Where God Is: Lukes 132 word subversive transformative Christmas gospel (“Slow Church” Meditations for Advent, Christmas, Epiphany) By Rev. Ron Robinson, UUCF Executive Director (In this article below are my meditations for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany Day for you and yours, weaving in my seasonal companion this year, the book Slow Church by Chris Smith and John Pattison, encouraging all to have a Slow Christmas this year.) ….The gospel of Luke brings us the ancient story for the first time, and it is a powerful story of the real place of power of hope and change, of liberation and love. In the old and familiar words recited every year by candlelight there is a clear choice presented about the kind of God we are called to follow, and how to shape communities, relationships, and lives in the image of that God… From Luke 2: “In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn…” There we have it. Centuries worth of words and struggles of two visions of God, of Church, encapsulated in Luke’s 132 words. It begins with the status quo, then and now, a world of Decrees, Messages, Empire, Power Over, Places of Influence and Wealth, of Accomplishment and Safety and Sameness. It is, then and now, where so many turned to find the good life, to find (named or not) God and the power in their lives. It ends--that simple story, that simple start to the grander story—with a subversive, world overturning image of God’s real spirit and power incarnated not in Rome but in Bethlehem, occupied by military legions, incarnated not in Emperors but in outcasts among the outcast, not in might and certainty but in the fragile vulnerability of a newborn dependent upon others struggling to live themselves and upon a world filled mostly with violence, incarnated not in a Decree, a message, an Idea, a Principle but in a person and a people, incarnated not in palaces or even in public spaces and expected places like an inn where those with privilege could find or buy shelter but in a manger among animals and where three humans snuggled together from the cold and in the dark. It is all there in those 132 words of scripture. Those words are embedded themselves in a story that in both its volumes, Luke and Acts, would arc from John the Baptist to Jesus to Peter to Paul. It would arc even from Adam in the genealogy of Luke to us the readers/hearers, who, like Paul near the end of his own letter to the church in Rome, are always on the road to Rome and then on to Spain ahead of us, much like the resurrected Jesus at Eastertime who is always going ahead of us to Galilee (such a short time away that is, Christmas to Easter, like life itself from cradle to grave) beckoning us to follow, to be with one another along the way and to do so “in the way” of Jesus which is from the start a different way than that of Augustus. How do we reclaim this way, this Christmas anti-decree, this community sustained by a subversive, transformative power? This year for Advent and Christmas and Epiphany (that trinity of church seasons that mirrors the trilogy of Lent and Easter and Pentecost) I am responding to that question by lifting up for us the spiritual truths and practices found in a new book which captures much of these different visions of God and Community. It is a way to re-enter into the radical story of Luke’s gospel and vision of Christ’s birth, a vision that sets Christ against dominance and dominion in all their cultural forms today, including in the Church, the State, the Corporation, as they were once set against Caeser. The book is “Slow Church: cultivating Community in the Patient way of Jesus” by Chris Smith and John Pattison (Intervarsity Press, 2014, with a foreward by new monastic leader Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove). Slow Church is a manifestation and elaboration of the contemplative stream that has run throughout church history to help its rejuvenation and to take it into its deepest waters. The authors say it is particularly time once more to focus on this tradition in new ways because of the ways the “fast food” culture has enveloped the church through the Church Growth Movement’s commodification of the church and its strategy of employing the HUP (homogenous unit principle) that denies the biblical witness of finding God in right relationships with those different from us and in fact with those we consider enemies. Among other names for Slow Church that are also finding adherents today is Simple Church, Organic Church, New Monastic Church, Missional Church, but Slow Church connects itself to the counter Dominant Culture movements outside of traditional church settings in Slow Food, Slow Money, Slow Design, etc. And this season of Advent and Christmas, with its seemingly inherent aspects of rushing, spending, anxiety, and depression, is a good time for the church to re-orient itself to lead the culture in doing so.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 23:59:51 +0000
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