Wonderings & Wanderings

Gleaning

Lev. 19:9-10 “‘When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.

Yahweh made many provisions for the poor, hungry, and downtrodden in legal codes and practices of Israel. One such provision included leaving some of the harvest to be collected by the poor and hungry.

This Saturday, the Emmaus Way community in observation of National Hunger Awareness Day (June 7) and as a practice to further our discussion on relational, cultural, and divine hospitality has the privilege of gleaning fields for the hungry in Durham. We're heading to Bunn, NC (about 75 minutes from Durham) to pick strawberries for hunger relief agencies in Durham. If you're local and want to participate, email us at and we'll get the essential information to you!

We'll we working with the Society of St. Andrew which organizes field gleanings all over the nation. Their website is .

From their website:
Gleaning is the Biblical practice of hand-gathering crops left in the fields after harvest.  We coordinate volunteers, growers, and distribution agencies to provide food for hungry people through gleaning. The salvaged produce is taken to local food distribution centers. Each year more than 20,000 volunteers participate in our gleaning events .

Did you know:
Americans spend $25 billion on candy each year (according to www.candyusa.org). If each American contributed the cost of one 50cent candy bar each year, all 36 million Americans living with "food insecurity" would be provided with a serving of food every day.

A full-time minimum-wage worker cannot afford to pay the fair market rent for a two-bedroom unit anywhere in America. (According to The National LowIncome Housing Coalition)

Jacob's Shame (Sermon Blog)

For the next couple Sundays, I'm guest speaking at the Chapel Hill Bible Church. I want to thank LeRon Shults (theology prof at Bethel Seminary) and Kara Eckman Powell (Fuller Seminary) for their excellent presentations at the Emergent Conventions this year on humanity. Their work on the theology of humanity conveyed in concepts of "face" and "facing" inspired this short series on Jacob.

A short summary of Kara's and LeRon's presentation:
• Much of the human experience is shaped by the faces of others. The human experience is also characterized by shame — we cover our faces because of our shame.
• The biblical narrative "face" and the "covering of our faces" takes on a grave theological significance. "Face" not only is used to express human emotion (for example: the biblical phrase for "joy" is literally "shining face), "face" also conveys relational encounters. The Hebrew word for "face" is also the theologically loaded word "presence" used regularly to describe the presence of Yahweh and human encounters with Yahweh.
• The covering our faces reveals the viral presence of sin our lives and community — we hide ourselves from God and from the presence of God in community. (Shame, of course, is experienced in community).

I strongly recommend getting their presentation from youthspecialties.com or emergentconvention.com. I'm just giving you a taste. Their words on the relationality of sin is a deeply provocative portion of theology that has been lost in our very individualized culture. The implications for baptism (a rite of initation into redeemed community) and eucharist (the repetitive practice of uncovering our faces to each other in affirming and accepting God's "face" or "presence" are huge in this concept. LeRon and Kara do a great job in exploring these possibilities.

I'm my sermons, I'm exploring these themes through the story of Jacob and his narrative of face covering. Note these incidents —
• Jacob disquises himself to steal his brother Esau's blessing. This, naturally, enrages Esau and Jacob must flee in the night to save his life.
• In his great dream, Jacob in his shame is blind to a facing event. At Bethel, the presence or face of God is revealed to Jacob but he proclaims his own shame and blindness with some of the most tragic words of the OT, "surely God was in this place and I didn't know it!"
• The bizarre wedding scene where he marries Leah rather than the intended Rachel. As was the custom, the face of the bride was covered during the ceremony. As Jacob goes to consummate the marriage, he finds that he has been tricked by Laban (the father of these two women). Face-covering in this scene reveals the treachery and dishonesty of all of humanity.
• The Jacob story is a narrative of two journeys — a shameful journey from home and a forced journey to home, to the place of Esau's angry face and the places (specifically Bethel) where Jacob has encountered the face of God.
• As foreshadowing of the presence of God, just before reaching Esau, Jacob encounters angels. Jacob names this place "the camp of God" (a place where God stops by on occassion?).
• As he sends his family and gifts ahead to appease Esau, Jacob wrestles with a divine figure. At daybreak, Jacob demands a blessing (literally "show me your face"). The blessing that Yahweh has always intended for Jacob is given. Jacob names this place, "Peniel" or "Face" because he has encountered the presence of God and survived.

