In response to their inquiry about what work I did in Calgary, I mimed sitting in front of a computer, typing all day long with an occasional phone call interrupting the action. “You do that all day?” they asked me incredulously. I assured them that I did. There was some laughter, then silence, then the haunting question, “No sweating?” I’ll never forget the look of confusion on their faces when they posed that question to me, these women who survived by the sweat of their brow. It was one of those moments that could easily have slipped away without being recognized as significant. But something about it and the ensuing silence shouted ‘this is important’!

I’ve lived for many years from the neck up. Most of what I do is brain work. I don’t grow my own food, don’t wash my own car, and I don’t scrub my own floors. All these I’ve considered unimportant in the face of the ‘more important’ neck-up work I’ve had to do.

I’ve been back in Canada for several months now but I can’t shake the question. Does God meet us in unique ways through physical work? Is there a unique way that physical labour contributes to our well-being? Do mind and spirit find opportunity for inspiration and discernment through activities that get our heart racing and our muscles flexing?

While I muse on these questions I have been consciously choosing to do things that make me sweat, paying attention to what the movement of my body brings to the quality of my life. For the most part I have relegated my spiritual life almost entirely to what I think, but now I am learning a kind of spiritual alertness in using the other 95% of my body. I am revelling in the joy of physical, not mental, tiredness. I am coming to see again that there is something sacred about physical work.

If truth be known, I’m clumsy at most of what I do, but I’m trying to pursue it nevertheless. I don’t know where this burst of inspiration will lead, but I am sure that I am on to something important.

For those of you who, like me, work in front of a computer, let’s do something with our hands. Is there any sweat in your life?

Judy McVean, guest contributor

Editor’s note: Judy recently spent time serving our mission partner Hands at Work in Zimbabwe.. You are invited to check out our annual mission report which you can access here.

My dad is a big man, big in body but even bigger in character. He has always stood for things that matter. He has always been deeply honest: I was taught early and often to tell and live the truth. But the best and most obvious part of my dad is that he is soft-hearted. Its a surprising thing about him really, especially because he is such a big guy. Its almost like he can’t help himself, but dad is a giver, not only towards his kids but to people he knows and meets. The number of times that he given away money or some form of practical help to people is almost legendary in those who know my dad. Somehow, he has been able to combine this mix of being both strong and tender at the same time. Thanks Dad. Thanks for being such a rare breed of man and for inspiring my life in ways that still live on.

I once had a tree in my front yard that was broken and bent. It was like that when we moved in and I considered replacing it. But I am tender-hearted towards trees (a specific tenderness that hasn’t yet translated to my daughter’s cat — OK, so I’m not perfect). I decided that I would try to save our little bent and broken tree. It was badly misshapen, beaten down by harsh conditions, without any sign of care or protection. I decided to do the obvious thing and stake it, but in order to reshape it, I double-staked it, pulling it two ways in order to create a straight direction for growth. A process like that takes time.

Maybe fathering is like this. A father at his best is the double stake in the ground next to a young soul, firmly planted in the ground to provide a straight and true guide. But fathering is a double stake, the stability of a strong character balanced by the surprise of tender-heartedness. It takes a double stake to make a young tree grow straight and strong.

This Sunday we are going to honor dads of course. But we hope to do even more than that: we want to inspire dads.

Enjoy your weekend and we hope to see you this Sunday at 9:29 or 11:11 am.

Bob Osborne

I will never forget the experience of reading the letter of James with students in the Ukraine. It was the spring of 1994. That country had just newly opened to the west after years of political suppression. I had diligently prepared myself to teach what are often called the “general letters” of the New Testament, James though Jude. I thought I knew my material, and maybe in one sense I did know my material. But it was in this new context where my understanding was pushed into a different place. Reading James with those Ukrainian students forever changed the way I now see those words.

Context literally means “that which goes with the text”. When we speak of context we usually mean the words which surround the words we are focusing on: what comes before and what follows after. Context can also mean the historical or culture setting, or the circumstances of the author. But consider for a moment how the reader is also situated in a time, place, culture, and personal circumstance, and how much the context of the reader matters to what is heard and understood.

My preparation for teaching those students only considered one part of the equation: what the text said. And while I take what James’ meant to say as primary, what I failed to see before hand was how much the place itself would impact our understanding. Instead of reading these ancient words in a prosperous and self-satisfied culture, I was reading with people who lived in difficult politics and uncertain economics. I was reading the Scripture with people who were sustained by spiritual hope, who were passionate and prayerful, and who were willing to serve with little tangible reward. Reading James with those people, in that time and place, made everything I saw there on the page look different.

