So much is happening.  It looks like today’s post might be one of those eclectic, A.D.D. posts.

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Last weekend Katrina and I drove all the way up to middle Tennessee for a family reunion retreat in the middle of Natchez Trace State Park.  It was an amazing journey up (including submitting a paper for a class by email while sitting in a Super 8 Motel parking lot!), and Katrina and I had a lot of time to talk a bunch of big things through.  The weekend itself was very nostalgic/avant-garde.  My family is a mixture of ultra-conservative non-institutional Church of Christ folks, and a branch of extreme-prophetic non-denominational neo-charismatics.  And then there’s Katrina and I who “don’t go to church anywhere”.  So its always interesting when we bust out the song books and break out in worship.  Good ole’ unity in Christ.  I guess Paul said we were “one” in Christ, not one in church.  Surprisingly, we had a lot of people get really excited about our mission work, and committed to praying for us.  Awesome!

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This Saturday is Wikicclesia, a chance for people who are living on the edges of God’s Kingdom and/or leading communities of God to come together and share what they’ve learned so far.  That’s why we’re calling it “Wikicclesia” - “cclesia” since that is the Greek word for gathering or church, and “wiki” because its set up not as a lecture-conference, but with lots of round tables, markers, and huge sheets of paper for brainstorming.  Everyone is encouraged to share what they’ve learned, which informs how the day goes - think of the day as an article on Wikipedia - the whole thing takes shape under the leadership of many, and truthfully, under the leadership of the Spirit.  Cool!  If you’re in the area and would like to attend, follow the link above and contact those at that email address.  Or just leave me a comment.

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We’re reading some great books, thanks to a little book on speed reading.  Here’s a few on our list right now:  Deep Economy: the wealth of economies and the durable future,  Global Chicago, Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything, and The Jesus Way: a conversation on the ways that Jesus is the Way.   Speed reading has been such a “freeing” tool for me and her lately; we have so much we want to learn (and remember) and speed reading helps us through the stack of library books before they’re all due.  And the TV can just stay off for all I’m concerned.

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Yesterday I went out with Kent and Miller to the 411 Project.  Miller and others have been working hard!  Much of the land has been cleared, simple shelters and structures have been erected, goats have a real pen, chickens have their roost…and the well is being dug.  Miller plans to use the dirt dug out for the well to make compressed earth blocks for his family’s house.  It was great fun learning and working with him on the making a few of these powerful bricks.  I’ve not written on this before, but Katrina and I are keenly interested in this type of building as a sustainable and durable alternative (not to mention affordable!) to traditional stick-and-insulation homes for our own living situation.  While the project is just getting started, I can say already that the 411 project has brought beauty out of a forgotten land, and is restoring it to a state that brings glory to God.

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I suppose that’s what I’ve got time to toss up here for now.  I keep waiting for the summer to slow down so I can get in a more blogarific mood, but I’m still waiting I guess.  Time to catch up on reading your blog!

Last night was an amazing time of intergenerational “discernment of the Body”.

One of our great friends here in town, Karen, had invited us to meet with her church family because Father had moved her to pray for the people in the state of Texas. Trina and I are always looking for excuses to hang out with Karen and her husband Kent (my prof and mentor), so we asked our church to come along with us.

The conversation was incredible. Meeting with several older couples was very enriching to our group. After some time of solid prayer and singing (how long has it been since our church has done any a cappella singing?) Kent mentioned that it might be a good time to hear what we have been hearing from the Spirit in our own lives…then he corrected himself and said we really need to share what we’d heard from him, since it edifies the whole Body…then pausing, he said, “so you’d jolly-well BETTER NOT hold back!” with a smile on his face. That really got the conversation rolling.

While we came to focus on the state of Texas, we found ourselves moving toward issues of climate change and how industrialized nations are “raping the earth” in their quest for economic prosperity and political supremacy. The utilization of fossil fuels has allowed nations like the United States to live on the “high hog”, careening through a lifestyle that capitalizes on resources that have been building on this planet for millions of years, and tearing through the majority of them in just the last 100. One man said that as he was flying home from Europe two weeks ago, he looked down on Greenland, once a huge sheet of solid ice, now has massive blue lakes all over its surface. This fresh water is boring down through fissures in the ice and becoming a lubricant for the ice on top to slide into the warm ocean. He went on to say that for the first time in recorded history, Antarctica’s peninsula failed to connect to the larger ice formation last year, meaning we have reached a threshold that is now impossible to recross.

