Ramblings: Christmas, Sleep, Beauty and Mission

Companions,

I've been listening to Lessons and Carols from Cambridge (O Come Let Us Adore Him!) and reading Tony Jones's repost of Chrysostom's Christmas sermon and reflecting on several things.

Christmastide and Mission
I hope these days for all of us and among the people with whom we serve in community will provide more opportunity for reflection, for pondering and seeing around us, the mystery of the Incarnation, than simply time off, or lots of time in "adjusting" gifts. May these days strengthen community for each of us.

Beauty and Mission
I am more and more convinced that beauty matters missionally. (Your convictions may vary!) Many of us who live on cultural or social or economic fringes by choice may also be tempted to downplay beauty as representing an investment in the powers that be. Call it the influence of Lessons and Carols if you will, but what I find is such beauty grants grace, hope, strength and generosity of spirit that overflows in and through the mission of God. So may we beautify as well as bring salt wherever we go.

Sleep and Mission
I've become over the years rather a curmudgeon about all the Christmas songs that tell infant Jesus to sleep or extol him for doing so, while I keep seeing Jesus calling us to wake up to the reality of God's reign (and judgment/mercy/justice) in our midst.

I don't back off from that perspective one bit, but I've come to see another one. We do need sleep, too. Too often sleep is associated with forgetting and escape, heavenly peace as a Christianized moniker for Lethe. But in reality, it is sleep that helps us remember. Sleep is part of the core filing process for our brains. Lack sleep and memory begins to fail. To be fully awake, we must sleep.

The NT never describes the infant Jesus sleeping. But what we who've had infants know in our bones is how fragile that sleep can be. They need it, and since theirs comes in smaller doses followed by cries that often disturb ours, we need them to get it, too.

So may we all sleep well that we may be awake!

A Methodist missional monastic (or otherwise) must-read

Companions,

I'm thanking God today for Twitter, for our companion Carl Thomas Gladstone, and for his Twitter post last week about Elaine Heath and Scott Kisker's new book, Longing for Spring: A New Vision for Wesleyan Community.

I'm also thanking God for my colleague, Steve Manskar, who let me borrow the book after he read it after I mentioned it to him last week after I saw Carl's tweet. I've now passed it on to another colleague, also in my Covenant Discipleship group, Tom Albin.

This little volume puts into 90-some pages of text personal narratives, solid history, and living examples of the very kinds of communities and community practices we have been seeking to incarnate and are already practicing, and even identifies the relationship between what they call "monastic communities" (or what we have called "missional groups") in much the same way as we did at emergingumc2.

Having this book in print is an amazing legitimation of what we've been talking about and working for.

It's a fun, and even fairly quick read.

And it includes a study guide at the end to use with groups where you are.

This isn't a sales pitch for the book. No commercial interest here at all. I have no idea who Wipf and Stock publishers are. It's just that if you're looking for something already in print by folks who are dedicated United Methodists that can help you make sense of what we've all been talking about and working on with others, this is really the first thing I've found that does that. And it does it really, really well.

Oh, and two UM bishops have endorsed it-- William Willimon and Sally Dyck.

So... as the voice of a child said to Augustine, "Take up and read!"

Blessed Advent and Christmastide,

Taylor Burton-Edwards