What is needed is to be intentional about this practice. I realize more and more that to be a reader of the Scriptures requires a continual movement of my body, mind and soul. I need to be a person in motion, seeing the world through the mixed reality of the human condition. I need to listen to different voices and perspectives, especially those voices that move me off my comfortable assumptions. And I need, finally, to be willing to look again at what I thought I already knew. I need to see and hear the “more” that I had previously missed.

As we enter the summer reading season, maybe this is time for you to set out on a Scriptural reading journey. What could you discover if you intently set out to re-read portions and passages that you thought you already knew? What might you see again, as if for the first time?

See you this Sunday at 9:29 or 11:11.

Bob Osborne

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It is important to name this condition of loneliness, a condition which is very much different from being alone. Who of us hasn’t felt the loneliness of being in a crowd? Loneliness can inflict married people, busy people, and people who have lots of social contact. Loneliness is simply the feeling of isolation, the sense of disconnection.

God wants it to be different. Marriage and family, friendship and community – these are gifts to us. But despite all the possible ways we have to connect, a gap can still exist inside of us. And this is because loneliness, in essence, is a spiritual condition. At the heart of loneliness is our homesickness for God, what the writer Frederick Buechner has called: “a longing for a long time from a long way off to belong”.

Loneliness strikes all kinds of people. It strikes those we think have it all together. James Houston, now an old and kindly professor of spirituality at Regent College in Vancouver, tells of sitting next to a very beautiful girl at the seminary, and saying “you must be very lonely”. “How do you know me?” she said. Well, because men would look at you as an object of desire, and women would be jealous of you. (This is something you can say when you are an old man and carry some integrity.)  I find this a very insightful window in a world based on surfaces and masks. We might be surprised who is struck with this lonely condition.

There are many ways we try to solve the ache: we medicate ourselves, we over-eat, we over-spend, we become sexually irresponsible. All of these behaviours are attempts to fill what has gone missing inside of us, the absence we feel but can’t really diagnose.

We need the humility to admit our condition, name it, and acknowledge it to God. Perhaps there is wisdom from the monastery that can help us here (you might have guessed this from me). For over 1600 years, the Benedictines have rehearsed a practice that is deeply transformative for personal life. They daily chant the psalms, repeating the entire corpus monthly. The psalms are prayers full of life’s emotions: anger, sadness, confusion, hope, joy – and loneliness.

“Turn to me and have mercy on me, because I am lonely and hurting.” [Psalm 25:16]

In daily repeating the psalms, the Benedictines continually rehearse their humanity before God. The psalms bring to light what human beings lack and need – that part of us that is “lonely and hurting”. In this way, loneliness becomes a shared human experience and not a cut-off and hidden thing, which is often the real power of loneliness. Instead, the daily repetition of the psalms make prayer a shared human experience. We move ourselves from the lonely “I” towards the connected “we”. We begin to see that the experience of being human is not ours alone to bear, but ours to experience in company. And in the heart of that company is God, who mystically enters into the lonely space we cannot fill.

It is possible to be shallow about this profound condition of loneliness. There are certainly complexities to this issue that I have not here discussed. And I don’t want to be one to give cheap advice. I simply want to say what I tend to say often and repeatedly: to be prayerful is the most connected way of living there is. To be prayerful is the best of all practices in this world of overwhelming loneliness. Prayer makes true community possible.

Find the movie What About Schmidt and watch it with a keen eye. It ends beautifully with a very simple realization by this lonely man. Schmidt realized that if he simply would reach out toward someone who really needed his help, he could find a way to move forward.

I recommend the movie. And I recommend the practice of praying the psalms.

See you this Sunday at 9:29 or 11:11 am.

Bob Osborne

One of the defining values of our present culture is the idea of personal choice, but we need to step back for a moment and ask this very important question: does our freedom to choose automatically produce the life we hope for? And the answer is: not always, not often. Choice almost always needs to be guided; choice almost always needs the support of wise living models. We make our best choices when we watch – and take seriously – someone who knows what is best.

So we learn by copying. I heard of one young writer who learned their craft by simply copying out, in written long-hand, the prose of a famous author they admired. They wanted to form their own abilities after the pattern of a master word-smith. They were learning by copying.

Can we do this in the Jesus-life? Yes we can. In fact, this is the basic way we learn his life. In 1 Peter 2:21, Peter says that Jesus has left us an “example”, that we should learn to copy. The word example is hupogrammos, which literally means “underwriting”. It was the word used when a school boy might learn his letters through tracing. Take note of the image: the example of Jesus is the writing underneath the page we are writing on. Plainly, we learn this life that Jesus calls us to by tracing our lives over his.

