Inviting Further Conversion

Brian McLaren considers how Jesus’ inclusive message invites us to ongoing conversion:  

[Jesus] loved to compare the kingdom of God to a party. He would demonstrate the open border of the kingdom of God by hosting or participating in parties where even the most notorious outcasts and sinners were welcome.  

Jesus was often criticized for this “table fellowship” with notorious sinners; his critics assumed that Jesus’ acceptance of these people implied an approval and endorsement of their shabby behavior. But they misunderstood: Jesus wanted to help them experience transformation. Rejection hardens people, but acceptance makes transformation possible. By accepting and welcoming people into his presence, just as they were, with all their problems and imperfections, Jesus was exposing them to his example and to his secret message. In this way, he could challenge them to think—and think again—and consider becoming part of the kingdom of God so they could experience and participate in the transformation that flows from being in interactive relationship with God and others…. 

The thrust of Jesus’ message is about inclusion—shocking, scandalous inclusion: the kingdom of God is available to all, beginning with the least. Yet Jesus often warns people of the possibility of missing the kingdom. “Unless you become like a little child,” he said, “you shall not enter the kingdom” (see Matthew 18:3). So the possibility is real: the kingdom of God that is available to all can be missed by some.  

This concern is especially relevant these days when the Christian religion is too often perceived as a divisive, judgmental, rancorous, and exclusionary movement—nearly the opposite of a kingdom of peace, available to all, beginning with the least. How can some people interpret Jesus’ message as exclusive, while others see it as the most radically inclusive message in human history? 

McLaren points to the sacramental nature of baptism and the Eucharist, honoring the radical inclusivity of Jesus’ mission, while also naming the deep commitment required to join it:  

What we need is a requirement that those who wish to enter actually have a change of heart—that they don’t sneak in to accomplish their own agenda, but rather that they genuinely want to learn a new way of thinking, feeling, living, and being in “the pastures of God.” Perhaps that is why baptism … was so important to Jesus and his disciples…. It was important to call people to a change of heart and give them a dramatic way of going public by saying, “Yes, this change of heart has happened within me, and I’m willing to identify myself publicly as a person who is on a new path.” And perhaps the Christian ritual of Eucharist was intended to function in a similar way—a kind of regular recommitment where people say, by gathering around a table and sharing in bread and wine, that they are continuing Jesus’ tradition of gathering in an inclusive community. “I’m still in,” they’re saying, “My heart is still in this mission and dream. I’m still committed.”  

Quote of the Week:   “We are intimately bonded with the traumas that have formed us.” – from The Contemplative Heart, p.20.Reflection  Jim is correct. Of course, as a clinical psychologist, he knows what he is talking about here.  As a human being, he also knows what he is talking about. Jim’s family of origin was deeply traumatic with an alcoholic and violent father.  His mother, a devout catholic, taught him prayer as a coping strategy for the pain.  Throughout high school, he dreamt of moving away until he found the writings of Thomas Merton and sought to join the monastery.  The monastery would surely be an escape from the trauma. Except it wasn’t. It was quiet and it was serene for a time, but the trauma was within.  To change the external circumstances or environment might be an improvement, but it cannot change what was internal to Jim.  For that to heal and to be well would take confrontation, counseling, and much prayer.   Fortunately, God granted Jim the grace of healing from those past traumas and is now a highly sought speaker and writer about transformative and contemplative practices alongside clinical psychology.  The reality is that we are intimately bonded with the traumas that have formed us.  It is difficult to let go of those traumas because they have shaped who we are or have been for years or even decades.  To give up that trauma is to take away the grounding of the person we thought we were, and it can leave us feeling as though we do not have an identity any longer. For this reason, many of us hold onto our traumas far longer than we should.  We say to ourselves, “If I give this up, who am I?  Who will I become?  I have learned how to live my life because of this event, will I have to learn a new way to live?”  To give up who we are, who we have become, and to become who we might be is no small task. But God is intimately interested in the restoration, renewal, and repair of the human heart, soul, mind, and spirit.  The traumas of life are not what define us, the unconditional love of God is what defines us. Prayer  Heavenly Father.  Grant us the courage to let go of the traumas that have formed us, so that we might become free to be who we can be, rather than the person the trauma influenced us to become.  We recognize that this is not an easy task, and we recognize our unhealthy attachments to these things.  Be gracious as well as merciful as you do your work of healing in us.  Amen and amen.

