Word of Life Church Podcast

<p>In Mark chapter ten we find two stories back to back that exemplify how we should and should not pray. In the first story James and John approach Jesus saying, "We want you to do for us whatever we ask." This self-agenda based prayer is met with rebuff from Jesus. In the second story the blind beggar Bartimaues simply prayers, "Lord, have mercy on me." Jesus responds to this humble, open-ended plea for mercy with, "What do you want me to do for you?" It wasn't the two disciples who knew how to pray, but the blind beggar.</p>

<p>If there’s a secret to making progress as a Christian pilgrim, it’s this: When following Jesus gets hard and discouraging and confusing—and it will!—just don’t quit, but keep on pressing on.</p>

<p>The modern adage goes, "I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual." But what does that mean and where does it come from? The modern contempt for religion doesn't come from Jesus and the Apostles, it comes from the likes of Voltaire and Nietzsche. Jesus was religious. Throughout his life Jesus engaged in religious practices. Religion is essential to spiritual formation. If we hope to be formed as Christian people we can't leave it up to vague notions of abstract spirituality, instead we need the practices and disciplines that belong to the received wisdom of the Christian religion.</p>

<p>The Christian life is a journey, a pilgrimage. It's not a static state of being, but a call to follow Jesus. The point of the journey is not so much where we're going, but what we're becoming. Jesus didn't say, "Follow me and I will take you..." Jesus said, "Follow me and I will make you..."</p>

<p>In the fifth century BC Ezra led Jerusalem in a revival of fidelity to the Torah by exhorting those who had married Samaritan women to divorce them and send them away along with their children. But what happens if we invite Jesus into the story? Things change. Jesus never used the word grace, but his whole life was an embodiment of grace. Jesus embodied the grace of God by always making room at the table for the excluded other.</p>

<p>Zechariah is the prophet of the comeback. Israel had been on a long losing streak. A divided kingdom, a civil war, corrupt kings and priests, Israel conquered by Assyria, Judah conquered by Babylon, and worst of all, the Temple of God destroyed. It's under these bleak conditions that Zechariah dares to prophesy of a comeback for Israel. Not only will the Temple be rebuilt, but Israel's true king will come to Jerusalem. This king won't ride the warhorse; he'll enter Jerusalem on the peace donkey. But Zechariah also prophesies that the Peaceable King will be the Pierced King.</p>

<p>God's people were living in exile in Babylon. The world around them had grown dark. No light. No temple. No Sabbath. No God. No hope. Into this dark cloud of despair comes a word from elsewhere from Isaiah of the Exile. He brings a word of comfort, a word of encouragement -- the God of Israel was coming to rescue and save.<br><br>Isaiah poetic word of prophecy was filled with seven themes:<br>1. God is creator. (Is. 40:28-31)<br>2. Israel is God’s servant. (Is. 43:10-11)<br>3. Idolatry is stupid. (Is. 44:9, 14-19) <br>4. Israel has sinned and thus suffered. (Is. 48:3-5) <br>5. God is compassionate. (Is. 49:13-18)<br>6. God’s messenger is coming. (Is. 52:7-8, 13-15; 53:1-9)<br>7. New creation awaits. (Is. 65:17-25)<br><br>In this we see the gospel in miniature.</p>

<p>We live in a secular age with this consensus, the way things are is the way things will be. In this secular age, there is little room for dreaming. Dreams are seen as the practice of children, but what if we could learn to dream again? What new possibilities might open up before us as we embrace this sacred practice of the imagination. From the dreams of Isaiah to the visions of John the Revelator, we are invited to join in the long history of sacred dreaming.</p>

<p>The story of Jeremiah is a tragedy -- a tragedy that foreshadows the tragedy and suffering of Christ. Jeremiah, like Jesus, lived and preached in a tragic time as Jerusalem hurdled toward destruction. Like Jesus, Jeremiah protested the Temple, was arrested, and publicly scourged. Jeremiah described himself as a lamb led to the slaughter. But Jeremiah also prophesied of a better day built upon a New Covenant. In the life of Jeremiah we see the tragic elements of the gospel story, but we also find echoes of hope, because in Christ no story is left as a tragedy.</p>

