EASTER PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING
(Book Of Common Worship)

You are holy, O God of majesty,
and blessed is Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord,
whom you sent to save us.
He came with healing in his touch,
and was wounded for our sins.
He came with mercy in his voice,
and was mocked as one despised.
He came with peace in his heart,
and met with violence and death.
By your power he broke free from the prison of the tomb,
and at his command the gates of hell were opened.
The one who was dead now lives.
The one who humbled himself is raised to rule over all creation,
the Lamb upon the throne.
The one ascended on high is with us always, as he promised.

Fuel For Forgiveness

Free Robbie Seay/TWOTP Easter Video!

Download for free HERE

Man In Black

Still relevant...Dwell IN the pain, not ON it....Friday's coming...

Stanley Hauerwas On Healthcare

I chatted with Stanley Hauerwas a few months ago & here's a clip with his thoughts on "healthcare."

An Easter Contemplation

Stories We Like, Stories We Don't

Why do we like stories of triumph over adversity? Why don’t we like stories of endless peace and happiness in an innocent and endless Garden of Eden? Why don't we like stories of perfectly average people to whom nothing overly good or bad happens? At the same time, it is the ‘over’ part of adversity we seem to like more in our personal lives. And also at the same time, we tend to run from suffering like "we hid our faces from him."

Is Easter about ‘Over’?

What if Jesus had come to earth, taught, prayed, worked miracles, healed people, suffered, died, and rose from the dead, but did not appear to anybody? The Jesus we ‘know’ – how would he be different?

What if Jesus didn’t die, or even suffer, but had overwhelmed his crucifiers with a bolt of lightning and floored them all with his transfigured glory? The Christianity we ‘know’ – how would it be different?

We believe that he is coming again, but what if he had already come again, and we were born after that? The faith we ‘have’ – how would it be different?

What would it be like if the story was all just ‘over’?

Good and Evil

(Looking at my own life…) What if I had always been ‘good’? (There was a time when Tiger Woods had always been ‘good’; when did Good-being Tiger end, exactly?)

What if all (or even most) of us were like:

Billy Graham
Mother Theresa
Albert Einstein
–or–
Dylan Klebold
Timothy McVeigh
Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot…

What if God was like a powerful government: Cross the line far enough and He attacks you? (Incidentally, a religious government is still a government.) That might put a limit on 'evil'...

But maybe God doesn't exist, like some say, and the reason we like the Easter story is because it gives us relief from all the suffering and doubt.

Three Questions

What if Easter is more than an event in history, more than merely a metaphoric 'three day story', but a real glimpse into the unchanging character of God? What if suffering is as much in God's character as are forgiveness, compassion, love, holiness, righteousness and power?

What if suffering is transcendental, in the same way as "transcendental meditation?"

What if suffering is like fuel that powers forgiveness?

We might boil all this storytelling about God and good down to three questions–

How do we 'know' God exists?
To what extent is the Easter story 'true'?
What is its meaning for us today?

How We 'Know'

(This line of thinking comes from C.S. Lewis, by way of John Ortberg.)

How we 'know' something depends on what we believe 'know' means. For example, we might 'know' that Billy Graham is good and Timothy McVeigh is evil, while some other person might 'know' exactly the opposite.

Still, all of us have concepts of 'unjust' and 'inhumane', because we all have concepts of 'just' and 'humane'; we recognize 'good' by differentiating it from 'evil' and can differentiate 'beauty' from 'tawdriness'. So we 'know' what we believe we have experienced or felt.

We can also 'know' something even when it is not always 'true'. For example, we 'know' we can trust our close friends and loved ones even though we also 'know' they have (or will) let us down.

There is another way to 'know' something. If someone we trust tells us 'the truth' then we 'know' their 'true' story even though we have not experienced or felt it ourselves.

Historical 'Truth'

We all know that our beliefs about past events can change– like our beliefs about 'Good' Tiger Woods, for example. Even our beliefs about events in the distant past are subject to scrutiny. One example is that we used to believe Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, but now we believe that Leif Ericson did, and some people even think there is evidence that the Phoenicians came here even before the Vikings.

