Sunday at encounter we talked about the contrast between desperation and hope, between what we see as hopeless and irredeemable, and what God sees as an opportunity for new life. The scripture passage was Ezekiel 37 - the Valley of Dry Bones.

Jacob Acosta wrote two dialogues, which he read while playing music. They’re two perspectives on a person.

The Lament

You know that kid is never going to learn, always getting in trouble

Always finding his way to get things all messy

Get things complicated

I won’t say I told you so

How’s he doing now?

Have any kids, or baby mama’s

You know he won’t be paying child support

He used to be a good boy

Used to play guitar and piano and be a good boy

Now look at him

He’ll find any way to make a few dollars

Can’t hold a job anymore

At least not more than a couple of weeks

Runnin around with different women everynight

Doing who knows what

With who knows who

At who knows where

I heard he was in jail

Or prison for something

Stealing or maybe was it killing somebody

I wouldn’t doubt it

This world is crazy

And he’s caught up in it

They say us humans will ruin the earth before any other species

I think I might start believing that not too far from now

So sad to see that happen to such a good boy

So much potential

I bet if he had another chance

Or maybe not

This might be the path, for all of us

Why try so hard

Death hasn’t misfired on our race yet

Everybody gets hit by it

Maybe that good boy is just confused by this world

I’m confused sometimes

Why am I trying so hard?

I bet I got something coming soon too

I bet we all do

Not too far

It can’t be too far from now

Not the way this world’s been looking

I’m So Proud of Him

He deserves it

He’s worked hard his whole life for this

What a great guy, he’s come a long way

I hope only the best for him

He’s so thoughtful and always thinking about others

See he’s the kind of guy that will help you when things go bad

He actually works for this non-profit organization and takes time

He takes time to hang out with kids and show them nature

He’ll be a great father

He is working on new career

And he’s really adventurous, always up for anything

I think he really knows how to keep things exciting

It’s hard to find people like that anymore

Smart with money too

This guy saves like crazy

I think he really respects older people

Finds their wisdom valuable

I kind of wish I was more like him

I heard he helped rebuild a couple houses in New Orleans after Katrina hit

He may have hit a rough spot but he’ll get out of it.

He’s always been so positive no matter what situation he’s in

And he’s so talented

I heard he still plays guitar and piano

Someday he’ll be ready to be a family man

And he’ll be a good one

I bet he’ll help a lot of children in this world

If there were more guys like him

This world would be a better place

No doubt in my mind

I have to make sure you meet him

And he’ll be happy to meet you

I can’t wait to see it

I’ll bet he’ll shake your hand

And smile at you

I’ll be more than happy to show him to you

I’ll be proud

I’m proud to know such a great guy

Last week at encounter the theme was “Desert Flowers,” taken from Isaiah 35:1-4.

In Arizona, after a wet winter, the hills become covered in Mexican poppies and desert lupine. The combination of the gold and purple is stunning, especially since the poppies leave very little stem or plant after blooming. It’s as though they appear out of no where, and return to no where. We dove-tailed on the image of the poppies as a metaphor for how God can bring beauty and life and growth where it seems to be empty and hopeless. We included this meditation about poppies, working off the symbolism of poppies as signs of remembrance of lost loved ones in the UK.

Here’s the meditation:

Poppies are almost magical. The seeds lay dormant for months, even years, in the hot desert ground, unfazed by the elements. Then, when the rains come in the winter, and the ground is moistened, the seeds come up, seemingly from no where, and the ground that lay bare and rugged for so long, now is bursting with bright color.

When the rains come and the poppies spring up, the hills of Picacho Peak, the mountains of Saguaro National Park, and whole swaths of the state of Arizona become bathed in bright golds and yellows of the Mexican Poppy, with the purple from the Desert Lupine blended in for contrast. What once looked harsh and unforgiving has now become a field of color, bright, radiant, and captivating.

The Song of Solomon says,
My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away;  for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.  The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.”

To the outside eye, the Arizona desert is barren, covered in hot, bare dirt and prickly cacti. It is a hostile place, devoid of delicacy and softness. But to those who know it, it it’s soil if full of nutrients and minerals and seeds of life – all waiting to spring up. It is not dead, but asleep, waiting to arise.To the outside eye, the Arizona desert is barren, covered in hot, bare dirt and prickly cacti. It is a hostile place, devoid of delicacy and softness. But to those who know it, it it’s soil if full of nutrients and minerals and seeds of life – all waiting to spring up. It is not dead, but asleep, waiting to arise.

St. Paul writes in Romans:
Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near.