<p>Tucked away in the middle of the often bleak and sometimes scathing Minor Prophets we find a comedy: The book of Jonah. This reluctant prophet turns out to be the most successful evangelist in the Old Testament. But how it happened is funny. When God calls Jonah to travel five hundred miles East and preach to Israel’s despised enemies the Ninevites, Jonah buys a ticket on a ship sailing two thousand miles West! In his flight from God, Jonah accidentally converts a ship full of heathen sailors, is swallowed by a whale, and is finally spit out on the shores of Nineveh. After Jonah’s bleak doomsday sermon everyone in the great city of Nineveh repents. Even the animals repent and don garments of mourning. Imagine cats and dogs, cows and pigs wearing burlap to show sorrow for their sin. Yes, this is a comedy. What we find in the dramatic comedy of Jonah is an Old Testament theology of mercy — a theology that will eventually find full expression in the life and teaching of Jesus.</p>

<p>Isaiah of Jerusalem gave us three of the most important Messianic songs of salvation -- The Immanuel Song, The Prince of Peace Song, The Lion and Lamb Song. These songs all find their fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth as he brings God's presence, God's peace, and God's kingdom.</p>

<p>The parables of Jesus are not nice and conventional stories with a moral lesson. Neither are they stories designed to simply get us to pray a “sinner’s prayer.” Anyone who thinks this is what Jesus’ parables are about has clearly not read them! There is nothing nice or easy, clear or conventional about Jesus’ parables. If anything, Jesus’ parables are crazy, confusing, and most of all disorienting. But why? Jesus’ parables are designed to disorient us from our conventional assumptions so we can be coaxed into the alternative and un-imagined universe that is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is nothing less than an alternative way (God’s way!) to arrange the world.</p>

<p>The Prophets are not predictors or political activists; they are poets. These poet/prophets assume the role of pulling back the curtain in society to reveal how things really are and what God is really like. Hosea does just that with a bold prophetic performance. He reveals the truth about Israel's unfaithfulness while also revealing the truth about God's faithfulness. Are we willing to face our own brokenness, pain, and sin? Because in doing so, we will discover a God who is ready and willing to heal, comfort, and forgive.</p>

<p>The fear of global terrorism creates anxiety, no doubt, the question is what do we do with our anxiety? There is the response of anger, hate, and the compulsion to stand up and fight on one hand and the response to suppress how we feel, disengage, and live comfortably numb on the other.<br><br>Jesus shows us a better way.<br><br>Jesus does not call us to stand up and fight for what is right. He does not call us to hide and pretend like injustice and fear are not real. Jesus invites us to live peaceably in a world of terror. Paul gives us at least 20 things we can do to live peaceably in his instructions to the church in Rome in Romans 12. As we live peaceably we can have hope for peace in our world.</p>

<p>What are the Hebrew prophets up to? What’s their agenda? The prophets call us to integrity—to wholeness of being. Religious people tend to build walls to separate the sacred and secular, but the prophets will not tolerate this bifurcation of being. The prophets use their poems like battering rams to break down the walls we build to separate the sacred from the secular. The poet-prophets thunder, "There is no secular! It’s all sacred!"<br><br>The Hebrew prophets simply will not tolerate the separation of worship and justice. Worship is how we relate to God and justice is how we relate to our neighbor. False religion says as long as we believe right and worship right, we can get away with treating our neighbor wrong, that our sins will be hidden by our worship. But the prophets vehemently disagree with this! All of them. This is a consistent theme throughout the Hebrew prophets.</p>

<p>The bonus track in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "Song for Someone" by U2.<br><br>And I’m a long, long way from your Hill of Calvary<br>And I’m a long way from where I was and where I need to be<br>If there is a light you can’t always see<br>And there is a world we can’t always be<br>If there is a dark that we shouldn’t doubt<br>And there is a light, don’t let it go out<br>And this is a song, a song for someone<br>-U2<br><br>Check out the music video above.<br><br>If there is a secret to the Christian life, it's this: Just don’t give up, don't quit, don’t stop. Press on. We all stumble. We all fall. We don’t have to be perfect, we just have to press on. Perfectionism is the enemy of true progress. When imperfect people seriously aspire to perfection the results are disastrous. People who find themselves in a culture where perfection is expected are forced to pretend. To live in a world of pretense is to live outside of reality. And there’s another word for living outside or reality—insanity! <br><br>When we try to be perfect we find it impossible to be good. The pretense of perfection leads people to be legalistic, judgmental, proud, duplicitous, depressed and generally screwed up from the cognitive dissonance of an expectation that is cruelly contradicted by reality. “Perfect” people cannot be good. This why perfectionist groups always implode in spectacular scandal! If because of an expectation of perfection and a fear of rejection we can’t bring our sin into the light of confession and forgiveness, it grows in the dark until it becomes an uncontrollable monster! But the good news is, we don’t have to be perfect! The only perfection Jesus calls us to is perfection of mercy.</p>