The times they are a changin’.

As we talked about our earth, and the greedy lifestyle of so many industrialized nations, I just kept getting a picture of the Prodigal Son. For years he has lived “high hog”, blowing his inheritance on reckless living, and now he (we) are just beginning to wake up, staring down at the bottom of an empty trough, wondering how we got here.

“In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it,” the LORD said to a riotous Israel. I believe we as a nation are hearing these words afresh.

I guess you could say I feel sort of jipped. I mean, what do I say to generations who went before us, who put personal wealth before their call to nurture the earth? My theology of creation has shifted.  No longer will I simply “have dominion” over the earth.  Being a follower of Christ for me now is inextricably linked with a nurturing relationship to the Earth.  With everything that I have in me, I want to pray for and protect “sister earth”.

A prayer of St. Francis of Assisi:

The Canticle of the Creatures

Most High, all-powerful, all-good Lord,

All praise is Yours, all glory, honor and blessings.

To you alone, Most High, do they belong;

no mortal lips are worthy to pronounce Your Name.

We praise You, Lord, for all Your creatures,

especially for Brother Sun,

who is the day through whom You give us light.

And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,

of You Most High, he bears your likeness.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars,

in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and fair.

We praise You, Lord, for Brothers Wind and Air,

fair and stormy, all weather’s moods,

by which You cherish all that You have made.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Water,

so useful, humble, precious and pure.

We praise You, Lord, for Brother Fire,

through whom You light the night.

He is beautiful, playful, robust, and strong.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Earth,

who sustains us

with her fruits, colored flowers, and herbs.

We praise You, Lord, for those who pardon,

for love of You bear sickness and trial.

Blessed are those who endure in peace,

by You Most High, they will be crowned.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Death,

from whom no-one living can escape.

Woe to those who die in their sins!

Blessed are those that She finds doing Your Will.

No second death can do them harm.

We praise and bless You, Lord, and give You thanks,

and serve You in all humility.

I am reappropriating spiritual mentors in my life these days. Most of my life my list of “saints” has been tragically truncated since I grew up in a religious fellowship that shunned the idea of “sainthood” and the basics of Church history. As a child, I had heard of the Christian Calendar, but thought of days like Christmas as a day associated with Santa Claus and presents (certainly not the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ).

Recently however, I have been discovering saints like Francis of Assisi, Benedict of Nursia, and Augustine. As you know, I am never one for putting the lid on any box, so I have been starting a unwritten “list” of people that might or might not be in any denomination’s list of saints, but are nevertheless a saint in my (and the world’s) mind.

What is a saint? To me, a saint is simply a man or woman who are a incarnated capsule of the Kingdom of God. In other words, they uniquely remind me of the already/not yet reality of God’s pervasive heavenly presence.

A recent addition to my own personal list of Kingdom capsules (saints) is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He is absolutely a genius, and if you haven’t just sat and listened to some of his speeches, stop whatever it is you’re doing right now and listen to them! (Check out this and this).

King looked at the world through compassionate eyes. His relentless pursuit of a transformed society grew both from grassroots levels and from policies made in Washington. His active commitment to nonviolence in revolutions most likely reoriented the quickly devolving civil rights brawls into a respectable movement that went places and changed the nation. His “dream” for his country was spoken out of the goodness he saw in peoples’ hearts as he spoke the reality into existence with powerful words before those realities would even have a chance to take hold. In other words, much like God at creation, or a minister presiding over a wedding service, his “words created worlds”. His compassion dug deeper than simply “flinging coins to a beggar”; he believed that the world could actually become a better place for ALL, and he gave his life to that end.

King’s view of social change in the Kingdom of God:

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”    (emphasis mine)

Thus saith the KING!

This is language that points to another world; an alternative reality that is more real than the rotting and corrupt world order set before us.  We have a choice: live in the world that King describes, or continue ripping each other apart.  That is why he is a saint - he speaks and acts in a Kingdom that is still coming.  I lift him up as a fellow brother, and as a incarnate capsule of the Kingdom!

Click below for an added bonus for reading the post! ~ by my beautiful wife!