We celebrated Pentecost this past Sunday, the day of wind and fire, language and speech, when thousands heard the Good News that there is a Love stronger than any grave, a Love that pursues us through death and brings us to Life.

Timed more by circumstance than planning, I lectured on the Holy Spirit and the Church last week in my Christian Formation class. What a great preparation for Pentecost! As I sat silently one very early morning (the Holy Spirit hour is around 4am for me), a list of reasons flowed from pen to paper about why actively participating in a local worshiping community is vital to discipleship.

But even before the 12 reasons is One Reality:  followers of Jesus Christ are already incorporated into the Body. There is no Christian without the Body of Christ (as much as our individualistic culture would want us to believe otherwise).   Being part of the Church Universal comes with being a disciple–though we can opt to not practice our participation. We have a place-setting at the feast, though we may stay home.

Paul writes to the Corinthian church in the 1st century, 1 Corinthians 12:27:

Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

Augustine writes in the 4th century:

What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the Body of Christ and the chalice the Blood of Christ. … How is the bread His Body? And the chalice, or what is in the chalice, how is it His Blood? Those elements, brethren, are called Sacraments, because in them one thing is seen, but another is understood. What is seen is the [material], but what is understood is the spiritual fruit. …

`You, however, are the Body of Christ and His members.’ If, therefore, you are the Body of Christ and His members, your mystery is presented at the table of the Lord, you receive your mystery.

To that which you are, you answer: `Amen’; and by answering, you subscribe to it. For you hear: `The Body of Christ!’ and you answer: `Amen!’

Be a member of Christ’s Body, so that your `Amen’ may be the truth.

Stanley Hauerwas writes in the 20th century:

“[Salvation is] being engrafted into practices that save us from those powers that would rule our lives making it impossible for us to truly worship God.”

One of those practices into which the Holy Spirit engrafts us is the Church, expressed both universally through all time and space, with all followers of Christ past, present, and future, and locally through gathering together to worship God and love each other.

With this in mind, here are 12 reasons to answer “Amen”  to our engrafting into the the practice of Church:

1. We have difficulty seeing the truth. Christian community reveals our blind spots and encourages us to choose love. We see each other’s amazing gifts and call them out. Others call out our gifts and help us not hide our light under a bushel.
2. The illusion of homogeneity is dispelled.  The local gathered church forces us to be with people who are different, creating opportunities for growth for everyone. Even if we think we are all the same, we’re not, I promise.
3. Dividing walls are broken. The church is a community that, at its best, can cross the boundaries imposed by the world. We learn to love those who are a different age, economic situation, ethnicity, gender, etc., than ourselves. We learn how to practice  hospitality.
4. It’s not all about you. (Read that again.) Christian community de-centers the self and places the self in a larger and longer Story, with a history and a future.
5. It’s about you and everyone else.  The church provides opportunities for people to grow into persons who are full of life, to encourage true selfhood. Then it offers opportunities to give the self away in love. “In order to be self-giving, you have to have a self to give.” (Fr Kevin Seasoltz)
6. It’s all about God. The local church is called to model the committed love of God to its members and the world. When a person sins, love doesn’t end, ever. Behavior may need to be confronted, boundaries may need to be set, but there is grace and forgiveness, and always the possibility of reconciliation.
7. It’s really all about God and all of creation. Loving God and loving others are two sides of the same reality. The church is a circle with God at the center. As we move closer to God, we move closer to each other; we love creation more, the more we grow in the love of God.
8. The Church is a foretaste of the Kingdom feast. The church lives in the “now but not yet”–where sin and suffering still exist, but in the promise of the future joy.  The church, at its best, is a witness to Love incarnate, the Body of Christ, a love that is stronger than death.W hen Christians love, they are showing the world that choosing to love is a possibility, one that has lasting impact.
9. You can do more together than alone. The needs of this world are huge and, while one person can make a difference, that one person will have a community supporting them–look for it.
10. Life is often brutal and we will all face death. The church is Kingdom life now. When a person faces the forces of chaos and death, the community intercedes on their behalf, holding them in their suffering, and looks for ways to provide materially, emotionally, and spiritually. The church gives us glimpse of the life on the other side of death.
11. The Church is a family, where the vision of the Kingdom is given to the next generation. The church is the place to raise children, your own or other’s,  in practices and habits of Love and self-gift. Children will hear about a Love that calls them by name and be entrusted with the Story that changes the world.
12. The Church is so much more than we understand now. The Church Universal is a mysterious, wondrous, super-natural, multidimensional way of living where all its members are persons-in-community, connected together through and in the dance of the Trinity. We’re only scratching the surface of possibility.