<p>Song nine in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "War in the Mind" by Lauryn Hill. <br><br>"The prophet knew that religion could distort what the Lord demanded of man, that priests themselves had committed perjury by bearing false witness, condoning violence, tolerating hatred, calling for ceremonies instead of bursting forth with wrath and indignation at cruelty, deceit, idolatry, and violence." –Abraham Joshua Heschel<br><br>"God needs prophets in order to make himself known, and all prophets are necessarily artistic. What a prophet has to say can never be said in prose." –Hans Urs von Balthsar</p>

<p>Song eight in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "Sing All Our Cares Away" by Damien Dempsey.<br><br>The power of song must never be underestimated. Don’t ever say, "but it’s just a song." Half the Bible is “just a song!” We’ve diminished the power of song because we’ve succumbed to empiricism. Song is not reason. Song is resistance—resistance to the totalizing of the facts. We sing to push back the “facts” and create room for hope to rise. And when hope rises, we rise with it. That’s when it becomes a Song of Ascent. The Hebrews have known this. The Irish have known this. African Americans have know this. And the church has always known this…unless we have forgotten it. The church is to be the community that sings the Jesus songs of faith, hope, and love.</p>

<p>Song seven in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "The Thief and The Friend" by Jason Upton.<br><br>"Many men are brave<br>And many men are strong<br>But few men have I ever seen<br>Who’ll fight for who’s right<br>And then fight for who’s wrong<br>Fight for the friend and the thief <br><br>But I’ve heard of you<br>You’ve got so many names<br>But you call yourself Son of Man<br>I’ve heard your song on the streets where I live<br>Heard it over and over again<br><br>Light a candle tonight let it shine, let it shine<br>Let it shine for the goodness and glory of God<br>Let it shine on the wrong<br>Let it shine on the right<br>And shine especially bright for the losers<br>I have given them hope and a future"<br><br>- Jason Upton</p>

<p>The sixth song in Finding God on your iPod 2015 is "Brother" by The Brilliance. The supreme Christian confession—Jesus is Lord—is a political statement. Those who confess Jesus is Lord are to seek to embody the politics of Jesus. What are the politics of Jesus? Not the politics of competition and conquest, but the politics of love. Love for God…love for neighbor…even love for enemy. Because when we look into the face our enemy…we see our brother.</p>

<p>The fifth song in Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "Us for Them" by Gungor. It’s easy to see we live in a world arranged around ‘Us vs. Them’—it's our organizing principle. But this arrangement produces hostility, hatred, and untold injustice and suffering. We may think that as long as “our side” wins it’s okay…but it’s not okay! It’s the way of death. If the world is to be saved and healed, it must be rescued from ‘Us vs. Them’—because the way of Cain always ends with Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and all manner of mass suffering.<br><br>So Jesus comes as the Savior of the world. Not to save us from God, but to save us from…us! Because the deep truth is this: There is no them, there is only us. In Christ the chosen people is the human race and the holy land is the whole earth.</p>

<p>The fourth song in Finding God on your iPod 2015 is "The Waterfall" by My Morning Jacket. Sometimes it feels like life is just piling one painful thing after another on top of <a href="http://us.The" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">us.The</a> power of the waterfall as a metaphor is in its unending relentlessness. Long before My Morning Jacket used the waterfall as a metaphor for how life can beat us down, the Sons of Korah used the waterfall as a metaphor in exactly the same way. So how do we stop the waterfall? How do we stop the endless cascades of pain? We can’t do it by stopping all the painful experiences. But here’s a secret:<br><br>Most of our pain is either retrieved from the past or borrowed from the future.<br><br>That’s the first part of the secret—that our pain is mostly not present, but retrieved or borrowed. The second part of the secret is this:<br><br>We stop the waterfall of pain by learning to live in the present moment present to God's eternal love.</p>

