These links go are part of our weekly sermon. We invite you to bring your wireless laptop to Emergent to browse these resources and learn extra stuff too.

People Get Ready - NPR site on the historic song
Original Song - Lyrics and chords

Sahara Desert - Pictures

Talmud - The most significant Jewish oral tradition interpreting the Torah.
Caanan - Brief summary and a map of the Promised Land.

Psalm 137 - "Oh, how could we ever sing GOD's song in this wasteland?"
Comfort, Comfort Ye my People - A 1671 German hymn by Johannes Olearius.

You may also comment and post other sites of interest that may fit with our text.

The text for this Sunday is Isaiah 40:1-11. Read over it and post your thoughts, stories, ideas, etc.

Is there anyone with a story about difficulty in getting pregnant and eventually you did? If so, post your story.

Ideas from the text that I'm planning to include the sermon:
- Israel is in the desert: desolate, unfruitful, barrenness, wandering
- Options: Give up on God, take things into their own hands
- A voice of hope cries out: Announcement that God is coming - get ready!

Click on the grey number at the top right of the title for this post to comment.

History of Advent
History of the Advent Wreath
The Season of Advent
Babylonian Captivity - Wikipedia
Babylonian Exile - Hope University

This week we're starting our Advent series at Emergent. This will take us through the Christmas season. The text for this Sunday is Isaiah 64:1-9. It's a dark and desperate passage, which I think turns in verse 8 with the word "still." Isaiah is saying that even in the midst of a dark time "God is still our Father." I plan to pick of the theme of waiting on God, which is a historic theme of Advent. What thoughts or personal stories come to mind (maybe waiting room?) about this passage and the theme of waiting?
Thanks so much for your input for this week's sermon. Click on the grey number on the top right of this post to add your comments.

This week at Emergent we're using our value of "story" to shape the gathering. There will be 7 "chapers," using a reworked summary of "The Story We Find Ourselves In." I'm trying to incorporate our elements of worship into each of these chapters, with each chapter being about 10 min long.
I would appreciate: ideas on rewording, things to take out or put in, elements that may fit into each of these chapters. Thanks.

Creation
We are all connected to the Creator by a story. God created order and life out of nothingness. But God is not enough in this story. God doesn’t want to be the only reality in our lives, the only relationship in our network. The Creator wants man and woman to find each other, as a lost part of themselves. The rib is taken out of Adam by God. God seems to want Adam to feel incomplete. God nicks a part of him on purpose. That means that Adam is, meaning we are too, incomplete by God’s design. The only real option is for us human beings to enjoy the company of our (1) Creator and (2) creation, animals, and especially our companions, a wife or husband and our friends, in whom we find a lost part of ourselves restored to us again. It is not good for a person to be alone, not in God’s story anyway. We humans bear the Creator’s image and are given the most amazing gift of creating. We are growing, changing, becoming, as we are masterpieces in progress, so creation is continuing in us. We are created by God to join Him in creating, as creation reflects His beauty.

Crisis/Chaos
The Creator did not create humans as robots or machines, but as humans with the freedom of choice. So we are free to respond to God’s invitation to be in relationship with Him, to be in His story, or to go our own way, and then create our own story. This is the beauty and the curse of free will. We have a tendency to lean toward isolation, independence, and aloneness. We fight for control and accumulate stuff, losing connection to God. We feel internal shame and this alienation disrupts our relationships. Selfishly we become our own top priority. It is this independent spirit that destroys connection, relationship, community, and that is what eating the fruit is all about. Human achievements are impressive, like the Tower of Babel, but tragic too, because we keep messing things up and we can not get along. Our evil has the capacity to unleash a flood of complete chaos and destruction.

There used to be one world, one story. But now, we have separated ourselves, moved out of that world and that story and went out to form our own. We have broken the harmony of goodness, so humans struggle in conflicted relationships, like Adam and Eve. New economies arise and compete, often with lethal results, like Cain and Abel. Languages and cultures strive for dominance, as at the Tower of Babel, and civilizations develop in the flood plain of complete chaos and selfish destruction. We have messed up the story. That is the crisis and chaos, the story we find ourselves in.

Calling
God entered into a special relationship with a man named Abraham, who lived in a land that is now called Iraq. The Lord said to Abraham, “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household, and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
Throughout the last four thousand years, because of our tendency toward crisis and chaos, we have misunderstood those words. When we think we are chosen only to be blessed, and forget that we are blessed to be a blessing - we distort our identity and drift from God’s calling for us. When we see ourselves as blessed to the exclusion of others rather than for the benefit of others, we become part of the problem instead of part of the solution. If more of us understood what it meant to be religious in this way,­ being blessed to be a blessing to others, then Christianity would have a better name in Clovis, Fresno and the world.

