Cascade Church Portland

In my late high school and early college years I listened to one album more than any other album in all the years before and since.  "Through Being Cool" by Saves the Day was on constant rotation day and night. 33 minutes and 22 seconds making up 12 songs of pure emo-punk perfection. I was sure it was the greatest feat of musicianship and lyrical content ever created. What kind of transcendent lyrical content am I talking about? How about;  "And my spleen is dripping from my pants." If you're not sold by that little nugget, I'm not sure what you're doing with your life.  If that album came out today exactly as it was back in 1999 would it still be the monolith of music in my life? Very doubtful. It's hard to be as angsty and driven by frustrated heartbrokenness when you have a mortgage, a minivan and you're coaching 6-7 year old soccer.  The reason that album holds such a special place in my life is due to it's timing and what I was experiencing. I'm not a static institution that remains unchanged through

When we attempt to make an argument one of the best strategies involves pointing out historical evidence to support your claims.  If I can find individuals or large groups of people who've "successfully" negotiated the world operating with an assumption I hold true, then my belief can be justified. And this makes sense when you think of humans as pack animals. Individual thoughts, actions or behaviors are inherently dangerous because that differentiation can threaten your survival. Wolves can easily take out one lone sheep, but a flock of sheep is much more difficult to attack.  This is why we dress, talk, and consume media in alignment with some number of people who currently or have previously existed. There can certainly be change in people's behaviors, but only when enough people move together to create it.  What makes this concept interesting in Biblical interpretation is that 2,000 years has created millions of ways to view the various parts of the Bible and what it is saying. Now, that statement pro

When I hear "The Bible says.." my ears immediately perk.  That's a pretty lofty claim regarding 66 books covering a 1,600 year span originating 3,500 years ago.  The Bible is the key sacred text of Christians, so it makes sense that there would be a lot of emotion and authority wrapped into it. Culturally, when we try and make a point or win an argument we often go to the highest shelves of language and thought.  Skipped breakfast? You're starving. Woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't fall back asleep? You're dead. Someone cut you off in traffic? You'll kill them. Step in gum? The worst. Every conversation is prone to extremism to make a point, but all of this extremism takes a toll on our relationship with the things we place at the peak. Our relationship with America gets strained when all political disagreements end with "Love it or Leave it." Our relationship with Justice gets strained when all issues are this age's holocaust.  And our relationship with Faith gets strained when everything

Prophets and the prophetic voice exist throughout the entirety of the Bible.  There are prophets throughout the First Testament like Jonah, Elijah, Jeremiah, Amos and Hosea. Many of them got full books named after them.  The New Testament has the prophetic voice of John the Baptist, Paul, John and Jesus Christ.  The nature of prophets and has become a bit co-opted today to mean the people who are putting forward an ideology that we agree with. Across political and religious lines people would point to very different individuals as prophets of truth.  But one of the key roles of prophets throughout the Bible isn't just to call out injustice, but to remind the people how these injustices are the result of forgetting who we are. War, violence, pollution, exclusion and financial inequity are the product of losing sight of who we are and how we best operate in relationship with one another. The prophet holds up a mirror to illustrate the cost of participating in systems that benefit some at the expense of othe

For the past 6 weeks our church has looked at the topics of fear, grief & sadness and shame. The summer of bummer. Ok, I don't think those emotions are a bummer, but it definitely causes us to access a place that many of us put effort towards avoiding. And these are conversations that are desperately needed in the church, because they aren't likely to come up otherwise in our culture. But this Sunday we're going to be exploring the tension we hold in the midst of tough emotions. We're going to be looking at the nature of hope. Hope is a popular word in the Christian world, and for good reason. The Jesus narrative is all about hope in the face of suffering and injustice. That the difficulty of the current situation is not the forever reality. It was this hope that inspired the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and is resonant throughout his "I Have a Dream" speech. What we want to explore is the complexity of hope and how to hold it in tension instead of a using it to avoid hard times. Hope is never

One of the most destructive aspects of shame is it's baked-in certainty. Shame can feel like a really squishy and uncertain emotion, but it has such a predictable outcome for every person who runs across it.  Some aspect of your being isn't enough. You don't have enough intelligence.  You don't have enough training.  You don't have enough patience.  You don't have enough love.  You don't have enough discipline.  You don't have enough physical strength.  Most of us structure our lives in such a way that we never have to face the areas of our lives that we don't feel "enough" in.  We don't speak or sing in public.  We don't do games.  We don't engage in conversations outside of our area of expertise.  We don't speak up in our area of expertise in case we're exposed for not being expert "enough".  "Enough" is a myth. And when shame enters the picture "enough" always moves just out of reach to expose us for what we don't have.  So what if we heard the voice of God celebrating what we are instead of what we

