Last weekend, we attended the Love Thy Neighbor Ordinary Revival gathering -- and one of the critical shifts they talked about was moving...

from fragmented isolation to neighborhood presence.

We are all too familiar with our hyper-mobile, technological, consumeristic, and individualistic culture and the ensuing fragmentation. Fragmentation of neighborhoods, families and communities that leaves so many of us today suffering from anxiety, depression and loneliness. But what is our response as the people of God? And how do we begin to imagine what it means to be faithfully present weaving a fabric of care in our places? [stolen from The New Parish] For this move from fragmented isolation to neighborhood presence is such an important shift. For how are we supposed to be love incarnate -- to reveal what God is like to our neighbors -- if we are not present?

This fall, there are going to be lots of opportunities for you to be present in your neighborhoods and communities. Whether that is a neighborhood dinner, a Muslim/Christian listening event, a social justice book club, a pub theology gathering or a 5K fun run, I encourage you to SHOW UP. Some of you have more bandwidth than others; and certainly, all of you have plenty of reasons why you don't have time, energy... yada yada yada ( I know I do!) But I want to encourage you, maybe even challenge you...to be present. In your neighborhood. At your local coffee shop. At the community forum. Your life will only be enriched.

I was talking with someone this week who shared how she was experiencing an increase in her quality of life -- the synergy and community that happens when you begin to run into folks everyday -- at the school pickup, the coffee shop, the grocery store and the local art show. It is an intangible gift until you experience it. The joy and beauty of belonging to a place, of feeling a sense of pride and ownership of the neighborhood, a feeling of being known and knowing others. This is the gift of presence in the neighborhood.

Of course, it will look different for each of us, depending on the unique contexts in which we live our lives, the demands of work and family and our passions and interests.

But no one is exempt.

You see, we don't get the privilege of talking without walking (it out).

Dear friends, do you think you'll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, "Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!" and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup -- where does that get you? Isn't it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense? [James 2:14-17 The Message]

For our faith must be expressed in action. This is why we are The Practicing Church. And formation doesn't happen just on Sunday. It happens on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday. And so we don't get to talk about justice and healing and renewal in the world without somehow, even in very small ways, participating in this work.

So many of you are steeped in this healing work in the world as counselors, teachers, mental health workers and chaplains that you feel like there is nothing left when you get home. Others of you are beginning to experience the joy of neighborhood presence. Still others of you are not sure where to begin. And so if this idea of neighborhood presence feels daunting to you, start small. But do start.

Love your neighbor -- your actual neighbors. It is a tremendous gift that just keeps on giving.

Root in a particular place and allow God's dream to grow there.

Show up and be present. Learn the names and faces of your community. Listen deeply to their stories.

Open up your homes. Open up your hearts. Open up your lives.

This week, as I've heard beautiful stories of heartache and resilience that moved me to tears at a cultural community event, as I've thrown back my head and laughed with my Muslim neighbor, as I've participated in a community forum for my neighbors experiencing homelessness, as I've grieved with my neighbor experiencing a tragic loss and as I've made of fool of myself with the neighborhood kids at Turning Point, my life is so much bigger, fuller and richer. And I feel alive and connected to God's dream here.

For surely it is the work of the Spirit. All I have to do is show up.

by Jessica Ketola

This last Sunday we talked about how Jesus came to reveal what God was like.

LOVE INCARNATE. Divine love in human form. A God who meets us in the everyday longings, pain and hunger of our ordinary lives.

I am intensely aware of this as we serve coffee on Aurora at the methadone clinic amidst more suffering than I can fully comprehend. Beautiful and resilient spirits housed in bodies ravaged by addiction with dreams that seem forever illusive. God, where are you?

For since the beginning of time, we have tried to wrap our minds around what God is like -- and I think that most religion, philosophy and mythology is trying to answer this question. Is God like the violent and demanding pagan gods of the ancients? Is God full of wrath and judgment like the hell and brimstone preachers say? Is God distant and uncaring? Or is God absent, irrelevant and obsolete?

But Jesus answered this question, once and for all. God is love incarnate. Love is the essence of God. God loves as the sun shines: love expresses who God is. And through Jesus, love came in human form and laid down his life for us through the work of the cross, taking on our suffering, sin, sorrow and pain. And somehow, even in our secular culture, the cross remains a poignant symbol with the theme of sacrifice repeated again and again in the stories we tell. For somehow we know in our bones that the cross of Jesus was the ultimate revelation of true power and true love.

For we all feel our wounds and our sorrows, whether discreetly hidden behind the safety of middle-class garage doors or flagrantly blatant on Aurora Avenue. And so the image of Jesus on the cross speaks of the true God -- not as a distant, faceless bureaucrat, nor as a bullying boss, but as the one who has strangely come right into the middle of the pains, the agonies, the hungers and sorrows of the world and taken their full force on himself. In a sense, all of Christian theology, certainly theology of the cross, is the attempt to explain this very immediate, personal, visceral experience.

And so standing at the foot of the cross taking in the extraordinary lengths that God has gone for us, it almost seems impossible to NOT sense the wonder, the power, the miracle and the possibility in love.This is the force that has changed the world, and is still has the power to change the world if we as followers of Jesus could only catch it.

