Sit Up, Get Up, Come Out, and Live. During the month of April, leading up to Easter Sunday, we are looking at narratives of Jesus raising people from the dead. While the narratives are undoubtedly amazing and cool, there is a sense that something more than “just” raising someone from the dead is going on. Each of these narratives are surrounded by, and sometimes even interrupted by other seemingly unrelated events. But the truth is that they aren’t at all unrelated, they may even be the point. As we make our way through these passages, we get the sense that there are whispers of something bigger, grander, and more mysterious than even life from death going on. It’s as though the miracles of raising people from the dead weren’t really big enough…they weren’t the main attraction or the best or biggest thing that could happen. You get the sense that Jesus is trying to show us, teach us, even lead us to something more amazing than that. All through these narratives we catch glimpses and whispers, whispers of the Messiah (Savior) and glimpses of things our minds can’t wrap around. It’s as though when Jesus speaks to a dead boy and says, “Sit up”, speaks to a dead girl and says, “Get up”; when he speaks to his dead friend Lazarus and says, “Come out”…it’s like he wasn’t talking to them, but to the rest of us. It’s like He is inviting all of us looking in to come join in what’s going on. It’s like He’s asking us if we really believe that we are alive, I mean really living…or just waiting for something bigger and better. It’s as though He is saying to me, and to you, “sit up, get up, come out….and live.”

We are currently teaching through our Covenant at Mosaic. We renew our covenant with each other every March. A couple of years ago when we first introduced Covenant I wrote a series of blogs about each section. We’ve re-posted those blogs below. You’ll notice some things aren’t quite right (like dates and such), but then again none of us are really quite right anyhow are we?

We are in a series on covenant right now, leading up to our ‘Covenant Sunday’ on March 16th. The short version is that we, as a church, are opting to move away from some of the ‘membership’ language that many of us have become familiar with in churches. We don’t think that membership is evil or anything like that, but we do feel like it’s lost some of it’s meaning in our society today. Afterall, you can be a member of the YMCA, the country club, and the book club, along with aproximately 1,573,593 other things. And almost without fail, being a member signifies that you pay your dues, and you therefore expect certain rights, privileges, or items in return. We don’t want to think of church as somewhere that we somehow pay our dues and therefore expect to recieve something, spiritual or otherwise, in return.

The first section of our covenant is about beginning. We believe that faith is a journey and not a one-time arrival. So, while there is obviously the beginning of a faith journey in the sense that one must make the very first decision to take the very first steps towards a relationship with Christ, the journey doesn’t end there. Scripture is full of language that emphasizes this idea that faith is not something we mystically achieve and mark off of our list. ...read on

The need to feel like we belong is one of the strongest driving forces in our lives, whether we realize it or not. We do, or don’t do, countless random things to fit in. We wear certain clothes, cut our hair a certain way, and use all of the right words. We pick up the cool hobby or habit, or drop it if it’s not cool. It’s hard-wired in us to want to be accepted, to belong. Think about it, why do people join gangs, join clubs, stay in abusive relationships, or flock to myspace and facebook? It’s because we shudder at the thought of not being able to say, “we.”

The author Henry David Thoreau once said, “Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.” From what I know, he would not have considered himself a follower of Christ, which is exactly why his statement should cause all of us who claim to be followers of Christ to take pause. According to the biographers, H.D.T. disliked organized religion, and he ignored most aspects of Christianity.

What if those who claim belief in Jesus as their Lord and Savior had lived out their beliefs around H.D.T.? I obviously can’t say if it would have changed anything or not (or even if they did or not), but for someone who basically ingored matters of faith and belief in a higher power to claim that living your belief can turn the world around says quite a bit to me about how he percieved people of faith.

Some of the headlines on cnn.com today are about the New York governor caught with a prostitute, Liberian troops forced to resort to cannibalism, the arrest of a man suspected of killing a Duke student, an archbishop kidnapped and killed, and a 16 year old girl that had been held captive as a sex slave.

We live in a broken and fragemented world, full of broken and fragmented people. We see it all around us, from the headlines to our own road rage and latest screaming match with our spouse. Of all the things that mankind is capable of, chief among them seems to be hurting each other.

One of our goals at Mosaic is to be a part of the community, to love and serve the community with no secret agendas; because we believe that is how Jesus loves our community. One of the ways that we strive to do this is by opening up the space that God has blessed us with to our community for various events. Over the past couple of years, we’ve hosted English as a second language classes, Children’s theater/acting classes, Special dinners and meetings for other local churches and ministries, we host the ‘Mosaic Art Gallery’ which is open as part of the citywide First Fridays (of each month), and in October we hosted some events for the Irvington Halloween Festival.

So am I wrong, or is the idea of the bucket list all of the stuff you want to do before you “kick the bucket”? Seems kind of odd to me, I mean, isn’t that kind of like a count down to your own death? “Oh, I just checked off number 43, wrestling with a tiger while skydiving into the amazon and then building my own home from indeginous trees!”

Okay, so that would be pretty cool, but I’m not sure even the great Chuck Norris could pull that one off. Here’s a list worth having though.

You know, that white fluffy stuff that comes out of your favorite stuffed animal after the 18,394th time you’ve played tug of war with it. The stuff that comes in little ball shapes of cloud like fun, or like that favorite t-shirt that shrank in the wash; but you just can’t seem to part with it anyway. Well, it turns out that cotton is also the traditional gift for a 2nd anniversary. Mosaic is about to celebrate our 2nd anniversary the weekend of September 6th, and we want lots of cotton…