12/24 – Christmas Eve

Emmanuel: “God with us”

 

 

12/18 – Advent 4: Build up the True Temple

Speaker: Chris Seay

Scripture: Romans 16:25-27; 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Luke 1:26-38, 47-55

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The sermon had a lot to do with Mary and so the image that i saw to do was of Mary. the first 3 were of just her, but then i saw to add an angel. the 5th one of the weekend became my favorite.

(5th is at top. 1st is at the bottom)

In light of everyones love of this image, I redid it digitally and you can buy a print (or shirt) of it through Society6.

12/04 – Advent 2: Stories of God’s Loving Pursuit from Ethiopia

Speaker: Chris Seay (from Ethiopia)

Scripture: Acts 8:26-39, Isaiah 56:4-5; 55:1-5

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Chris came to us from Ethiopia, where the drought has affected 5 million people. He taught from Acts where Philip meets the Ethiopian Eunuch.

here’s some footage from Ethiopia

11/27 – Advent 1: Vigilant Love

Speaker: Jack Wisdom

Scripture: Isaiah 2:2-5, Psalm 122:6-9, Romans 12:1-2, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36,42,44

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5 paintings. 5 services. all painted in 45mins.

 

11/20 – Gratitude

Speaker: Gideon Tsang    Scripture: Psalm 107

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Gid gave one of his best talks i’ve ever heard or witnessed. So great. If you need to be reminded of Gratitude, this is the talk for you.

One of the passages in psalm 107 talks about sailors being saved from the waves at sea. This is where my inspiration for the imagery came from. And i admittingly used a kind of Shepard Fairey – ish type color scheme.

in addition….

here’s the “good” video that Gideon shared:

and here’s that whale story he shared at the end:

also, i did a painting awhile ago of that last whale story….

11/05- Baptize Me

Speaker: Chris Seay      Scripture: 1 COR 15: 20-34; 2 COR 5: 11-21; Acts 22:16

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We did baptisms this weekend.

With the painting i did this drip painting underneath and then painted the butterfly over top. sold all the paintings this weekend.

 

A Man Of Sorrow

A Man Of Sorrow | acrylic on panel | 36"x48"

I don’t do a lot of paintings of Jesus. For one, we don’t know what he looked like and I don’t want to progress the eurocentric Jesus we’ve all come to corporately believe in. I’ve spent years trying to get blond/white Jesus-knocking-on-the-door out of my head when I contemplate Him. Second, I’d rather spend time visually depicting what He talked about than rather trying to represent his physical features.

Man Acquainted With Grief | acrylic on canvas | 48"x48"

But in this past year, I’ve had a friend and a grandfather die and I’ve contemplated a lot the pain of death we face in our reality.

My last two years of high school were spend at a christian boarding school in the middle of nowhere Minnesota. While there we had to memorize scripture for one of our classes. So of course the first one you learn is the shortest verse in the bible: John 11:35, “Jesus wept.” Jesus cried when he was at the burial tomb of his friend Lazarus. He resurrected Lazarus from the dead, which is the amazing part of the story… but what I find amazing in this passage is that Jesus, the fullness of God incarnate,… cries at human death. There, in the midst of Lazarus’ sisters and all his friends, even though He knew He was going to raise him, He weeps.

This verse has become so important to me. In fact, if this little verse did not exist in the Jesus narrative, I don’t know if I would trust Him. I don’t know if I would trust a God-who-became-man and never once wept in the face of death and the suffering that we all experience from that. If He never wept it would seem as though He was insulated through all that we have to go through. I couldn’t trust a God who had insulated Himself from us.

But He didn’t. He took it in. He gets what is happening to us.

So I made these paintings to remind me of that. I think Jesus was full of laughter and joy. I think Jesus is now radiant and like the sun, full of glory and might. But during His brief time on this earth, I think He was also full of grief. To be human is to experience sorrow.

I’m thankful He knows our story.

Isaiah 53

 

¹ Who has believed our message? 

And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
² For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot,
And like a root out of parched ground;
He has no stately form or majesty
That we should look upon Him,
Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.
³ He was despised and forsaken of men,
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
And like one from whom men hide their face
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

 ⁴ Surely our griefs He Himself bore,
And our sorrows He carried;
Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten of God, and afflicted.
⁵ But He was pierced through for our transgressions,
He was crushed for our iniquities;
The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him,
And by His scourging we are healed.
⁶ All of us like sheep have gone astray,
Each of us has turned to his own way;
But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all
To fall on Him.

