catholic celebrations of All Saints Day & All Souls Day as also in North America we remember the Mexican Day of the Dead to ultimately form Halloween, a deeply ecumenical & eclectic interspiritual occasion.

Just as our observance of Christmas is carefully timed to coincide to with the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere or our celebration of Easter arrives around the time of the Spring Equinox, the entire Christian calendar shares wide roots with the changing of the seasons, with the turning of the year, with the natural religious antecedents of the Jesus movements.

More than simple & quiet acknowledgement, just what might be our best understanding of Christianity’s connections with the spiritual & religious practices of our Native European ancestors?

The better aspects of these thematic unities tend to get untied as these threads don’t get talked about very much in Christian circles, but when they do get discussed by certain contemporary Christians, they tend to make folks very uncomfortable, especially around the holiday of Halloween.

Some folks prefer to see Halloween as a non-religious pop-culture observance, not unlike the Super Bowl or the World Series & probably most like Mardi Gras.

Some evangelicals harbor strong suspicions & hostilities towards Halloween & its alleged promotion of Witchcraft & Satanism. Some folks who cannot just ignore this time of year have reclaimed it as a de-fanged & demon-free “harvest festival.” Still others have re-framed the more traditional haunted house as the equally creepy “Hell House,” which, according to a documentary I’ve seen, literally scares the hell out of teenagers & spooks them into submitting to the doctrine of salvation.

While I do not place much stock in Hell Houses or harvest festivals purged of their interspiritual heritage, it’s not because I don’t believe in evil or the devil or monsters or bogeyman or am naïve about the dark side of the contemporary occult.

Rather, I think that the real demons are fear, hate, greed, prejudice, ignorance, and war. And if we are utterly honest – some of our Christian ancestors used fear, hate, greed, prejudice, ignorance, and war to punish & persecute so-called witches in very unchristian ways. These kinds of violent & vile legacies are not something contemporary Jesus-followers need to revive & promote with misguided anti-Halloween propaganda; rather, contemporary Christendom can & might repent from its present problem with some Jesus-followers who still insist on attacking the “other”—whether it’s folks who follow other religious paths to God or folks we deem unacceptable for other reasons, such as our gay/lesbian/bisexual/and transgendered brothers & sisters.

Christian participation in any & many pop-culture phenomenon seems inevitable today—& as long as these gestures are imbued with perspective, with a loving, humble, & gentle attitude, it’s hard for me to stomach the claim that there need be any inherently Satanic or demonic content or bent to pumpkin-carving, costume-wearing, candy-feasting, apple-cider-sipping celebrations.

If celebrating Halloween in the cultural sense brings joy & fosters community & entertains children & unites families, let’s celebrate it!

If we, like our ancestors, take time to honor the harvest & recognize the turning of the year & further the legacy of our loved-ones & ancestors, could this in any way harm our faith in God?

I must confess my sympathy & solidarity with the Catholic-Christian impulse to reclaim & recontextualize this time as sacred remembrance, recalling the death & eternal resurrection of loved ones & lost ones, ancestors & martyrs, parents & grandparents, siblings & children, best friends & spouses.

Friends of the 21^st century-Jesus-movement, we need not fear Halloween or any day or any so-called force or spirit of darkness. As Christians, we follow the light that casts out all darkness, the love that casts out all fear, the life that triumphs over all death. Let’s remember today those we’ve lost this year & over the years with an amazing love, an amazing faith, a death-defying, Christ-following ethos of the utterly mysterious majesty of the marvelous: life everlasting & world without end!

In the memories of our friends today, let’s see the defeated cross & the risen Christ. In the New Testament, Paul’s letters percolate with the promise of paradise; his prose pulses with the profound proclamation of life & love’s power! Like the passage we read earlier from Romans, the “O Death Where Is Thy Sting” passage from I Corinthians is likewise comforting & clear:

“I need to emphasize, friends, that our natural, earthy lives don't in themselves lead us by their very nature into the kingdom of God. Their very "nature" is to die, so how could they "naturally" end up in the Life kingdom?

