CMC Service 8-13-23 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

An offering of earth and Spirit

Texts: Romans 8:22-26; 12:1-2

Speaker: Joel Miller

On the last day of seminars at Mennonite Church USA Convention I attended one called “Resistance and Healing: Queer, Decolonial Movements.”    This and the entire event this took place within the large Convention Center in downtown Kansas City. One of the panelists was Sarah Augustine, a Pueblo (Tewa) woman from the Pacific Northwest.  In her introduction, she mentioned her morning routine of making a gratitude offering, and joked about the difficulty of finding a patch of grass amidst the concrete and asphalt.  Fortunately, earlier in the day, she had managed for find about a two foot by two foot green spot somewhere nearby where she could touch the earth, an essential part of the ritual. 

As we reflect today about the church – the wider church, the local church, what it means to be church, I’d like to linger with this image from Sarah Augustine — Searching for a patch of earth to touch to make an offering. 

It’s a pretty good description of how I have experienced these national conventions.  Truth be told, I haven’t approached these times with very high expectations.  We are a theologically varied clan, which is fine until some of those convictions involve drawing sharp lines of who’s in and who’s out.  And we do meet in these cavernous convention halls with zero acoustics that swallow up one of the most potentially beautiful parts of gathering – thousands of folks singing in one space, raising our voices in harmony.

But it’s been quite a while since I expected the church to be perfect.  Which is why I like Sarah’s image so much.  Even the wider church can feel…

CMC Service 8/6/23 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

“Lift up your eyes…” | 6 August 2023
Texts: Isaiah 40:12-31
Speaker: Mark Rupp

I heard a story this week that is apparently one told among the Hasidic Jewish community. In this story, there was a grandfather who noticed that every morning during the time for daily prayers his granddaughter would sneak off into the woods. At first he ignored it, perhaps thinking she was sneaking off to play. But one day he decided to follow her. When he came upon her deep in the woods, he found her not making mud pies or swinging sticks or climbing trees. No, instead he found her going through the daily prayers just like the rest of the family was back in the house.

He stepped into the clearing and asked his granddaughter, “Why do you go outside to pray?”

She looked up at him and replied, “I feel closer to God when I am in nature.”

The grandfather tried to sound as wise as he could and said to the girl, “Don’t you know that God is the same everywhere?”

“I know,” she said back. “But I’m not.”

It is a nice little story that borders slightly on the saccharine, but when I first read it this week, the ending caught me off guard like the end of a well-told parable. God may be the same everywhere, but I am not. Or perhaps we might say, the essence of who or what God is may be the same everywhere, but our experiences and receptivity to those revelations are not the same everywhere. Whether we are praying, worshiping, studying, meditating, dancing, or simply waiting for God in quiet contemplation, our experiences can be greatly affected by our surroundings. We are not…

CMC Service 7-30-23 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

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7/23/23 CMC Service from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

A Way Back To Beginner’s Mind | 23 July 2023
Texts: Luke 11:1-13; 1 Thessalonians 5:15-19
Speaker: Joel Miller

There’s a teaching in Zen Buddhism called “beginner’s mind;” shoshin in Japanese.  It goes back to the 13th century and made its way into the English-speaking world through the book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, written in 1970 by Shunryu Suzuki.

A beginner’s mind is open and curious, no matter how old the person.  It’s free of rigid categories that automatically organize experiences and thoughts into set patterns.  A person with shoshin is forever a student. 

It’s like a child first encountering the wonders of the world.  The beginner’s mind welcomes delight and surprise and other things it can’t control.  It is, it seems to me, the scientific mind at its best: always open to new information.  Even when, or perhaps especially when, it doesn’t fit into existing theory.  A popular line from Suzuki’s book goes like this: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few” (Quoted from The Spirituality of Imperfection, p. 142). 

Beginner’s mind is ultimately a spiritual condition. 

A kindred teaching in the Christian New Testament is when Jesus tells his disciples, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).

The need for the 12 Steps, their reason for existence, we could say, is that it’s so easy to lose the beginners mind.  It’s quite a bit easier to claim the expert’s mind.  The one that’s convinced of its own correctness.  The one that knows what’s best.  The one that is eager to point out other’s mistakes and slow to examine one’s own.  The mind, in the…

CMC Service 7/16/2023 from Gwen Reiser on Vimeo.

“A Way Out of Hell” 
Texts: Exodus 21:33-36; Matthew 5:23-24
Speaker: Joel Miller

There’s a scene from the movie Gandhi that’s stuck with me since I first saw it.  Mohandas Gandhi was an attorney from India during British colonial rule.  He found a basis for nonviolent philosophy in his Hindu sacred text, the Bhagavad Gita.  He was also deeply influenced by the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, which he thought might be worth trying out on these British Christians occupying his country.  He became a leader of the Indian National Congress, even as he traded in his comfortable lifestyle and Western attire for homespun cloth and simple food produced in a self-sufficient community.  He developed a vision of a free India that honored religious pluralism and cultural diversity. Through nonviolent public campaigns and numerous imprisonments, Gandhi led India to independence from Britain in 1947.  But violence broke out between Indian Muslim nationalists, and Hindu Indians.  As he had done several times before, Gandhi went on a hunger strike, pledging not to eat until all Indians would stop attacking each other. 

The scene I’m referring to happens at this point, toward the end of the film, as leaders are gathered around Gandhi’s bedside, his energy depleted from fasting.  They’re telling him the fighting had finally stopped.  Suddenly a wide-eyed man bursts in and begs Gandhi to eat so he can stay alive, but that he himself was going to hell.  Gandhi replies that only God can decide this.  The man insists, saying that he killed a child.  The Muslims had killed his boy, so in his rage he had retaliated.  Gandhi takes in the gravity of this confession and replies to…