This past Sunday we revisited Philippians 2, and the famous Christ-hymn we find in verses 5-11. This would be a worthy passage to memorize, to get into one’s heart and soul. And the thing to copy is the very attitude of Jesus, the state of mind that informed his humble service: “your attitude should be the same as that of Christ” (Phil 2:5). In order to be the community of Jesus, Paul says, you will have to learn to copy the mindset of Jesus. Copying the actions of Jesus is good but takes us only part of the way. Copying the attitude of Jesus is certainly as important as anything he did.

See you this Sunday at 9:29 or 11:11 am.

Bob Osborne

For further reflection:

1. How are you at making choices (of any kind)? Do you have a friend or mentor that seems to make better choices than you? Have you ever thought about copying them? Or have you been copying the wrong models?
2. What aspects of the model of Jesus are you drawn to copy? What story in the life of Jesus defines this for you?
3. Take a look into the story of Jesus’ testing in the desert (Matthew 4 and parallels). Note how Jesus answers all of the Devil’s temptations with a quote from Deuteronomy, the message to Israel in their desert moment. Where Israel failed, Jesus succeeds. In other words, he used the same resource we are given to fulfill his life and calling (obedience and trust in the word of God). How can we copy him in this?
4. If you have read down this far, I am interested in how we might serve you in becoming a better Bible reader. If you want to email any thoughts you have on this I am interested in hearing your perspective. You can contact me at bosborne@wkc.org.   How can we learn to copy this life unless we see it for what it is? The Scriptures are our clearest and most faithful guide.

For years now, I have realized that managing a library of books, papers, and other assorted items, requires a certain kind of courage. One can’t be too attached; sentimentality is not always helpful. The truth is that in order to make room for the future I have to choose what I want to keep and what I need to throw away. Another recent foray into all my stuff was illuminating to me on several fronts. Let me share with you what I found out.

I found out just how much we do change through time. I found out that some of what I valued in the past just isn’t that important to me anymore. And some of what I previously took for granted is now most precious, most definitive. Through all of this change, I have become convinced that truth requires the long view.

I found out just how dated and faddish parts of my collection can be. For instance, in one recent sweep I got rid of all those statistics I had collected on the up-and-coming baby boomers. I was one of those up-and-comers but, my, how the time flies. Anyway, our penchant for naming the generations was well documented in my old files and I have grown tired of it. I have thrown out almost everything that names people by category. And I have little tolerance for fads.

I found out just how much I value writers and leaders who prove to be faithful over time. Somehow, it matters to me not just what people have said, but how they have lived. I have grown to love good biography.

I found out that, after multiple sweeps of my books and files through the years, the items I have kept are getting more valuable to me through time, especially since they have stuck with me now for decades in some cases. A decade is a fairly good test of what is important, though I suspect that it still isn’t long enough.

Whenever I do this, whenever I feel the need to sort through my stuff, I end up carrying out a few bags of paper and a few boxes of books. The process is not always easy – I do wrestle with my choices – but I must say that I am always happy to make room in my life. I certainly can move around a bit better. I have room for new thoughts, new pieces to add to my life. I am never sorry for it.

I wonder how much my little story reminds you of repentance. See you this Sunday at 9:29 or 11:11 am.

Bob Osborne

For further reflection:

1. What does my regular exercise mean to you? Do you have a similar exercise?
2. Last Sunday we talked about repentance in the context of our story at Westside King’s Church. I invite you to listen again to the podcast. How did you hear what was said?
3. Take a read through Philippians 3. How might this text address the ideas of “life sorting”, maturity and change?

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Written as a follow up to the previous weeks teachings, the email devotional gives you an opportunity to reflect on where we have been as a community and to stay on top of news and events from within Westside.

This Sunday we invite you to what we think will be an important moment. We intend to take a courageous and redemptive look at our own spiritual history and identity. As we have been talking about six practices that can help us realize the gift of community, we intend to imbed out sixth practice into the heart of our gatherings this weekend. We are calling this practice “alter”, the practice of change which is deep and personal. The older word for this deeply held Christian value was repentance. The reason we chose an alternative word was to get us all to think in new ways about what it might mean for us to experience real change together. What might deep spiritual change look like for each of us as individuals, and what would deep spiritual change look like for us as a community?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a promising young theologian who died as a martyr for the Christian faith in one of Hitler’s death camps. He was only 37 when he died, but he left a rich legacy in his writings and in his personal example. Bonhoeffer was born into an age and place that had long intellectualized the Christian faith and had made it over into a kind of speculative philosophy for gentlemen at leisure. It was certainly not the living and breathing (and dying and rising) faith of the Scriptures. Early in his theological career, Bonhoeffer realized that as a theologian he needed to become a Christian. He needed to become a true follower of Jesus. This might seem like an absurd disconnection to begin with, but it reminds us how easily we can push the heart of our faith away from us. We are not called to merely think great thoughts; we are called to enter into a life of real and significant alteration. Grace is more than a great thought; grace is a door into a new life. And it is a door we must walk through.