I have a love/hate relationship with small talk.  I know that it's pretty popular to despise small talk, but I can't get fully on board with that movement. I've had too many great conversations and connections come from chatting about work, the weather and the location of people's current or former home to completely write it off. I'm also aware that it can actually inhibit true connection. Sometimes it's just a swirl of information swapping and never gets to anything people are passionate about.  One of my least favorite aspects of small talk is when it comes to vocation. I never quite know how to ask the question.  1. I never want to assume that people are currently employed somewhere. It can deeply sting to have your identity reduced to employment and asking it as a first question can do just that.  2. There is this strange dynamic in the U.S. where we assume that you need to be passionate about what you do for work. In small talk I'm trying to discover the other person's passion and talk about work ca

As human beings we sure are funny about routine.  If you sit in any public space long enough you'll hear someone complain about the monotony of life.  "Another day, another dollar" "Same stuff (or some variation of that word), different day" "I just want one day where I don't have to sit in traffic for an hour" It makes sense. A lot of our television, movies and books center around ordinary folks being pulled into extraordinary circumstances. We long for aliens to arrive, super powers to be bestowed or portals to another dimension to appear. We want there to be some break in the ordinary and expected outcome of our days to remind us we're still alive.  But how do we (and the characters in TV, film and literature) usually respond when the regular rhythms of life break into a drumroll? We long for the boring! We want to be returned to routine and met expectations. We long for the mundane to remind us that life isn't just wild chance and chaos.  In the midst of these competing desires is a truth to sit with

One of my least favorite stereotypes is that only Type A personalities like control. Type A personalities might be more inclined to take charge, but they are not any more inclined than the rest of us to be in control.  Most every person is trying to gain control of their circumstances through their tool of choice. Some use passive-aggressive avoidance Some use humor Some use others-focused service Some use effusive praise.  The desire to be in control is deep within all of us. We live in a wild and unruly reality and attempting to tame it is vital to our survival. It is the desire to control that leads people to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter those living outside. To surrender trying to control the world around us is to surrender to a passive fatalism that is equally problematic.  The error is to believe that we've succeeded. When our desire to control convinces us that we have control, we stop showing up to parts of our own reality. We start eliminating information that demonstrates that w

It was Father's Day when this sermon was preached.  For some of us the weekend is a flood of good memories and a happy childhood.  For some of us it is loaded with harsh memories and deep wounds. For some of us it is a combination of them both. What's tricky is that the emotions around our fathers gets attached to our picture of God as father. This can become a really helpful pathway to understand and engage with God, or it can become a barrier.  As far as barriers to God, this is one that is really common and entirely unnecessary.  Jesus talks about God as His father. There are parables where Jesus tells about the nature of God through the metaphor of father. There are reasons why we think of God in terms of an older man up in heaven. But what do we lose if we keep the parental metaphor and drop the link to gender? If God is a good and loving parent do we miss something because he's not male? Can we hold space for people who love God as father and for people who love God as mother and for people who conn

Listen in to our new liturgical flow in action as we create space for grief, the release of shame and a celebration of joy.  ((Some moments of silence have been edited out of the podcast to avoid confusion on if the podcast was still playing)) 

When I started officiating weddings I was shocked to learn that none of what we traditionally associate with weddings are necessary for people to get married.  Vows? Nope.  1 Corinthians 13? Nuh uh.  I do's? You don't.  "I now pronounce you"? Nein.  All that you need to do to make it official is fill out the paperwork with a couple of witnesses. You could wrap it all up at a courthouse in the time it takes any of our bureaucracies to stumble along.  It reminds me of what we do with our church services. We think that they have to look a particular way because of what we have seen or experienced before. While this tradition is helpful in many ways, it can actually keep us from getting to the heart of what we could be doing. 

Hear this amazing reflection on Good Friday with Leroy and Donna Barber, Mark Charles, Sunia Gibbs, Andru Morgan and Treneil Washington. 

If you've ever walked through the Home section in a Target then you'll probably recognize the collection wall decals and nick nacks that feature the "true enough" sayings. These are the quotes and sayings that have a sliver of truth in them, but require specific circumstances to be true.    On a number of occasions I've dreamt about hovering 4 feet by the power of my mind off the ground and it's yet to happen.   If how badly you want something is the key to unlocking life, I would have conquered eating an entire sheet cake by now.  There's still truth in both of these statements, so I'm not trying to invalidate the power of dreaming of realities that don't exist yet or the power of eliminating certain desires when I realize how weak the drive behind them is. The problem is that when we consume true enough, we usually end up deeply disappointed in the complexity of life. If we sit with deep wisdom we find truth that can negotiate this complexity.  I think the Jesus story and Easter Sunday is deep wisdom t

Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. James 5:16   This one Bible verse filled me with so much hope and so much dread early on in my faith.  The hope was linked to the feeling that my prayers could be powerful and effective. Power and effect meant that I would have the ability to enact real positive change in the world. Cancer could be miraculously healed, relationships could be restored and pain could be avoided if I could unlock this whole "righteous" conundrum.  And that's where the dread came into the picture. There's a terrifying lack of specificity to being "righteous". What was I doing or not doing that could compromise this identification? Had I lied too often? Had I neglected to serve and help enough people? I was pretty sure I was a devout person that loved God, but the elevation to being righteous always felt just out of reach.  Honestly, I thought that if you had ever considered yo