But let me tell you something wonderful, a mystery I'll probably never fully understand. We're not all going to die—but we are all going to be changed. You hear a blast to end all blasts from a trumpet, and in the time that you look up and blink your eyes—it's over. On signal from that trumpet from heaven, the dead will be up and out of their graves, beyond the reach of death, never to die again. At the same moment and in the same way, we'll all be changed. In the resurrection scheme of things, this has to happen: everything perishable taken off the shelves and replaced by the imperishable, this mortal replaced by the immortal. Then the saying will come true:

Death swallowed by triumphant Life!

Who got the last word, oh, Death?

Oh, Death, who's afraid of you now?

It was sin that made death so frightening and law-code guilt that gave sin its leverage, its destructive power. But now in a single victorious stroke of Life, all three—sin, guilt, death—are gone, the gift of our Master, Jesus Christ. Thank God!”

The religion editor at Newsweek, Lisa Miller recently gave the topic of eternal life a journalist’s treatment in her book Heaven. Among many fascinating aspects to the text, Miller discusses the intersection between science & so-called Near Death Experiences, leading her to encounter speculations like the claim “consciousness exists even after normal brain function ceases” or the question as to whether science could actually prove “that upon death people really go to another realm.”

Another tension in Miller’s book concerns the specific nature of the afterlife & diverging views about how we’ll experience it.

One amorphous and oceanic version might go like this: One’s immortal soul communes with the great cosmic life force that is, a mysterious and direct and eternal connectedness with the real and living God, an everlasting peace inside the Lord. Miller describes this as “One continual Sabbath”

Other versions are much more particular about the resurrection of your specific body in heaven. Miller’s journalistic journey to heaven relishes the tension with those that do or don’t believe in an actual body, actually resurrected body.

The appeal is obvious, as Miller wrote, for you the banquets, the gardens, the cities, the learning, and the loving “flow could any of this exist,” Miller asks, without—physical self to enjoy it?”

Do you know? I don’t…

Do you know whether you’ll experience resurrection in the bodily sense or whether eternal life is somehow simultaneously more brilliant and subtle, subsuming all previously known experiences into an extraordinary and ecstatic exhilaration? Could it be both—or even beyond approximation?

Do you know? I don’t….

Do you know whether your resurrected body will look like you? Or feel like you? Or experience sensations like hunger or thirst or soreness or pain or musical pleasure? I’ve heard it said that we’ll be unmarried and without gender in heaven. I’ve also heard that a happy, loving marriage is the closest thing to heaven on earth.

Do you know? I don’t….

Do you know whether your resurrected body, if it is a physical body, will it also have an ego, identity, and personality and whether that eternal personality in a resurrected physical body will meet other eternal personalities from your past in their resurrected bodies? Or whether upon meeting God, in all God’s glories, the physical bodies, egos, & personalities on this earth we’ve so enjoyed until now will suddenly seem inconsequential in resplendent infinity?

Do you know? I don’t…

We know some of our church fathers & theologians & philosophers & poets have imagined & articulated the unfathomable. We know what we know—that’s there’s nothing close to consensus—but can we know what we don’t know?

Do you know? I don’t…

Do you know how to get to heaven?

So much of the Christianity I learned as a youth deflected our attention from Christ’s teaching & onto the question of how to earn your ticket to heaven—the “learn so you don’t burn” school of summer camp theology.

Even if we love God & follow Jesus with all our hearts, souls, & minds, do we really have any business deciding for others the path to eternal life, or even worse, laying the paving stones on the path to hell, paved as it were with our good intentions or our greatest ideologies?

Here, I agree with Christian universalist Carlton Pearson when he warns that too much focus on the devil actually “glorifies the devil” & that too much focus on condemnation rather than salvation takes a “wise, moral, benevolent” God & makes God “weak, immoral, malevolent, even vulgar.”

Perhaps if we focus on the core tenets of Christ’s message, on the radical, unconditional love of our neighbors & on our unquenchable, unflinching love of God, might heaven take care of itself?