Abraham’s family is being enrolled as God’s helpers, partners, team-mates in cooperating with God in the ongoing creation of good in the world. So calling means God recruiting us to be part of this movement of people who want to bring God’s blessing back to the world. To be called is to say that we have signed up with this higher purpose or mission in life, to be blessed and to be a blessing.

Conversations/Cycles
God continued in relationship with his people through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses. Over a period of time God raised up Judges and then Kings. God continued to be faithful to His people even though they disobeyed Him by walking out of relationship and then writing their own story. God inspires people among them who fulfilled several important roles to keep the communication flowing between God and God’s people. God continuously called His people back to join His story. He sent priests who were the spiritual educators and guardians of the people. They helped the people sustain and strengthen their faith through the regular rituals of worship, through weekly Sabbaths, and annual holy days. He sent prophets who were seized with a passion to convey a message from God. Often they confronted the people about their moral and ethical failures. The prophets cried for justice and genuineness. He sent poets who tried to capture the experience and emotion of the people, their grief, hopes, joys, praises, fears, holiness, anger, doubts, faith, affections ­- the whole range of human emotions and experiences. They articulated the hearts of the people toward God, and they tried to capture the heart of God for the people too. David is the most famous of the poets. God also sent philosophers. Philosophy for the ancient Jews simply meant a way of life characterized by a passionate pursuit of wisdom. So there’s the book of Ecclesiastes. Proverbs is a kind of practical philosophy. So God through conversations, the title for this chapter of the story, partners with the people, guiding them, but not manipulating them, not robbing them of that special gift of freedom.

Christ
If God creates a real universe and if people of this universe really do have the freedom to make choices, and if they make some bad choices, then we have a real problem. God sent Jesus into the world to absorb all the punishment for our sins. That is what the cross was about. It was Jesus accepting the punishment that all of us deserve. He became the substitute for all of us. As He suffered and died, all our wrongs were paid for, so all of us can be forgiven. God’s merciful acts of absolute goodness and selflessness in giving Himself through Jesus on the cross satisfied God’s just anger about human evil and selfishness. By entering into and overcoming death, Jesus opens the door for us to enter into an eternal relationship with Him.

Jesus becomes a representative of all humanity. The cross demonstrates Jesus’ self-giving, His complete abandonment to God’s will. He makes visible the self-giving love of God. When that sacrificial love touches us, we are changed internally ­- “constrained” is the word Paul uses for it,­ so that we want to stop being selfish, and we want to join God in self-giving, beginning by giving ourselves back to God, and leading us to give ourselves to our neighbors and the world too. Jesus gives Himself to God, for the sake of the whole world, and He invites us to do that same. He is showing God’s loving heart, which wants forgiveness, not revenge, for everyone. Jesus shows us that the wisdom of God’s Kingdom is sacrifice, not violence. It is about accepting suffering and transforming it into reconciliation, not avenging suffering through retaliation. The cross shows God’s rejection of the human violence and dominance and oppression that have spun the world in a cycle of crisis from the story of Cain and Abel through the headlines this morning in the Fresno Bee. The cross calls humanity to stop trying to make God’s Kingdom happen through intimidation and force, which are always self-defeating in the end, and instead, to welcome it through self-sacrifice and vulnerability.

Community
Jesus called people to follow Him...to be His disciple. A disciple is a follower, a learner that wants to know and do what the teacher knows and does. Jesus was creating a community of followers. There was a way of living as a disciple. Later, they got the nickname “Christian,” which means “little Christ” or “mini-messiah,” and their way of living became known as “Christianity,” which might better be called a messianic way of living. They were also apostles, who would be sent out to practice and teach what they had learned. That is what apostle means, a person who is sent on a mission. So Jesus brings together this community of men and women who are called out from the crowds to be disciples, and then these disciples will be sent back into the world on a mission of expressing Jesus’ message of God’s Kingdom, and helping others become disciples who will in turn help others, and so on.

This revolution begins on Pentecost, 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus on Easter, with the arrival of the Holy Spirit and spreads from country to country and from generation to generation. It often feels less like we have the mission, and more like the mission has us. Jesus was sent into the world to express, in word and deed, the saving love of God. We, as a community of faith at this church, are similarly sent into the world to express, in word and deed, the saving love of God. Jesus was sent here on a mission, and He said, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” This mission has us! The Holy Spirit is changing us to be Christ-like people - transforming our lives from the inside out. The Holy Spirit tries to do something in us, ­makes us more like Jesus,­ and then tries to do something through us by involving us in God’s mission and giving us some special part of the mission to do. The Holy Spirit connects us with other people, so that what He does in and through one person is coordinated with what He does in and through another person, and so on. That way it is not just a bunch of individuals working on the same cause, but it’s a mosaic of God’s people, united in one Spirit. And that is what the community of faith is supposed to be.

