Ruth: Waiting for a Redeemer [guest post]

December 18, 2019December 18, 2019 / Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

This Advent meditation is part of the Liberti Church 2019 Advent and Christmas Prayerbook, and it is by Liberti seminary intern Tara Ann Wooward.

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The first time the phrase “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” meant something was when my beloved brother returned home from college—and the second time was when I moved away to seminary. Home takes on a new meaning once it’s been left behind.

Yet, home can also be elusive and painful. For anyone who has experienced exile or homelessness, job or school relocation, the question “where are you from?” can provoke painful memories of loss and loneliness. In a time of unprecedented transience, we might wonder where and when we will ever truly feel at home again.
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Bathsheba: Waiting for Mercy [guest post]

December 12, 2019December 12, 2019 / Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

This Advent meditation is part of the Liberti Church 2019 Advent and Christmas Prayerbook, and it is by Liberti member Maria Lipkin.

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When I read some of the episodes of David’s story I often think, “what a coward! How did God let him get away with so much?!” I feel this way especially when I read the story of David and Bathsheba. Here is a king who was supposed to be fighting with his men but is instead lounging around his palace. At the first sight of a naked woman, he makes her have sex with him even though she is married to one of his own valiant soldiers! They conceive a child and David kills her husband to cover up his act. The child dies because of David’s sin.
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This Advent, Pray with the Mothers of Jesus

December 2, 2019January 21, 2020 / Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

Yesterday marked the beginning of Advent 2019, a period of time which the Christian Church has historically set aside to meditate on Jesus’ coming into the world at Christmas. It’s usually a time of reflection, meditation, and preparation, leading up to the full-on celebration that is Christmas.

To help focus us in this time, people at my church designed a prayerbook built around the women named in the genealogies of Jesus in the gospels: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.

You can find downloadable and and web versions of the prayerbook here. Or, if a direct link is easier: PDF / EPUB / MOBI (Kindle) / Web.

Different people put together the daily prayer liturgies, reflections, art, poetry, and seasonal meditations, so there’s variety and depth for those that appreciate and connect with such things. Though it is a product of a particular church congregation, it is put together in such away that anyone, anywhere could engage with it and benefit from it. So download and share it widely and sit with it deeply. We all hope it will be a useful way to stop, reflect, and connect during this season.

Advent & Mortality

December 1, 2019 / Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

“If our mortality is overcome as the mortality of Jesus’ humanity was, we do not leave our mortal lives behind after death, as if our deaths (and sufferings) have been cancelled out. We are not replaced by new immortal versions of ourselves, any more than the resurrected Christ appears as someone who is not visibly the crucified. It is the crucified body that is glorified to immortality in the resurrection of the body. Our mortality is not changed into immortality after death, mortal bodies replaced by essentially immortal ones. Instead our mortality is (even now, though unapparently) clothed in immortality. (1 Cor 15:33)”
– Dr. Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity

I got this book in Advent last year and never actually read it. This quote makes me think that, with where my soul is now, the delay was providential. This will be my Advent read this year. Join me!

Advent Prayers [Mon 12/11/17]

December 11, 2017December 8, 2017 / Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

Opening Prayer

Be pleased, O God, to deliver me.
O LORD, make haste to help me!
-from Psalm 70:1

-silence-

The Gloria

Glory be to God the Father,
God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning, so it is now,
and so it ever shall be, world without end.
Alleluia- Amen!
-the “Gloria Patri”

Scripture Reading

Isaiah 11:1-5
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist,
and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

-silence for reflection, meditation-

Prayer

-pray for yourself, your loved ones, friends, enemies, the church, and the world-

Prayer for the Week

God for whom we watch and wait,
you sent John the Baptist to prepare the way of your Son:
give us courage to speak the truth, to hunger for justice,
and to suffer for the cause of right,
with Jesus Christ our Lord-
Amen

[From the Liberti Church 2017 Advent + Christmas Prayerbook. Photo by Monica Ayers.]

Advent Reflection by Alyssa Mallgrave [Sun 12/10/17]

December 10, 2017December 8, 2017 / Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

A couple of months ago, I went camping alone, totally isolated somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania. Dirt roads, no signal, completely in the dark. I thought it would be a cool spiritual experience – it was not. Instead of the perfect night’s sleep I had hoped for, I laid awake for hours. The sound of every falling leaf reminded me that I was alone, causing my imagination to devise ridiculous scenarios of what I assumed was an inevitable demise at the hands of a bear, a murderer, or some other unlikely adversary. I was terrified, and as soon as morning came, I scrambled back to civilization.