I do know that from her inter-religious and cross-cultural study of heaven, Lisa Miller concludes the common notion that heaven’s based on hope, what she calls radical hope—she writes:

“The heaven that will come at the end of the world is a radical reversal of the social & natural order. The first shall be last, the meek shall inherit the earth, the stars will fall from the sky. Heaven is not just love, it’s radical love; it’s not just a return to the perfection of Eden, but a radical return. This is no warm hug, no easy train ride. It’s radical because God is involved & God can do anything. Heaven [is] a radical concept, a place that embodies the best of everything—but beyond the best. A belief in heaven focuses our minds on the radical nature of what’s most beautiful, most loving, most just, & most true.”

I do know that I share Miller’s hope in what’s so good & beautiful that it’s beyond our comprehension, beyond even our belief of good & beautiful.

I do know that in my own brushes with mortality—near tragedies like a physical beating at the hand of anonymous & brutal assailants & terrifying automobile accidents—I’ve experienced an uncommon lightness & levity defiance of traditional gravity and the depths of spiritual gratitude.

I do know that in the dreams & visions I’ve had of a lost friend or grandfather have been strikingly vivid as have been their Christ-like contentions from the dreamspace that death is an illusion, a conspiracy, & that only love & life are real.

I do know that comfort that I take in the words of the apostle Paul:

“If we get included in Christ's sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God.”

With these words we remember the dead & we remember their lives & an unconditional love & an eternal life that words cannot describe.

Amen.

The Messiah’s Misfits

2010-10-16T06:46:00.000-07:00

1 Corinthians 4:9-16

It seems to me that God has put us who bear his Message on stage in a theater in which no one wants to buy a ticket. We're something everyone stands around and stares at, like an accident in the street. We're the Messiah's misfits. You might be sure of yourselves, but we live in the midst of frailties and uncertainties. You might be well-thought-of by others, but we're mostly kicked around. Much of the time we don't have enough to eat, we wear patched and threadbare clothes, we get doors slammed in our faces, and we pick up odd jobs anywhere we can to eke out a living. When they call us names, we say, "God bless you." When they spread rumors about us, we put in a good word for them. We're treated like garbage, potato peelings from the culture's kitchen. And it's not getting any better.

I'm not writing all this as a neighborhood scold just to make you feel rotten. I'm writing as a father to you, my children. I love you and want you to grow up well, not spoiled. There are a lot of people around who can't wait to tell you what you've done wrong, but there aren't many fathers willing to take the time and effort to help you grow up. It was as Jesus helped me proclaim God's Message to you that I became your father. I'm not, you know, asking you to do anything I'm not already doing myself.

I discovered that the text from I Corinthians was already the daily reading for today when it became crystal clear just a few days ago that the Come ToGather (C2G) ministry would have to move its home only seven weeks into its history. The stark and radical early-church symbols that Peterson makes even more poetic could not have been more telling & more obvious about the situation of our fledgling little creative worship community.

I take some solace that the early Jesus followers got kicked around, wore patched and threadbare clothes, got doors slammed in our faces, and were only able to eke out a living . Tonight, I am going to get into some of the specifics about what C2G was designed to be, what the criticisms were, and why we needed to move to remain moved by the marvelous spirit of the living God. The scripture says— When they call us names, we say, "God bless you." When they spread rumors about us, we put in a good word for them. —so tonight, I am not going to defend but expand, not complain but explain. I am not angry & only hope this will be an opportunity for C2G to find its fullest calling.

What a fitting scripture for how I am feeling. We’re the messiah’s misfits—not yet a congregation, gently entering the “emergent church” conversation, an itinerant ragamuffin band of Jesus followers & some of our friends just looking, just seeking, & even just looking at the candlelight. We’re the messiah’s misfits, a ministry in exile, that didn’t quite fit in a local church but got welcomed by an atheist thespian and the Jewish house manager. So this is the parable of the Atheist, the Jesus Freak, and the Jew. I’d tell you a story about what happened when the Atheist, the Jesus Freak, and the Jew walked into a bar—except I don’t drink anymore & thus don’t frequent bars.

