naomi lippett

Vineyard USA 25th Anniversary from Vineyard USA on Vimeo.

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I got up at 6am to watch one of the best tennis matches that I have seen in the last 10 years . . . great rivals and a truly beautiful game!

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It seems like a long time since I’ve written something in this space, although I have gone back to a post which I’m trying to get out about righteousness. Hopefully I’ll post it sometime soon. Lots has been happening but at the moment my head is swirling with the following: graphic design, the influence that art and society have on each other, song writing both on my own and with another, communications, not being spread so thin with my involvement in things but rather streamlining and focusing on 2-3 things , people!

Here is something that landed on my desk by an anonymous source . . . I’m pondering it!
“Everyone is born to live creatively, but many of us fail to do so. Why? Because we are lazy. Creativity is difficult. When youa re being creative you’re living by faith. You don’t know what’s next because the created, by definition, is what’s never been before. So you’re living at the edge of something in which you’re not very confident. You might fail: in fact, you almost certainly will fail a good part of the time. All the creative persons I know throw away most of the stuff they do.
The streets and fields, the homes and markets of the world are an art gallery displaying not culture, but new creations in Christ.” (Eugene Peterson)

Here is another good excerpt that goes along with my thinking.

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“I am the vessel. The draught is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.”

Understand - through the stillness
Act - out of the stillness
Conquer - in the stillness
“In order for the eye to perceive color, it must divest itself of all colors”

Be grateful as your deeds become less and less associated with your name, as your feet ever more lightly tread the earth.

Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961)

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I wake up and in some of the first disorientating moments of the day realize
new beginning, just for a moment . . . new beginning
new beginning, a new leg of the journey
a great gift.
Then it slips away like sand through my fingers
thousands of grains of thoughts pile in
thoughts about the minutes, hours, days, months ahead
but I dig for it
searching for the treasure
the great gift.

Most of the significant Celts had a great sense of journey and how each day is a new beginning. They often set out each day with no particular destination in mind, but wherever they went they shared Jesus with words and actions. Also they were acutely aware that their Master was one who wandered and never had anywhere to rest his head (Matthew 8:20). The Celts history then is full of wanderers, obediently following the ‘Wild Goose’ (the Holy Spirit).

Today, as I think and reflect on this journeying people, I look at my own life and see how attached I can become to place and people. But is my posture before God still one of abandonment??
Brendan’s words inspire me . . .

“Shall I abandon, O King of Mysteries, the soft comforts of home? Shall I turn my back on my native land, and my face towards the sea?

Shall I put myself wholly at the mercy of God, without silver, without a horse, without fame and honour? Shall I throw myself wholly on the King of Kings, without sword and shield, without food and drink, without a bed to lie on?
Shall I say farewell to my beautiful land, placing myself under Christ’s yoke? Shall I pour out my heart to him, confesing my manifold sins and begging forgiveness, tears streaming down my cheeks?

Shall I leave the prints of the knees on the sandy beach, a record of my final prayer in my native land? Shall I then suffer every kind of wound that the sea can inflict?

Shall I take coracle across the wide, sparkling ocean? O King of the Glorious Heaven, shall I go of my own choice upon the sea?

O Christ will you help me on the wild waves?”

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I feel like I’ve hit this week running again, with a mega full on weekend last week. Its taken me a good week to digest all that went on and take a moment to acknowledge in all the life that came from it. Most of last weekend was spent visibly out in suburbia drawing attention to the inequality that the world holds, and asking people to take a small step towards changing that. Through an open mic and also a day busking, about $1200 was raised, which will be tripled by the canadian government - this was a really visible impact. The the other impacts you had to look harder to see were: new friendships made, community was built, the young, old and all the inbetween, were given the opportunity to share their god-given gifts, use their voices. We did bring a small amount of justice to those far away from suburbia.
Justice for me is so tied up up in the language of righteousness and the Hebrew thought about the word. They saw righteousness as a concept of relationship and is something one has precisely in one’s relationship as a social being i.e righteousness is not something which an individual has on his or her own, independent of anyone else. Being in right relationship with God vertically is inseperable from being in right relationship with one another in the Hebrew Old Testament. “God’s righteousness is prior to any human righteousness because human righteousness is a repsonse to God’s righteous actions toward human beings. . . . In other words God’s righteousness is something worked out among a people of God, and it is first and foremost a response to his righteousness.” (Fitch)