Scripture talks about the wilderness a lot, and this is how I picture it: alienated from society, totally vulnerable, and constantly on edge. But you don’t necessarily need to travel very far for this kind of experience. For some of us, the wilderness is right here in our city, our homes, and our everyday lives. And regardless of where we find it, we all know that this is a world that’s deeply broken and in need of redemption.

Long before Christ was born, God spoke words of comfort to the Israelites through the ancient prophet Isaiah, assuring them that a messiah would one day come to rule and to serve them in a glorified world, where valleys rise high and mountains bow low. But they’d need to get ready – in the wilderness, they’d need to prepare the way for this coming Lord. Continue reading →

Advent Reading [Sat 12/9/17]

December 9, 2017December 8, 2017 / Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment. The Salvation Army Santa Claus clangs his bell. The sidewalks are so crowded you can hardly move. Exhaust fumes are the chief fragrance in the air, and everybody is as bundled up against all the fuss is really about as they are bundled up against the windchill factor. But if you concentrate just for an instant, far off in the deeps of you somewhere you can feel the beating of your heart. For all its madness and lostness, not to mention your own, you can hear the world itself holding its breath.

Glory be to God the Father,
God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning, so it is now,
and so it ever shall be, world without end.
Alleluia- Amen!
-the “Gloria Patri”

Continue reading →

Advent Reflection by Lauren Clausen [Sun 12/3/17]

December 3, 2017December 8, 2017 / Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

When I think about the Advent season this year, I feel a bit overwhelmed. Not only does it mean that there are Christmas presents to buy and wrap, parties to attend, cookies to bake and decorations to put up, but it means that the weather is turning, the light disappearing and the cold creeping in. As the days grow shorter my inclination is to turn inward, to hunker down in the coziness of home and use the chill as an excuse to stay in. And in the midst of this season—this combination of frenzied holiday preparations and cold that makes you want to just hibernate for a bit—we are supposed to spend time contemplating our sin, the darkness of the world, our need for the light of Christ. Sometimes it feels like a lot just to focus on all the trappings that come with Christmas, but we are called to more. We are called to Advent as a time of recognizing that we dwell in darkness until the arrival of the One who set things alight.

Thank goodness for Scripture, which gives word to the realities whose existence we sometimes find it easier to forget. This passage in Isaiah does just that, calling on God to “rend the heavens and come down” because “we have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” Come down, Lord, here where we are so sinful that even our good deeds are filthy. Come down here where we are selfish. Here where we ignore you, here where we’re mired in sin. Come down here where there is “no one who calls upon your name,” where were find it easier to pretend you don’t exist.
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“Darkest Before the Dawn” [a sermon]

February 21, 2017March 23, 2017 / Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

During the Advent and Christmas season, my church did a sermon series going through the key texts of Handel’s Messiah.

I got to preach during that series and only recently realized I never posted it here.

I’m beginning to see that light and darkness are constant themes through my preaching, and in this sermon, those themes are explicitly in the text. God’s people have returned from exile to their homeland, but it still hurts. Things aren’t the way they remembered, and they keep encountering difficulties and old temptations at every turn.

And so God acknowledged the darkness, but promises light. Is that enough, though? How do we not just sit back and say, “yeah, yeah yeah–I’ve heard this all before” and then continue on steeped in our cynicism? In this sermon (as with others I’ve preached), I try to press more deeply into the darkness to see what God might say. The text is Isaiah 60.1-3, and here’s the sermon audio. Feel free to send me any thoughts, questions or concerns:

You can also download it here, or subscribe to our podcast. If reading is more your style, here are my notes for your perusal. Continue reading →

Demand a Miracle (Merry Christmas) [from W.H. Auden’s “For the Time Being”]

December 27, 2016December 27, 2016 / Paul Burkhart / Leave a comment

This is from the Advent portion of W. H. Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being. The full text is under copyright, but it’s in this book, if you’re interested.

From Part I:

[T]ime never moves and nothing can ever happen:
I mean that although there’s a person we know all about
Still bearing our name and loving himself as before,
That person has become a fiction; our true existence
Is decided by no one and has no importance to love.

That is why we despair; that is why we would welcome
The nursery bogey or the winecellar ghost, why even
The violent howling of winter and war has become
Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop. We are afraid
Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare
Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.
This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God.

Part II, Chorus:

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.