During this season of Lent, I've been consistently invited into sacred spaces of waiting - with people who are dying to this life (and wondering without knowing what happens next), within silence together with other pilgrims not searching for answers but content with stillness together, experiencing worship itself as a pilgrimage (and enjoying the journey together), and waiting in the confusing timelessness of the hope of healing from an injury.
So much of this waiting is new to me - though it shouldn't be - that it feels in many ways like a new birth. This season of Lent, I have with the earth shaken off my slumber - even as my (limping) pace has slowed to allow time for silent waiting in the presence of God (?) that defies any attempt to contain or explain it (or even to claim it). As the earth leans again into the warming rays of the Springtime sunlight, I have been reminded everywhere I turn that while I can participate in Spring, I cannot hasten its arrival. So, too, with God.
Lent this year has been a journey of waiting - but as I have slowed my spiritual pace, I have begun to notice many things that escaped my attention before. As I have settled into places of tension in my life, and in the life of my family and church community, I have found that submitting to the death of my attempts to flee or to relieve this tension in destructive ways has given rise to the realization that this tension will not kill me - it becomes a catalyst for creativity and abundant life.
I have begun to see the community of people gathered at Skyline for the treasure we are - by no means perfect but holding onto a vision of God's love for all people with passionate intensity and faith. Seeds that have been nurtured in the warmth of the tension we have experienced for several years now are beginning to sprout and to give some indication of the potential explosive growth in grace and love through our life together: in reaching out in love in many tangible ways to people in our surrounding community (people searching for sanctuaries of wellness, healing and recreation for the body and the soul).
Jesus, who invites us to this place of tension and creativity, paid with his life for his refusal to bow to the pretend gods of convention and compromise in his day. Yet he continues to invite us all to follow him into a realm of God's presence and power breaking in on all who are willing to wake from our contented sleep into a vision of a world where peace, love and merciful justice prevail. And because that vision conflicts constantly with our world and with our lives, to walk into this vision is to walk into unbearable tension. Jesus reminds us with his life and with his death that this tension cannot kill or silence us - only our fear of it.
Love binds us - binds the poles of tension to relate them if not to reconcile (or to remove) them. In this love we live and move and have our being. Jesus reveals this Love to us and calls us to life in Love - Love that birthed us into existence, and that now calls us into Life in all its Abundance. Follow me, he calls relentlessly and patiently. To the cross, where you will surely die to a false notion of your self-hood that hopelessly traps you in a prison of your own making. Follow me through the cross and beyond, to a place of existence beyond yourself - to a place of being for others, of communion in that Body that transcends all dividing walls and participates in an ongoing ministry of reconciliation for all people - for all creation.
So don't let's rush too quickly into Sunday. How can we ever hope to interpret the emptiness we will find there unless we have watched and waited with Jesus, who knows and shows us to be the Way where he is going? It's Wednesday, time for silence. And tomorrow the time of our betrayal will come. Yet he will not refuse us a place at his Table, knowing what it means to dip bread together with us in a common bowl. Then the howling crowd, and the terrible silence of Friday afternoon, when he will have to die alone because we will have deserted him (not wanting to walk into that pain). And a Sabbath that forces us to rest in (an uneasy) peace. And then (we know) another week will begin. A dawning of a new creation as the Spirit hovers fitfully yet purposefully over the face of the deep darkness.
Let there be Light. And he will shine in us.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Skate Park Revisited - Meeting Tonight 3-23-10
We've got a lot to talk about tonight! Here's some of the things I'd like to share with you.
1. I was unable to attend the public planning meeting about the Newark, DE skate park on Paper Mill (at the Curtis Mill site), but you can sign a petition here in support of the park and see the plans options (Option 2 does not include a skate park) here.
2. I'm hoping that we can sponsor a Skate Jam (Day) on or near June 21, 2010, Go Skateboarding Day. The good folks at Switch Skate Shop in Newark, DE are interested in helping us by contributing some elements for use that day. Epworth UMC in Rehoboth Beach, DE has sponsored several of these events, and one of their pastors, the Rev. Pat Laughlin, has passed along some good advice about how to run such an event that I will pass along to you this evening. Pat also put me onto a YouTube video called "Nowhere to Go" advocating a public skate park in Rehoboth Beach - like the one in Smyrna, DE.