In England, poppies are a symbol of Memorial Day, where they remember their veterans lost in wars. The poppy is the symbol of death brought back to life by God, of our remembrance of the fallen, of those who’ve sacrificed for others, and of the loved ones who remember them.In England, poppies are a symbol of Memorial Day, where they remember their veterans lost in wars. The poppy is the symbol of death brought back to life by God, of our remembrance of the fallen, of those who’ve sacrificed for others, and of the loved ones who remember them.

Now take a moment to remember your lost loved ones, those who have died and who now rest in sleep with the Lord. And you can take come forward and write on a yellow flower, on your own paper poppy, the names of the loved ones you remember, who sleep with the Lord.

(move into music while people do the ritual)

——————–
During the meditation, we ran this loop I made from pictures of Picacho Peak State Park, when the Mexican poppies were in bloom.

 Picacho Peak Flowers stills loop: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

While animal sacrifice practices seem bizarre and grotesque to our sensibilities, they’re all over the Bible. Even in the New Testament, Jesus had to deal with debates about animal sacrifice, and its proper place. While Jesus himself rejects animal sacrifice, as do the prophets, the practice played a part in Jesus’ ministry, and the history of the people of Israel.

We study the animal sacrifice debates, not because as Christians or Jews we still perform them, but because they deal with the more important issues of how we relate to God and one another.

Listen Now:

 sacrifice and burdens: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We did a worship service on “wandering” at encounter. It seemed apt, given that the theme is both very prominent in the Bible (the exodus) and in our lives today. Where once our lives were closely dictated by family and community etc., now we are faced with myriads of choices. Where once wandering was seen as a selfish, irresponsible way to live, it’s now how many of us find our careers, life choices. The parallel is similar with the nature of church. For centuries church was the unchanging rock, but now you have to change all the time, as the culture and the world change. God may not change, but life never sits still. Instead of viewing church as a community that never changes or moves, we worked with the metaphor of church as a community of desert nomads, who embrace the journey of faith together, while moving all the time.

The service used three interactive rituals at the beginning, interspersed with music. The theme was “journey,” so the first meditation had us focus on our own journeys from being very connected to our families and parents, to moving out on our own and discovering for ourselves. Some of those things we discover turn out to be real, and many turn out to be creations of our own making. So, we molded the symbolic idols, the false securities of our own making, out of clay, and placed them up front. The full text of the meditation is here.

Then we did a meditation on the things we had placed our securities in, the “rocks” of our lives. We took the rocks and wrote on them the things we had placed our securities in, even if they turned out to be false, the point was to name the things we had trusted, relied on.

The third station was to reflect on the journeys of our lives. To reflect on our own wanderings, and where God is leading us, we need to be aware of where we are. So we took some time in a meditation to reflect on our lives and what got us here. The full text of the meditation is here.

The third meditation centered around where we were in our lives. I call it the “where are you in your life today meditation”. The basic idea was to reflect on where we are, what wanderings we’re doing. The ritual was to write the place you’re at in your journey on the wall with a large post-it note. The background on the wall is just a desert scene projected on an old-fashioned overhead projector. The full text is here.

For centuries, the image that was projected of church was the solid rock, the unchanging rock, the one thing that was always consistent, solid, predictable, secure. The qualities of an age of slow evolution and gradual progress. If the world was moving too quickly, don’t worry, your church never will. I was nurtured on that sensibility, and it has many great qualitites. For a child, those are exactly the things that make for a good home: stability, security, consistency.

But the very nature of our world has changed from one of gradual change to spontaneous, and perpetual, revolutionary change. The jobs you may spend most of your life in may not even exist when you enter college. We get married later, we have fewer kids, we spend lots of time wandering for our place, or for many places. In this context, faith is approached in a similar paradigm, where we wander around for years trying to find who God is, what it really means to be a follower of Jesus, and trying on different forms of faith for years before settling, or not. This can be a mixed bag, offering us greater possibilities for discovery of a God who’s infinitely deep and beautiful, or leaving us so unrooted that we never stay in one place long enough to give it a chance to change us, and never allowing us to experience anything in its fullness.

Being that so many of the people who come to encounter are in their twenties, and unmarried, the theme of wandering seemed fitting. It gave us a chance to explore a new metaphor for church. Instead of the unchanging rock, think of church as a mongolian yurt - a large tent that holds the whole family, but is collapsed and moved, with the whole community, to new pastures as the seasons change. We need each other in our spiritual searching, and church is that: a community of searches, all desiring to find God and know him better. It’s not an aimless search, trying on every different way willy nilly; it’s a search for God in Jesus Christ.

The complete order of worship is here.

We started our summer worship series at encounter. We’re calling it “desert spirituality.” In Arizona you feel heat and dryness so intensely, it makes you reflect on basic necessities of life - like water and shade. The desert has a way of doing that, of humbling us, of reminding us of what is really important, what is really necessary. When you stand in the heat, in front of the beauty, you have little choice but to see your own limitations, and your dependence on God.