Consumation
Instead of history being driven by the past, what if history is constantly being invited to receive the future? Imagine - God unleashes history in the beginning. God helps the baby to stand in the beginning. But God is also out ahead, calling us, His children, homeward across the room - He doesn’t force it. Sometimes history responds, or some parts of history respond, but others resist or rebel. And God keeps calling. Not just pushed from the past, or even engineered in the present, but being pulled, invited, called, into the future, which keeps coming to us as a gift. God is waiting to give Himself to us across the room, and so we are pulled toward Him by hope and desire. What are we called to do? To enter the Kingdom of God - to come into the future of the Kingdom of God. And that is a great way to understand the church. The church is a community of people who are learning to live the way everyone will live in the future.

We can think of it like a love story, a romance. God creates the universe, and loves her. God calls her to Him in the future, and at first, she refuses to come. But God beckons her ­and this is a great way to understand Jesus ­- entering time and space and by coming to her to declare His love. God comes to walk beside her wherever she roams. She rejects God. But God’s love can’t be defeated, and eventually, by patiently walking beside her, God wins her heart. And God continues to call her into the future, and she finally comes to God, and God comes to her. When they meet, because all the wrong, all the evil, all the dishonesty and ugliness and distrust are judged and gone and forgotten forever, God can take everything to Himself in an embrace of boundless, uninhibited, limitless love. And that is the new beginning. That is the consummation: that embrace.

Theme: Mission of God
Series: Values of the Emergent Congregation
Texts: We're not using one passage this week, as it is more topical. Here is some scripture and thoughts I'm working through for the underlying story that I want to tell this week. I'd appreciate some feedback, ideas, personal stories of how our lives intersect with these.

Genesis 12:1-3
In Genesis, after the stories of creation, we read the story of how God deals with fallen people after being booted out of Eden and the problems and challenges of the world as people began to gather in larger groups in Gen. 1-11. After the stories of the Flood and the Tower of Babel, if you hadn’t heard the rest of the story, you could wonder if there was any kind of a future for the gathered people and hope for the nations, or if God’s judgment would be the end of it all.

Abraham’s story, beginning in Genesis 12, tells us that God isn’t giving up on humanity. In fact, God makes a promise to bring blessing to the nations, when he tells Abram: 'all the families of the earth will be blessed through you' (Gen. 12:3). It’s an announcement repeated six times in Genesis and it’s the foundation of all biblical mission. It is the mission of God to bless all the nations through Abraham’s descendants.

So God gave Abram a new name to reflect his new identity (“exalted father” to “father of many nations”)

From Abraham came the nation of Israel. Still today, Jews look back to Abraham as the father of Judaism. Israel was chosen, not as a superior nation, but as God’s gathered people to accomplish his mission.

The announcement to them is that Yahweh, the God who had called out Israel (Deut. 10:14f), was also the creator, owner and Lord of the whole world, and that He had chosen and blessed Israel to carry out his purpose for the world, not just for Israel. God choosing Israel wasn’t a rejection of the other nations, but for their benefit. Israel was blessed in order for them to be a blessing to others. Their identity is tied directly to their mission as God’s gathered people.

After 400 years of silence in scripture, Jesus is born and there is a change in Covenants, old to new. But Jesus and the early church continue to have their purpose as God’s purpose – first in the conversion of Jews and then welcoming in Gentiles, or non-Jews, which would include the rest of humanity.

Luke 4:14-21
Within Jesus and the early church is still the foundational element that started with Abram being blessed in order to be a blessing.

Matthew 28:16-20
Like the first Christians and the early church, we are a “sent” people - a missional community
Also, we have a heritage tracing back to Abram of being blessed to be a blessing

The term "missional" asks this question: what is the purpose of the church? To enfold and warehouse Christians for heaven, protecting them from damage and spoiling until they reach their destination? Or to recruit and train people to be transforming agents of the Kingdom of God in our culture? A missional church understands itself to be blessed not to the exclusion of the world, but for the benefit of the world. It is a church that seeks to bring benefits to its nonadherents through its adherents.

Romans 8:18-27
God’s ultimate purpose is redemption of all creation.

Galatians 3:6-9
God’s purpose of blessing all the nations is so important that Paul refers back to Genesis when he says God announced "the gospel in advance" to Abraham.

Galatians 3:26-29
Again, if we belong to Christ we are Abraham's seed.

Revelelation 7:9
The closing vision of the Bible shows the fulfillment of the promise to Abram, as people from every nation, tribe, language and people are gathered among the redeemed in the new creation.