Life Overview:  Who is He: James Finley  When: Born in Akron, Ohio in 1943.  Why He is Important: As a Clinical Psychologist and Spiritual Director, James speaks from the depth of his own experience and training about the life of a Christian mystic.  Most Known For: James was a direct mentee of Thomas Merton while living in the cloistered monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Trappist, Kentucky. Notable Works to Check Out: Merton’s Palace of NowhereThe Contemplative HeartChristian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of GodTurning to the Mystics Podcast

Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) retells one of Jesus’ parables as an expansive invitation to come to God’s table:  

Jesus once had [a conversation] with a group of religious leaders at the home of a prominent Pharisee. “When you give a banquet,” Jesus said to his host, “invite the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed.” He told them a parable about a man who prepared a banquet and invited many guests. When those on the guest list declined to attend, the man instructed his servant to go into the streets and alleyways in town and bring back the poor, the hungry…. The servant obeyed, but told his master there was still room at the table. “Then go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come,” the master said, “so that my house will be full” (Luke 14:12–23). This is what God’s kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there’s always room for more.  

Evans shares the story of author Sara Miles, whose experience of Jesus through communion inspired her to start a food pantry:  

Not only did [Sara] convert to Christianity, she devoted herself entirely to “a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honored.” [1]  Sara partnered with St. Gregory’s [Episcopal Church] to create a massive food pantry, where the poor, elderly, sick, homeless, and marginalized from the community are served each week from the very table where Sara took her first communion—no strings attached, no questions asked. With the saints painted on the walls looking on, hundreds gather around the communion table to fill their bags with fruit, vegetables, rice, cereal … and whatever happens to be in the five-to-six-ton bounty of food that particular Friday.  

Evans honors Christ’s transformative presence in the bread and wine. 

I don’t know exactly how Jesus is present in the bread and wine, but I believe Jesus is present, so it seems counterintuitive to tell people they have to wait and meet him someplace else before they meet him at the table. If people are hungry, let them come and eat. If they are thirsty, let them come and drink. It’s not my table anyway. It’s not my denomination’s table or my church’s table. It’s Christ’s table. Christ sends out the invitations, and if he has to run through the streets gathering up the riffraff to fill up his house, then that’s exactly what he’ll do…. 

The gospel doesn’t need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out. It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, “Welcome! There’s bread and wine. Come eat with us and talk.” This isn’t a kingdom for the worthy; it’s a kingdom for the hungry. 

===========================

From The Corners by Nadia Bolz Weber

I was 29 years old and 6 months pregnant with our first child when my (former) husband and I moved to dry land wheat farming country for his first job as a Lutheran pastor; a town of 5,000 people in Eastern Washington, several hours drive from anything like a yoga class.

I remember thinking that since the town had a library, a gym and access to an NPR station, I could make a go of it. Maybe. I had, at this point in my life, only ever driven through a small town, never stayed the night in one, much less moved there without knowing a soul. 

The two and a half years we spent there were not unhappy ones, my days busy with nursing a baby (and eventually conceiving and birthing a second), washing the diapers, making our meals (thank God for WIC since we made maybe 25k a year), and hanging out the laundry on the backyard clothesline. The people at the church were kind folks, and I did my best to find a place for myself in a place I did not belong or understand.

I was not unhappy, as I said, but I was profoundly lonely.

Which is why Sally meant so much to me.

Sally was the town’s earth mama, the one who knew how to make anything, grow anything, fix anything. Her home had a warm witchy feel to it, filled with herbs, knitting projects and laughter. She found bugs, especially beetles, to be beautiful, knew how to cut hair even though hers was so long, and had a stash of chocolate chips in a jelly jar she’d pull out when I visited, knowing I have a sweet tooth.

When this big city liberal tattooed smart mouthed very pregnant girl showed up, who was also somehow married to the new Lutheran pastor, Sally took me in.

She taught me to knit, would watch the baby when I took a night class, and just about always seemed to be ok with me stopping by. Her home was a soft landing place. At Sally’s I didn’t have to be on my best behavior. 

She loved me. And let the reader understand, I had done precious little “personal work” at this point in time. I was a LOT. But still, even in all my bossy anger, dysregulation and self-centeredness, she loved me.

And that love was nothing short of manna. Manna; enough to make a difficult time feel survivable. 

I’m telling you all of this because last week in Boise, at the Red State Revival, I got to see Sally for the first time in 24 years and tell her, albeit inadequately, what she meant to me. I was too immature at the time to be as grateful for it as I am now. Some things only come after getting them wrong enough. 

