When your mission becomes impossible

For a peek into last Thursday’s Bread for your journey gathering, come and have a seat in the circle of chairs that’s been set up for you and others who might wander in. After you all chat a bit about how your day has been, you settle down with some quiet words of prayer, the lighting of a candle, and an overview of tonight’s theme: the exhilaration of being chosen for a mission… and the seed-planting that takes place even if your mission becomes impossible.

Three readings are offered, each followed by the lighting of a votive candle and some words of prayer. The first is an excerpt from the poetry of the 13th century Sufi mystic known as Rumi:

Exerpt from "An Early Morning Eye"
If you become addicted to looking back,
half your life will be spent in distraction,
and the other half in regret.
You can live better than that!...
Solomon had a habit of visiting the mosque at dawn,
because then he could see
with an early morning eye
the new spirit-plants that were growing.
Encourage that freshnessin yourself,
and not what clouds youwith dullness and futility.
Source: Delicious Laughter by Rumi

God, we begin our gathering tonight, hoping for some freshness, for a breath of fresh air to come and fill our lungs and enliven our imaginations. Thank you for speaking to us through poets of ancient times and through the words of each other. In your name we pray… amen.

The second reading is from a book of the Bible named for the prophet, Isaiah of Jerusalem, the 6th chapter, verses 1 – 8:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%206:1-8;&version=51;

Holy God, like Isaiah when he saw an awesome vision of you and heard your call, we sometimes get that thrilling sense of you at work in our lives and in our world. Come and visit us, in this time and place, that we might know where you are sending us next. In your name we pray… amen.

A third piece is offered for our reflection: words seen as a Facebook “status message” of a young woman in Jerusalem (from the same location as Isaiah but with a time differential of about 2750 years!):
William Blake once wrote: “There are things that are known and things that are unknown. And in between, there are doors” 9:42am, Thursday, June 4

God of the unknown, God of open doors, walk with us as we try new ways of being, whether we are in unfamiliar territory or the same old places. Give us good courage and healthy caution, as we venture out to be taking care of your people and your creation. In your name we pray… amen.

Next comes “R&D” time (reflection and discussion) where we get into our texts, not only examining what they mean but also how the meanings are enhanced when we add our own stories to the mix. Though I can’t recreate Thursday’s discussion, I can relay some of the questions and comments that came out of our exploration.

Imagining Isaiah’s awe-inspiring yet terrifying experience of being chosen to speak for God, some of us shared our own stories of being chosen, what it felt like and how it affected our lives after that point.
~ Can you see God calling you through these experiences, even though you might not have noticed it at the time?
~ As you look back, is there a difference in your living, in your sense of meaning and purpose, when you had a sense of being “called” or a feeling that God sees some potential in you?

Take a moment to read the next piece of Isaiah’s story, 4 verses in which God says what Isaiah’s call will be like:
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah%206:9-13;&version=51;

We talked about how much easier it would be to forget these verses and end the story with the thrilling words, “Here I am, send me!”, but also about the value of tackling “difficult” readings in the Bible.
~ Is God really setting up Isaiah for failure (as it first looks)… or just acknowledging the extreme difficulty of Isaiah’s mission… and that “success” and “failure” may be defined differently by God than most people see it?
~ How do we (with God’s help) define success differently than our world tends to?

Earlier in the book of Isaiah, God talks about how God’s people have dropped God in favor of living for themselves, and the justice and compassion God likes to see is getting harder to find.
~ Though Isaiah may have had a “mission impossible” in calling people to live justly, he kept at it, even as his world was imploding around him.
~ How is our world of economic crisis similar to this, and how can we be redefining success and failure? Certainly not alone! We need God's power and to be surrounded by faith community.

We ended up our R&D time each with pen and paper in hand, thinking about how we are being “sent”, how we are being called to speak out and/or to be planting seeds for the future. We then took some “open space” time, to use as we choose: to pray and light candles, to eat of our homemade bread, to talk more with one another, to let God care for us in whatever way is needed…

We reconvened briefly to pray for our world, especially those who are suffering, sending one another off into the world to live out our callings.

Peace,
Kari