There are, no doubt, more, but this list will keep me busy for at least the next 4o years.

(And if you need a good dose of how a local church made a world-changing difference simply through a prayer service, go here.)

An excerpt of the Easter Sermon of John Chrysostom, pastor of Constantinople, 5th century. This sermon has been continuously preached every Easter morning in the Eastern Orthodox Churches for 1500 years.

Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!
First and last alike receive your reward;
rich and poor, rejoice together!
Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!

You that have kept the fast, and you that have not,
rejoice today for the Table is richly laden!
Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one.
Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of God’s goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.
Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.
Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free.
He has destroyed it by enduring it.

He destroyed Hades when He descended into it.
He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh.
Isaiah foretold this when he said,
“You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below.”

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hades, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, O Death, are annihilated!
Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!
Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead,
has become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.
To God be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!

With Palm Sunday, we enter into the Passion week, a Holy Week, remembering the Lord’s final days and building in anticipation toward the Resurrection.

For the world, this is much like any other week, and paradoxically, for ministers and others working in Christian contexts, it can be a week with little time for prayer and reflection.

To counter-act what feels like a break-neck race to Easter, I long to pause and rest in ‘unforced rhythms of grace’; to walk with Jesus through these days and let his Spirit transform my DNA; to practice a new way of thinking by remembering my small story in the midst The Story; to be patient on the hard days before the Glory, even as I learn to be patient in the whole of an often Holy Saturday life.

We live in death. We see it all around.

We live in-between. We are residents of  the Now but Not yet of the coming Kingdom. We live in that moment of baptism, under the water, the moment between death and resurrection.

Yet we also live resurrected in promise and hope, taking in that wonderful first gasp of earthly air as we rise from the baptismal water. One day we will take in that full sweet heavenly breath as we rise with Jesus.

I’m a rushing wind through life right now, a whirlwind of activity blowing through, a Tasmanian Devil of the old cartoons, and I’m not remembering to breathe earth’s air, and even less of heaven.

Last night at 3am, I woke to blessed silence and lit a candle and made some tea and journalled the Spirit’s prayer in me: Your life is wonderful–two awesome jobs and a wonderful community–but it is not sustainable. Pray and reflect, but use your night hours to sleep and learn to pause during the day. 

Let Me be the wind and you breathe Me.

I’ve read enough books on prayer and gotten myself into this kind of pickle too many times to know that pausing in the midst of being a one-woman tornado of activity is easier said than done.

But I also know that our rich prayer tradition offers centuries of helps for just such a situation.

One way to pause, to mark the days and hours of Holy Week, or any week, is to join with the wider Church in the Divine Office, or Liturgy of the Hours. For centuries, the Office was the prayer of  Benedictine monks and sisters, but then the Office moved into the lives of laypeople.

This week I will take a couple moments to pause and pray the Hours. Would you join me?

Here is a simple Liturgy of the Hours  for Morning, Noon, and Compline prayer, starting with Palm Sunday evening.  It offers a pattern based on the full Liturgy of the Hours, some simple chants, and scripture passages from The Message translation of the Bible.

I invite you to mark this week with me as different from the world’s calendar, to enter into the Now, but Not Yet, to pause and rest, and breathe in the wind of the Spirit as we are caught up in our Savior’s story.

***

If you want to print the PDF, select the file and choose booklet settings on your printer. It should print two pages horizontally on  8.5 x 11 paper in the proper order so you can fold and staple it. Or enjoy it as a digital prayer book on your phone or tablet.

As the birds build nests, as the furry catkins bud on the willow, new bright green leaves open in the sunniest places, and cherry blossoms begin to pink-tinge the trees, I break my two month blog silence with my most favorite quote from the book Christ the Tiger by Thomas Howard:

“Here from this stable, here, from this Nazareth, this stony beach, this Jerusalem, this market place, this garden, this Praetorium, this Cross, this mountain, I announce it to you. I announce to you what is guessed at in all the phenomena of your world. You see the corn of wheat shrivel and break open and die, but you expect a crop.

I tell you of the Springtime of which all springtimes speak.