To put it mildly, my conversion to Christ was cosmic & compelling —after years as a dedicated psychedelic sinner, I felt kinship with the images I saw of rag-tag bands of 1970s Jesus People convening on the Pacific Ocean beach for mass baptisms & convincing the hordes of Haight Asbury addicts that God’s glory had a better injection of insight than the bags of goodies getting peddled by speed freaks & acid casualties.

Drawn like a moth to flame to God’s magnetic love & forgiveness, I might have forgotten for a moment that not every Jesus follower is a Jesus freak—a reborn Christian, I was just so overjoyed & overwhelmed to get my Jesus freak-on. So apparently, this grassroots, organic, all natural Jesus freak ministry was just a little too freaky for my some of my friends at the church down the street, which is why Come ToGather suddenly finds itself worshipping in a small community theater on a college campus.

So what exactly is the emergent church—and why did C2G immediately identify with it? Or attempt to be Presbymergent? And also, why was an attraction to the emergent church something that some of our friends at First Pres so strongly objected to?

Well, frankly, it’s entirely impossible to define the emergent church—but what attracted me to it was how utterly engaged with the real world & excited about cultural innovation these folks were. I would describe it as: A fusion of liturgical flexibility with denominational fluidity played out in a theatrical way by fun-loving fools-for-Christ forever feasting at His table—or, put another way, I noticed right away that these people had it going on with the Holy Spirit, & I wanted in on the reformation & revelation.

It’s said that the emergent church is post-everything: postmodern, postevangelical, postconservative, postliberal. It’s post-everything except posting on the internet—because just about every emergent-type church leader I’ve encountered has a blog. To be Presbymergent—we would have been rooted in the Presbyterian Church-USA, which may or may not be an option for us anymore. We could choose to incorporate or affiliate or we could go the way of many Emergent movement communities & be a non-authoritarian, non-institutional, grassroots body of 21^st century gatherers revisiting the first century model.

The emergent tag itself is not nearly as important as the kind of energy it points to: something deeper & more nuanced than just more-of-the-same “church that’s not churchy” contemporary service –which, as good for so many people as some of these services can be—does not yet approach the unguarded, disarmed, & intimate connection with God & our community of God-seeking humans that C2G was born to search for.

As we’ve stated before, we wanted a heart-over-head community, where we could be fearless about feeling our faith, saturated by Grace in what Brennan Manning calls the Christ-soaked universe, feeling God’s magic with feet stuck in the daily struggle, healing the people’s misery, willing to walk in the worldly muck.

We speak the truth that we know—but admit that there’s so much that we don’t know about God because God’s infinite mystery can never be fully known. That’s what makes mystery mysterious. That’s what makes God God.

Truth travels quickly but could get quickly derailed or deranged if God’s delight were not our aim; this is at first a tenuous and tentative theological truth born of study—but then suddenly an innocent & ravenous truth born of wonder, born of the children’s feet dancing in the Cookietown streets.

The idea for Come ToGather (C2G) came together in a spontaneous burst of spirit, over dinner, among friends. A research trip to a Presbymergent congregation in Louisville, Kentucky gave us many of our ideas for how to structure & style our happy little liturgy of candlelight & liberation.

Some of the features that our friends at First Pres found problematic with C2G would have been easy to change—but we realized that each of these features had become central to our imperfect but focused journey after God’s truth. We could have made the changes & stayed at First Pres—but what would have been left would not have been C2G. So here we are.

We choose to begin each meeting with a moment of silence, of breathing in the spirit, of coming-to-gather in candlelight, of sharing the light, of lighting the tiny spark of God that lives within each of us. We worship in an ambient, dimly-lit room illuminated by candlelight.

Why do we start with relative darkness? Why do we need this light? Why do we need the light?

I can think of few greater symbols of God’s unfathomable & fabulous love than of candles illuminating a dark room. Aren’t we, each of us, called to be those candles, burning brightly with God’s unconditional love, a loving-liberating-light for a world rapidly descending towards its own destruction? Haven’t we all on our worst days felt like the dark world—lonely & scared, lost & searching? Isn’t the authentic faith journey a little like spelunking in a cave where we often crave just a little light? Doesn’t it just make you want to sing & shout, “this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine”?

