Being Alone

This past Thursday, I had business in Edmonton with a colleague who rode along on the way up. On the way back, I drove alone, and it was wonderful — like something you've missed desperately without realizing it.

To be sure, I've had my alone times each morning on my daily walk, but somehow the focus on listening to the lectures or sermons makes it a different sort of alone time. And also, there have been times alone in the house when no one else is there — physically, anyway. But somehow peoples' auras still remain behind in so many ways that one doesn't really get quite the same sense.

With all the activities surrounding my son's wedding this past weekend, and with so many other things before that, I have not had the opportunity for the times of aloneness that my soul seems to need — or is it that I have not disciplined myself to take such sabbath times? Whichever it is, I am sure that without the tradition of silence at the end of the Maundy Thursday service, and the periods of silence throughout the Good Friday service that we were able to attend at the local Anglican church, I may not have made it through these last weeks with my sanity intact.

This blog has been an obvious indicator of the lack of silence and aloneness in my life. I'm coming to realize that blogging — at least for me — is something that flows out of that sabbath alone time. The thoughts and reflections that run around in my head never properly gel otherwise — they remain just impressions, feelings, at best half-articulated ideas. So even when time and access to one of our computers is available, the capacity to get into the space of writing is simply not there.

Seen this way, perhaps struggles with the discipline of blogging, or journaling, is not so much a failure in and of itself, but rather a symptom of a failure to to maintain the discipline of sabbath — of wasting time on God, because He is worth more than the various and sundry other things that so absorb my time.

Of course, this raises the question, How then shall I rearrange my life to respond to this insight? That too may require some alone time.

« Continue »

The Sea at the End of the World

Stand still, and see the Salvation of our God.

That is what Moses told the people of Israel when they were standing at the edge of the yom soph — the sea at the end of the world, traditionally identified with the Red Sea, but in the mythology of Egypt much more like the realm of chaos and destruction; the place later peoples would call Tartarus or Hades — and were looking back at the dust clouds raised by Pharoah's armies, charging towards them, hell bent on destruction.

The people of Israel had seen the power of God displayed mightily in the contest of plagues, but here they were, only days later, in despair. They were, so far as they could see, totally beyond hope; trapped at the edge of the sea at the end of the world, with no way forward or bacj but into death. Perhaps it is only when we stand on the very brink of the end of the world that we are really in a place to understand the great salvation of our God.

Later, Moses would command the people to tell this story again and again — to their children, to their grandchildren, to themselves — so that they would never forget the great salvation of our God.

On Thursday evening, Carrie did just as Moses had commanded, as she told us the story of her own journey to the sea at the end of the world, and standing there in despair, as the Egyptians were racing in to sweep up everything that was left of her world. But really, her story was the invitation again to stand still and see the salvation of our God — a salvation that, like for the people of Israel, led not away from the sea at the end of the world, but through it.

Tomorrow, Holy Week begins. A week when we are invited once again to enter into the story of the great salvation of our God — when we are invited to walk with Jesus as he makes his journey to the sea at the end of the world. We are invited to walk with Jesus right up to the very pit of hell, and watch as he plumbs its depths.

The thing that draws us to this story, the thing that made Mel Gibson's cinematic retelling of it such a box office event, is not the gore and the violence and the destruction. It is instead that here, in this story, we finally see the ultimate salvation of our God, as God once again parts the waters of the sea at the end of the world — Hell itself — and makes a path not just through the valley of the shadow of death, but through death itself.

This story is the real story — the reality that the Exodus story foreshadows, and that Carrie's story echoes. The story of how in dying we are born into eternal life — the story of the great salvation of our God.

« Continue »

TheBolgBlog: Dreams for My School

A seminary training model is built around the idea that a single person or a set of staff workers has most of the gifts in a particular church community and then we train that one person or group of persons. But, what do we do when the gifts are spread throughout the community as they are in many new forms of church? How do we continue to train the many, rather than the few?

In the first of a series of posts about his dreams for Fuller Seminary, Ryan Bolger introduces his first dream with the foregoing observation. In many ways, his description of the emerging type of church where leadership is distributed among the people reminds me strongly of what we Baptists have long said we believed in: the universal priesthood of believers.

My experience to date, though, has been that this belief is one we tend to hold intellectually, but we have never really tried to believe it experientially in our churches and our seminaries. I'm not sure if this is a result of the lure of power among the clerical class, or whether it is that our people broadly are just like the Israelites at Mount Sinai. After God spoke directly to the people, they insisted to Moses that they wanted him to go between them and God, and promised that they would listen to him and follow his leadership — just don't let God speak directly to us any more.

Whatever the reason, I have long had a dream of being part of a local congregation which did indeed express the kind of broad-based, communal approach to leadership, teaching, and many other spiritual offices. Ryan Bolger's dream sounds very familiar to me.

« Continue »