So, our picture of history is constantly changing as we discover new artifacts and documents from the past. Some artifacts and documents may be viewed with suspicion by historians because they don't appear to be 'legitimate' or because they tend to promote one particular viewpoint over others. Other times, the obvious falsehood, or 'embarrassment' of a document is what makes it historically 'true'. For example, an ancient Egyptian monument called the Merneptah Stele is inscribed with the words, "Israel is laid waste; its seed is no more," sometime between 1213 and 1203 BCE (before the Christian era). Now today, we know that Merneptah's claim of wasting Israel is not 'true' because we know that Israel existed after that time. But what the 'untrue' Merneptah Stele proves is that there was a group of people named 'Israel' large enough for the King of Egypt to brag about 'wasting' in 1200 BCE!

'Doubting' Thomas

You could say that the disciple called Thomas was somewhat embarrassing to the Gospel story, because he was a skeptic: "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands..." We don't hear anything about him after Acts 1:13, where he is reported to be present with the other disciples. The only other association Western historians make between Thomas and Christianity is that his name was attached to a 'heretical' early Christian document, written much later than he would have been alive. Thus does Thomas disappear from the traditions of the Western church.

Mar Thoma Church

On the Southwest coast of India is a tiny, ancient sect of Christians, who call themselves, 'Mar Thoma.' They started out as Jewish refugees in India who were converted to Christianity by (they claim) Doubting Thomas, the disciple who needed to see the nail marks, in 52 AD.

There are many independent (though obscure) historical verifications of their claims, such as the report by the philosopher, missionary and church father, Pantaenus (died by 200 AD), who wrote that he had personally found pre-existing Christians in India who used the Gospel of Matthew, written in Hebrew, as their only New Testament scriptures. (This is an important 'embarrassing' detail, because the only manuscript copies of Matthew's Gospel ever found have been Greek, and Matthew's Gospel is supposed to have been originally composed in Greek, according to modern biblical scholars.) Another embarrassing fact of history was the Synod of Diamper convened by Portuguese Catholics over the Mar Thomas. As one result of the synod, all Mar Thoma religious texts differing from the Catholic Bible were burned.

The fact that these embarrassing ancient 'Christians' who were not like us and didn't have our Bible still celebrated Easter (and communion) goes a long way toward convincing us that the Easter story is 'true'– at least we know it was a story that truly existed far away from the Western church very long ago.

Suffering

'Suffering' used to be the go-to argument in the philosophical debate about the existence of God. I've personally never understood what the big deal is, because clearly God suffers. But what good is suffering and why does it matter to God? Let's try to take a fresh look at suffering by asking what the world would be like if suffering never was.

How would we know we loved somebody (or some thing, even) if suffering never was? No delayed gratification, no emotion attached to being without our love object– How can 'take-it-or-leave-it' and 'love' coexist? So we see that a world without suffering might also be a world without love. Similarly, we can make a case for each of the following claims:

No suffering, no comforting
No suffering, no forgiveness
No suffering, no grace
No suffering, no peacemakers
No suffering, no patience...

To Everything a Season

We might now come to the point of view that evil and good, suffering and joy, sin and love, are all necessarily balanced in tension, and this is the way it must be. "To everything there is a season" appears to be the point of view of the writer of Ecclesiastes, after all. But it is also the writer's point of view that:

"Meaningless! Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless."
Ecclesiastes 1:2
This is the pre-Easter state of humanity: everything balanced and meaningless... Twentieth century philosophers called this "Existential Dread"...

Balance, Beauty, Big Bang

The idea that the universe must be in balance runs deep in us. For example, symmetry has been known to be an important component of aesthetic beauty. Attractiveness studies show that composite (balanced, symmetrical) human faces are deemed more beautiful than any of the individuals' faces used to create the composites. Mathematics seeks to balance equations. Physics theories strive for balance– "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." Life is about balance... or is it?