It is a great story, an "everywoman" and "everyman" story of our fleeing in shame from the face or presence of God. Next week, I'm going to continue the story by looking at "Esau's kiss" — an event laden with divine eradication of shame and typology of Jesus.

For those who heard me today, feel free to use the comments here to share a story or a thought. The covering of our faces in a universal human experience. Freedom from shame comes in community that follows the journey of Christ.

Emmaus Way

OK, I admit, I have been the poster-child of a blogworld AWOL...

This winter/spring has been filled with so many gracious and challenging events —

• Finishing a manuscript for Zondervan: "The Church in Transition: The Journey of the Existing Church into the Emerging Culture" (it will be out in Jan 2006)
• Getting approval for our emerging culture initative that has developed into a missional community/church plant in Durham, NC and beginning the development of this community that we now call "Emmaus Way"
• Managing a health scare in our family. For those who know, my wife Mimi had a tumor on her thyroid removed last month. Graciously, it was mostly benign and she has a great prognosis!

But I'm back....

I want to post over the next few days about the values of our mission, Emmaus Way and describe a bit more of the story of this community. As many know, our dream is forge a community that embodies the life of Jesus in our postmodern world and relates with intentionality to an existing church (the Chapel Hill Bible Church which has gracious funded this effort). We seek to be a community that continues to learn from the historical church while also acting as a scout for the church as begins to collide with the emerging culture.

“Community” at Emmaus Way
“Community” has become one of the most overused words in our vocabulary — we use it to refer to almost every form of relationship and association in our culture. Some common uses of “community” include “people who are like me or agree with me,” “persons who help me accomplish my goals,” or simply “times when I’m comfortable around others.”

When we dream of community at Emmaus Way, we seek an embodiment of relationships that challenges some of our culture’s comfortable reductions of community and seeks to express Christian community with honesty and humility in a vastly changed culture.

Our understanding of community has been forged in our passion for and exploration of hospitality. Henri Nouwen, one of the great voices of Christian spirituality in the 20th Century, defined hospitality as the radical combination of “receptivity” (being truly open to the presence of others on their own terms) and “honesty” (being vulnerable, humble, and authentic with one’s own heart and perspective). So many times in Christian community, one of these poles of hospitality is practiced without the other!

Several extensions of hospitality have become passions and goals for our community:
• Divine Hospitality: Being a community that is open to the presence and God on God’s terms and agendas…Being shaped by spiritual practices that enhance our ability to hear God’s voice.
• Relational Hospitality: Living with kindness in all our relationships.
• Cultural Hospitality: Recognizing that God speaks outside of our overly delineated notions of the sacred and secular…Listening for God’s voice outside of the church and throughout the cultures that surround us…Worshipping God as Creator by acknowledging that our whole world is created and loved by God…Learning from other cultures and expressions of Christianity…Seeking and honoring the beauty around us.
• Communicational Hospitality: Practicing and valuing the art of dialogue…Learning by listening
• Environmental Hospitality: Loving and protecting all of God’s creation.

The greatest teacher and embodiment of hospitality was Jesus. He defied the norms of his day by inviting cultural aliens and his own people, “sinners” and “the righteous,” scholars and the uneducated, paupers and princes, and women and men into his friendship and the embrace of God. We hope to practice the way of Jesus in all of our relationships.

Our name, Emmaus Way, comes from a scene of hospitality extended in the narrative of Jesus’ life. It is an Easter story. On the day of Jesus’ resurrection, two of Jesus’ disciples traveled the road to Emmaus. With lingering sadness and incredulity at the reports of Jesus’ resurrection, they were joined by Jesus himself. Despite his rebuke of their lack of faith (hadn’t he promised them personally that he would rise from the grave) and extensive explanation of the Jewish Scriptures, they still do not recognize him. As the day wanes and they reach their destination, the stranger appears to be intent to travel on into the night. Graciously, they invite the man who has rebuked and taught them in for the evening. While breaking bread and pouring wine in an event that recalls the last supper and anticipates the Christian practice of Eucharist, Jesus is revealed them. Though Jesus’ teachings were not lost (some scholars teach that the core of the New Testament was revealed in Jesus’ traveling explanation to these men), it was an act of hospitality that yielded recognition of the risen Christ. At Emmaus Way, we seek to embrace and practice the tradition of this narrative in our acts of community.