The times Bonhoeffer lived in were deeply challenging for the church in Germany. For the most part, the “cheap grace” he saw dispensed by the institutional church (almost the entire nation had been baptized as a matter of course) had left it powerless to critique the rising evil embodied in Nazism. Bonhoeffer saw clearly that what was needed was an awareness, an acknowledgment, a confrontation with our human bent-ness we call sin. For without an understanding of sin as sin, grace was not only cheap, but meaningless. Without repentance, grace was trivial. Without the practice of confession, grace would whither into something uninteresting, limp, irrelevant.

In Bonhoeffer’s understanding, to participate in the community of Jesus was to participate in an experience of alteration. Confession, he said, would actually bring “a breakthrough into community”. Confession was “the God-given remedy for self-deception and self-indulgence”. Regularly practiced, confession would free the church from all of the hidden yet real ways we remain isolated and split off from each other, in all of the hidden yet real ways we remain spiritually anemic and culturally irrelevant. Simply put, confession was essential.

So I invite you to the practice of alteration, the practice of confession and repentance, the practice of change that brings a promise with it. In Acts 3, Peter shares the good news of Jesus in those first days following the resurrection. His message was unvarnished and raw, its primitive essence unmistakable: “… change your hearts and lives! Come back to God, and he will forgive your sins. Then the Lord will send the time of rest.”

May I simply remind us that the grace now available in and through Jesus requires a counterbalancing action on our part — a fundamental change of life. As we follow that pathway, says Peter, we enter into the rest God promises (the original language suggests the ability to “breathe again”). The offer of grace in Jesus is both a call to change and the promise of restored life.

See you this Sunday at 9:29 or 11:11 am — come prepared for a gracious, but altering, experience. And don’t fear — we will do this together.

Bob Osborne

For further reflection:

1. What would you like to deeply change about yourself? What hinders that change? Are you afraid of change? Do you feel helpless? How have you reacted to this sixth practice?
2. What models or stories of life alteration do you have to guide or inspire you?
3. Read and ponder Psalm 51 and the corresponding story in 2 Samuel 11-12. What can be learned from David’s experience. How is David a model of repentance?
4. Take a look at James 5:16. How might this idea be practiced in community? What might possibly be the link between the first and second halves of this statement from James?

The Bonhoeffer quotes were taken from L. Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis (1995)

What mothers do is hold our lives in their hearts. The first parts of the story of Jesus were probably preserved by his mother Mary. At the end of Luke’s telling of Jesus’ wondrous birth story, he reveals what was surely his best source: Mary, he said, “treasured all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51). In all probability, Jesus’ self-identity was nourished early on by his mother’s rehearsal of his own story to him. Mary remembered to him what he could not access otherwise. Remembering, it seems, is a sacred duty, and mothers do it best.

Remembering is the fifth of the six community-building practices we are talking about for this season. And while it may in some ways seem like a small thing, I want to suggest that the practice of remembering is one of the most powerful ways to nourish human connectedness. Simply put, to be remembered is to be loved. To be remembered is to be valued. Remembering is making and preserving relational connection. For this fifth week of community challenge, we invite you to remember someone and act on that remembrance in a practical way.

Of course, one of the problems in our culture at present is that with all of the transience and constant movement, few of us stay put long enough to be known. In such conditions how can real remembering take place? One of the large and often unconsidered benefits of staying put is that you become known well enough to be remembered. And that may become more important to you than you might realize. There is a lot of dismembering of community going on at present in our culture, a lot of taking apart of human connectedness and belonging. Consider that it might be better to stay put. Dis-membering is taking apart, but re-membering is putting back together.

But what if a remembrance is painful? What then? Miroslav Volf is a Christian theologian who grew up in the war-ravaged country of Croatia. He writes often on the themes of grace, forgiveness and reconciliation; he writes as one experienced in the real challenge of these Christian virtues, especially when our hearts are deeply wounded. Volf asserts that we need to practice the art of “remembering well”. He says that we are not merely shaped by our memories, but we ourselves shape the memories that shape us. In other words, there are skills and practices we need to learn; we must remember in a way that heals. His book, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, is his attempt to move wounded cultures and communities on from paralyzing memories. His remedy for communities that are stuck in pain is to learn how to re-member the past, to learn how to look at history in a gracious way.