<p>Song three in Finding God on your iPod 2015 is "Mercy" by Muse. The cry, show me mercy from the powers that be, is actually this cry: Show me the church! Show me the body of Christ that is characterized by compassion and looks like Jesus! Without knowing it, Muse is actually being very prophetic; they’re saying, Please, church, won’t you act like Jesus so we can see mercy!<br><br>Which is why the church in America can be neither Democrat nor Republican. If we import their politics of power into the church, we import the spirits of the principalities and powers into the church and we become deeply compromised.<br><br>As Christians we don’t follow a donkey or an elephant…we follow the Lamb!</p>

<p>The second song for Finding God on Your iPod 2015 is "Don't Wanna Fight" by Alabama Shakes. We live in a combative age. It’s constantly modeled for us and if we're not careful we'll pick it up like a bad habit. If the church takes on a combative spirit, it has capitulated to the spirit of the age. To be Christian is not to be combative in the name of Jesus, but to be something else entirely. If the church is to be a city set on a hill, a light shining in a dark place, then we must turn away from the combative and turn toward the contemplative.<br><br>Jesus was a fighter, but his weapon was not a whip or a sword or a gun or a nuke. His weapon was a cross. On the cross Jesus laid down his life forgiving his enemies. His weapon was love, his weapon was forgiveness, his weapon was faith. And having seen Jesus on the cross forgiving his enemies…I don’t wanna fight no more.</p>

<p>First song in Finding God On Your iPod 2015 is "There Is No End To Love" by U2.<br><br>Finding God On Your iPod is not an attempt to be cute or clever; I take this sermon series very seriously. I think some of my best sermons in the past seven years have come from Finding God On Your iPod. "Don’t Drink The Water" (2012) and "Ain’t No Reason" (2014) come to mind. Preaching is an intrinsically artistic endeavor. Sermons without artistry are either just lectures or bad sermons. What the Bible calls prophets, we usually think of as poets. Isaiah and Jeremiah, Hosea and Amos, Zechariah and Malachi, and even John the Revelator were what we call poets. The poetic and the prophetic are closely related. And the most visible poets today are music artists. So Finding God On Your iPod is an exploration of prophetic and spiritual themes found in contemporary music; some of it is explicitly Christian, some of it is not. But you can be sure of this: Every song will lead to a sermon that is saturated with gospel message of Jesus.</p>

<p>We have all felt the restless weight of our culture's demands to want more, need more, and thus do more. Just as God heard the restless cry of his people in Egypt, God hears our cry. He is calling us out of The Madness of More and toward the promised land of plenty. Will we trust God to deliver, sustain, and provide?</p>

<p>Without seeing the kingdom all we are left with is a docile, sentimental, personal "Jesus" who has little to do with the world God loves and wants to save. Jesus without a kingdom is like an eagle without the open sky or a whale without the expansive ocean or a bear without the thick woods. You cannot lock up Jesus in the captivity of your own personal spirituality and expect to see Jesus as he is. To see Jesus as king requires you see the kingdom of God and catching a glimpse of the kingdom of God changes how you see everything else.</p>

<p>All of Creation—from the mightiest mountain to the tiniest grain of sand—is a gift from God. People and animals, plants and every grain of sand, all belong. To be rightly connected to God’s good Creation can bring dimensions of revelation and restoration that may come in no other way.</p>

<p>Is the blessing and mercy of Christ just for those in the center of God's will or is it also for those on the fringe? If we carefully observe Jesus in the Gospels the answer should be obvious. But the little Pharisee that lives in all of us objects to this. We need to ask ourselves if we are trying to reconcile scandalous grace with a moral economy of merit? If so, the kingdom of God will remain either invisible or offensive.</p>

<p>Life can have a way of becoming a grey tedium of dull routine for many people. Every day can seem very 'everyday.' In the midst of our seemingly humdrum lives, is there a way to redeem a sense of the holy? Is God closer than we might think? If so, how might we find him? And once we do, how might our lives change?</p>

<p>We know God by approximation and encounter. Within the approximation we have been given by the church we see that God is righteous. Righteousness is a Bible word that many fail to understand. God’s righteousness is his covenant faithfulness. This reimagining of the word righteousness fits within the big story the Bible tells: a story of creation, corruption, covenant, and new creation. God has remained faithful to his covenant to bless the world through Israel. As followers of Jesus the Messiah we are invited to participate with God in blessing and restoring the world as we seek after his covenant faithfulness and embody it as we live our lives of worship, work, and play.</p>

