What Can Be Seen Is Temporary, But What Cannot Be Seen Is Eternal: Pentecost Saturday

LOOK: Wheat and Wine (germinated wheat, wine, paper, thread, beeswax), Paul Roorda - Source

READ: Psalm 30, 32; Psalm 42, 43; Deuteronomy 5:22-33; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:10; Luke 16:19-31

PRAY: Prayer to the Holy Spirit

Come, Holy Spirit,
fill the hearts of your faithful,
and enkindle in us the fire of your love.
Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created,
and you shall renew the face of the earth.
Amen.

DO: Throughout the first week of Pentecost, I'll be sharing excerpts from my upcoming book, The Spacious Path: Practicing the Restful Way of Jesus in a Fragmented World. In Part 2 of the book, I invite us to consider Jesus invitation in Matthew 11:28-30 to “walk with him” as an invitation to walk with his church. Today, I’m sharing an excerpt from Chapter 6, “One Center: A Rule for Holding Together the Unity in Diversity of God’s Beloved Community.”

Unity of diversity in the eucharist

No act of worship combines loving, embodied presence and humble, prayerful listening more completely than the liturgy of eucharist. Week in and week out, we reenact the drama of the broken body of Christ made whole when every child, woman, and man walks to the front to receive the gifts of God for the people of God, while healing pray-ers stand by waiting for the ones who can’t make it that far. I will also never forget the times I have watched our pastors serve to the end of the communion line and then, while we remained in the sanctuary savoring the wine on our lips, walked the bread and cup out to the parking lot where they knew they would find folks who just couldn’t get through the barrier of the church door. This is the beauty of Jesus’ body broken for us and his blood spilled for us.

The eucharistic liturgy is old and broad enough to articulate all I strove for in years of restless worship and anxious altar calls that stressed personal relationship with Jesus as something distinct from participating in God’s loving communion. I have found rest knowing that no matter how convicting the sermon or provoking the altar call, at the beginning of the service, it’s God the Father who gathers us; during the service, it’s God’s Spirit that inhabits our praises, and at the end of the service it is Jesus himself hosting the feast.

Unity of diversity in the communion of saints

I began seeking the wisdom of Christians outside of our own time and place when I began to experience the severe limitations of not understanding our place within this enormous lineage of Christianity. While the people of God in the Old and New Testament remain the foundation for understanding what it means to live in this world as a community of Christians, a whole lot has occurred between the book of Acts and now!

This desire to dig into the roots of my Christianity is what led me to appreciate things like the church calendar and classic spiritual disciplines. I’m grateful to saints and prophets from every age, and for countless contemporary teachers, poets, artists, and keepers of the faith. It’s a rich heritage, and every time I hope to grow in a particular spiritual practice like a Rule of Life, I’m reminded I’m surrounded by this beloved community of the church. In my practice of a Rule of Life, I rely on the direction of people of color and other marginalized voices so that I practice contemplation and community with those who have lived different experiences than my own. I do this by nurturing real life relationships with people who are not white like me in my work, church, family, and neighborhood, by reading and studying authors and scholars from different ethnicities, and by expanding my imagination for a range of cultural expressions found in art, music, and movies. In every area of my life, a Rule of Life on the spacious path prompts me to ask the question “Who’s missing from this conversation?”

Because we live with Christ in community, we cultivate a Rule of Life in ways particular to us and to our local congregation, as well as to the work of the global and historic church. We locate our stories as part of a community of loving, embodied presence with God, each other, and our full-dimensional human selves. We locate our true stories wrapped up in God’s grand story. Centering a Rule of Life in the baptized community of God has helped me welcome my own story of being named Beloved.

—from Chapter 7, “Centering in the Beloved” pp. 115-116

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As you read about the communion of saints, who are the people (from this era or the ones before us) who have influenced you? Who do you want to follow as they follow(ed) Christ?

Read, reflect, journal, and share your own responses with the rest of us in the comment section below.