Another objection to C2G came from our choice of music, from our blending of songs with secular roots & reviving them with a sacred flavor. Choosing the music & working with the musicians—thanks so much to Jesse, Talitha, Nate, Betti, & Kory—has been one of the greatest joys of creating C2G, &on the topic of sacred-versus-secular, I must admit it’s our distinction—not God’s. God’s love claims all of creation & transcends every category.

One of the reasons we had to move C2G resulted from hard questions. Is C2G really Christian? Or is it like Anne Rice recently noted —just into Christ but not His body, called Christians. Or is it some kind of Jesus-Curious, Unitarian Universalist-New Age-Pantheist Hybrid, sort of like the Prius of prophecy?

Now for me—having done more than just dabble in neopaganism & the New Age movement while compiling my walk-on-the-wild-side radical resume in devout heathenism & delirious hedonism, I’m at some liberty to talk about what’s dramatically different between the New Age movement & the 21^st century emergent church: we follow Jesus. And if any of you are at all like me—following Jesus was not born of being trendy or cool or joining the “in crowd” in the born-again Bible belt.

Now, I was born-again & there are quite a few notches in this bible-reader’s belt—but come on, really, isn’t faith in Jesus always already less-than-hip, more hot-than-cool, a hopeful retreat from the cliff’s edge, a life-preserver for the drowning man, a ripped piece of bread dipped in juice & fed to the hopeless sinner, a life-or-death decision, a giant leap of faith into the realm of life-over-death?

While all of our stories differ in the details, we follow Jesus for a few basic reasons: for what He did when He walked the earth in the flesh—helping, healing, hoping, & hurling truth at hypocrisy—& for what He did on the cross—crossing the boundary between human & divine, heaven & hell, emancipation & empire—& for what He did when He met us in our hearts: forgiving forever & forgetting why we needed to be forgiven in the first place, making us once again perfect & pure in the imminent & transcendent power of perfect pure grace. For these reasons & so many others we claim Christ & Christianity for ourselves—but we also question what kind of Christ-like habits might best cultivate an authentic community of creative worship.

Perhaps we might see doubt & questioning & critical-thinking & still-seeking as the functions of a healthy faith—we’re willing to admit that we don’t have it all figured out. Another awesome aspect of this ministry is the way in which we want to embrace the mission to be the Messiah’s misfits, to be like Jesus in the company we keep—that is, to have a radically inclusive & inviting “open door” policy as stated in our original call:

More than anything, we want to be inclusive of folks, seekers and sinners, the unchurched and undecided, regardless of their spiritual history and spiritual self-definition. We want to invite Christians whose relationship with Jesus is not diluted by welcoming—and even worshiping and studying with—people from diverse and divergent religious paths.

Some see this tone of interspiritual dialogue & tolerance or interfaith openness at best as a concession to our democratic or secular society; at worst, some see it as a demonic force, even a form of devil worship.

The Jesus I follow already defeated death & the devil & by Good Friday & Easter Sunday accounts—He

isn’t afraid of anyone or anything. Most of all, He’s not afraid to have your back—while others perhaps just want to fact-check what our atheist brothers & sisters already claim to know is just fiction. I don’t know about you, but I have this intense sense that God is bigger, bolder, & brighter than the cozy little boxes that some believers prefer to confine God in.

If you hear someone at C2G call on The Creator instead of God or call on God the Mother as well as God the Father or call on the Spirit as well as the Holy Spirit, you might say, “They’re watering down their Christianity with New Age mumbo jumbo.” Or you might say, “My God doesn’t give vocabulary tests.” Or you might say, “My God’s a visionary jester who always sat at the wrong table with the wrong crowd & overturned tables & got chased out of temples.”

If you hear someone at C2G describe their spirituality as magical, you might say that we’re practicing witchcraft or paganism. Or you might say, “My God healed the sick. My God made the blind to see. My God fed five thousand people with a few loaves & a fish. My God walked on water & turned water into the wine. My God raised the dead & was raised from the dead.” You don’t have to call that magical or supernatural, but I do know that some Christians want to revise the Bibles & take the miracles out. They are obsessed with historicism & like the author John Shelby Spong see the miraculous at best as a “literary device” & at worst as “a distortion.”

