Worship In The Park...

..ing lot. That's what we did this past Sunday night. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we went in another direction, we adapted, we tried something new. And it was amazing. One of the best Sunday meetings we've had. On a night that celebrated "new"ness and change, it was a reminder never to get too comfortable. Some thoughts from that night:

We live in a world where many feel just as hopeless as the discples must have felt between death and resurrection. The promises of modernism proved to be less concrete than we had hoped, the ideals of postmodernism can prove too unwieldy. Nietzsche said "God is dead" and too often he looks to be right. G. K. Chesterton said that the horrifying thing about a life without God is not that we believe in nothing, but end up believing in anything. The maxim of the day is "it's all good", but when everything is good then none of it is good. We had a war to end all wars, and we have had nothing but wars ever since. We had a sexual revolution and it gave us casual relationships and broken families. We pursued wealth. The poor stay poor and the rich get rich and they all end up empty. Even the "haves" wake up feeling like "have-nots". We can do whatever we like and we have all forgotten why we liked it. Our dreams have gone sour, and we do not even know who we are anymore. Even within the church itself, there are many whose hopes were placed within their own ideas of Messiah, one who would make us prosperous and powerful, and those ideas are dying a slow death.

Jesus walks alongside us and explains how the mission of God is and has always been to heal and restore. He says that no one is good but God and that God is out to recreate humanity and the world as it was meant to be, to deal with evil, to create a new family where forgiveness is common and to challenge the rule of war, sex, money, and power. And, beginning to end, the stranger interprets both old and new testaments and explains how this re-creation and revolution will take place.

Jesus speaks resurrection into our world. He is still calling us to new life, a new way, a new reality. One that leaves room for evidence as well as mystery, but overturns our assumptions about both. The sacrifice of Jesus means death to our old lives, but that is good news. His resurrection means our resurrection. It means everything is different now. Everything is new.