Our youth and adults traveling to New Orleans arrived back safe and sound on Monday, after a few glitches with an early morning canceled flight. You can read all about our adventures on this blog and at another unofficial Gathering blog. Thank you for all of your prayers while we were gone.
I am Bourbon Street
I have chosen to title this post-Gathering reflection “I am Bourbon Street.” Bourbon Street in the French Quarter is of course famous for many things, most of them revolving around what I would all “excess.” Bourbon Street is, of course, almost a parody of itself. Because of so much excess, it is easy for most people, I imagine, to speak of Bourbon Street as some place those people go to do those things. But what if we all admit that deep down we are all Bourbon Street. The interiors of our lives are plagued with sins known and unknown, things done and left undone. It turns out we are all Bourbon Street.
But here is the great news. You see, each morning a full crew of garbage collectors and sanitation workers with soapy, pressurized water descends on the French Quarter to clean things up. They don’t ever consider not doing this. It is simply what they do, day in and day out: clean things up. So it is with God’s forgiveness of us. Not because it is something that God has to do, but because it is fitting with the very nature of God: It is something God chooses to do and wants to do. God descends upon the Bourbon Streets of our lives in Jesus Christ and cleans us up. Sometimes this cleaning is with gentle scrubbing, sometimes it is with the blast of pressurized water. These sanitation workers presented for me an image of Baptism: the life-giving water that rescues us from sin and cleanses us through daily repentance and forgiveness.
And, grace upon grace, the wonder if all this forgiveness and washing is that it precedes our sin. God’s forgiveness is the first act. Jesus Christ is not Plan B. Before the foundations of the world, the Cross stands looming.
I am Bourbon Street, caked in sin. But I am also Bourbon Street, new every day, washed in the waters of Holy Baptism and made new in the blood of the Lamb.
Channel 11 News Feature
Our Church at Cherry’s theology discussion made last night’s evening news. I want to be clear about a few things. First, neither Pastor Jim Miller nor I nor the bar owner invited the news. It was not done as a publicity stunt. Second, I want to give due credit to where we got the idea: We swiped it from Pastor David Nevergall in Elmore who got it from the Roman Catholic Diocese with their “Theology on Tap” program. And I’m pretty sure that they got the idea from Jesus himself.
While it would have been nice to have a heads up, I am thankful, not for the publicity for our community, our churches or even Cherry’s, but rather that the Gospel was spoken publicly.