Why do I say all this? Because its a big challenge. Its easy to raise money for a cause such as O.I. and bring some kind of right relatedness / justice, and yet ignore bringing justice amongst our ‘own’ in our church. What do I mean? Well we raise money for OI and bring justice / right relatedness, but at the same time within our churches there are fractured and ruptured relationships, brushed under the carpet, left to fester and spread. Justice when thought about in the Hebrew understanding encompasses our whole lives in all areas - from how we relate to those closest to us to the people who live in ‘famined and war torn countries’ (to use a well coined phrase) to creation and the earth that we inhabit.

As someone who is marked out as following Jesus, I fall short from the mark in so many ways. Living in a capitalist culture, the new creation that I am supposed to be so often morphs and blends into the capitalist backdrop. ‘I’ becomes the most important, my money, my life, private and personal - am I meeting my needs? This makes practicing the justice of God so much more difficult! How can we become communities of God in which the righteousness and justice of God are worked out among us without being determined by forces of democracy and capitalism? “How do we see justice as more than leveling the economic playing feild or providing the basics necessary to give someone an opportunity to be successful in a democratic capitalistic society(like Opportunity International)?”

So this is where I end up in the rant, with this quote which sends me more into to drowning in God’s grace.

“the work of justice will not be done until the relationships one with another and with God have been restored in the way God himself call us to be with himself. Justice then is never just about the money; it is also about stewardship. It is never just about equal opportunity; it is about restored whole political realtionships. It is never just about aid to dependent mothers; it is about a healing and retoration of the borken down and a retoration of their place in a renewed people. It is about the work of God for a new humanity and the restoration of that humanity into relationships not governed out of the ontology of voilence upon which democracy is built but gifted out of our mutual participation in the body of Chirst. It is a about a restored and redeemed economics. This kind of justice can only begin in the church.  . . . it cannot be done in complicity with the terms laid down for us by the power of democracy and capitalism. It must be done first as the workd of God in his church through Jesus from which we then display it to the world, engage the foreign injustices with it, and ultimately invite the victims and the victimizers out of the agnostic society to sit as one with us at the Table of the kingdom of God”. 

If you read all of this, its really time for you to get a cup of tea now . . . . I’m off! lol!

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DAN WILT …

“I’ve decided again, just today, that the raw artist voices in the emerging church world must continue to speak in language that is not necessarily familiar, nor easily accessible.

I will go on record - I am incredibly grateful for the accessibility of much of today’s Christian music - it breathes life into my wife and children powerfully, beautifully and vitally, in the face of many challenges.

I will also go on record saying that the Christian music industry is struggling to find a way to elevate important voices that will not make them big bucks.

Both/And is the way of the future. Re-tellings of the Human Story that bring wholeness and insight must be shared. I suppose I’m projecting again; speaking to myself as much as anyone else. My musical work, now running in the background and changing over the years, in the face of a season holding no recordings and no one in line to make them, is to write toward this present, and this future.”

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Heaven is intertwined with earth. Alleluia!
We have taken the Divine life into ourselves. Alleluia!
And so now each may say,
I rise up clothed in the strength of Christ,
I shall not be imprisoned, I shall not be harmed;
I shall not be down-trodden, I shall not be left alone;
I shall not be tainted, I shall not be overwhelmed;

I go clothes in Christ’s white garments;
I go freed to weave Christ’s patterns;
I go loved to serve Christ’s weak ones;
I go armed to rout Christ’s foes.

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