I tell you of the world for which this world groans and toward which it strains. I tell you that beyond the awful borders imposed by time and space and contingency, there lies what you seek. I announce to you life instead of mere existence, freedom instead of frustration, justice instead of compensation.

For I announce to you redemption. Behold I make all things new. Behold I do what cannot be done.

I restore the years that the locusts and worms have eaten. I restore the years you have drooped away upon your crutches and in your wheel-chair. I restore the symphonies and operas which your deaf ears have never heard, and the snowy massif your blind eyes have never seen, and the freedom lost to you through plunder and the identity lost to you because of calumny and the failure of justice; and I restore the good which your own foolish mistakes have cheated you of.

And I bring you to the Love of which all other loves speak, the Love which is joy and beauty, and which you have sought in a thousand streets and for which you have wept and clawed your pillow.”

One of my favorite Christmas movies is The Bishop’s Wife, where Cary Grant plays an angel sent to help a workaholic bishop learn that his family and those in need are more important than building a cathedral. In my favorite scene, Dudley the angel and the bishop’s wife visit the bishop’s former church, poor and facing closure, to hear the boy’s choir rehearse. What a glorious song! (Please pause the Music for Dreaming in the right column of this page before playing the video!)

O Sing To God, composed by Charles Gounod Dec. 1, 1885 and lyrics by Rev. B. Webb

O sing to God your hymns of gladness
Ye loving hearts your tribute pay
Your Lord is born this happy day
Then pierce the sky with songs of gladness
Disperse the shades of gloom and sadness
The Lord is born this happy day
O sing to God your hymns of gladness
O sing to God your hymns of gladness
Ye loving hearts your tribute pay
Your Lord is born this happy day
Then pierce the sky with songs of gladness
Disperse the shades of gloom and sadness
Your Lord is born this happy day
O sing to God your hymns of gladness
O Word of God for us incarnate
O Word of God for us incarnate
By faith we hear thine angels sing
Thy blessed angels sing their hymns
Thine angels sing of praise to thee their King
We join with them in adoration
We join with them in adoration
We pour to thee our supplication
That Thou would grant us, Lord, salvation.

Wishing you all a merry and blessed Christmas!

Hungry and tired, she waited for the campus bus, the visible world reduced to the lamp light’s reach. The chill made her burrow deeper into her jacket, the library’s warmth only a memory in the foggy twilight.

Decisions yet to be made pressed in upon her. She worried at all the questions as she worried at her frayed sleeve, plucking threads and watching the fabric unravel. A familiar sting pricked her eyes.

Clenching her teeth, she shoved her hands back into her pockets, roughly setting her thoughts against the ache and her eyes to look for distant headlights.

And there, on the sidewalk, she saw them, just at the edge between sight and obscurity:

Paw prints.

Large paw prints, like some gigantic creature only meant for the wilds had stepped through paint and then sprinted into the darkening fog.

She half-turned away. It was cold. Late. I’ll take a closer look tomorrow, she decided.

Pinpricks of bus lights cut through the fog. Supper and bed beckoned. Warmth and sleep wooed.

Yet her eyes kept finding their way back to the prints. Even in the fog, she could just make out more marking a path into the distance. A little spark of adventure flickered to life in her heart. A little less weariness weighed down her limbs.

She hardly noticed stepping out from the certainty of the stop.

She followed, up and around, down and back, street lamps lighting her way, one moment certain she had lost the trail only to find it again further up and further in, until the paw prints finally stopped.

And she stopped; breathing deep from the chase, hope of a deeper magic rising in her heart.

At the end of the trail, scrawled joyfully on the pavement, were two shimmering words from her childhood, catching her up in the Story, breaking past all her doubts, filling the ache, until her heart spilled over in laughter and tears and laughter again:

ASLAN LIVES!!

(And edited repost from the archives, in honor of C.S. Lewis’ birth this day in 1898, and based on Deborah Smith Douglas’ mention of finding paw prints on Duke University’s campus and following them to the joyful words.  She writes: “I simply, with all my heart, recognized the transforming truth of the affirmation. Aslan is alive. Resurrection happens. Christ is risen.  In a single leap, Aslan had bounded past the watchful dragons of my mind and all the intervening years to return…Because my whole childhood rose up to greet the Lion, my tenuously sophisticated young-adult self had no defenses against the saving “allelujah!” truth of that moment.” –Weavings, Jan/Feb 1997, 21)