I don’t know about you, but I want to keep the miracles in. I want to let go of stiff literalism & literary rationalizations & let the miracles in. I want to tell you about the miracle that’s on my heart every time I confess my sin & admit that I am powerless without my powerful savior. There’s a miracle on my heart every time I call on the name of Jesus.

Now how do you call on God? One reason that C2G had to move is that we do not limit our preaching & teaching ministry to the ordained clergy but are a lay ministry & a people’s ministry. While we have a loose co-leadership structure, we also practice an open pulpit.

A few weeks ago, I quoted Richard Foster on meditation, on the need to “enter the living presence of God for ourselves.” Foster warns against a pious religious professionalism, calling us all to “the universal priesthood of God.”

Years ago in my day-to-day teaching here at Tech, I learned that the best teachers are forever students. We bring that principle to the spiritual practice that is C2G: we are perpetually learning about God, learning to love God, & living our walk with God out loud. So we invite you to walk with us, or like the song said—let’s walk together children.

If C2G speaks to your heart, we want you to grow with us a garden. I don’t know what that garden will look like, but I imagine a fun & funky little family of friends & strangers & Jesus freaks who love a hungry life that forever seeks after God.

Tonight, we open the stage of this secular theater to sacred dance & to sacred art & to sacred poetry & to sacred music & to you—to sing God’s song as you hear it inside your own heart. Maybe you too feel like Paul described, maybe you feel like one of the messiah’s misfits, like the culture’s compost. Let’s take this compost of our lives, then, wherever we’re at tonight, & grow a beautiful new garden by planting again the seeds of God’s grace. Amen.—Andrew William Smith, Cookeville, TN 10/10/10

Creating The Church We've Dreamed Of

2010-08-25T03:56:00.000-07:00

Why does Cookeville need another church service? We never miss our exit off the interstate because of the giant cross that marks it. There’s lots of church in Cookeville. Why might we need more? And why am I, a person with plenty of extracurricular joy already on his plate, and only a year “back in church” after more than 20 years way, so enthused and dedicated to the creation of this service?

Come ToGather wants to be a church we’ve dreamed of -- or at least the church I imagine we might want to become. More than anything, we want to be inclusive of folks, seekers and sinners, the unchurched and undecided, regardless of their spiritual history and spiritual self-definition.

We want to transcend the narrow notions of liberal and conservative currently stifling so many to be real-world-active and open-minded and open-hearted in a biblical manner. We want to invite Christians whose relationship with Jesus is not diluted by welcoming -- and even worshiping and studying with -- people from diverse and divergent religious paths.

Come ToGather seeks a style that’s immediate, intimate, and inspired. We want to be down-to-earth in the house-church-without-dogma or church-campfire-in-the-woods kind of way.

We want to connect with the movement known as the “emergent church.” In August, we visited an emergent church in Lousville, Kentucky, to discover folks already doing what we want to do, making church holy and holistic in ways that seem obvious but still largely untapped. Come ToGather began as the evenong worship at a local Presybterian church but has since moved its worship onto the campus of Tennessee Tech, where it is exploring the possibility of becoming a recognized campus ministry. Now unaffiliated with any parent institution, we don’t know if we are non-denominational, anti-denominational, post-denominational, cross-denominational, trans-denominational, or un-denominational – but we enjoy meeting each week & discovering what the spirit has in store for us.

We want to be a singing, dancing, creating, celebrating kind of church where spiritual gifts and artistic gifts commingle. We want poets, artists, dancers, singers, painters, and more to come experience with us, to grow and know with us.

Come ToGather wants you to bring your light to share with the larger light that might open us up to larger life. Come ToGather will gather in a circle. We will unashamedly read and study and sing together. And every week, we will gather for a feast to which every one is invited. We will share a spiritual meal and then a potluck meal. This Sunday, the table will be set. I hope to see you there. --Andrew William Smith, co-founder of Come ToGather