 ⁷ He was oppressed and He was afflicted,
Yet He did not open His mouth;
Like a lamb that is led to slaughter,
And like a sheep that is silent before its shearers,
So He did not open His mouth.
⁸ By oppression and judgment He was taken away;
And as for His generation, who considered
That He was cut off out of the land of the living
For the transgression of my people, to whom the stroke was due?
⁹ His grave was assigned with wicked men,
Yet He was with a rich man in His death,
Because He had done no violence,
Nor was there any deceit in His mouth.

 ¹⁰ But the LORD was pleased
To crush Him, putting Him to grief;
If He would render Himself as a guilt offering,
He will see His offspring,
He will prolong His days,
And the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand.
¹¹ As a result of the anguish of His soul,
He will see it and be satisfied;
By His knowledge the Righteous One,
My Servant, will justify the many,
As He will bear their iniquities.
¹² Therefore, I will allot Him a portion with the great,
And He will divide the booty with the strong;
Because He poured out Himself to death,
And was numbered with the transgressors;
Yet He Himself bore the sin of many,
And interceded for the transgressors.

10/30 – Doctrine Matters

Speaker: Chris Seay            Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:1-28

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Chris’ continuation into Corinthians climaxed this weekend with Paul’s addressing of the Corinthians in their bad behaviors that it was because they had an incomplete belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Amazing sermon. The painting is about the need to die in order to be resurrected to new life.

It’s started me on some thinking about what happens in that color scheme stage – the process of dying. Why is it necessary for us to be resurrected? What happens to us during that transformation?

My friend Taylor said something about his life lately that I think gives us some insight to what happens. In talking about his own life, he said that everything good thing that God has brought about has come out of something dying in his life. He said it only makes sense then for God to bring about the best thing in our existence through our biggest death – the loss of our physical earthly vessel. Much to ponder

here are the other variations i did over 5 services this weekend….

 

The Lazarus Ball

 

So here at Ecclesia, we do parties very well. We’d actually say we have the spiritual gift of partying.  And my wife and I particularly have the spiritual gifts of throwing parties.

Now a lot of religious people don’t know how to respond to this…. and I get it. We’ve been pitched by the culture we live in that “partying” is primarily drinking heavily, acting stupid, grinding on each other, and eventually loose interactions of a sexual nature… all to be remembered the next day with advil and sunglasses (thanks Kanye). This is not the whole picture.

Celebration/parties… these are ways that we experience community together. These are the avenues to joy, fellowship, celebration…. and  we know in this life that there are plenty of hard mournful things that we need to go through… so along with that, we also need times of celebration. I mean we use Jesus as our model. When the wedding was seemingly going to die, He kept it going….

So we decided to throw a dance party around Halloween. We called it the Lazarus Ball:

Here’s the write up I had on the website explaining the event:

So, we did a prom over a year ago… and it was awesome. We had an amazing time as a community and raised $4500 for clean water. We wanted to continue those good times this year and do something for the Elder Building… our soon to be home. Dates kept getting pushed back until the only opening we have is during Halloween weekend. So we decided to have our own Halloween-ish type dance party.

We thought it would be fun to do a Halloween dance for Elder, a sort of “dead prom” or “zombie prom”… but we really aren’t into participating in the celebration of gore and death that goes on during this time of year. But the more we discussed, the more we realized that this popular narrative of being dead and coming to life is actually a main story line of the Christian story. We were once “dead” and we have been made alive. Sin kept us from Life, and we have now been “resurrected” through Jesus Christ into the eternal life of the Almighty. Not only are these concepts we believe in, but Jesus showed us a literal resurrection when He brought His friend Lazarus back from the dead. Through Jesus, we will all be resurrected from death… into Life. Hallelujah.

So we are going to celebrate this. We will come together and celebrate this truth…. in a bit of a theatrical way, yes… but it will be really fun. So come to the prom “dead”. Not gory, bloodied, and visually disgusting. Let’s have a little taste.
But come with a little makeup, a little tattered, and little deceased…. and as we celebrate, we will be resurrected:
-resurrected when we come into community from aloneness.
-resurrected when we celebrate the power of Jesus over death.
-resurrected when we laugh and celebrate in a world of so much pain and brokeness.
-resurrected as we raise money to restore a hollow building into a place of community and light.
-resurrected when we move the bodies God gave us! (aka shake what yo momma gave you.)

So there you go.

Below are some pics from our friends at Smilebooth that let us use their photobooth for the party. We danced a lot and when all is said and done we raised around $1000 for the building fund. And we got to boogie.

 

 

 

 

10/16- Steering Wheel on the Other Side

Speaker: Rick McKinley

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Amazing day under the freeway bridges of Houston as we met at our new home at 1100 Elder. It was awesome to have our friend Rick McKinley from Imago Dei church in Portland, OR hanging with us as well. So stoked to be in Elder soon!!!!