Most of the scriptures were written in a desert climate, not that unlike Tucson. The struggles of the people of God to survive, and stay faithful, in the face of a harsh and unforgiving environment created both great faithfulness, and great doubt. They were always tempted, in times of scarcity, to question God’s faithfulness to them, and turn to various fertility cults that promised rain. “Will God really deliver on his promises to provide for us?” “Will God really protect us, when we’re this thirsty and this hot?”

Our series started this week with a look at Exodus 17:1-7, the story of Moses and the Jewish people at Meribah, in the Sinai Peninsula. The people of God are delivered from slavery, but are then faced with the possibility of starvation and thirst in the Sinai Desert. They get so upset that they complain to God, and try to stone Moses. I used to preach this text from the angle that the people were ungrateful and unfaithful, that they preferred slavery with regular meals to freedom with a little thirst. But when one looks at how utterly desolate the Sinai is, it becomes clear that they weren’t just whining about discomfort, but were raising a legitimate complaint against God in the face of death. And, God had promised to deliver them, so the people were, in essence, holding God accountable to His promises.

It’s hard some times to tell the difference between whining about inconvenience (”why did I get a used car for my 16th birthday?”), and legitimate complaints about injustices (”why are the people in Myanmar starving when the Junta has plenty of food?”). That’s not always an easy distinction, between want and need, between entitlement and accountability. So we had two stations set up during communion. One I call “The Wall of Legitimate Complaints,” a white-board to write publicly the injustices that aggrieve us and the innocents of our world. The other I call “The Shredder of Illegitimate Whining,” where you could write down your own petty complaints and run them through a big, office shredder. Both were well received. The hum of the shredder combined with the visuals on the screen, the video from Work of the People called the Storms of Life Loop, with Jake playing acoustic guitar in the background, made for a good contrast.

The whole service was based on the idea of contrasts, juxtaposition, which is something we do a lot at encounter. Like the great Zen masters who put different things together to make you think about what is beyond the dualities of our worldly thinking, juxtaposition forces us to see things in both their contrast and comparison, as the extremes shine light on the opposite’s extremities, so in our worship it shows us of God’s truth beyond the normal categories of our thinking. As part of this, we alternated between videos of people showing experiencing real hardship - in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina - with the story of the people in wilderness and their complaining, and the ways in which we complain and whine today.

We used a couple original musical arrangements from Jake Acosta. One, “The Stresses in Daily Life” was a list of complaints, read off with dueling voices and a techno-arrangement behind it. The other, “Complain with Me,” was a back and forth between a recorded Jazz tune, and Jake playing on the sax. I have both of them here, though “Complain with Me” has only the recorded Jazz tune, as we didn’t get a live recording of Jake’s half. You’ll have to imagine that, or put your own music or words in there.

I also included here a homemade video of a bunch of desert flower pictures I took. It’s very basic, just 5 second stills in a row without any transitions or effects. I didn’t have the time to put together anything fancy.

The full order of service is here.

Listen Now:

 Stresses in Daily Life - Jacob Acosta: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Complain with Me - Jacob Acosta: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Desert Flowers Stills Loop: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We celebrated Holy Trinity Sunday at encounter. We took the chance to explore the Trinity the way the mystics used to - as a mystery that one enters into. There’s so much ink spilled about the Trinity, a lot of it good, but it’s not ultimately something we can define with propositions. Three persons - one God, how that works will always be something beyond the scope of our words. The mystics used to speak of “entering into” the Trinity, through a process of meditation and prayer one would open one’s self to the Trinity, and allow one’s self to experience it. We used Rublev’s icon of the Trinity.

You can see how well the icon shows this. The painting uses a perspective that pulls you in, where everything converges on the center, which is the communion cup. The Trinity is something we enter into and participate in, through the sacrament. In many ways, this is what worship should be - bringing us in to the sacrament, into focus on God, and into a the mystery of the God who is also so much greater and beyond our selves.

Mystery can be defined as something that we simply don’t know, or it can be understood as something that is beyond, greater than, deeper than what we know with our normal ways of apprehending and speaking. The things we know, the truths, are the evidence of the work of the God. But, they are not the full explanation of God. God is more than the words we say in the creeds. So we use the creeds, Nicene and Apostle’s and even Athanasian, propositions of the nature of God, that are simultaneously true and incomplete, so that they can bring us into the mystery of the truths that lie beyond them.

I made this the goal of our service, to bring us into an experience of the mystery of the Trinity, something we can only begin to touch on in one brief service.

The full order of service is here.

Acts 2:1-21 - the story of Pentecost.