This little act of remembering, it becomes, is one of the most powerful ways we remake the world. And remembering someone remakes the world one person at a time. We do not make the world better by forgetting the past; and a hateful or hurt memory stalls us, locks us up. No, contrary to these two usual options, we make the world better by remembering well, by remembering the people we are connected to, by remembering the whole story we are part of with eyes of faith and gratitude. Like Mary, we put the world together by treasuring in our hearts the grace that is happening. We remake the world by remembering well.

How might you be able to practice this idea this week? Who might you remember, and how might you act on that memory? As I have written this, various persons have come to my memory, people I haven’t talked to in a little while. You know how that happens; life gets busy and we get absorbed in so many things. Those are my excuses, but it still is an impoverished way to live. In light of this practice, I have remembered some people I should pay attention to, some brothers and sisters that need encouragement and a little remembering. Maybe part of being a brother is to be a little bit of a mother as well.

See you Sunday at 9:29 or 11:11 am — mothers get in free.

Bob Osborne

For further reflection:

1. Has there been a moment in your life when your mom remembered something about your life that helped you understand who you were?
2. In reading this, has there been someone brought to your mind? Someone you are called to remember? What do you need to do?
3. What might be required of you to shape your memory of a particular person, place, event, or season in your life? How could you dare to remember differently, more graciously?
4. Remembering is a large theme in scripture. What scriptures can you find that speak to this theme? What do they teach you? Meditate on Deuteronomy 8:2-3.

The city of Philippi was founded approximately 200 years before the common era by the King of Macedon. His name was King Philip II so the name seemed appropriate. Later in 167 BCE the city is conquered by Rome. At the time it wasn’t a particularly large or important city and it remained largely insignificant for another hundred years until 42 BCE when Octavian (who would later change his name to Augutus Caesar) and Mark Antony have a big battle with Brutus and Cassius over their assasination of Julius Caesar. After that victory they released a number of soldier from the 18th legion, the main force that had fought in the battle, to colonize the area. So the city was centuriated, which meant they divided it into square lots and gave it to loyal soldiers. Philippi was officially renamed Colonia Vitrix Philippensium but most people, for obvious reasons, just kept calling it Philippi. Eventually things broke down between Octavian and Antony and so, 12 years later, in 30 BCE, after Octavian finally defeats Mark Antony and takes sole power in Rome, he releases another round of the Praetorian guard and grants them land in Philippi. He again renames the city Colonia Iulia Philippensis but everybody kept calling it Philippi for obvious reasons. This time the boundaries of the city are redrawn. A temple to Mars is built and a small forum is constructed. Philippi adopts the municipal governmental structure of Rome and literally starts to become a miniature Rome. In 27 BCE Octavian changes his name to Augustus Caesar and so he renames the city again, this time, Colonia Augustis Iulia Philippensis but everybody kept calling it Philippi for obvious reasons.

Point being there is a huge history of Rome written into very landscape of the city. Everything about Philippi has been designed to remind the citizens of Rome. Not just city of Rome, but the idea of Rome. The ideology of Rome. The theology of Rome
The Pax Romana. Peace through victory. Caesar as the savior of the world

And so here are a group of new Christians,
In a city steeped in Roman culture,
In a city where not even 10 Jewish men could be found to hold a Synagogue (Acts 16),
In a city literally founded and filled with ex-Roman soldiers,

And they’ve just heard that their founding pastor has been arrested and imprisoned in Rome for his belief that Jesus (not Caesar) is Lord.

And Paul writes to this community, from Prison, to say, that the God who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it. He echoes the language of the creation narrative to say these fledgling, scared, tiny, community, that their God, the one they serve, the one that is working in them right now… is the same God that pulled the universe from the spark of his creativity. In other words, Rome is not all that it thinks it is.

And this is a striking piece of the Philippians story. Paul is depending on their support while he awaits trial in Rome, while the Philippians are depending on Paul’s encouragement while they face into the growing fear in Philippi. For Paul, I think this is exactly how he imagines it should be. Faith is not something we do alone. Your relationship with God leans on my relationship with God and vice versa.

One of the challenges we’ve set out for this time in our community is to engage in the practice of hospitality. To invite people into our homes and loves and begin the process that could turn into the kind of relationship we can really lean on when we need it.

If you’re not sure were to start, we have a mechanism at Westside to help get that process rolling. It’s called the Dinner Party Network. You can sign up online to host or attend a dinner. It’s low risk (a few hours for dinner) but the potential upside is incredible. The chance to take the first step toward the kind of relationship that defined the Philippian community.

http://www.wkc.org/community/dinner

See you Sunday

Jeremy Duncan