<p>Once we understand that Jesus is image of God, the exact imprint of God’s nature, and the only perfect theology, we can answer some important questions about God that in the past we humans have often gotten wrong.<br><br>Does God send the storm? No. He calms the storm.<br><br>Does God cause famines? No. He feeds the hungry.<br><br>Does God inflict sickness? No. He heals the sick.<br><br>Does God shun sinners? No. He welcomes them.<br><br>Does God condemn the guilty? No. He saves them.<br><br>Does God blame the afflicted? No. He shows them mercy.<br><br>Does God resent human pleasure? No. He turns the water to wine.<br><br>Does God take our side in our hostilities? No. He humanizes the other side.<br><br>Does God kill his enemies? No. He forgives them.<br><br>Does God return with revenge on his mind? No. He comes with words of peace.</p>

<p>Martha was distracted and worried about many things. But Mary had learned the secret of Real Presence. If we don't learn how to be really present to the Real Presence, we will be constantly harassed by pain from the past, distraction in the present, and anxiety about the future. In our age of distraction learning to practice Real Presence will bring much needed peace and healing to our souls.</p>

<p>When Jesus quoted from Isaiah 61 at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, he says the Spirit of the Lord is upon him to proclaim good news, liberation, restoration, and the year of God's favor. But Jesus omits Isaiah's line about "the vengeance of our God." Was it was a mistake? No. From what Jesus says next we know it was clearly intentional. Jesus came to bring the mercy of God and close the book on vengeance.</p>

<p>Whether it’s a flood, a famine or a Pharaoh…God will deliver you! When you’re facing a Goliath or in a lion’s den…God will deliver you! Even if the wine runs out, the boat is begins to sink or Lazarus begins to stink…God will deliver you! The point of salvation history is that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of Christ. But faith doesn’t mean that everything will always turn out just the way you want it to. Shall we say that God failed to deliver these heroic sufferers and faithful martyrs? Of course not! God delivered them through the testing of their faith, not from the testing of faith. Isaiah sawn asunder was not less delivered than Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego.</p>

<p>When we follow the example of Stephen we discover a life filled with the Holy Spirit as we remain open to God in prayer, acknowledging his presence with us and his love for us.</p>

<p>In the final hours before his crucifixion Jesus is blamed, accused, condemned. The Sanhedrin accused Jesus of blasphemy; Pilate convicted him of insurrection. But Jesus is neither a blasphemer nor a violent revolutionary—he is blameless. Indeed, he is the only truly blameless one—he is the innocent Lamb of God. But Jesus takes the blame anyway. All of it. He doesn’t try to defend himself. Jesus doesn’t argue, Jesus doesn’t defend himself, Jesus doesn’t even open his mouth. Why? Because Jesus takes all the blame. Jesus doesn’t deserve any of the blame, but… Jesus bears it. He takes it. He carries it. He absorbs it. All of it. Why? Because he’s the Lamb of God—the completely innocent scapegoat who takes all our blame. Jesus is the Lamb of God. And what does the Lamb of God do? The Lamb of God takes away all the sin of the world. Jesus takes away all the blame of the world. Where does he take it way to? To hell, to Sheol, to the grave. Where it belongs! And Jesus leaves it there…in hell…where it belongs…where satan belongs!</p>

<p>O LORD, the hope of Israel!<br>All who forsake you shall be put to shame.<br>Those who turn away from you <br>shall be written in the dust,<br>for they have forsaken the LORD,<br>the fountain of living water.<br>–Jeremiah 17:13<br><br>If we use the Bible to condemn other people…<br>If we use the Bible as a weapon to trap our enemies…<br>If we use the Bible as a barrier to dam the river of God’s mercy…<br>We are written in the dust.</p>

<p>The journey from Sinai to Tabor…<br>The journey from Exodus to Matthew…<br>The journey from the Old Testament to the New Testament…<br>The journey from God hidden in darkness to God revealed in light…<br>The journey from seeing the back of God to seeing the face of God…<br>Is the journey of the progressive revelation of God found in Scripture.<br>It's the journey from Back of God Theology to Face of God theology.</p>

<p>In Acts 2 we find the believers devoting themselves to “the prayers.” In Acts 4 we find the believers lifting their voices in spontaneous prayer. We need both: The formation of liturgical prayer and the spontaneity of improvisational prayer.</p>

<p>"Sitting with Jesus" is a form of contemplative prayer. There are breakthroughs in spiritual development that can occur through contemplative prayer that can occur no other way. Either we gain new perspectives through contemplative prayer or we forever look at the world through the same old lens of frightened self-interest. It is in contemplative prayer (or "sitting with Jesus") that universal love becomes possible.</p>