During the children’s sermon at the 8:45am Traditions service, I asked if any of them had ever seen tongues as of fire resting on people’s heads. One girl said, “yes”. I asked her where, and she replied “in Wisonsin.” I didn’t quiz her further, but she was very adamant that it was true. Aside from her, the only other known occurence of this particular spiritual gifts was Hildegard of Bingen in the 1100’s in Germany. And, unlike Pentecost, Hildegard had no witnesses.

But whether one believes this gift of the Spirit is repeatable, there’s no question that it was real to the disciples and Jesus’ mother Mary, and Jesus’ biological brothers who were there. And there’s also no question that the Holy Spirit is alive today, able to give us the power to transform our world and change people’s lives for the better.

Listen Now:

 Pentecost 2008 sermon: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In April the Pima County Interfaith Council (PCIC) got a special audience with the Tucson city council to discuss its agenda. Most groups are not given this much time at the council meetings, but PCIC has enough clout to get an audience like this. As an organization, PCIC presented it’s agenda, including things like KIDCO (the city’s after-school program), School Plus Jobs, and rights for care givers, among others. For the most part, the city council has been fairly receptive of our proposals, as has the mayor. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to continue to hold them accountable. There are many forces at work in a down economy, and many who would like to balance the city’s budget by cutting programs for the poor, children, and lower-income working families. Our philosophy is that the opposite is true. In a bad economy we should increase our investments in education and social care as a means of bringing ourselves out of recession. Even at a local level we can make an economic impact.

 Community organizing works!! It gets real change done that makes a real difference.

Above, Leah Mundell, of PCIC, introducing the PCIC and speakers for the City Council

The Tucson City Council with Mayor Bob Walkup (far left) listening to PCIC speakers.

 Pima County Interfaith Council at Tucson City Council - excerpts: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Pima County Interfaith Council meeting at Tucson City Council - full session: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 Why do we spend so much time, as Christians, looking up to heaven, when there is so much need in the world around us? Why do we look for Jesus only in the life beyond, and not in the suffering and injustices of our world?

Ascension Day. Acts 1:1-14

Listen Now:

 Ascension - why are you staring into heaven?: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Part of my vision for the encounter worship has been to have original music, so our music is completely current, relevant, and an expression of our own community’s life and faith. I’m still working on the technology to get more of our worship music recorded, but I thought I’d post the lyrics to a couple of Jake Acosta’s songs, since I found them to be particularly powerful by themselves.

One of my own personal beefs with a lot of worship music is that it’s so much of the “I just want to praise you because my heart’s so filled with love of your greatness so I just have to praise you from all of my heart because you’re so great that I can’t help but praise you all day long, and praising you gives me so much joy in my heart ..….”. I’m drawing a gross caricature, of course. But it’s been my impression so often with worship music. No pain, struggle, ambiguity, irreverance, or personal quest.

The first is from a sung ditty we did a couple months ago called “Aching Eyes”. This is the one that had a very techno-Depeche Mode-type sound behind it.

I have walked this world
Afraid of prejudice
Sometimes of my own

I’m holding hands with my brother
But if I love him too much
The world lets me know

Passing over what we have overcome
There shouldn’t be an end
God is watching, always watching
Waiting, we can no longer pretend

Paging up into the sky

Hear the call, please reply
I’m listening, looking for a sign
For these aching eyes

Heard the holy wars
Families were killing
Heard about the Christian martyrs
How many would be willing

Lacing up my combat boots
Cause Charlie changes color
Power cannot drive us all I’ve seen another hunger

For these aching eyes

The second song was done a few weeks ago, though written in 2007. It’s called “Spirit that Falls”

Fall

You fall.

When you fall,

Sometimes when you fall,

Discovering, sometimes when you fall

I’m discovering sometimes, when you fall.

Know, I’m discovering sometimes when you fall.

To know I’m discovering sometimes when you fall,

Need to know I’m discovering sometimes when you fall,

You need to know I’m discovering sometimes, when you fall

Into me.

I wonder how different our reactions would be, walking into a church, and seeing that the community was wrestling, discovering, seeking, struggling, and maybe even venting some anger at God - like most of us in the world do?

We multiply, inhabit the earth 

Our musicians, poets, artists 

Can paint you a picture of 

Where we are now 

And where we’re going   

Hope to inscribe, some words on your mind  

That I took the time to think around 

If I get through, will you find any  

Realization, realization 

Do you believe in something real? 

Cause we believe in what we feel 

So do you believe in God? 

Do you believe in God? 

We build our houses so much bigger than our means 

Sometimes we buy ourselves into a place, we just can’t see 

What’s this wide road we’re traveling? 

It used to be so narrow, narrow 

Sink into my melody 

It’s holy I swear I’ve heard some 

Revelations   Straight from the heaven air