Of course she came bearing gifts: crocheted vegetables and something she’d sewn that I couldn’t identify right away. “It’s a dead house fly!” she said with cheer.

And all I could offer her in exchange, was to say the words, “Thank you for loving me during a time when I really needed it. You’ll never know how much it mattered”.

She just hugged me for a long time, said I love you, and went and found her seats.

There’s a verse in Hebrews that says, Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.

Yes, I was the stranger – but Sally was the angel.

And I may not have felt as grateful as I should have at the time, but I can feel it now. We get to do that. We get to embody the gratitude we lacked when young (or the humility, or wisdom, or patience) and hopefully it leads us not just to expressing it when possible, but also to a sweet compassion for our younger selves who just did the best they could with what they had before they knew better.

---

Do you have a story about your one person who loved you when you needed it most? 

Or a time when you got to thank somebody for something years after the fact?

I’d love to read them.

In it with you,

-Love, Nadia

Father Richard Rohr understands Jesus’ eating habits as a model for the kind of inclusive and open hospitality Christians might practice.  

God’s major problem in liberating humanity has become apparent to me as I consider the undying recurrence of hatred of the other, century after century, in culture after culture and religion after religion. 

Can you think of an era or nation or culture that did not oppose otherness? I doubt there has ever been such a sustained group. There have been enlightened individuals, thank God, but seldom established groups—not even in churches, I’m sorry to say. The Christian Eucharist was supposed to model equality and inclusivity, but we turned the holy meal into an exclusionary game, a religiously sanctioned declaration and division into groups of the worthy and the unworthy—as if any of us were worthy! [1]  

Before Christianity developed the relatively safe ritual meal we call the Eucharist, Jesus’ most consistent social action was eating in new ways and with new people, encountering those who were oppressed or excluded from the system. It seems Jesus didn’t please anybody by breaking rules to make a bigger table. Notice how his contemporaries accused Jesus: one side criticized him for eating with tax collectors and sinners (see Matthew 9:10–11). The other side judged him for eating too much (Luke 7:34) or dining with the Pharisees and lawyers (Luke 7:36–50, 11:37–54, 14:1). Jesus ate with all sides. He ate with lepers (Mark 14:3), he received a woman with a poor reputation at a men’s dinner (Luke 7:36–39), and he even invited himself to a “sinner’s” house (Luke 19:1–10). How do we not see that? [2]  

It seems we ordinary humans must have our “other”! It appears we don’t know who we are except by opposition and exclusion. “Where can my negative energy go?” is the enduring human question; it must be exported somewhere. Sadly, it never occurs to us that we are the negative energy, which then sees and contributes to that negative energy in others. The ego refuses to see this in itself. Recognizing this takes foundational conversion from the egoic self, and most have not undergone that transformation. We can only give away the goodness (or the sadness) that we ourselves have experienced and become.  

Eucharist is meant to identify us in a positive, inclusionary way, but we are not yet well-practiced at this. We honestly don’t know how to do unity. Many today want to make the holy meal into a “prize for the perfect,” as Pope Francis observed. [3] Most Christians still do not know how to receive a positive identity from God—that we belong and are loved by our very nature! [4] The Eucharistic meal is meant to be a microcosmic event, summarizing at one table what is true in the whole macrocosm: we are one, we are equal in dignity, we all eat of the same divine food, and Jesus still and always “eats with sinners,” just as he did when on Earth. [5]

Meal-Based Social Action

Jesus didn’t please anybody, it seems. He was always breaking the rules and spreading out the table.
—Richard Rohr  

Father Richard considers how Jesus’ eating habits challenged the religious and cultural norms of his time—and our own:  

Jesus didn’t want his community to have a social ethic; he wanted it to be a social ethic. Their very way of relating was to be an affront to the system of dominance and power; it was to name reality in a new way. They were to live in a new symbolic universe. This radical idea is given in a simple clue found throughout the Christian Scriptures—one that biblical scholars overlooked until only recently: Jesus’ presence with others at table. That theme is so constant in the Christian Scriptures that scholars today see it as central to Jesus’ message. Jesus never appears to be pushing what we call social programs. He is much more radical. He calls us to a new social order in which we literally share table differently!   

The mystery of sharing food and a common table takes place on different levels. First, there’s the unifying idea of sharing the same food. Then, there is the whole symbolism of the table itself: where we sit at the table and how the table is arranged. Together, the food and table become a symbol of how our social world is arranged. Once we rearrange life around the table we begin to change our notions of social life.  