3. If you don't already know about it, Family Life Church has been running a Skate and BMX Park under 141 in Newport, DE for over 12 years. For the past few years, a group in Wilmington has been raising money for a public skate plaza in Wilmington near the Blue Rocks stadium. The guys at Switch told me that some skateboarders in our area like to go to a privately run skate bowl constructed by a Christian in PA (20 miles from here) who runs a ministry called threesixteen skateboarding.
4. Even putting together a day-long event requires some careful planning to avoid what skatepark planners call the "Crashup Derby Factor" (poor arrangement of elements that contributes to skater collisions is what our underwriter is most concerned about). I ran across a site called Skaters for Public Skateparks that has lots of info about planning a park and ordered a Public Skatepark Development Guide for us to take a look at. Last summer, we saw some skateboarding elements in a campground in Wisconsin made by a company called SunRamp. Switch skate shop can also help us with plans for elements.
5. If all of this seems a little overwhelming, consider this: there are scads of kids in our area who like to skate - and very few places for them to do so legally and safely (think of the many "No Skateboarding" signs the litter our public spaces). Sakteboarders already use our parking lot to gather and skate. I have driven through Deacon's Walk streets so crowded with kids on skateboards and their friends that I had to stop the car and wait for them to part. Churches that want to offer skateboard facilities typically do so with a price tag attached (attend Bible study in order to skate). I'd like to think that at Skyline, we offer people Christ by living his love in such a way that people won't have to be coerced into falling in love with God.
In short - the time is right! Thank you for being a part of this dream.
Bo
1. I was unable to attend the public planning meeting about the Newark, DE skate park on Paper Mill (at the Curtis Mill site), but you can sign a petition here in support of the park and see the plans options (Option 2 does not include a skate park) here.
2. I'm hoping that we can sponsor a Skate Jam (Day) on or near June 21, 2010, Go Skateboarding Day. The good folks at Switch Skate Shop in Newark, DE are interested in helping us by contributing some elements for use that day. Epworth UMC in Rehoboth Beach, DE has sponsored several of these events, and one of their pastors, the Rev. Pat Laughlin, has passed along some good advice about how to run such an event that I will pass along to you this evening. Pat also put me onto a YouTube video called "Nowhere to Go" advocating a public skate park in Rehoboth Beach - like the one in Smyrna, DE.
3. If you don't already know about it, Family Life Church has been running a Skate and BMX Park under 141 in Newport, DE for over 12 years. For the past few years, a group in Wilmington has been raising money for a public skate plaza in Wilmington near the Blue Rocks stadium. The guys at Switch told me that some skateboarders in our area like to go to a privately run skate bowl constructed by a Christian in PA (20 miles from here) who runs a ministry called threesixteen skateboarding.
4. Even putting together a day-long event requires some careful planning to avoid what skatepark planners call the "Crashup Derby Factor" (poor arrangement of elements that contributes to skater collisions is what our underwriter is most concerned about). I ran across a site called Skaters for Public Skateparks that has lots of info about planning a park and ordered a Public Skatepark Development Guide for us to take a look at. Last summer, we saw some skateboarding elements in a campground in Wisconsin made by a company called SunRamp. Switch skate shop can also help us with plans for elements.
5. If all of this seems a little overwhelming, consider this: there are scads of kids in our area who like to skate - and very few places for them to do so legally and safely (think of the many "No Skateboarding" signs the litter our public spaces). Sakteboarders already use our parking lot to gather and skate. I have driven through Deacon's Walk streets so crowded with kids on skateboards and their friends that I had to stop the car and wait for them to part. Churches that want to offer skateboard facilities typically do so with a price tag attached (attend Bible study in order to skate). I'd like to think that at Skyline, we offer people Christ by living his love in such a way that people won't have to be coerced into falling in love with God.
In short - the time is right! Thank you for being a part of this dream.
Bo
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