at the refuge’s saturday evening gatherings we are walking through the urban skye advent guide - the third way-in anticipation of the hope and promise of Christ’s birth and what it means for our lives.  while i never grew up using the word “advent” and had no idea what “the church calendar” meant for many years, i have come to appreciate some intention during these holiday weeks as a spiritual discipline of focusing on God, noticing his spirit at work in my life, the refuge community, and the world and doing what i can to ignore the other crazy holiday distractions that rob me of life and generally make me tired.

so just what is the third way anyway? when threatened in any way, shape or form, we all have a tendency to respond in one of two ways.  the first way is to fight, to respond in violence & anger; this might be in our hearts, our actions, our words.   the second way is to flee, to run away, hide, pretend that the problem is not there and avoid addressing it because we think we can’t change it anyway.   neither of these ways are the ways of Jesus.  the third way, the way of Jesus, is an active presence, a crazy combination of justice & mercy, of staying in and working through conflict and tension instead of lashing out in violence & anger or just running away.    it is not natural for most of us. as human beings, we tend to take the path of least resistance & that path typically leads us to the first or second way.

this saturday evening we talked about the first way & the way of violence.  king herod, in the story of Jesus, when threatened by news of Jesus’ birth, responded with an act of horrid violence that most of us would say ‘we’d never do that’, ordering the killing of baby boys to make sure Jesus didn’t have a chance.  most of us probably aren’t going to kill anyone anytime soon (even though we might want to), but the reality of herod’s response is part of our humanness, too.   when we are afraid, power is threatened, we perceive we are “right”, we do all kinds of things that we can justify in our mind and hearts but are utterly contrary to the ways of Jesus.   these small or big acts of “violence” happens in our relationship with God, with ourselves, with others & usually always end up resulting in shame, disconnectedness, loneliness.

yeah, the first way always leads to destruction of relationships.  it hurts people.  it hurts ourselves.  it hurts our relationship with God.   what’s interesting to me, though, is even though it’s not as ugly, the second way has the same effect.   fleeing, running, hiding, doing-whatever-we-can-to-avoid conflict offer the same kind of self-protecting and separate us from relationship, too.  and the end result is usually the same:  we miss out on Love.   Jesus, in the sermon on the mount, offers us a third way, a better way, a way of staying in, engaging in the brutality of a harsh world, of difficult relationships, of pain and sadness & clinging to the hope for something better-the kingdom of God somehow available to us now regardless of our circumstances.

if you weren’t there, here was the question we reflected on before communion:

martin luther king said:

returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

i do look forward to the upcoming weeks of conversation & reflection and for God’s continued work in my life, in the life of our community, that i’d know more deeply what Jesus ways–the ways of Love–can really look like.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 3:36 pm and is filed under advent, kathy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.