That, I believe, was Jesus’ most consistent social action: eating in new ways! In the midst of that eating, he announced the reign of God and talked in new ways. Usually, on his way in or out of a house, he encountered those who were oppressed and eliminated from the system. A great number of Jesus’ healings and exorcisms take place while he’s either entering a house to have a meal with someone or leaving a house just after having had a meal with someone. He redefines where power is on many different levels at the same time. Religious power is, for one thing, mostly exercised outside the Temple and synagogue.  

It’s necessary to calculate very carefully what was lost and what was gained as Christianity developed. The church moved from Jesus’ real meal with open table fellowship to its continuance in the relatively safe ritual meal that became the Christian Eucharist. Unfortunately, the meal itself came to redefine social reality in a negative way, in terms of worthiness and unworthiness.  

That is almost exactly the opposite of Jesus’ intention. To this day, we use Eucharist to define membership in terms of worthy and unworthy. Even if we deny that is our intention, it’s clearly the practical message people hear. Isn’t it strange that sins of marriage and sexuality are the primary ones we use to exclude people from the table, when other sins like greed and hatefulness that cause more public damage are never considered?  

---

From Chuck DeGroat.

Here is an abridged section of Ch. 3 of Healing What’s Within. 

Storm and Fog

Some of us live in what I call Storm. From a nervous system perspective, this is a state of hyperarousal — our sympathetic system activated to survive a perceived threat. Blood pressure rises, heart rate spikes, adrenaline pumps. We go into fight (enemy mode, demanding, defensive), flight (anxious, vigilant), fawn (appeasing, compliant), or find (searching for rescue). These responses are designed for short-term survival — to get our immediate needs met. But for many, this Storm becomes a long-term reality. We adapt to it. We suffer in it. Alone.

Others get caught in what I call Fog — a state of hypoarousal. Here, we feel depleted, shut down, disconnected. This is the domain of the dorsal vagal system. Where Storm mobilizes us to act in self-protection, Fog immobilizes us through disconnection. In freeze, we’re stuck between the urge to act and the instinct to protect. In fold, our system numbs out to survive — heart rate drops, muscles relax, awareness blurs. We may feel ashamed, helpless, even forgetful of what overwhelmed us. It can feel like depression. Or complete shutdown. We may adapt to life here, too. 

Feels Like Home

To navigate the dysregulating impact of Storm and Fog, we also need to know what it feels like to be Home — the internal space of safety, clarity, and connection.

After moving into a new house with Sara, I remember a lazy Sunday afternoon, lying in bed, watching leaves fall. A whisper rose from within: Home. It took weeks to get there, to settle. But my body recognized it.

Home is where your nervous system breathes.

It’s not just comfort — it’s coherence. Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel calls this the Window of Tolerance: the internal space where you can feel your emotions in a right-sized way and respond from presence. The wider your window, the more able you are to stay grounded amid life’s chaos. 

We are meant to live here, hidden with Christ (Col. 3:3), rooted in love (Eph. 3:17). This is our truest place. Home begins in Eden, and its memory lingers in us. As Frederick Buechner writes, “At the innermost heart… there is peace… Eden is there. Home is there.”

When we’re pulled from Home into Storm or Fog, God’s first question still comes: Where are you? (Gen. 3:9). And like the father in Jesus’ parable, God runs to greet us (Luke 15:20). Even when we drift, we’re not untethered. Nothing can separate us from this love (Rom. 8:39). As Martin Laird puts it, “God is our homeland. And the homing instinct of the human being is homed on God.”

To live from Home is to live from your center. As Teresa of Avila asks, “What could be worse than not being at home in our own house?” And you can cultivate a sense of Home, physiologically and spiritually. Practices of nervous system regulation can cultivate an enduring sense of Home, even as you occasionally feel pulled to-and-fro. Even the simple act of placing your hand on your chest and breathing can whisper to your body, “It’s ok. I’m here.” 

Pay attention to what it feels like in your body to be present and at peace — grounded, open, connected. I know I’m there when I’m breathing, when I’m not rushing, when I feel like myself… and even like myself.

You might pause right now and reflect:

• When do I feel most at Home?
• Where, with whom, under what conditions?
• And when do I feel far from Home — reactive, avoidant, ashamed, disconnected, numb?
• How can I continue to cultivate a sense of Home? 

Storm and Fog will visit — that’s part of being human. But Home is always there, waiting, at the center of your being, beside a window of grace.