Peacemaking Together

We are called to be a missionary people. We are called to answer spiritual questions. People are asking different questions today. Peacemaking helps us answer contemporary questions. Peacemaking helps us be a people that are true, real, and beautiful. 

The church is the most overpromised and underdelivered product today. 

Christianity is not about what we do, it's about what we are. 

Expansive faith means that although the Bible is truth, it's not the only truth. Be open to science and art and philosophy. When we are open we build bridges to others. The Church is not a fortress we hide inside. We are called to go into the world - not to be the world but to go into the world - to connect, to love, to bring peace, to bring Christ into the world. 

The Hebrew word shalom means more that the absence of war. It is harmony, it is bringing love, light, and compassion to others. 

See people as people - do not see them as their mistakes, their sins, or their labels. 

Peacemakers are seen by the world as the children of God. How does the world see me?

The three tools of peacemaking are faith (mine is a broken hammer and some bent nails), love, and community. 

Love doesn't work as the only tool in your box. Richard Rohr says love is not love until you don't expect something back. Love is dynamic. 

You can't go backwards in life. The only way to deal with fear is to go forward into it and through it. 

Burdens should be shared. That makes them meaningful. 

What is God giving us to do as a community so that we can sow peace into the world? The mission starts with our commitment to this community. 

Spiritual Questions

One problem with sharing the faith is that evangelical Christians are answering questions no one is asking. But the Gospel is both a confrontation and an accommodation. We need to listen to the questions people are asking and see how the Gospel answers those questions. 

We need to balance confrontation and accommodation. We also need to make sure that are answers aren't seen as meaningless because they don't touch on the questions people ask. 

Every generation has different questions. Baby Boomers and those older grew up in a world where institutions were viewed as good. They live to work - career is tantamount. They underparented their children because schools did so much. They tend to be idealists and think problems should be solved. They experienced great social upheaval and they were last American generation to experience a great Christian revival (the Jesus Movement). They viewed truth as objective - there is the Truth. 

Key spiritual question: What is true?

These people are losing power in society. No longer largest cohort. 

Generation X is pessimistic rather than optimistic. These are the underparented. They do not view institutions as good. They work to live rather than live to work. They look to friends for identity - not society. First generation to experience postmodernism. They do not believe in objective truth. More comfortable with questions than answers. 

Key Question: What is real?

Millennials grew up in child-centered homes. Science and technology shaped them. They are not actually lazy. They are pragmatic and want to change the world for the better. 

Key Question: What is good?

Willing to partner with anyone, regardless of belief system, to reach their goals. 

Today's children, born after 2003, greatly influenced by the democratization of art. 

Key Question: What is beautiful?

What does the Gospel say to these questions? We need to think differently. We need to be peacemakers, carrying forward the incarceration of Christ into the world. We will measure our success, our spiritual authenticity, by how much good we bring to others. 

Three activities of peacemaking:

1. Refuse to objectify others. It is not a black-and-white world. Receive and love people regardless. Bring Christ to everyone. If we can't do this, our mission is dead in the water. 

2. Seek reconciliation. We need to be a mediating influence. What can I do to bring Christ into this place. 

3. Bring the Kingdom where it is not. If you see hungry people, violence, environmental damage, etc. - these are not of the Kingdom. 

How can we bring beauty to the world?

Art

The sermon is based on Matthew 25:14-30. We are invited to put ourselves into the story. It is the Parable of the Talents. 

Talents were worth a lot. Even one talent pretty much equals an average lifetime of earning. Looked at this way, the servant with one talent spent his lifetime of work avoiding any productive use of his talent. One translation has the master displaying disgust for the "play it safe guy who won't go out on a limb."

Not using my talents for God equals an absence of joy. We express love by using our gifts for God. 

The word talent in its present meaning came from this parable. That is way cool. 

Talent means "the natural endowments of a person." When we don't use our talents "we forfeit our own good."

God doesn't ask for more than what we are capable of doing or being. 

In the "divorce" between Catholics and Protestants, Protestants got the Bible and Catholics got everything else. We cannot lose the art - the beauty that saves the world. 

God is the Great Creator and our creativity is our imaging of God. Art is spirituality. 

Art is the expression or application of human skill and creativity. 

To create is to bring into being. 

Acting intuitively is acting on truth without conscious reasoning (instinctive). 

We are gifted with stories. We have a sacred duty to clothe the world in stories. 

Why don't we create? Fear. Creating and sharing what we create makes us vulnerable. 

Come what may, I will create today. 

Prayer is a right brain activity. It is creative. It allows God's creativity to be expressed through us. Contemplate where you allowed God's creativity to flow today and where you blocked that flow. 

"What we play is life." Louis Armstrong

Michelangelo believed every stone held a figure captive and he sent these prisoners free. When we create we set free the beauty in the world. 

We put ourselves into our art and into our story. 

The Wordless Art of Storytelling

How do you tell a story without words?Of course, given the title of the sermon, I immediately thought of dance, silent movies, charades, the movement of story. Photography and visual art sprang to mind as well; and, of course, illustration. Children's books show us how to tell a story without words.
We provide story as a subtext of life. We storify everything. Storification is what humans do - I think it is a reflection of the idea that we are made in God's image. Other species love, some better than us, but what are their stories? Do they also storify life?
Biblical stories have been extensively illustrated. That was how illiterate laity learned about God in the Middle Ages; hence, the centrality of Christian art. We largely lost that in the Reformation with the rise of sola scriptura. But, with the loss of art, we lost part of what made Christianity the "beautiful religion" to the early Russian tribes who chose to convert to Christianity because of its beauty.
Words, of course, have beauty too (I am a writer, after all); but I am with Alice in Alice's in Wonderland, who saw little use of a story without illustrations.
None of this has anything to do with the sermon - I am off on a tangent. But it's worth chasing this particular white rabbit, even if it doesn't have a pocket watch, in part because it meshes so well with the story I wrote for Tuesday.
Jesus was a god who told stories; but, Jesus also illustrated God without and beyond words.
Perhaps storifying our life becomes art when we live with intention and awareness.
"A poet is a person who takes words and does something with them, makes something personal and original out of them."
A person who tells stories with intention illustrates the nature of God.
"We are all illustrating a story, whether we know it or not." Our actions illustrate the words we use to tell the story of our life.