For what John says next is huge.

Beloved, if that's how God loved us, we ought to love one another in the same way. Nobody has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and God's love is completed in us. [I John 4:11-12]

Jesus is the example; now we should copy it. Yes, simple and straightforward, beautiful and stunning, and well, almost impossible to do. And yet through the power and unction of the Spirit, that which is impossible becomes possible.

No one has ever seen God, not so much as a glimpse. This one-of-a-kind God-Expression, who exists at the very heart of the Father, has made him plain as day. [John 1:18] This is remarkably profound. We don't really know who God is until we look at Jesus. And so what John is provocatively saying is that people around us really don't know who God is -- until they see it revealed in our lives as the people of God. Until God's love is completed in us. For the work of Jesus is meant to continue through us, the church.

This is phenomenally challenging and also achingly true. This is why I signed up to be a pastor and why I can't walk away from the church -- for this is our calling, our vocation and our mandate as the people of God. As disparaging as our current realities are and as far as we stray from this truth, it remains.

We are called to be LOVE INCARNATE.

And this week as I stood out on Aurora doing an inanely simple thing, a profoundly human and earthy thing, offering coffee, muffins and a smile to my fellow siblings, I was reminded by sages much wiser than I. Of the goodness of showing up. Of the beauty of presence. Of the gift of listening and seeing. One woman said, "Thank you so much for doing this, for being here. You know most folks don't even see us as people." And she offered me the gift of seeing what I couldn't see without her eyes -- showing me how we dehumanize, categorize, and ostracize, cutting ourselves off from the true lament of suffering with.

This is the kind of love that Jesus offers. Compassion. A love that suffers with. Us. In all our pain, flailing, acting out and struggle. And a love that suffers with our neighbor. Who we are tempted to classify and thus write off as "other". Somehow I know that as we attempt to connect to this divine love and to more fully embody it, those who we deem most in need will become our greatest teachers. For our arrogance is blinding and our independence crippling.

Somehow we as a community will have to find ways to embody this love, to live a way of love together in our neighborhoods and communities, to share life and meals, joys and pains, our dreams and our disappointments. We will have to begin to "overflow" with the love that we have received to those around us as we show up in our communities joining in justice, renewal, mercy and compassion. We will have to care about those that are perceived to be "other" or on the "outside", those who are oppressed, those who are hated. And doing this will take intentionality. It will take sacrifice. It will take proximity.

But what if...?

What if we could begin to be love incarnate? Love in human form. What if we could stumble and experiment and practice and embody love as the Spirit weaves us into something truly beautiful and stunning?

I hope you will join us this Sunday as we continue to wrestle with how we are called to live lives of love. For God is love and this love is so compelling, so true, so powerful that it can still change the world.

by Jessica Ketola

This week we were once again provoked by I John to love one another even as Jesus laid down his life for us. For this is how we've come to understand and experience love -- through Christ's sacrifice. This is at the heart of the goodness of our story and yet to follow in the example of Jesus is... well... just plain hard (to put it mildly).

Because Jesus DIED. He gave up his life. And as the famous saying goes, "Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die." Nobody wants to die. But it does seem that there is a correlation between loving and dying. Ask any parent, spouse, sibling, child or human who has attempted to love. True love requires sacrifice, some giving up of our desire or preference, some dying to self. Some letting go of the life that I imagined for the life that we now share.

But here, the apostle John is not just talking about our closest friends and family. He is talking to the faith community and urging them to love one another this way. And well, today this is a hard concept to wrap our heads around. In a culture that is fiercely independent, fragmented, frenetically busy, and commitment-avoidant, it is hard for us to think in terms of the collective "we". And even more foreign to think about loving our fellow church members in this sacrificial way, no less our neighbors! And yet...isn't this the greatest commandment? To love God and to love our neighbor even as we love ourselves.

This is why I believe that we must reimagine our lives together as those who are seeking to follow the Way of Jesus. How can we ever begin to live out these challenging words without a context of sharing life, proximity, and meals together? It will take more than seeing each other a few hours on a Sunday to learn how to lay down our lives for one another. For love is more than an ideal or sentiment. It is lived out in the everyday, gritty realities of our lives. Love is far more than words. It is action. And we all sense this as we perceive the world around us -- we can only trust love that is proven, tested and lived. This is why John urges us in I John 3:18,

Children, let us not love in word, or in speech, but in deed and in truth. [NTE]

Somehow we have to move beyond the utopian ideals, theoretical debates, sanitized notions, and deluge of words and begin to live this out.

In real time. With real people. In real life.

Like choosing to show up and be present for someone when you're tired and spent. Like crossing the street to talk to your neighbor when you'd prefer to run inside. Like being vulnerable to share your anger when you'd rather hide. Like attending a "thing" that isn't your thing in your desire to know the other. Like sacrificing your scarce time, energy, and money to embrace the abundance of the community.

This is love ->  Love = life laid down.

This is not something that comes easy. It will take practice. But love, true love, has the power to transform us, heal us and uplift us. It is the essence of God and the reason why we are all here.

My dear children, let's not just talk about love; let's practice real love. This is the only way we'll know we're living truly, living in God's reality.   
[I John 3:18 The Message]

by Jessica Ketola