<p>We all know we live in a broken world. From Fallujah to Ferguson, Beirut to Baltimore, there’s too much hate, too much war, too much poverty, too much sorrow. Some religious folk just want to post a “condemned” sign and abandon the world. Their escapist fantasy is to fly off to some other world. But this is not the blessed hope. God still loves our beautiful and broken world, and the Carpenter of Nazareth came to restore it, not condemn it. The Hebrew prophets dreamed of a day when all things would be restored. Their poems speak of lions lying down with lambs, swords turning into plowshares, barren wastelands being healed, and every bitter tear wiped away. After Pentecost the apostles preached that Jesus is the hero of the poet’s dream. So this is our gospel: The world is broken because we are broken…but Jesus restores all things!<br>That God may send Jesus<br>The Christ appointed for you<br>Whom heaven must receive<br>Until the time<br>For the restoration<br>Of all things<br>-The Apostle Peter (Acts 3:20-21)</p>

<p>The Apostle Paul says that he received his revelation directly from Christ. Paul never knew the historical Jesus of Nazareth, but he did know the risen and ascended Christ of the Cosmos. Paul also says that it is this "Christ of the Cosmos" who has been given all authority in heaven and on earth.</p>

<p>If we don’t perceive the importance of Pentecost, it’s because we don’t perceive how the gospel culminates with the creation of the Church. The catholicity of the Church is not about speaking one language. (That's Babylon.) It's about one gospel spoken in many tongues. We must not shrink Pentecost to an individual spiritual experience. Pentecost isn't about individualism; it's about our unity in the Holy Spirit.</p>

<p>Armageddon. It's word that only appears once in the Bible, but few words have captured popular imagination more than Armageddon. As such it's much used and and abused by the popular misinterpreters of Revelation. To hear them tell it, the world is being drawn inevitably toward an unpreventable war. But this is a horrible misinterpretation. Our looming Armageddons are always a possibility, but never an inevitability. Armageddon is inevitable only if that's what we want. Armageddon is inevitable only if we refuse to follow the Lamb. Armageddon is inevitable only if we follow dragons, beasts, and false prophets.</p>

<p>The only thing Jesus ever talked about was the Kingdom of God. Think of it as the Government of God; God's politics of grace; God's alternative to anti-human empire.<br><br>Jesus announced the Government of God in disorienting parables about a curious grace and a new kind of justice that upends the established order. Jesus said that with the coming of God's Government, "many who are first will be last and the last will first."<br><br>Jesus enacted the Government of God by miracles of healing and provision, the "unauthorized" forgiveness of sinners, and a table practice of radical hospitality.<br><br>The Government of God that Jesus announced and enacted isn't about dying and going to heaven. The Government of God is about heaven's politics of grace and justice coming to earth—as Jesus taught us to pray, "Thy Government come, Thy Politics be done, on earth as it is in heaven."</p>

<p>We certainly need fresh encounters with the Holy Spirit, but we also need the wisdom of the historic church. We need the Holy Spirit and we need the creeds. We need the power of the Spirit and we need the writings of the church fathers. We need the gifts of the Spirit and we need the traditions of the church. We need an openness to the surprising work of the Holy Spirit and we need serious, theological study of Scripture.<br><br>One of the ways to bridge the gap between these kinds of needs is to reflect upon the Holy Spirit using "Come, Creator Spirit," a 9th century hymn to the Holy Spirit. What we see among other things in considering this hymn is the Holy Spirit is not only the breath of God, but the touch of God; the place where God touches humanity.</p>

<p>Most of our problems in church life are rooted in worship problems driven by theology problems. This phenomenon is why the Apostle Paul addressed problems in the ancient church with answers in what we think and what we say about God. The god we believe in is the god we will worship. Worship the wrong god and experience the road to destruction and heartache. Christians worship the one God, the creator God, the God of Israel. We worship one God, but whatever it meant for God to be one was radically rethought by Paul by Jesus and the Spirit. The one God we worship is a holy community of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.</p>

<p>The branches of our life that are incapable of transmitting the life of Jesus will eventually be burned. The branches of our life that are capable of transmitting the life of Jesus will eventually be cut back. But if we keep abiding in the mystery of Jesus, the pruned places of pain and loss will become the source of great grace to help heal others.</p>