The universe we know exists because of a huge imbalance: "matter" far outweighs "antimatter" in our universe. The reason for this bald fact is one of the unsolved questions of theoretical physics, because "The Big Bang" should have created equal amounts of antimatter and matter. To a physicist, there is no mathematical reason that the universe as it is would even exist. Where is all the antimatter? God only knows. Ultimately, then, life as we know it is about a huge imbalance: that of matter over antimatter.

Unbalance Makes Meaning

So, here we are living in a universe where, if you want to study antimatter you have to create it in the laboratory. If we imagine a theoretical physicist who had never witnessed our universe, he might say that this was an absurd idea– "Matter must be balanced by antimatter; symmetry must be preserved!" But I think we can 'know' our experience is 'true'...

In a similar way, the pre-Easter man would say that a universe without suffering and pain is absurd. But what if someone came to us who had been to that universe, someone whose report we could trust? What if there is a universe where, if you want to study suffering, you have to create it in a laboratory?

Necessity for Suffering Only for Awhile

In this universe, God (who is attested to exist by Jesus, who is attested to have risen by Thomas, who is attested to have converted to Christianity the Mar Thoma, who are attested to have used a Hebrew gospel similar to Matthew and to have existed before 200 A.D. by Pantaenus and attested to have been 'heretics' by the Portuguese, ...) suffers. We don't have a proper theory for that, we just know it is true, just like the matter/antimatter imbalance.

In this universe, we have no way to understand the meaning of good without evil, because we are somehow wired to perceive truth and beauty in symmetry. Again, we don't have a good theory for the idea of aesthetic beauty in averageness, but it's true nonetheless. At the same time we find composite faces attractive, we find composite lives of composite people boring, and there's no theory for that either. It's just 'true'.

In this suffering, loving universe a suffering, loving being is said to have appeared talking about peacemaking, humility, forgiveness, and joy. This being claimed to be the inventor of everything. This being, this Christ, claimed to have also created another universe, a parallel universe where suffering is like antimatter. In these 'truths' is the meaning of Easter for us today.

(All 'fact-checking' can easily be done using http://en.wikipedia.or)

- Mark Ingalls
mark.w.ingalls@gmail.com

Ira Walking

With God - All Things Are Possible...

Who Needs A Pastor?

Who needs a Pastor? A must read from dear friend Claudio Oliver. Good manure for the brain.

Go HERE to read.

Father's Ashes

Lent is in full effect. Here with Mark Pierson and his family as they bury the ashes of Mark's dad on the one year anniversary of his father's death. Sacred.

Creativity is Not A Novelty

TWOTP's Steve Frost discusses...

Creativity is Not Novelty from Transposition Films on Vimeo.

"Enough"

Australian Brother Jonathan Cornford of Australia Oxfam offers up thoughts on what is "enough." Films coming soon.

Providing A Safe Place

A couple of the communities that TWOTP is rooted in are the SOnday's community in Tomball Texas and The Mosaic in Vancouver, Canada. Here are a couple raw interviews with Aaron Edwards of SOndays and Steve Frost of The Mosaic chatting with Walter Brueggemann about providing safe places for lament and the transformation they are seeing in those places.

PROVIDING A SAFE PLACE - Aaron and Steve chat with Walt about pain, lament and creating a safe place for people to cry out to YAHWEH.

Go HERE to watch.


TAUGHT BY THE WOUNDED - I turn the camera on a little late her, but Aaron and Steve discuss the transformation they are seeing in their communities and Walter delights in the confirmation of his own work.

Go HERE to watch.

iPhone Liturgy: Love Conducer

Recently had the the joy and privilege of chilling with Bobbi Ninni one our community's worship leaders. We're taking in the car wash here or the "puchi train" as Bobbi likes to call it. Here's a link to Bobbi leading us in worship at Sondays HERE



TWOTP's Steve Frost responded after watching...

Read this in Corinthians 12:11 about spiritual gifts:

"All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful:

wise counsel
clear understanding
simple trust
healing the sick
miraculous acts
proclamation
distinguishing between spirits
tongues
interpretation of tongues

All these gifts have a common origin, but are handed out one by one by the one Spirit of God. He decides who gets what, and when."

There's your simple trust right there.